There were plenty of cars at my school, because it was far away from everything, and nobody wanted to take the bus. At my school, it wasn't cool to take the bus. It meant you were either too young to drive, or you were poor, and being poor was the most uncool thing to be. I went to a pretty expensive school, right. You probably could have figured that out already. Occasionally they gave out scholarships, though, to what they called "economically disadvantaged students." There would usually be some super intelligent student in sixth or seventh grade that lived in Dalewood or someplace, some not-so-nice part of town, right, where there weren't any cars past eighty-five. Cars on blocks in front of the houses. The houses, even, sometimes only one storey. I mean, really. So the administration at my school would see this student and go nuts. Kid was probably winning spelling bees or science fairs, stuff like that, but obviously couldn't afford to go to a school that started with "the." They would talk to the kid, talk to the kid's parents, and say something about how they wanted the kid to reach his or her potential and all that, and how a public high school would only be holding the kid back, and how the kid could really excel at a private school. Whatever. It's more like they were hoping the kid would turn out to be a superstar or something, like that one computer guy, and would be all grateful to The _____ School, donating all kinds of money, saying oh, thank you, thank you for believing in me and giving me a chance. Whatever.
These "economically disadvantaged students," okay, the rest of the school called them "Eds." Understand that when I was a senior, there were maybe only fifteen, sixteen Eds, and the school was somewhere around five hundred students. So everybody knew everybody. In a school that size you always had to be careful, because the walls had ears. It was kind of this unwritten thing that you didn't ever talk about "the poor students." They were Eds, okay, because it was simple, and if a teacher walked by, they'd just think you were talking about Ed Smith, or Ed Johnson. Everybody knew what "Ed" meant, anyway. It was just a courtesy thing.
You can probably tell, from the way I talk about them, that I wasn't an Ed. I lived in the Heights. If you're from the area, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. You probably know what the school is and all that, and if you read the papers or watch the news at all, you probably know what this whole thing is all about already. But just because my parents were a little better off than most doesn't mean anything. It's not something that you can hold against me, okay. As if I had any choice in the matter. I mean, sometimes I'd be driving to school, right, and it would be raining out. My dad gave me a black Audi for my birthday, leather interior and all. But it wasn't new, okay. Some guy that worked with Dad owned it first. So it's not like it was a spoiled little rich boy type of car. I mean, it was used. And I'd be driving to school, and it would be raining hard, right, and I'd drive past a bunch of kids waiting for the bus. Soaking wet. Most of them freshmen, so I'd figure they deserved it, but also one or two guys from my class, Eds. And I'd think to myself, really, would I want to be standing out in the rain, waiting for a bus? Sure I'd have an umbrella and all that, but what the hell? If I had the choice, would I rather be an Ed, standing all shivering, waiting on some bus driver, for chrissakes, or myself in my Audi, not waiting on anybody? So when people started pointing fingers, started trying to lay the blame on one or a bunch of people, we all shrugged and said "not our fault, really."
I said before that this whole thing was in the papers. So if you know what I'm talking about, just clear your mind. Forget about what the paper said, about who did what and why, because most of it was lies anyway, written by somebody who came to the school for a couple of days and asked questions and decided that they understood better than we did what was going on. Well, that's a crock of shit. I'm sorry for swearing, but it's true. How can anybody understand what happened unless they were there? Those newspaper guys didn't go to my school, they didn't know the people like I knew them. You want the truth? I was there, it happened to my friends. I think that I know better than some strangers that just waltzed in for four days.
