He looked crestfallen.  It had performed so beautifully in his basement.  Now here in what he thought was just a gentle breeze, it would travel only a few meters before flipping to one side, or stalling.  He had one flight left, and there was virtually no chance he would make it into the semifinals.

His turn came all too quickly.  He stood at the line, cocked his arm, and launched the plane.  It started a graceful, slow turn, and for a moment he had hope.  But the turn became sharper, and the plane began to lose precious inches of altitude.  He counted mentally, knowing it was over long before it was.  In just under seven seconds, the nose hit the ground, and the judge’s stopwatch clicked.

The winning paper airplane stayed in the air for almost fifteen seconds.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t really wanted to win.  Kids who spent under a minute folding a piece of notebook paper did better than he did.  He’d made dozens of planes, and brought his best design, and it had all been a waste of time.

He unfolded his losing entry carefully, and stared at its clean, sharp creases.  Then he crumpled it into a tight ball and threw it as hard as he could at a trash can.  It bounced off the rim  and hit the floor.  That figured.  He walked away, feeling disgusted and full of self-loathing.

“Young man?”

At first he didn’t even turn.  Nothing mattered, anyway.

“Young man!”

He knew the words were directed at him.  He guessed immediately what he was going to hear.  After an eternity of slience, she spoke softly, but firmly.

“You know the school rules about littering.”

He knew them.

“You’ll be expected in detention tomorrow afternoon.  You’ll be emptying all the wastebaskets in the building.  Don’t be late.”

He almost, almost forgot to return to pick up his paper ball.  She watched him  until it was safely in the basket.  Neither of them said a word.

 

School seemed to be in slow motion the next day.  Each class was longer than the last.  He could have sworn the second hand on the clock stopped moving whenever he took his eyes off it.  But finally it was last period, and he could tell the rest of his class was fidgety with anticipation.  But not David.  He had nothing to look forward to but time alone with classroom trash, and of course some jabs from his friends on their way out into the sunshine.

It was of course perhaps the most beautiful day in history.  Thanks largely to the fact that he had detention, the weather gods had chosen to bless everyone who was free to enjoy it.  There would be a pickup basketball game, his friends racing each other on their bikes, and quite probably he’d not even be missed.

His mood was thus about as black at it could be as he walked into the vice-principal’s office to begin his detention.  Seeing Douglas “Doug the Rug” Burham already in the office was only a handful of salt poured into his open emotional wound.

Doug was one of those kids who got detention often.  Possibly even more often than not.  He had a big mouth, which he opened often.  He had big arms and big fists, which he used often.  He was a big kid, half a head taller than David.  And he had a big head of curly brown hair.  You might have guessed it was the reason for his nickname, but only until you saw him in the shower in the locker room.  The pelt on his back and arms was something you’d expect to see in a much older kid, or even an adult.  David suspected that there was an orangutan somewhere in Doug’s family tree.

“David Butthead!  So the Gestapo got you too!”

David hated his last name.

His mother had had a perfectly reasonable last name.  He’d have been happy to be David Miller.  But she married a Buckhead.  And Buckheads in David’s town were generally rich, and generally envied.  It didn’t matter that his dad was just a manager in a hardware store owned by one of his wealthier cousins.  It didn’t matter that David’s allowance was only average, that he rode a hand-me-down bike, and that his mother shopped at thrift stores.  It didn’t matter that David was the last person on earth who would put on airs or pretend to be better than other people.  It only mattered that Doug didn’t like Buckheads in general.

David didn’t like Doug in particular, so the feeling was mutual.  He was working on what to say back to Doug when the vice-principal stepped out of his office and spoke to both of them.

“Where is Miss Tanner?”

Doug and David looked at Mr. Wisham with blank stares.  He might have spoken to them a second time, but before he could, the door behind them opened.

Jane Tanner walked into the office.  Jane Tanner.  Janie to her friends.  Janie of every fantasy David had had since the beginning of 7th grade.

Doug would have laughed at anyone else.  He would have kept up his swagger and posed as a general tough guy, even facing Mr. Wisham.  But this was Jane Tanner.  The Jane Tanner.  Easily the prettiest girl in 7th grade, and maybe the entire school.  You wanted to be noticed by Jane, but only in a good way.

