Mystery

Dennis’s face closed like a trap. He looked down at his thick, pale hands, locked together on top of his desk. “I know things are difficult for you at home, Tom. I want you to know that you can always come to me. I don’t suppose I’ll ever say this to another student, no matter how long I might teach, but you can call me any time.”

A flash of perception that seemed to come from the adult he would be told Tom that Dennis would make a similar speech to a particularly favored student once every four or five years for the rest of his life.

“There’s nothing wrong with my home life,” he said, and heard his mother’s almost unemotional screams.

“Just remember what I told you.”

“Can I go now?”

Dennis sighed. “Listen, Tom—I just want you to know who you are. That’s what I care about—who you are.”

Tom could not stop himself from standing up. His breath had caught in a hot little pocket deep in his throat, and could not move up or down.

Dennis sent him a complicated look that combined resentment, surprise, and a desire to repeat everything he had just said. “Go on.” Tom took a step backwards. “I won’t keep you.”

Tom left the room and found Fritz Redwing sitting in the hallway with his back against the plate glass window overlooking the school’s courtyard. Fritz had been kept back at the start of what should have been his freshman year, and had been in Tom’s class ever since.

“What’d he do?” Fritz scrambled to his feet.

Tom swallowed the burning air in his throat. “He didn’t do anything.”

“We can still make the cart to dancing class—the kids who had sports are still down in the locker room.”

The two boys began moving down the corridor.

Fritz Redwing’s hair was a thick blond thatch, but in most other ways he was a typical Redwing—short, broad-shouldered, with short thick legs and virtually no waist. Fritz was a kind and friendly boy, not very highly regarded by his family; he had been pleased to find his old friend Tom Pasmore back in the class into which failure had thrown him, almost as if he imagined that Tom kept him company in his disgrace. Tom knew that when people spoke of the stupidity of the younger Redwings, it was Fritz they had most in mind, but Fritz seemed merely slow to him, and for that reason not much inclined to thought. Thinking took time, and Fritz tended to be lazy. When he bothered to think, Fritz generally did all right. The top of his blond head came only to the middle of Tom’s chest. Next to Tom, he resembled a small, shaggy blond bear.

Tom and Fritz came out of the school’s side door and walked toward the parking lot in hot steady sunlight. The cart stood at the far end of the parking lot, and from it a hum of high-pitched voices, pierced now and then by a shriek, came to the two boys. Tom instantly saw Sarah Spence’s blond head in the second of the four front rows, which had been filled with girls. The cart’s fluttering cover cast a greenish shade over the rows of girls. For different reasons, both Tom and Fritz Redwing slowed their pace and turned off the path to stand in the darker shade at the side of the school building.

Tom thought that Sarah Spence, seated between Marion Hufstetter and Moonie Firestone on the second bench, flashed her eyes at him as she leaned over to whisper something in Marion’s ear. He suspected that she was saying something about him, and his blood froze.

“You can pick your nose,” Fritz said, turning to him with an upraised index finger, “and you can pick your friends. But you can’t pick your friend’s nose.” He laughed; then because Tom remained silent, looked at him sideways with his queer light-filled eyes.

A lizard the size of a cat ran on pinwheeling legs across the asphalt parking lot and disappeared beneath the cart. Sarah Spence grinned at something said by Moonie Firestone. Tom thought she had forgotten he was there, but in the green shade her eyes moved toward him, and his blood froze again.

“I suppose Buddy’s coming home soon,” he said to Fritz.

“Buddy’s so cool. Life is one big party to Buddy. You heard about how he wrecked his mom’s car last summer. Totaled it. Just walked away. I can’t wait till we get up to Eagle Lake this summer.”

“But when is he coming home?”

“Who?”

“Buddy. Your cousin Buddy, the one-man demolition derby.”

“Mr. Cool,” Fritz said.

“When is Mr. Cool coming to Mill Walk?”

“He isn’t,” Fritz said. “He’s going straight from Arizona to Wisconsin. Him and some other guys are going to drive straight through. Par-ty. All the way cross-country.”

They watched a stream of third- and fourth-year boys pour from the Field House, slinging their jackets over their shoulders on their way up the hill to the parking lot. As soon as the other boys had passed them, Tom and Fritz began moving together toward the cart.