When you grow up in a small town you get to know the people around you really well. You make friends with kids your age and since hardly anyone moves away, you have the same people around you from the day you’re born until someone dies. As I sat outside the cafeteria and ate warm, greasy tater tots, I hardly said a word to Trevor. I didn’t need to. We lived next door to each other for as long as I could remember. Most days he gave me a ride to school and on the days he didn’t have football practice, we rode home together. On days when I couldn’t handle being in the same house as my parents, I would go sit on the porch swing in front of Trevor’s house. He would come home from practice or come out after dinner and we would sit together. Sometimes we would talk about how awful it was to live in such a tiny shit hole of a town. Sometimes we would just listen to the music that drifted from the headphones that sat around my neck.
From where I sat on the sidewalk, I could look past Trevor and into the cafeteria window. Hundreds of kids sat at blue tables, many of which had initials or rude messages scratched into the Formica. They all talked. I never understood how a group of kids could sit around a table where everyone talked at the same time. They boasted, complained, and lied to each other. Nobody really listened, which didn’t matter since none of them really had anything important to say. Every day at school I was removed of some of my hope for the future of America. I was a naturally a cynic but attending high school in a small town made me a misanthrope. There were only a few kids that were not a complete waste of natural resources.
Trevor had removed the lid from his shake cup and was strategically aiming his straw at small deposits of chocolate shake while sucking air into the straw. He looked up from his cup and looked over my head. He nodded in greeting.
“What’s up, Dave?”
I turned and looked over my shoulder to see David Morneau give a complicated handshake to two other boys. The other boys placed their hands in their pockets to keep their pants up as they walked to the cafeteria. David sauntered over to where I sat and leisurely lowered himself to the concrete. He crossed his legs and sighed heavily.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “You smell like a Bob Marley concert.”
David giggled and shook his head.
“Don’t,” he started. “Don’t make me laugh, I won’t be able to stop.”
Trevor rolled his eyes and asked, “Did you guys just take a hike in the forest?”
The forest was a plot of land across the street from the high school. Trails wound between the trees of the undeveloped property that kids would use to cut across on their way to and from school. It was also a popular place for students to sneak away for a cigarette or something stronger.
David took a steadying breath to kill his giggle fit.
“My brother’s friend came down from Alaska. He brought a bag full of purple kush that will knock a lesser person to the ground.”
“Those other two,” I asked. “They’re not lesser folk?”
“Skid and Jason? Ha, yeah. They can handle their shit.”
Martin “Skid” Covey and Jason Peterson were juniors. Martin was a junior last year too. Nobody expected them to graduate unless the teachers cut them slack just to get rid of the two. They were both continual troublemakers and Jason already had a police record. My dad had chased them from abandoned mine properties more times then I can remember.
“Ooh,” said David. “Got any tater tots left?”
I gave David the orange cup that still had a few tots in the bottom. He ate them all at once and when he finished chewing, he upended the cup over his mouth to catch the last greasy crumbs.
The bell rang to mark the end of lunch. I put my hand up to Trevor, who pulled me off the ground with little effort. Trevor extended his hand to David, who shook his head.
“Nah man, that bell means my lunch just started.”
I forgot that David had second lunch. He had been hiking in the forest while he was supposed to be in fourth period.
“Okay man, I’ll talk to you later,” said Trevor and waved.
“Is your brother picking you up from school,” I asked David.
“Yeah, man. You need a ride?”
I looked at Trevor.
“Sorry Nic, I have practice today.”
I looked back at David, “Looks like I do.”
“Sweet, I’ll see you by the flag pole.”
I turned and walked with Trevor into the cafeteria and wondered if David would make it to any of his afternoon classes. The cafeteria tables were mostly empty but the second lunch crowd was on their way in and many kids were already in line to pick up their daily slop.
“You know,” said Trevor. “You could come watch me at practice and I could give you a ride home after.”
“I don’t know if I could handle all the testosterone,” I said.
“Don’t worry, the cheerleaders practice at the same time so there’s some estrogen to balance it out.”
“Then I’m definitely not going. Cheerleaders give me the creeps.”
We had reached the hallway where Trevor would turn to get to his next class.
“Okay, I’ll see you later then,” he said and smiled before making his way down the hallway.
A sophomore with a red baseball cap held his hand up for a high five and yelled, “Kinsey!” Trevor answered the high five and kept walking. I stood still in the flow of teenagers. Their words swirled around me like water. The only steady thing in sight was the back of Trevor’s head as he made his way down the hall. I lost sight of him as he opened the door to his history class and entered. I sighed, turned to walk toward my chemistry class, and bumped directly into someone much bigger than me.
The hallway lights reflected off of a badge. I looked up and found I was face to face with our school resource officer.