David realized only too late that his mouth was open when Jane spoke first to him.

“David?  You’re in detention too?”

Nothing made less sense than Jane Tanner in detention.  Jane was not only fantastically beautiful, she was generally well-liked by teachers and a good student.  She was class president, even though she hadn’t even made much of an effort to get the office.  The girls who wanted to be seen with her, and the boys who just wanted to be with her, had all voted for her.

Mr. Wisham spoke before David could, and basically rescued him from what would probably have sounded like babbling.

“I believe this is your first time in detention, is it not, young lady?”

Jane’s eyes drifted away from David’s face.  His eyes stayed locked on hers.

“Yes.  I don’t really deserve to be here, though.”

Mr. Wisham smiled.  “I suspect this may be your one and only time.  So make the most of the learning experience.  Everyone makes a mistake now and then.  Just make sure you learn from it.”

His smile evaporated as he turned to Doug.  “For you, Mr. Burham, detention is nothing new.”

Doug’s reflex tough guy nod acknowledged the remark, and communicated clearly that Doug was just too cool to be bothered by it.

“And you, Mr. Buckhead.  I believe you are another repeat offender.”

It was true that this was not David’s first time in detention.  He’d already been in once in his 7th grade year, and the fall semester was only half over.  In 6th grade he’d been in 4 times.  But somehow having his criminal record reviewed in front of Jane made it seem more awful than it had really been.

David tried to think of something clever to say, or something cool to do.  In the end all he managed to do was unglue his gaze from Jane and acknowledge that Mr. Wisham had spoken to him.  “Yeah.”

The process of detention was really quite simple.  You showed up within 5 minutes of the final bell, or you got an extra day tacked onto your sentence.  There was a roll call, and then you got your assignments.  None of them were fun, and all of them took time... Usually about an hour, but sometimes more like two.  Then you returned to Mr. Wisham’s office to wait until he confirmed that you did was you were assigned to do.  Then you had to write the note.

The note was to your parents.  You wrote it and gave it to Mr. Wisham to read.  If he was satisfied with it, he took it to mail to your parents, and then you were free to go.

So the first order of business was David’s assignment.  He’d assumed it would be trash detail, and he wasn’t wrong.  Doug got cafeteria cleanup.  Jane got envelopes.

Trash detail was easy, really.  You went to the janitor’s room to get a rolling trash cart.  You wheeled it to each classroom.  In each room you emptied the wastebaskets into the trash cart.  There were usually 3 or 4 to each room.  If there was trash on the floor, you picked that up too.

Cafeteria cleanup was actual work.  You had to stack up all the chairs and fold up all the tables.  You had to mop the entire floor.  Then you had to set all the tables and chairs back up again.  If any table or chair was messy, it was to be cleaned with soap and water.

Envelopes was what the first offenders got.  David remembered.  Basically you folded paper, stuffed envelopes, licked stamps, and copied addresses.  It was tedious, quiet work, sitting at a desk.  With quick work, Jane would finish and be on her way before either David or Doug was even half done.

Even by the time David emptied what was probably his fiftieth basket, he still hadn’t been able to guess what Jane might possibly have done to get detention.  He had thought about virtually nothing else.

The piece of paper had stuck to the bottom of the basket, on some chewed gum.  He shook the basket but it wouldn’t fall out on its own.  He had to reach in to pull it out, or he’d never have even glanced at it.

What caught his eye was Jane’s name.  It was a fantastic coincidence, or perhaps just a prepared mind alert to a particular pattern of letters.  The paper was Jane’s, and somehow he had been fated to find it, he was instantly sure.

Now, of course, the proper thing to do was to just throw the paper into the trash cart, and move on to the next room, the next wastebasket.  The paper wasn’t his, and wasn’t meant for him.  It was in the trash because it wasn’t wanted, and wasn’t wanted to be seen again.  It was supposed to be recycled, not read.

He looked around him, as if guilty.  He looked carefully at the paper.

It was the first page of an essay, and Jane was the author.  It had some red marks on it, which suggested that it had been looked at by a teacher.  It had a staple mark in the upper left corner, and the numeral “1” on the bottom, to suggest it was the first of possibly several pages.  He read:

“Shoplifting in the 21st Century - Who Does It, and How Its Done”

“By Jane Tanner, 7th Grade English”

The first red mark was to indicate a missing apostrophe in the title.

