Bad Blood at Madden High

Prelude
Sunlight first touches America on its eastern shore, crawling determinedly over the cities that made that nation great. Yet just as America’s early citizens, restless and curious about what lay beyond the blue horizon, spread themselves out and away from the Atlantic that conducted them to these fruitful shores, daylight makes its way further west, echoing the destined movement of the country’s population westward, across the mighty Mississippi and into the Great Plains that mark the American West. It creeps past the plains, inches its way up the magnificent Rocky Mountains, and dives headlong toward the frigid Pacific. This is the wild country about which the poets sang: Buffalo, eagles, tumbleweed, silver-miners, and coyotes inhabit the landscape, a living painting of hardscrabble life, of survival in this rough land. There is no room for the feeble, there is no mercy for the timid, and except for the Code of the West and those who would uphold it, there is often no restraint for the wicked.

When those early-morning sunrays have awakened the buffalo, eagle, coyote, and miner, they yet have one stretch of land to bring into day: It is a land so wild and so far west that it lies even beyond the shores of the Pacific. This last bit of American ground, eight tiny dots in the middle of the sea, is the Mighty State of Hawaii. In that state is an island called Oahu, and on that island a city called Honolulu, and in that city a neighborhood called Paradise Heights, and in that neighborhood an American high school called J. Madden High School. It is everything the cowboy songwriters have sung while gathered around campfires in the frigid night, and it is more. In its storied, untamed corridors walk the scoundrel and the saint, the beauty and the beast. Brutes with bodies as hard as the hard sidewalk and damsels with eyes as reflective as the Olympic-sized swimming pool, seemingly with little in common other than the will to survive the hard life of the American West, walk among each other in a complicated dance of sin, survival, and sometimes redemption. Fortunes are made, hearts broken, trusts betrayed, and sometimes, though few will discuss it in tones above a secret whisper, exams flunked. It is in these hard corridors of this wild, lawless country that our story is set.

Chapter 1
The stranger chained his Gary Fisher Fat Possum LX to the rack fronting the school’s main entrance. Pushing the Kryptonite lock home with a satisfying click, he ran a hand along the upper tube in a loving caress, giving the saddle an affectionate pat. “I’ll be back before you know it, darling,” he said gently. “We’ll be back on the road with hours to go ‘til sundown.” The love of his life, the Fat Possum had been his only after a year of laborious industry, hauling grocery bags from checkout to minivan for frail elderly citizens. Two bits here and a dollar there added up slowly, but by the sweat of his brow did he earn the asking price for the Fat Possum. With a final glance backward over his shoulder at the mountain bike, he climbed the steps to his new school. Six guys sat on the top step, leaving little room for entrants to make their way into the hall.

Seniors. The stranger knew seniors when he saw them; his practiced eye discerning the casual indifference, the easy way they surveyed the parking lot as if it and the country that surrounded it were their personal playground. Seniors like these were usually nothing to be afraid of, he knew, but they must be treated with the deference earned by surviving the hard years of high school. They had calluses on their writing hands, he was sure, and probably knew every convenience store, magazine stand, and café within a ten-mile radius. Trouble was unlikely, but if were around the corner, he was ready for it.

“Any you guys know where the counselor is?” he asked.

There was no response.

“I’m looking for Mirikitani. You know where her office is?” He directed his question at the senior seated directly in front of the door.

“You got Mirikitani?” the guy responded in a flat voice. There was the slightest hint of a challenge in his tone, but it sounded more curious than feisty.

“Yeah. Where’s her office?”

“Down the hall. Right side,” he said. “Right after the trophy case.”

“Thanks.” He stepped through the small space between the guy and his buddy, stepping carefully over their shoulders, careful too to keep his backpack raised high enough not to hit anyone in the head.

The counselor’s office was marked by a sign: Mary Mirikitani, counselor. A laminated computer-printed sign, printed on paper bordered by yellow school buses, informed him that if the door was open, she was available. The door was open a crack, so he pushed it open and stepped through. A woman with her back turned to him was either putting something into or taking something out of a file cabinet.

