by Jim Krieg
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
CHAPTER TWO - RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL SAFETY PATROL
CHAPTER THREE - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
CHAPTER FOUR - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
CHAPTER FIVE - RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL SAFETY PATROL Incident Report
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN - RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL SAFETY PATROL Incident Report
CHAPTER EIGHT - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN - RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL SAFETY PATROL Incident Report
CHAPTER ELEVEN - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
CHAPTER TWELVE - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
Acknowledgments
Griff Carver, Hallway Patrol
RAZORBILL
Published by the Penguin Group
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For my top cops,
Susan, Riley, and Dalila, with love.
CHAPTER ONE
HELEN NUTTING GUIDANCE COUNSELOR RAMPART MIDDLE SCHOOL
The following are portions of a TRANSCRIPTION of my recorded interview with student Griffin Carver, grade 7, recorded. This interview was requested by Beatrice Komack from the School Safety Bureau in con junction with their investigation of the startling events of the last few weeks.
This was my first meeting with Griffin (I oversee 103 seventh graders alone!), and he was initially reluctant to talk with me at all. My telling him how much better talking about the situation would make him feel completely backfired. He said he had no interest in “feeling better.” It wasn’t until I stressed how difficult and painful the process was, yet how necessary to the public good, that we had a breakthrough.
NUTTING: Just pretend the microphone isn’t there, Griff.
GRIFF: I’d rather pretend I’m not here.
NUTTING: Isn’t there anything you’d like to get on the record?
GRIFF: (shakes head distractedly)
NUTTING: I’d think you’d want your side of the story told.
GRIFF: There is no “my side of the story.” There’s only the truth.
NUTTING: Why don’t you tell me the truth, Griff? After all, I’m here for you. I’m a pretty good guidance counselor.
GRIFF: Really? Never seen you before today. Didn’t even know I had a guidance counselor.
NUTTING: You know what, Griff? The sooner you talk to me, the sooner you’re back out there in the halls doing what you’re supposed to be doing!
GRIFF: I wouldn’t even know where to start.
NUTTING: Start at the beginning. Your first day here. What was the first thing you saw?
GRIFF: Whattaya think I saw? The school. Same thing you see every day when you pull into the parking lot. Rampart Middle School.
NUTTING: Okay. What did you hear? Think about it. What was the first thing you heard when you saw the school?
GRIFF: “Have you got everything?” That’s what she asked me. Something like that.
NUTTING: Then what? What did you answer?
GRIFF: “Yeah.” I lied.
“There’s nothing to be nervous about. Nothing at all.”
That’s what the Old Lady said next. She said it with a little squeak in her voice that let me know that she was nervous. Plenty nervous. I grunted at her, but she wasn’t about to let up.
“Nobody knows anything about you here. You can start fresh. A clean slate.”
The Old Lady pulled our gray minivan up another ten feet as we waited our turn at the drop-off site. I looked through the window and got an eyeful of the place. I didn’t know exactly what to expect from public school, maybe a bunch of little mobile homes for classes behind a serious chain-link fence. But Rampart Middle is old school. Big old main building with a playing field behind it and a lot of traffic in front. Hardly any graffiti. There’s even a pool. But you know that. You work here.
And no, I wasn’t nervous. Not really. The Old Lady was.
She was wound so tight, she didn’t even notice the Go-Go’s on the satellite radio. That was the sort of thing that usually sent her into some kind of a giddy New Wave flashback dance at the wheel. Not today.
“I know, Ma,” I said, just to keep up the illusion of conversation. I knew the pep talk was really for her.
“Topschools.com rated Rampart Middle School in the top fifty safest schools in the state,” she informed me, not for the first time. “So, really they don’t need . . . There’s no reason to—”
“Been through all this,” I finally said. The car behind us honked and the Old Lady pulled up.
“Are you sure you’ve got everything?”
“Got my trumpet, got my new attitude . . . got my marching orders.” Literally. The Rampart Middle marching band was never going to be the same. I hadn’t practiced since my underwear had Power Rangers on them.
“Got everything,” I lied again as I slid out of the van and dropped onto the sidewalk, loaded down with the idiotic first-week-of-school flotsam and jetsam. All that junk, but not the one item I gave a rat’s butt about.
My badge.
“And Griffin!” she shouted after me. “Be careful!”