“You might think that with metal detectors and security cameras everywhere these days, nobody shoplifts anymore.”, the essay began.  Somehow David could not imagine Jane writing it, or even considering the topic.

“After all, who could steal without getting caught?  But what many thieves know is that shoplifting is not only possible, it is still about as easy as it ever was.”

The essay didn’t sound like it came from Jane.  It couldn’t have, could it?  Her name was one it, but the name was just printed characters.  The essay had been put onto paper by a printer, not a pen.  It might not even be hers.

“Shoplifting used to be about having fun, or about getting occasional things you couldn’t afford.  But today it is about getting money, often to buy drugs.”

The more he read, the stranger the world around him seemed to become.

“If you can get something small and valuable out of one store, you can return it to another.  These days, all stores sell pretty much the same things.  You can’t get cash if you return something without a receipt, but from some stores you can get merchandise cards, which work pretty much like cash to buy things in the store.”

David pondered what the essay was saying.  He had never stolen anything from a store, and never even thought about doing so.  It was oddly fascinating to consider how he would do it if he wanted to.

“But the easiest way to get money for what you steal is to sell it on eBay.  All you need to do is take a digital picture of it, describe it in words, and”

The first page of the essay abruptly ended.  It had been double-spaced and printed in a large font.  The bottom of the page had interrupted the sentence.

He turned the page over, but nothing was printed on it.  He would have immediately begun the search for page 2, but he noticed that the page was not blank.  In red pen, a telephone number was written on the bottom right corner of the page, at a slant.  He didn’t recognize the number, which had only 7 digits, so it was probably local.

He looked in the basket.  He looked in the trash cart.  He actually dug armloads of paper out of the trash cart and flipped through it carefully.  He spent a good 15 minutes with papers scattered all over the classroom floor.  He didn’t find page 2, or any additional pages.

He couldn’t believe it.  Why would someone throw away just one page of an essay?  And why had he found page 1, if he wasn’t supposed to find the rest?

He realized that he might be missed if he spent any more time in this one classroom.  He hurriedly gathered up the uninteresting trash and put it back into the cart.  He stared at page 1 of Jane’s essay for a long moment, as it deciding what to do.  Then he folded the page and put it into his pocket.

The rest of trash detail was uneventful.  It took almost an hour, but the time flew by.  He never stopped thinking about Jane, or the essay, or about why she was in detention.  He hardly paid any attention to the work, but simply collected trash in a robot-like fashion.  This would have been a perfectly fine thing to do, except that it meant he forgot totally about Doug.

His trash detail rounds took him into the hall by the cafeteria.  He wasn’t paying attention.  The wet rag hit him squarely on the side of his face.

He had no idea what it was, and never saw it coming.  When something splats hard onto your face, and then you feel liquid running onto your neck and shoulder, your first, perhaps irrational, fear is that it is your own blood.  He staggered to one side and let go of the trash cart he was pushing.  Doug kicked the trash cart over in David’s direction.  Paper spilled out of the very full cart and made an ankle-deep pile at David’s feet.  Doug laughed as he grabbed the wet rag from David.

“Looks like you’ve got some more picking up to do, Butthead!”

It all happened so suddenly.  If he’d had his wits about him, he might have tried to put up some resistance, or at least not seemed to be such a total wimp.  If he’d not been completely on another planet, he might have made a brave retort, or perhaps picked up some trash to throw at Doug.  But Doug was gone in a flash, pulling the cafeteria door shut between him and David.  The entire encounter had taken perhaps 5 seconds, and now David was in the hallway alone, with paper and other trash everywhere.  He looked stupidly at his feet, then stupidly at his wet shirt, and the stupidly at the very end of end of the hall, where he saw something move.  Jane was staring at him.  She was a long way down the hall, but he was the only thing in it.

He didn’t immediately know what to do.  Would she walk down to talk with him?  Would he look like a fool?  Did he look like one already?

He started pick up the trash cart and the paper.  He’d have to do it anyway.  He was halfway though picking up when he dared to look down the hall again.  She was gone.