There are basically only three people that really matter, but there were a lot more actually involved. I'm not going to use their real names, not that it matters, but I just don't feel comfortable, okay. The most important person was Dave, and the most important thing to know about Dave is that he was an Ed. But even that's not really fair, because it makes people think that he was just some poor guy. Dave was pretty cool. He was good looking, I guess, according to some of the girls in our class. He was kind of a popular, for an Ed. Sometimes you could almost forget about his being an Ed and all, just because he was so cool, but there was always something that made you remember. You'd see him working at the mall, for instance. He worked at this kind of woodsy outdoorsman type of store called The Natural Collection. They had these great 100% cotton turtlenecks, lots of colors, and also these sort of hiking boot things that were popular my senior year. A bunch of us went to the mall one day in the early fall, and decided that we wanted these boots. Dave was working that day, and we all talked to him, and it was cool, and we said that we didn't know that he worked there, even though we did. Then all of a sudden he was Mr. Salesman, helping us try on the boots. All of us. We all tried them on. He'd work the shoe horn between our heels and the boot. They were solid boots, see. But the thing about it was that this was Dave, and there he was helping us put on boots. For chrissakes, how can you look at a guy the same way after he's touched your socks and laced up your boots? I didn't even end up buying them, just because I didn't want to think about him every time that I wore them.
The other really important person was Cheryl. She lived in the Heights, too, just down the street from me. She was basically a good person, sort of beautiful, you know, but we'd grown up together. She was practically a sister to me. She was the first person that I'd ever kissed, in the first grade, behind the backstop. We were curious, I guess, to see what happened when two people put their lips together. We both decided it was kind of icky, just lips like that, but kind of neat at the same time. As we grew up, we stayed good friends. All of us did, really. That's the other thing. There were, I don't know, ten or twelve of us, scattered across four blocks in the Heights. There was a lot of experimentation between us. First kisses, first time drinking, getting stoned, losing our virginity, things like that.
The deal with Cheryl, first of all, is that she wasn't a mean person. That has to be made clear. She was usually pretty honest, and she really liked people. She was one of the few really good people that you'll ever meet. I mean, sometimes she'd do stuff, stuff just to piss her parents off or whatever, but she was basically a good person. We all loved her, right. All of us. We'd do just about anything for her.
There was this time when she had to get an abortion. This was in the ninth grade. Her, Keri, and Deb managed to get up to this party at the U. near the beginning of the school year. Cheryl met this guy, and they kind of had sex. She had told him that she was seventeen. Cheryl had a pretty incredible body back then, so I guess you could believe it if you wanted to. Anyway, they just slept together that one night, and the guy never called her again. I think somebody told him that she was only thirteen, and that was the end of that.
None of us could drive or anything, but she had this appointment, so we all met her at the mall. We took the bus from the mall to the airport, but this clinic place was still three miles away, and the bus didn't go any farther. A bunch of us walked with her, you know, just to be there for her. Every once in awhile a car would drive by. She'd panic, thinking it was her parents, and she'd start crying. We ended up forming this circle around her so she would be protected from the wind and stuff, and so that passing cars couldn't tell who she was. She kept on crying, anyway, all the way to the clinic.
The third person who was important, but only at the very end, was Phil. He moved into the Heights when he was eleven. He was kind of a psycho at times, shooting stuff in his house with a b.b. gun just to see how far he could push his parents, that kind of thing. But he was basically a decent guy. He was one of us, okay. He was our friend.
Cheryl and Dave started dating sometime during the summer before our senior year, which was kind of weird. I mean, it was almost like Dave wasn’t an Ed that summer, but nobody really could forget. He worked, right, and that was seriously uncool. During the week, Cheryl would come to the beach by herself, because Dave had his job, but the weekends were usually a lot of fun. For an Ed, Dave knew how to handle himself. It’s something that none of us were able to put our finger on, the way Dave acted, but I guess you could say that he had class. It's something that Cheryl's parents couldn't understand, and they told her quite explicitly that they didn't want her dating "that Anderson boy." Like they really cared about her or anything. I'm sorry, but Cheryl's parents were really fucked up. I mean, everybody's parents were, but her parents, for chrissakes, all they cared about was the name, and the Club, and what people would think if their daughter was dating some boy that lived in Dalewood.
So what was she going to do? Not date Dave just because her parents told her not to? I mean, really. I’m pretty sure that it was just supposed to be a summer fling, but as soon as her parents forbade her to date him, things got serious. By the end of the summer, Cheryl was always telling her parents that she was going to the mall, or to the beach, or wherever, but she'd be with Dave.