“Always am,” I said, without looking back. I heard the tic-tic-tic of the bad alternator as she pulled away a
nd I took in my new turf.
It wasn’t ugly. At first blush, all you’d see is squeaky clean kids playing and killing time till the bell rings. Big lawn. Nice clothes. First-hand bikes. Right out of the school brochure. Maybe that’s all you’d ever see.
’Cause you never wore a badge.
Me? I carried that piece of tin for six years. Almost half my life.
Started in first grade. Typical wet-behind-the-ears rookie. Made all the rookie mistakes. Thought I was God’s gift to Safety Patrol. In retrospect, maybe I came on a little strong. Like I was trying too hard. Like I could do it all myself. Maybe I was asking for it. Maybe not.
Either way, I got it. The intersection of Maple Avenue and Third Street. First graders were only supposed to assist superior Safety Patrol officers, but somehow, probably to take me down a peg or two, I “accidentally” got assigned my own crosswalk. THE crosswalk. Mape and Three was the toughest intersection in town, a clearing-house for third grade discipline problems who poured soda on their sugar cereal and had something to prove. That’s where I learned what the red, reflective Safety Patrol belt did, the good kind that makes an X right across your chest.
It makes you a target.
You might as well draw a bull’s-eye on your nose with permanent marker. Same effect.
What happened? You don’t have to consult the Magic 8 Ball for that one. I got knocked down.
That’s not the weird part. The weird part is . . . I got up again. And again. And again.
Too stubborn, or just plain dumb, to stay down. Maybe that’s what makes me so good at what I do.
Did.
Don’t know what you think of Safety Patrol. If you’re like most people, you don’t think about it at all. You don’t know that the squad is the only thing holding it together. We’re the thin blue line that keeps middle school from sliding into absolute and complete chaos.
Deep down, you probably know. Look at the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders around you. The veneer of civilization will never be as thin as it is right now. Think I’m exaggerating? What did your class do the last time you had a substitute teacher? What did your hallways look like on the last day of school?
The patrol keeps order. Not much. But enough. Just enough.
And being a member of the Brotherhood of Officers makes me proud as . . .
Made. Made me proud. ’Cause that was all over for me . . .
“Watch out!”
A hand on my shoulder jerked me out of my brooding and onto the grass. Four BMX bikes shot past me in a blur. I was glad the Old Lady had already driven away. This was just the kind of near-miss scenario that sent her into hysterics.
The bikers laughed. Nothing quite so funny as a kid falling on his butt. Real comedy gem.
But it’s better than being knocked over by eight Dura-Grip Flyers. Those were the tires. I got a close-up look at the brand as they rolled by my face. I asked for it. I lost focus.
“You okay?”
The first thing I saw was his shoes. They were shined. Polished. I could see my reflection in those things. My would-be rescuer pulled me up to my feet, past the sharp creases in his olive pants, past the highly polished buckle on his camping belt, past the sash full of badges, the bolo tie. A real live Camp Scout. Lanky, fit, but with a smile so warm and trusting he gave you the feeling that he’d still expect a buck from the tooth fairy if he still had any baby choppers to stick under his pillow. The head-to-toe olive drabs didn’t help much. Made him look like he was trolling for some old geezer to help across the street.
I know what you’re thinking. Maybe they’re required to wear their uniforms on the first day for school. Yeah, fine. Except this was the tenth day of school. My paperwork had just come through. The Camp Scout kept talking.
“You know, most cycling accidents occur within five miles of your home.”
“No kidding?” I said flatly. “I’ll tell my mom we need to move.”
He had to think about it before he laughed. But at least he laughed.
“Good one,” he said. “You’re new, right? I make a point of knowing all the faces on campus.”
FYI, when I start walking away, it isn’t really an invitation to walk along with me, but that didn’t stop him.
“Yeah, just transferred,” I said.
“Lucky man,” he announced. “You won’t find a better, cleaner, or more secure school. We even have a pool!”
“So I’ve heard.” Doesn’t this kid have something better to do?
“And you’re just in time for the Participation Fair.”
At this point, I actually looked in his direction. “The what?”
Turns out, today I was not going straight to Home-room. Nobody was. This was the day the entire middle school was funneled onto the football field for the annual Rampart Middle festival of “getting involved.” Evidently, there’s a school requirement for at least one extracurricular activity. Thank you, Parents’ Association.