The rest of detention was very predictable.  He’d written the “I’m in detention, Mom” note.  Mr. Wisham hadn’t bothered to check on how thorough his trash collection had been.  Doug had been mercifully gone by the time he got to the office.

He walked home mulling over the day in his head.  He still hadn’t figured out any of the mysteries.  Why was Jane in detention?  Had she written the essay?  What did the rest of the essay talk about?  What could he do about Doug, who was probably bragging right now to his friends about how he had surprised “Butthead”.

 

The page he had folded in his pocket stayed there until well after dinner. He’d actually forgotten about it, although not forgotten about its curious content.  He pulled the paper out and stared at it, and then very slowly turned it over, as if making a decision.  He picked up a phone, and dialed the number.

It rang 4 times. No answer.  He hung up.  He was wondering what to do next when the phone rang.  He answered, not expecting anything.

“Hello.  Buckhead residence.”

There was a long silence.  He was about to hang up when he heard a voice.  “Who were you looking for?”

That was the question he was supposed to ask, seeing as how he was answering the phone.  It puzzled him to be asked by the caller.

“You called here.  Who are YOU looking for?”

The caller simply hung up.

Another mystery.  He thought about it for a while, and then had an idea.  He dialed the number on page 1 again.  Once again there was no answer.  He hung up, and then waited.  This time no call came.  He tried again later, with the same result.

 

The next day at school he saw Jane during the break between classes.  She didn’t see him, for which he was both thankful and irritated at himself.  He saw her again later in the day.  Clearly he was looking for her, even more than usual, considering how he’d been infatuated with her for months.  She was still beautiful, and still a mystery.  She was in only one class with him, at the end of the day.  Math class.

He sat almost as far away from her as possible in the room.  Not by choice, but simply because when he’d come to the first class of the year, and arrived late, he had to take the only remaining seat.  The teacher had then told the students she expected them to stay in the same seats for the entire school year.

He opened his math book.  The math books were shared, and generally stayed in the classroom.  Kids who wanted good grades in math took them home more often than David did.  He left his in the desk on most days.  He turned to the current chapter and without any enthusiasm whatsoever glanced down at the book.  In the crease was a small pink sticky note.  On it were a few words that jolted him immediately awake.

“Call me tonight.  J.”

Now, ordinarily he would have assumed that “J” meant any other person on the planet earth before it could possibly mean “Jane”.  He knew she knew him, but he also doubted she considered him a friend.  He certainly wasn’t on a first-letter-of-first-name basis with her.  He didn’t even know her phone number, and doubted that she thought he did.

He looked at the handwritten letters.  The dot over the letter “i” in “tonight” was a tiny circle.  That was how girls sometimes dotted their “i’s”.  The ink was black, from a ball point pen.  The sticky note was pink.  No boy would be caught dead with pink sticky notes.  It had to be her, didn’t it?

He spent virtually the entire math class staring at her.  He sat far enough away, and behind her, so that for her to look at him she would have had to turn her head around.  She didn’t.  Not even once.

When the bell rang, he was the first one out.  Once into the hall, he turned to watch Jane come out.  She finally did.  But when she did, she seemed to barely notice him.  She went immediately towards her locker, in the next hallway over.

He followed her at a distance.  He knew she lived far enough away from school that she had to ride the bus.  She talked with her friends, she spoke to some boys he didn’t much like, and then she climbed onto the bus.

David set down his backpack and stared as the bus as it pulled away.  Should he call her?  If so, then how?  Could he find her phone number in the book?  He didn’t know her exact address or her parents’ names.

The white pages had more than a dozen Tanners.  He called one at random, and it wasn’t the right one.  He paused before calling another.  What was he doing?  What would he say to her even if he did reach her by phone?  What if she wasn’t “J”?  He paced up and down in his room.  For no good reason, he decided not to call her from his home.  He got on his bike and pedaled to a nearby drugstore that he knew had a pay phone.

He called 3 more Tanners.  None was the right one.  He called a fourth and got no answer.  He was pausing to gather his courage, and searching for more change for the pay phone, when suddenly the phone rang.  Someone was calling him?  Or perhaps someone was calling the pay phone?

He let it ring 5 times before he decided to answer it.  When he finally did, it wasn’t her.

