December Park(43)

Returning to school after the holidays was like resuming a death march after a brief respite to catch your breath. The halls had grown cold in our absence, the ancient furnace no match for the weather. Time itself seemed to get mired down in molasses, and even the clocks appeared to tick more slowly. Each footfall was duller; each gloomy corridor was somehow less hospitable. Stanton School was a mine shaft hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth. And it was haunted by Aaron Ransom’s ghost.

As it always was, the first week back in class was torturous. Mr. Mattingly’s class was the last one of the day, and when the final bell rang that Friday, it was like the report of a starter’s pistol. The cacophony of desk chairs skidding across the scuffed tile floor was followed by a rush of students heading for the door.

“Angelo.” It was Mr. Mattingly. “Do you have a couple of minutes?”

I swung my backpack over one shoulder. “Sure.”

The remaining students filed into the hallway, Adrian Gardiner bringing up the rear. He walked quickly and with his head down, his backpack looking like something an astronaut would wear. He merged with the rest of the foot traffic in the hallway and disappeared.

Mr. Mattingly got up from his desk, smoothing out the wrinkles in his slacks. He went to the door and shut it. “Have a seat,” he told me, nodding toward the chair directly in front of his desk.

I sat and he perched opposite me on the edge of his desk, the way cops on TV sometimes did when they were pretending to be sympathetic to a perp.

“Have you been enjoying the class?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Have you started thinking about college?”

“No. It’s still a few years off.”

“Understandable. But do you have any notion of what you’d like to study in college? Where you’d like to go?”

“Not really. I mean, I haven’t given it that much thought.”

“Right.” He prodded the cleft in his chin with one thumb. “I know you’ve been here only a short time.”

For one sinking moment I thought he was going to ask why I’d been transferred from Naczalnik’s class to his. I had just assumed he’d already known the reason. It seemed that Mr. Mattingly liked me, and I didn’t want to tarnish that with what had transpired between Naczalnik and me.

“I just want to throw something out there and see what you think.”

“Okay . . .”

“I’d like to recommend you for Advanced Placement English next year.”

His statement caught me off guard. I didn’t speak. Only nerds and members of the school marching band took Advanced Placement classes.

Mr. Mattingly laughed and rubbed the side of his face. “I see I shocked you a little. Sorry about that.” He leaned over his desk and picked up a small stack of papers that he thumbed through but did not look at. He stared at me. “I’ve been very impressed with your work. You possess exceptional writing skills, and you never have trouble with any of the harder texts. I checked your transcripts and saw that you’ve been acing your English courses since your first semester of freshman year.”

I shrugged. “I like to read a lot.”

Again, Mr. Mattingly surrendered a warm laugh. “Yeah, I bet. And you do some writing, too, don’t you?” His gaze shifted toward a copy of the school’s creative arts magazine on his desk. A story of mine had been published in that very issue.

“I guess so,” I said.

“So what do you think?”

I shifted in my seat. “You mean about the AP class? I don’t know. I hear those classes are pretty tough.”

“Not if you’re willing to do the work.”

“It’s not . . . uh, I mean . . .”

“I get it. You want to be in class with your friends. Only nerds take AP classes.”

“Something like that,” I said sheepishly.

“Listen,” he said. “You don’t have to make up your mind right here on the spot. Go home and think about it, talk it over with your parents. Take some time to figure out what it is you want to do.”

“It’s just me and my dad,” I said.

“Then talk it over with your dad.”

“Okay. I will.”

“Good.” He clapped. Then he held a hand out for me to shake.

As I gripped his warm palm, it occurred to me that I had never shaken a teacher’s hand before.

“Now get out of here and enjoy the weekend,” he said, smiling.

Out in the hall the crowd had mostly died down. A few stragglers hollered down the corridor, and I had to duck to avoid getting dive-bombed by a paper airplane. I dumped some of my heavier textbooks into my locker, not up for hauling them on my back the whole way home.

Glancing at my new wristwatch, which had been a Christmas present from my dad, I saw that I was too late to meet up with Peter, Michael, and Scott in the parking lot. There was an unspoken pact between the four of us that if someone didn’t show within the first five minutes, it most likely meant detention and the others were free to skedaddle.

I looked to my left. A few lockers down, Adrian Gardiner glared at his enormous overloaded backpack, which rested on the floor at his feet. After a moment, he turned and looked at me. Those large colorless eyes were like the headlamps on a VW minibus behind the thick lenses of his glasses. There was a blotch of dried ketchup on the front of his sweater that resembled a gunshot wound.