The Crew

Untitled Part 28

Chapter Twenty-Eight

On my knees and seeing her face, I lowered my arms and carefully set the joint down on my backpack. A hand gripped my shoulder—hard—the thin, spindly fingers colder than the Pacific. It'd come from behind completely unforeseen. Sophia had witnessed the apparition as it became a reality, seeing behind me with horrified eyes, unable to do anything.

Beyond her look of total shock, I couldn't figure it out. My mind went completely blank. After a few seconds, an emotion began to surface: fear. With every part of my being I felt fear. I felt it as a knot in my gut. The grip loosened and there followed a deadly silence broken only by a buzzing sensation in my brain.

"Go ahead, son, turn around. You've been caught."

I stared at Sophia in disbelief, not allowing myself to grasp that the voice was real. In that second I fell in some kind of love with Sophia, banishing any semblance of love for Sarah. In that brief lifetime between feeling the hand on my shoulder and turning around to face my ultimate doom, I felt a hundred feet tall. I felt powerful. I was a rebel. I was a rebel in front of a beautiful woman. Camus. Sartre. Dostoevsky. Johnny Rotten. Sid Vicious. The front man of Unknown Society.

I sensed a new aspect of my young character, a form still emerging. I envisioned myself tattooed, with slicked-back hair, an iconic anti-hero leaning against a muscle car, a man with honor who followed his beliefs no matter what. Like I officially replaced Cannonball as leader, and was now the one the rest of The Crew would look up to, the one brave enough to live as he believed, not hide behind a boss. I'd come full circle and it was here that I realized it, understood the whole cycle, death and re-birth and life in between.

Still on my knees, I did an about-face, seeing Mr. Watson standing less than a foot away. My eyes hit waist level on him. I stared at his midsection, my eyes blurry, trying not to focus too hard, as I sensed a bratty, shit-eating grin develop. The Headmaster wore a sport coat with a white shirt and beige khaki slacks; his shoes were black and polished. It was completely ludicrous seeing as we were at the beach, for Christ-sakes.

His balding head glistened in the sun, sparse brown locks sticking out from each side as a result of the wind. I looked into his shallow eyes, murky, as if they had no life at all, no joy save for the squelching of youthful freedom. His thick, wrinkled eyebrows were comical in their refusal to band together in a line and his mouth sagged downward, tired after years of forced smiles. His jaw was tight, flexing.

He crossed his arms over his chest. "Well, what do you have to say for yourself, Mr. Donnigan? Hmmmm, I beg of you, what do you have to say this time? How are you going to extricate yourself from this one, huh? Have you thought about that yet? Have you thought about college yet? Have you thought about anything yet? Your poor parents, Mr. Donnigan, they must have a lot on their hands."

Mr. Watson waited a few seconds, seeing if I might attempt to respond to his rhetorical questions.

He glanced at Sophia and then back at me. "Here at St. Andrew's Preparatory, we, the faculty, are the educating and disciplining body, and have taken it upon our shoulders to mold young minds. We do our best to accept only the brightest and most apt students. However, I can see now that our Student Selection Committee has faltered. Unfortunately and unmistakably, at times the wrong student slips through, errors in the self-selecting gene pool one might say. Every now and again, I believe Nature herself makes an error and a species aberration, which should not have made it quite this far, invariably does. These are, of course, rare cases and Nature fairly quickly self corrects, nips the issue in the bud. Do you follow me when I tell you that Nature nips the problem in the bud? Do you under—"