Camp Scout wasted no time in ushering me to the feeding frenzy. There must have been a “hospitality” badge in it for him somewhere.
He wasn’t exaggerating. It was like a fair. Only without the puke-encrusted rides and two-strike carnies. Or the fun. Booths and tables for every club and wannabe activity. Latin, Chess, and Pep. Representin’.
I looked past the Plexiglas and neon stand for what must be the Science Club and saw a booth of tall, good-looking kids. I didn’t even have to read the sign. I could tell they were student govie types. Some boy with a million-dollar smile was arguing with a serious girl with serious glasses. Even from this distance I was pretty sure that she was right and that she’d never get past that smile.
Finally, I eyed the booth with the large Marching Band sign over it. A few bandies, in full dress, were playing the crowd like a glockenspiel. They looked well funded and, as usual, full of school spirit.
“Well,” I said in as friendly a tone as I could muster, “looks like my stop.” I held up my trumpet case like a get-out-of-conversation-free card.
“Stay safe, kid,” he advised me. Right out of the Camp Scout Handbook.
Once his uniform vanished into the churning sea of middle school identity-searching, I turned back toward the marching band booth. I almost took a step forward. Then, suddenly, I couldn’t.
I just stood there staring at the bandies. What was my problem? They seemed happy. They were all friends. Probably went to band parties. Heck, they were better off than most. They’d come out of this extracurricular with a salable skill. Provided they could find someone to pay them to play, say, the sousaphone.
Come on, Griff. How hard could it be? You told the Old Lady you would. Promised her. And hasn’t she been through enough? I lifted my foot to walk.
“Sure you wanna do that, son?” a man’s voice asked.
I looked over and saw him. Coveralls. Mop. Garbage can on wheels with a few rat traps dangling from it. I don’t know how old he was, but he’d been janitoring longer than I’d been breathing. “I wasn’t doing anything,” I told him.
“You were about to make a decision,” he said. Like he knew. He had one of those voices. Gravelly. Like he had a line on Wisdom or maybe he smoked a lot, back in the day when people did that. It occurred to me that those two things were probably mutually exclusive.
“So?” I said.
He looked past me. I followed his gaze over to the bleachers. A lanky girl took out her chewing gum and affixed it to the bottom of the bench she was sitting on. Two boys were in a shoving match, the smaller one blissfully unaware that his opponent’s buddy was creeping up behind him on hands and knees. One last shove and the sucker went toppling heels over butt thanks to the human stumbling block. Oldest trick in the book.
Literally. Some caveman learned to talk to his homey just so he could pull this stunt on a Neanderthal. Probably why we’re still here.
“What do you see?” the custodian asked.
“Nothin’.” I went with the standard middle school response. He wasn’t
buying it. Meanwhile, the alpha shover was already victory-strutting away, victim’s milk money in hand.
“What do you really see?” the old man persisted.
Maybe it was the nicotine vibrato in his voice or maybe he just caught me off guard by not buying my dumb-kid answer. Anyway, it all came tumbling out.
“An eighth-grade girl defacing school property. Two seventh-grade goons giving some dork the hi-low. Extorted milk money making its way up the food chain,” I reported matter-of-factly.
And I was spot-on about the money. One piece of prime chuck had already handed it off to an eighth grader evidently suffering from gigantism, who quickly vanished into the crowd. I looked back at the old janitor. Was that a slight smile on his face? Tough to tell with all those wrinkles.
“You and me. We got something in common,” he announced. “Everybody else looks over there and all they see is squeaky clean bleachers. But we know . . . there’s a lot of dirt hiding underneath.”
I glanced at his rat traps. “And maybe something more. Maybe something that scurries around, chewing up stuff that doesn’t belong to him. Something that carries disease.”
He nodded at me. Amen, brother. He glanced down at my trumpet case, then over to the band geeks. “Is that who you’re gonna be here?” he asked.
I didn’t give the man an answer. I don’t think he was waiting for one. Instead, I just walked.
I walked past Drama Club. I walked past the Latin Society. I walked past the Athletic Boosters and Literary Junto.
I headed straight for it. I’d seen it out of my peripheral vision but hadn’t wanted to look right at it.
No fancy booth. Just a lonely card table with a couple of the boys milling around. And one girl, of course, who was basically one of the boys. At least one of them had bothered to make a sign. Block letters in Magic Marker. Safety Patrol Squad. Nice recruitment work, fellas.