Sway by Kat Spears

Author:Kat Spears [Spears, Kat]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: dpgroup.org, IDS@DPG
ISBN: 9781466852198
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

It was bitterly cold by the middle of October. The sky assaulted us almost daily with stinging rain or sleet, and the gloom of a Massachusetts winter started to set in hard. The Wakefield microcosm was rocked by one of its worst football seasons since the Eisenhower administration. Ken, captain of the team, was too preoccupied with coaching the kids at the Siegel Center, and trying to get into Bridget’s pants, to pay much attention to taking the team all the way. The first game against crosstown rival Buford High was a blowout. They delivered a punishment of 42–0.

Wakefield’s star student, David Cohen, who after the midterm grade report would drop to a disappointing fifty-first in his class, fumbled the annual Battle of the Brains regional academic competition. David was too busy getting hand jobs from Heather in his dad’s old Volvo to care about the academic reputation of Wakefield, a bafflingly dim reputation considering more than half the student population had at least one parent who taught at the college.

Since it was the major employer in town, most of the kids who grew up here had at least one parent who worked at the college, but Buford High, for the most part, hosted those students whose parents served food to, or collected the garbage of, the literati. That its student body consistently outshone Wakefield in almost every measurable academic marker had confounded the school system patriarchs for decades.

David had been one of Wakefield’s few shining lights, eclipsed only by the football and hockey programs, which were known for graduating its players to acceptance at schools like University of Michigan, Ohio State, and Nebraska—schools where, if news reports were at all reliable, middle-class girls with impossibly blond hair were frequently roofied at frat parties.

For a while Principal Burke had been flying high after Travis Marsh was expelled. Burke tried promoting a new vision of a Wakefield High School where school spirit could be expressed through the jelly bracelets that went out of fashion in 2006. The school spent close to a thousand dollars on the plastic bracelets in the Wakefield colors of green and white, the words WARRIOR PRIDE inscribed on them. The students refused to wear them, as did most of the faculty, and all but a few ended up in the local landfill. Pep rallies became a regular venue where Burke talked about Wakefield Warrior pride and other ridiculous concepts. I used the assembly periods to catch up on my e-mail and texts.

Now Principal Burke was at a low point and anarchy threatened his reign. Burke’s moment of glory after Travis Marsh’s demise had been an illusion, his control of the student body only superficial. Battle of the Brains was a disappointment, a minor letdown, but when the football team started a downward spiral, a losing streak of six games, you could see Burke was starting to feel the strain.

* * *

When I shut my locker door I found a skinny kid standing there, just watching me, a hopeful look on his face.

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