It was when school started again that things got a little weirder. Dave was pretty cool, okay. You gotta understand that we liked him. Well, most of us. And most of us thought that it was cool that Cheryl was still dating him. Whatever made her happy, right? It was just that, well, he was an Ed. Bottom line, like I said before, was that we couldn't forget about that no matter how hard we tried. So when we would skip fourth period to get drunk or whatever, and we would laugh about that new Ed, the skinny kid with, like, no fashion sense or anything, Cheryl would laugh too. Kind of soft and not really there, but she'd still laugh.
And then one day, Dave showed up in this car. I mean, he drove to school. That floored us at first, that an Ed actually drove to school. He had this pretty decent looking Honda CRX. Turns out that he'd been saving money for a couple of years so that he could buy a car. Paid cash for the whole thing. Boom, one minute he was waiting for people to give him rides everywhere, the next minute he was driving around in his Honda. Some of the people at school didn't like that Dave had a car, as if the parking lot was off limits to Eds or something. Our crowd from the Heights, well, we didn't exactly support him, but it wasn't like we were telling him that he shouldn't be driving.
It was the car, actually, that started the fight. Used to be that Cheryl would pick Dave up in the morning, and they'd drive to school together. After he bought his car, see, he wanted to pick her up, drive her to school. The thing about it was that she had told her parents that she wasn't dating him anymore. They had threatened to cut off her allowance or something if she kept dating him. So all she did was tell them that she wasn’t dating him anymore, so they’d get off her back. But then she kept dating him anyway. Like she was going to do what her parents told her to do. He bugged her for a week or so, wanting to pick her up in the morning, but she always came up with some reason why she had to drive to school that day. I think he was starting to piss Cheryl off a little, you know, like why should he pick her up? She had the better car, after all.
They had this big fight about it one day after school. He wanted to drive her to this party in the Valley, but she said no way. In the first place, it wasn’t even the type of party that Dave should want to be going to. And secondly, same reason as above, you know. I think he had started to figure out what was going on. I mean, he had to be pretty smart to be an Ed in the first place. He also had to have been able to put two and two together. That’s the kind of stuff that Eds are supposed to know how to do.
So he just flat-out confronted her in the parking lot after school, asked her to tell him exactly why he couldn't pick her up. She was kind of backed into a corner, right. Here she still wanted to go out with him, but then all of a sudden he was being a dick. I mean, so what if he couldn't pick her up at her house? It's not like it was the end of the world or anything. She was real upset after he just demanded an answer like that. We all stood around, giving her silent support. She didn't want to lie to Dave. I guess that's the important thing: even though she knew it would hurt him, she felt like she at least owed him the truth. So she told him about the whole deal with her parents, and she started to cry, which was something that I hadn’t seen her do in at least a couple of months or something. But then Dave just went stupid. He said something about how he should've known better, then he started calling her daddy's little girl, and stupid spoiled rich bitch, and things like that. I mean, way uncalled for kind of talk. Me, Phil, Toby, some other guys, we grabbed him and started to, you know, to take him away from Cheryl, so he could at least calm down. He started freaking out, right, flailing his arms around, saying get your fucking rich hands off of me. I mean, the guy went stupid, right? We told him to calm down, just relax. Nobody wanted to fight, and we especially didn't want to fight Dave. We just couldn't figure out what had gotten into him all of a sudden.
Cheryl was kind of angry by this point. I mean, no one calls her a bitch like that and gets away with it. What she did next was way uncool, too, but she walked up to Dave, walked right up to him, composed, and said why don't you just run on home, you stupid little Ed.
Now, the thing was that you just didn't call them Eds to their faces. I mean, it just wasn't done. Sure, we talked about them behind their backs, but we never ever went and said something like that. But Cheryl, I don't know what she was thinking. She said the words just like she was spitting on Dave, like she didn't care how much it hurt.