But it was her mother.

“Hello?”

“Yes, hello.  I’m sorry to bother you, but did someone there try to call us just now?

This was the second time in 24 hours that he was having this same strange experience with a caller.  He didn’t do much better than he did the first time.

“Umm, well.  This is David Buckhead.  I was trying to call Jane Tanner.”  He felt as awkward as he could possibly feel.  He almost hoped it wasn’t Jane’s mother.

“Oh.  That’s fine.  Please hold on while I find her.”

“OK.”

The wait was agonizing.  What would he say to her?  Why did he call?  Why, why did he call?

“Hi, David.”  Jane’s voice.

He drew a deep breath, and managed only a somewhat squeaky voice.

“Hi.  I was calling you because...”  Then she cut him off.

“Listen.  I can’t talk right now, but I want to talk to you.  Are you at home?  What’s your phone number?”

“I’m not at home.  I’m calling from a pay phone.”  He wished his voice was deeper.

“So what’s the number there?”

He read her the number.  Things weren’t going according to any plan, or even in a way that made sense.  He had scarcely finished speaking the number when she came back in a loud voice.

“I’m going to call you from my cell phone, when I’m up in my room.  I have to ask you about our homework assignment in English class.  I’ll call you.  Bye!”

His throat was dry.  He didn’t even manage to say “Bye” before there was a click on the line.

So he found himself sitting by the payphone in the drugstore, completely confused.  He replayed their brief conversation in his mind.  Had he mentioned that he was calling because of the note?  Had she somehow indicated that she expected his call?  Was she “J”?

He waited several minutes, but the phone didn’t ring.  Or at least it felt like several minutes.  Finally, the phone rang.  He answered immediately.

“David?”

“Yeah.  It’s me.”

“Good.  Can you talk?”

He looked around, but nobody seemed even remotely interested in either him or the phone.

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“Did you get my note?”

The relief in hearing the question was almost overpowering.  He realized that he’d been holding his breath.

“The pink one?”

“Yeah.  I’m glad you figured out what our phone number was.  I didn’t have time when I left the note to write it down for you.”

“It was easy to figure out.”  Finally words came out that made him sound like a cool, resourceful, smart guy.

“I don’t really want to talk to you about homework.”

He knew that much already.  He wasn’t even in the same English class as she was.

“Yeah.  I figured.”

“My Mom is so nosy.  I can’t talk to anyone on our house phone.  Luckily I have a cell phone I got for my birthday, or I’d have no privacy at all.”

It struck him that girls manage to talk more easily than boys.

“Yeah.  I wish I had one.”

“So, anyway.  What I want to talk to you about is detention.”

Not what he expected at all.  But perhaps a welcome direction, towards a solution to the mystery.

“I was really surprised to see you in Mr. Wisham’s office.  I didn’t figure you would ever get detention.”

“I didn’t expect to get it either.  And I didn’t deserve it.”  She sounded a bit mad, he thought.

“So what did you do?”

There was a longer pause than he liked before she answered.

“I guess you might as well know.  My stupid English teacher gave me a detention because he thinks I copied a paper from someone else.”

Again, David was unsure of what to think, and unsure what to say next.

“So did you?  Cheat, I mean?”

“No.  I didn’t copy anything from anybody.  I didn’t even turn in a stupid essay!”

The page was still in his pocket.  He suddenly could feel it there, through the fabric.

“What do you mean?”  David was thinking as fast as possible.  He shouldn’t admit to having seen the paper, should he?

“I mean I didn’t turn in an essay, but he said I did.  And he said it must have been copied from someone else.”

The conversation was going in an unpredictable way.  He slid his hand into his pocket as he listened.

“Why would someone turn in a paper with your name on it?”

There was a silence.  He instantly regretted the question.  Had he said too much?

“Well, someone did, I guess.  I didn’t see the paper he said I turned in.”

Now David was in an even stranger place.  He was looking at the page that she was claiming she didn’t write and hadn’t seen.

“What was the paper about, anyway?”

“He said it was about stealing.  He said I couldn’t have written it.  He demanded that I tell him who did.”

David looked at the page in his hand, as if it would tell him something new.  It didn’t.

“Why would you write about stealing?”

