Children_of_the_Night_final_proofs by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-04-14T23:33:55+00:00

I Love You, Joe

I mean I guess it all started that day at Jefferson Cole, which calls itself a high school even though it’s really just three two-story cellblocks, triangles painted yellow with brown hallways and white lockers, and thick green glass with black wire crossed up inside. There’s smaller buildings, too, like the cafeteria, that you had to go outside to get to … but even those, with bars over the windows instead of the chicken wire in the glass, have the same low-down, locked-up, and locked-in feel of this place. Halfway through the first day of school and here I was getting kicked out of history class for, of all things, calling a thing by its proper name. I could smell the caf, the deep fryer getting ready for lunch, the moment I left the room and stepped into the hallway.

The school’s offices were bottom center, a glassed-off suite behind a gurgly fountain and some tired-looking plastic trees. I woke the secretary there, tickling her nose with the note my history teacher, Mr. Westerburg, wrote up on me. The way that lady, with her puffed-up hair and serious face and huge pink glasses, jumped up and stamped the note … She pointed the way and buzzed the door, mad as hell.

I remember marching into the principal’s office, which was an office with wooden stuff and a kind of heavy silence, and yellow lights. The principal was a principal, sitting behind a desk with a black phone shaped like a Bible on it. The back corner of the room was basically this wooden planter-thing with one fat dead cactus inside and I remember thinking: How do you kill a cactus? I mean seriously, how do you kill a cactus?

I walked in and the man didn’t move. He didn’t say anything, not until I fell into a chair and said what I was there for: telling Mr. Westerburg what my father Joe had always told me, that it was the Battle of Bull Run, and only disappointed rednecks still called it the Battle of Manassas. Which is when this guy, this high school principal, shot up and yelled for me to get the hell out of his office and stop wasting his time with this crap … which I did. I grabbed my bag and shut his door right as the lunch bell rang, and I jogged over to the caf and sat alone, in a corner by a window with meatloaf that was soggy and yet smelled deep-fried. Even the milk was a day from the date on the carton. But like my pops used to say, people in Africa are starving. So I ate.

J. Cole’s caf was like our caf: busy and noisy, with a lot of look-alike people dressed in the same-type clothes, all eating the same-type food: The End. After that was gym and then French, which I was only taking because I already knew it. Then Honor’s English and our teacher, Ms. Andrews, a small white lady with a big butt and horn-rims and short, brown curls.

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