Dave didn't move or anything. I mean, it was as if Cheryl had erased the entire summer, like they never even knew each other. Dave just stood there and kind of absorbed everything, I guess, the crowd that had formed, the way Cheryl's eyes had turned cool as glass. I don't know. I'm not a mind reader or anything, but it seemed like forever that we waited for him to respond, that he just stood there thinking about who knows what.
And then he hit her. He reached out and punched her square in the nose. He called her something I'm not going to repeat. You talk about uncool. I don't care who you are, you do not hit Cheryl, no matter what she's said to you. And you especially don't call her that kind of a name. I'm not even sure who jumped on him first, but within a couple of seconds, there were five of us taking turns on Dave, pounding his face, kicking him, everything.
I kind of lose track of things here. Sometimes it goes in super slow motion, and sometimes it all blurs into one action, and sometimes a little of both. But at least I've got a clearer picture of what happened than those newspaper guys.
Dave had somehow managed to get up and was scrambling to get away from us. He was holding his face, and it looked like some blood was dribbling down through his hands. He'd either messed up his face real bad, or it was the back of his hand that was doing the bleeding. I couldn't tell.
But then Phil went and did the ultimate stupid thing. None of us acted particularly smart that day, I realize that now, but Phil, he just came out of nowhere with this knife. I mean, we all knew that he had it, this butterfly knife, and he loved playing around with it, opening it, closing it, stuff like that, but nobody ever expected him to use it. The knife opened up and everything stopped. It was like there was some instant group consciousness or something. Everybody realized that things were getting way out of hand, with the knife, and that it would be a good time to clear out. Toby and I moved over to Phil, slow like, because he had this super volatile temper, and, like I said, he was kind of a psycho at times. We talked real smooth and quiet, telling him to just put the knife away. He was out of it. I mean, what was he thinking? What the hell could Phil have possibly been thinking? I ask myself that a lot, but I can't ever come up with an answer.
He nodded at us, kind of grinned, and said, yeah, I'll put it away. Then it was slow motion. He grabbed Dave by the shoulder and stood him up. Toby and I lunged, Dave tried to pull away. Dave was lucky. Real lucky, I guess. The blade slashed from the upper part of his chest down across his stomach, but it wasn't deep or anything. It wasn't anything more than a very bloody scratch. Phil tried slashing Dave again, but by that time, Toby and I had tackled him. People were screaming and stuff, and I think some teachers or somebody had finally shown up. I don't remember.
You probably already know the rest. It was on the news that night, a stabbing at The _____ School, and class warfare and all that. Some guy gave an editorial about the whole scholarship thing, and see what happens when you try to integrate, and a whole bunch of crap like that. Then the newspaper guys were down for the next couple of days, interviewing people, being all righteous and stuff, but none of us were talking. They got most of their information from the Eds. What else were they going to say except that it was our fault. They talked about how this poor little poor kid had suffered through three some years of alienation, and how he just wanted to belong, but now he had to transfer, all because of this incident. They always called it an incident, like that, like it was something real ugly, like cancer or something.
And now if you think that it was just the money thing, if you think that it was a fight only about money and who lived where, then I guess you're missing the whole point. We all liked Dave. Most of us, anyway. When he hung out with us, we kind of accepted him, you know, because he was an okay guy. So it wasn't like we had wanted to hurt him or anything. Things just got a little out of control. Besides, the guy had hurt Cheryl, okay, and was talking stuff that he just shouldn't have been talking. When he hit her like that, and called her those names, we knew that he had to be taught a lesson. And the way we figured, at least it was his friends that did the teaching. That way, at least, he would know that we didn't mean any real harm, that we only wanted him to understand that there were certain things that just shouldn't be done.
I'm not so sure that he saw it the same way we did, however. I went to the mall later in the year, okay, and there were these great shorts at The Natural Collection. Khakis, you know. Knee length. The funny thing is that Dave was working that day, and he pretended like he didn't even know me. He acted like I was just any other guy coming in to buy clothes. I mean, really. I didn't know what to do, so I tried on a couple pairs of shoes, you know, and made him lace them for me.
(c) Copyright 1992 Robert K. Brown
Copyright 2002 © Robert K. Brown