“That’s just it.  I didn’t.  Don’t you understand?”

He didn’t.

“Did he think you were stealing?”

Again, an unfortunate choice of words that just slipped out.  Why couldn’t he just act cool, and be smart, like a detective or a secret agent or someone like that?  There was yet another pause that seemed to last longer than it should have before she spoke again.

“Why do you ask me that?”

Why indeed.

“No reason” was all he could think to say.  He tried to say it in a light, breezy way.

“He said he was going to send me to detention to think about what I had done.  He told me that I would have to admit to him where I copied the essay from, or he was going to call my parents.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I need your help.”

Now, in any young boy’s life there came only a few calls from damsels in distress.  When these come, you have to sally forth right away, with sword in hand.  A great confidence and pride swelled him as he finally sensed an opportunity to do something right, instead of something else to be ashamed of.

“I’ll help in any way I can.”  But what could he do?

“You can help me get the essay back, so I can read it.”

“Sure, but how?”  He was strapping on his armor.

“You can help me get the essay from his desk.”

He was slow.  He didn’t get it.

“The essay is in his desk?”

“I figure it has to be.  He never carries anything home with him after school, and I doubt he would throw it away.”

“What good will it do you to get it?”

“I don’t know.  I guess maybe it will tell me who did it.  I think somebody is pulling some sort of dirty trick on me.”

He looked at the paper in his hand yet another time.

“Maybe he’s thrown it away.”  Maybe he could get her to give up looking for it.

“I doubt it.  I have to try, at least.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to just ask to see it?”  What was he thinking?  Maybe if she asked, he would simply say he threw it away.

“I already asked.  When he told me I was getting detention.  He told me that he was going to keep it safe until I told him where it came from.”

So here was a real dilemna.  Should he encourage a risky raid on a desk for a piece of paper that he knew not to be in there?  Should he admit to having found the paper?  Why hadn’t he admitted that he had it already?  Why was he such a doofus?

“I don’t think you’ll be able to get it, and it probably won’t do you any good even if you do.  Maybe you should just take your punishment.”

“I’m not like you.”  Those words stung.  “I don’t get in trouble a lot, and I don’t cheat.”  There was his criminal record again, coming back to haunt him.

“I don’t cheat either.  Or steal.”  Now, why did he say that?

There was a silence that stretched to infinity before she spoke.  And when she did, it wasn’t in a good voice.

“I thought I could trust you, but I guess I can’t.”  His sword was broken.

“I always thought you were kind of nice, and I figured since we were in detention together you might help me.”  His armor was badly tarnished.

“I thought you would see things the way I do, and you would believe me.”  He was bleeding.  He did believe her.  He believed every word she had spoken.

“I’ll find some way to get the essay myself.  Just don’t tell anyone about what I’ve told you.  You can at least keep a secret, can’t you?”  He was willing to submit to physical torture.  He wouldn’t utter a single word.  He wanted to tell her.

“Sure I can keep a secret!”

He would have said more.  He should have said more.  Much more.

But she cut him off again, and gave him one last wound.

“Good.  So when we’re back in school, don’t talk to me or act weird or anything.  Just go back to ignoring me like you always have.”

And then she hung up.

He stared at the phone in one hand and the essay page in the other.  He would probably have been staring for several minutes, but he heard a voice speaking to him.

“Young man, are you finished using the phone?”

He looked up at the woman speaking to him.  He simply handed the phone to her without hanging it up.  He got up quickly and within seconds was pedaling his bike furiously.  He didn’t even have a destination.

 

That night he asked his Dad about Caller ID.  The Buckhead’s phone didn’t have the feature, and David was unfamiliar with it.  His dad explained that some people can see the number that is calling before they have to answer.  He told David about how if you missed a call, there was a special code you could enter to allow you to call back the person who called you, but cautioned him that it would add cost to their phone bill.  So that was how Mrs. Tanner had called him back at the pay phone.  And was that how the earlier call had worked as well?  He thought about it a long time.

The next day was busy.  David had a quiz in one class, and an afternoon field trip to a museum.  He missed math class, and never saw Jane even once.  But he found an opportunity to do something he had planned.  While waiting at the museum for the bus that would bring him back to school, he found a pay phone and called the number on page 1 again.  Once again, the number wasn’t answered.  And once again, within a few seconds after he hung up, the pay phone rang.  This time the caller was even more terse.