“Ma’am?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t call me ma’am,” said the counselor, spinning around to address her visitor. “Ms. Mirikitani is fine. What’s your name?” She was slender, with wavy black hair that seemed cut to make curlicues along the sides of her face. She wore square-framed glasses, as if to offer a look of seriousness to a face that otherwise seemed to want to get just a bit wild. Her white, collared shirt was tucked into a long denim skirt. Her boots were suede, with short heels and silver laces.

“Brooks. Brooks Anderson.”

“Brooks is your first name?” She shuffled through papers on her desk, moving to take her seat behind it. With a look back, she hooked her right boot into the front leg of her office chair, dragging it close behind her and sitting down in one fluid motion, never taking her eyes off the papers on her desk. Her slender, manicured fingers rifled through one messy pile and then another.

“Yes ma’am. My parents named me after some baseball player.”

“Okay, here you are. I was looking up Brooks as a last name.” She looked up at him. Her eyes were dark enough to be called black, her nose a gentle, short nose with barely enough of a bridge for her glasses to rest upon. She wore no makeup that he could tell. “Here’s your schedule, in case you lost the copy we mailed you, and you’ll start the day in homeroom 103. Would you like me to have someone take you there?”

“No thank you, ma’am. I’ll find it.”

“Okay, then. You’re all set. Have a good first day, and if you have any problems or questions, please drop by and I’ll be happy to help you. We look forward to your becoming a part of our community.” She smiled and watched as he exited the office.

As Anderson navigated the hall, he looked with critical eyes at the graffiti that decorated the walls, the dented lockers, the trash that even on this first day of school seemed to have been deliberately placed so as to warn anyone who dared enter the halls that, if cleanliness were next to Godliness, this was not the most virtuous of schools. Packs of vermin—freshmen and sophomores, as far as he could surmise—scuttled here and there like conspiratorial rats plotting their next pantry raid, sticking to the shadowy edges of the corridors, preferring to wade through the trash that lined the halls. Groups of girls clearly not dressed for church erupted in impolite laughter, animal-like in their call, as if to send an audible warning to all comers that only ridicule and mockery awaited the poor soul who directed unsolicited attention at their pretty forms. With a little soap and water, thought Anderson, not to mention a few lessons in deportment, these ladies could be presentable enough to introduce to mother.

He reminded himself that his heart belonged to another, and that next to her memory, these obnoxious young ladies in the hall were but crows compared to his dove. He carried in his laptop computer a photo of a lock of her hair as a reminder and inspiration. Someday, he would return to her.

He knew he must be getting close to his destination when the hall seemed to be populated mostly by juniors. Not every man can tell by looking the difference between a junior and a senior, but he’d traversed many a hallway in his time, and there was no mistaking the balance of confidence and respect that a respectable junior carried. The demeanor of a well-bred junior was unmistakable to his trained glance, and while there is no such thing as a typical junior, he could tell a junior from a senior, no matter the social status of the student in question. He had an eye for people, and was a quick study. One quick look and he was able to place the subject of his scrutiny into either the friend category or the foe category, ‘though here in his new school he was uncertain what exactly would constitute a friend. If the entire student population left him be, would that be enough to consider them all friends? He was necessarily wary of new relationships, preferring at present to walk alone, to ride alone, and to drink alone. This population of juniors he observed was not especially reprehensible, but neither was it especially appealing. Something about the way the juniors looked at each other, at him, and at their surroundings broadcast certain darkness, a certain futility, a certain loss of innocence and hope. While his own innocence had left him years before, he clung to hope the way a dying man in the desert clings to his last drop of potable water. Without hope, he knew, he was as good as lost in this wild country, and he refused to let the land win in his struggle to someday liberate himself and his beloved. He imagined that overexposure to these dark-tinged juniors could suck what remained of hope from his tired soul. If he could keep his head while those about him were losing theirs, he knew he’d be okay. It was only 302 school days until graduation and he was determined to make it.

It begins now, he reminded himself as he stepped through the door labeled 103.

---

Locale: Starbucks Kapalama
Word count, this selection: 1744.
Cumulative word count: 1744.
Words left: 48,256.
Ahead or behind pace: + 77 words.
Tunage: Savatage Dead Winter Dead and Vanden Plas Beyond Daylight.
Consumables: 1 bottle of water, 1 grande nonfat latte.
Spirits: Hopeful.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 10:48 pm and is filed under The 2006 Novel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.