“Excuse me, Office Hoskins. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
“It’s okay, but you better hurry or you’ll be late for class,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
I walked briskly down the now empty hallway. I felt someone watching me and I looked over my shoulder to see the policeman watching me with a little smile on his face.
Hoskins was a football star four years ago. After going to college on a scholarship for two years, his career was cut short by a damaged knee. Hoskins returned to Kiln Valley after passing the state law enforcement officer training and enrolled in the KVPD. He was assigned to Kiln Valley High School as a resource officer. The idea behind a resource officer is to allow students to become accustomed to the presence of a policeman and to see them not as a threat but as a member of the community. Like many programs built by adults for teenagers, this one was largely a failure. Kids at my school that were caught with cigarettes or other contraband found themselves taking a ride to the police station in the back of Hoskins’ cop car. Getting in a fight at school used to mean nothing more than detention but more and more students ended up with assault charges if Hoskins was involved in breaking them up.
I didn’t have a problem with school administrators deterring drug use and violence on campus, but it was common knowledge that Hoskins was easy on the popular kids, the rich kids, and the kids whose parents served on the police force. If you were none of those, you had to especially watch out for SRO Hoskins. I felt like I had to watch out for him for another reason.
Every time I saw Hoskins, he was looking at a female student. He would have this smirk on his face that was probably supposed to look confident but he always looked like he was enjoying himself a little too much. A rumor went around that Hoskins had put his hands on a female student in an inappropriate way. There was an investigation but the girl in question retracted her accusation. New rules were drawn up that stated the SRO couldn’t interview or search a female student without a female teacher present but that hardly made me feel better. I shivered and walked faster to my classroom.
I arrived to my science class just in time for the bell to ring. I made my way to my desk and sat down roughly. My chemistry teacher was busy writing on the chalkboard. He began to talk without turning around.
“Students are expected to be in their seats by the time the bell rings or else they are marked as tardy.”
Mr. Lantz finished writing a formula on the chalkboard. His was the last classroom with real chalkboards, every other classroom had the white boards on which the teachers would write with dry-erase markers. Mr. Lantz had been teaching at the school for 34 years. This was the last year before he was supposed to retire, but so had the last three years. When he found out that the school was replacing the old chalkboards with dry-erase boards, he lobbied the principal and the school board for the right to keep his old chalkboards until he retired. He assured them he would be retiring soon. That was four years ago and Mr. Lantz had yet to officially file for retirement. He was still too young for the district to force him into retirement and so the chalkboards remained.
Mr. Lantz was outwardly a stickler for the rules and I had no doubt that he had already marked me tardy. However, his curmudgeonly resistance to adopting the white boards made me like him. He was never unfair or inaccurate when grading our work which is more than I could say for the biology teacher I had sophomore year.
Mr. Lantz surveyed his chalk marks once more and then turned to glower at the class from under ridiculously long eyebrows.
“Can anyone tell me what is happening in the formula I have written on the board?”
A few students flipped though their notes, a few more looked in their enormous chemistry book, and the rest stared at the white letters, numbers, and symbols as if they had seen nothing like it in all their lives.
“Someone, please.”
I raised my hand and said, “It looks like photosynthesis. But something is missing.”
“Correct on both counts, Ms. Miller,” he said and returned to the board to draw a small sun above the arrow in the middle of the formula. “What is missing is the input of energy, which in this case comes in the form of light from our sun.”
He turned around and put his hands on his lectern, another item found only his his classroom.
“Photosynthesis is the chemical reaction used by plants to convert water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen. Can anyone tell me why this is important?”
“Um,” said a meek voice from a couple aisles over. “Because animals need oxygen and sugar?”
“Precisely, Ms. Wallace. Almost the exact same chemical formula happens in reverse in the process of cellular respiration, where the cell of an animal uses sugar and oxygen to create water and carbon dioxide.”
“And energy,” I said.
“Yes, Ms. Miller, and energy. This cyclical relationship of photosynthesis and cellular respiration works as both an allegory to the relationship between animal and plant life and as an introduction to our section on organic chemistry. Please open your textbooks to page one hundred fifty-seven and read to yourselves until page one hundred sixty-three while I prepare the next example.”
I flipped to the correct page but I did not read. I sat and watched my classmates while they did as they were told. Some of them were actually learning this stuff for the first time. So many of them actually had no idea what was photosynthesis. I couldn’t believe that someone could make it to senior year knowing so little. But I should not have been surprised. I am surrounded by hundreds of kids who couldn’t diagram a sentence. I was surrounded by classmates who couldn’t tell you source document for the phrase “We the people.”
I was surrounded by the average and below-average. I could not wait to go to college, where I hoped to find more people like me and Trevor. Trevor and I were going to leave town after high school and never come back. That day could not come soon enough.