“Talk to me.”  Quite the strange way to start a conversation.

“Hi.  I have your number, and thought I should call.”  David had thought about what he would say for a long time, and decided not to give any clues about who he was.

“Who are you looking for?”  This was the question he expected and feared.  Now to see if his plan would work.

“Mr. Carroll gave me the number.”  Mr. Carroll was Jane’s English teacher.  

After a brief pause, the voice spoke again.  It was a man’s voice, with no detectable emotion or accent.  The voice was very clear and easy to understand.  Every word was pronounced perfectly.

“Then he probably told you not to call here unless it was an emergency.  What’s happening?”

David had no earthly idea what to say next.  He didn’t know what was going on, he didn’t know who he was talking to, and he didn’t have an emergency.  He had only an instant to think, and what came out surprised even him.

“Somebody needs to meet me.  At the school.  Today.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

David charged in the direction he had chosen.

“I don’t care if it’s possible or not.  Someone needs to meet me.  By the fence beside the baseball diamond.  At 5 pm.”  David’s heart was pounding.  He got the words out, and with a shaky hand he hung up the phone before the person on the other end could say anything more.

He waited to see if the phone would ring again.  It didn’t.

 

The bus back to school was time for David to kick himself several times about what he had said.  Why did he pick the school?  Why the baseball diamond?  Why tonight?  He came up with dozens of better choices for each.

He walked home and sat on his bed in his room.  It was 4:00 pm exactly on his clock.  He had an hour to decide what to do, and whether to go to the school or not.  He decided it might be best not to be alone.  And then he got an idea.

He called his best friend, Stuart.  “Stu” for short, which Stu was.  Stu was small, but he was an amazing athlete, and was the shortstop on the school’s baseball team.

“Hey, Stu.”

“Hey.”

“Want to go throw some balls?”

“Sure.  Where?”

“Let’s go to the diamond at school, so we can use the backstop.  Bring a bat, too.”  They would at least look dangerous if they had baseball bats with them.

“OK.  I gotta finish homework first, tho.”

“How long is that gonna take?”  This might be a problem.

“Maybe an hour or so.”

“Right, so we can meet at the school at 5?”

“I don’t know if I can be done by then.  How about 5:30?”

David had no answer for this.  He’d just have to make the best of it.

“Well, I’ll be there at 5.  Just come as soon as you can.”

“OK.”

“OK, see you.”

 

David rode to the diamond with his bat, glove, and ball.  He got to the diamond a few minutes before 5 pm.  The field was empty.  Some kids were rollerblading in the parking lot next to the field, and in the distance he could see the football team practicing.  There were a couple of cars in the lot, but mostly it was empty.  There were no adults he could see.  He stopped astride his bike and tried to think.

Next to the field was a concession stand.  David knew that the stand was not exactly secure.  He knew that from one of his prior escapades leading to detention.  The window of the stand was a wooden board, and the latch could be reached if you knew where it was.  He did.

He climbed into the concession stand through the window, and looked around.  There was very little light with the window mostly closed.  The stand itself was empty... No money or food was kept in it.  There was a popcorn machine, and a drink machine.  There were boxes of cups, and bags, and napkins.  There was also not much ventilation, but there were vents on either side of the stand with wire mesh covering them.  From inside, you could see out through the vents, but not easily be seen by someone looking in.

He climbed back out through the window.  He had to work fast.  He threw his baseball stuff into the stand and pedalled his bike all the way to the football field.  Then he ran back to the concession stand.  He climbed back inside and hoped he wasn’t making too much noise just breathing.  It was 5 minutes to 5 pm on his watch.

He watched out the vents.  He saw nothing.  Just the rollerbladers.

He waited.  Still nothing.  5 pm came and went.

At 10 minutes after 5 he began to get nervous.

At 15 minutes after 5 he saw Stu pull up to the diamond on his bike.

30 seconds later, a car pulled up beside the diamond.

Things were not going as he had expected.  A man got out of the car, and started walking toward Stu.  Both were too far away to be heard.  David was worried.  Had he got Stu in some trouble?

