Drowned Boy by Jerry Gabriel

Author:Jerry Gabriel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2012-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

That morning, the day Stevie Lowe was to be buried, students quietly moped about in homeroom. At the request of the family only a small number of kids from the school—mainly family friends—were given passes to attend the event, but the mood was solemn and mournful anyway. Most sat in their seats without being told and listened to the morning announcements. A girl toward the back of the sprawling room sobbed quietly. The basketball team would travel to Hanover tomorrow, Mr. Holt said over the P.A.; the wrestlers had a home tournament over the weekend. The lunch today would be baked chicken with carrots and mashed potatoes. Have a good day.

Briefly Samantha looked down at the seat next to her where Stevie Lowe had sat. The kid on the other side of Stevie’s seat, a boy named Chad, glanced at her. He was surreptitiously spitting tobacco juice into a Coke can; his lower lip bulged slightly. “Fuckin’ A,” he said. “Huh?”

She looked at him expressionless, no clue as to how to respond. He continued to nod anyway, as if she had agreed with him.

When the first bell rang, Samantha followed the winding stream of bodies out of the cavernous hall, down the bottlenecked aisle that led to the school’s main building. Where the hallway emptied into a large locker area, she could hear someone wailing above the quiet, loud enough to be heard up and down the entire length of the hallway. Casting around, she saw Amy Schultz being tended to by two girls.

Samantha passed them with her eyes to the floor. At the end of the wide corridor, she ducked into the first-floor bathroom. Inside, some girls stood looking at themselves in the mirror, quietly talking about a television show in which a boy had died. Samantha stepped into one of the stalls and locked the door and waited until the late bell rang, then waited another few minutes before re-entering the empty hall and following a small corridor to the back of the school, to the stadium, and, beyond that, the streets of Moraine. If any teachers saw her, they did not bother to question her; she was a good student, a class officer, first-chair clarinet in the jazz band and orchestra. No one worried about Samantha Longstreth.

She wandered first toward the center of town, not any too sure of where exactly she intended to go. She went to Hebbing’s Shoes and looked at a few pairs of flats but didn’t stay long. Outside again, she took alleys and avoided the main avenue through town. She went to an out-of-the-way clothing shop near the light-bulb factory and spent most of her lunch money for the week on a shirt she’d seen a month before. She folded it up, stuck it in her backpack and walked on down Second to Williams Street and entered A&P at the side door. Nate Holland greeted her almost immediately; he stood close to the door stacking a display of peas. A year older than Samantha, Nate had already graduated.

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