The man seemed to say something to Stu.  Stu pointed to the diamond.  They talked for a few more seconds, and then the man looked around.  He walked toward the rollerbladers.

David wasn’t sure what to do.  He could see the man only poorly.  He didn’t look threatening.  He didn’t act strange.

The man seemed to speak to one of the rollerbladers very briefly.  Then he spoke to the other one, just as briefly.  And then he walked back to his car.  For a long time he sat in his car.

Stu walked onto the diamond and looked around.  He was doubtless wondering where David was.

The car started up and pulled out of the parking lot.  David waited.

After it did not return, David crawled out of the concession stand.  Stu saw him climb out.  Within moments they were talking.

 

“What were you doing in the concession stand?”

“I’ll explain that later.  Who was that just now?”

“Who was what?”

“The man.  Who was the man who talked to you just now?”

Stu was clearly more than a bit confused.

“The guy a few minutes ago, you mean?  I don’t know who he is.  He looked familiar, tho.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He asked if I was waiting for someone.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yeah, but he wasn’t here.  I said I thought I missed him.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He just asked me my name.”

“Did you tell him?”  David was more than a bit worried.

“Sure.  Why not?”

“Did he ask you anything else?”

“No.  He just said I should be good.  What the heck is going on?”

“He told you to be good?”

“Yeah.  He just said, ‘Be good’ and then he left.  What was that supposed to mean?”

David slumped against the chain link backstop.  He had to think.  He was about to start telling Stu the whole story when from somewhere in his mind popped Jane’s voice.  He could at least keep a secret, couldn’t he?

“I think we should get out of here.  I’ll have to explain later.”

Stu could see that David was upset about something.  None of what had just happened seemed to be anything to be upset about.  He decided to ask his original question again.

“Can’t you at least tell me what you were doing in the concession stand?  You’re not trying to get in trouble messing around in there again, are you?”

David had been busted for following another kid into the stand on a dare about a year ago.  He hadn’t stolen or broken anything.  He been seen by an assistant coach, and by readily admitting his actions, had been punished less severely than the other boy.  He’d felt stupid and thought he would never tempt fate in the stand again.

“Listen.  That guy who talked to you.  I think he was looking for me, and thought you might be me.”

“We don’t even look alike!”

“I know.  He doesn’t know what I look like.  He doesn’t know my name.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know!  I wish I did know.”

“Why was he looking for you then?”

David had already said more than he wanted to.

“I just can’t explain right now.”

David walked to the stand and let himself back in once again.  He came out seconds later carrying his baseball stuff.  He started at a trot toward the football field.  Stu grabbed his bike and pedaled beside him.”

“Where’s your bike?”

“It’s over at the football field.”

“Why?  You don’t even like football.”

“I just put it there so he wouldn’t see it.  I didn’t want him to see me.”

“This whole story stinks.  Are you in trouble with this guy?”

“I keep telling you that I can’t explain right now.  I think the guy was looking for me because he thought I would be at the baseball diamond.”  This was at least partly true.

“He didn’t ask about you.”

“He doesn’t know my name, so he couldn’t ask about me.  After he figured out that you weren’t me, he took off.”

Stu was smarter than most.  “How could he know I wasn’t you, if he doesn’t know what you look like?”

David couldn’t keep up the conversation.  Even to him it didn’t make much sense.  He couldn’t think of another half-truth to tell Stu, and he didn’t want to lie to him.  Fortunately the trot to the football field gave him an excuse to act out of breath.

“I... think... he... knows... my voice.”

“Why?  Did you talk to him on the phone or something?”  Stu was definitely smarter than most.

“Yeah.  I think I did.  But I can’t be sure.  What did the guy sound like?”

“Just sounded like a normal guy.  Nothing special.  Except that business about be good.  Who says something like that?”

David ran the last few steps to his bike and mounted it immediately.  He turned to Stu.

“OK. So here’s the deal.  Baseball is off for tonight.  I have to get home.”  David wanted to get home, even though nobody there was looking for or waiting on him.

“You mean you dragged me out for no reason?  That kind of sucks.”

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t know how things were going to go.  When you didn’t get here at 5, I just had to think of something fast.  I wasn’t sure when you would come.”