January

On New Year's Day, the Home Town Chronicle devoted itself proudly to celebrating the many accomplishments of those, young and old, who had made outstanding contributions to the life and culture of our town in the past year. It wasn't a very big issue. Most of the stories were about librarians and the Kiwanis Club officers and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Mr. Guareschi for something and even about my father for the enormous success of Hoodhood and Associates and how he had been voted the Chamber of Commerce Businessman of 1967. The paper printed grainy headshots of people looking distinguished—like they were already thinking about their next outstanding contribution to the life and culture of the town.

There was one action shot, though.

Of Ariel the Fairy, flying high in the air, across the stage of the Festival Theater, his legs splayed out as though he really was flying.

The picture covered almost half of the front page.

And the story told the whole world that the tights were yellow!

And that they had white feathers on the butt!

"No one is going to see it," said my mother. "It's New Year's Day. Who looks at the newspaper on New Year's Day?"

It turned out that Doug Swieteck's brother did. Probably he looked at the picture on the front page. He saw who it was and what he was doing. And there was a flash of inspiration and ambition—which was, according to Shakespeare, what Macbeth was feeling a day or so before he murdered Duncan.

Maybe for a second, Doug Swieteck's brother thought that, since I had told him about "pied ninny," he shouldn't do anything about what his inspiration and ambition were telling him to do. But probably only for a second. In the end, he was Doug Swieteck's brother, and he couldn't help himself. It's like there's a Doug Swieteck's Brother Gene that switches on, too.

Some of what happened after that we found out from Doug Swieteck, who came back to Camillo Junior High with a black eye—which is not how you're supposed to come back to school after the happy holidays. The shiner had been a whole lot bigger and blacker a couple of days earlier, he said. But it was still pretty impressive. It's hard to believe that parts of you can turn green and purple at the same time, but they can.

At first he wouldn't tell anyone what had happened—not even when Danny threatened to give him a matching set of black, green, and purple eyes. But when I promised him one of my free cream puffs from Goldman's Best Bakery, he gave in. (People will do just about anything for one of Mr. Goldman's cream puffs, I guess.)

So here's what happened.

It was still early in the morning when his brother found the newspaper, Doug told us. Since it was the day after people had stayed up to watch the New Year's ball drop in Times Square, his brother figured everyone was sleeping late. He put his coat on, went out into the neighborhood, and stole the front page of the Home Town Chronicle from every stoop he could find. And there were plenty. Then he came back home, carried them up to his lair, and cut out the Ariel the Fairy picture from each one, careful to include the headline, which was this:

Holling Hoodhood as Ariel the Fairy Soars Onstage
to Rescue His Potent Master

This isn't at all what was happening in the play, but that was the least thing to fuss about.

After he finished cutting out the pictures, he took them all to the basement and found the bright yellow oil paint left over from a go-cart he had made to run kids down with. Then he went to get Doug—probably because he didn't know how to paint inside the lines.

Doug wouldn't tell us what he said when he saw the pictures and the can of yellow paint. All I know is that he wouldn't help, and so took a black eye. His brother probably promised a whole lot more if he said anything about the pictures—or the black eye. Then he found a brush and got to work himself.

Whatever it means to be a friend, taking a black eye for someone has to be in it.

The rest of what happened I figured out myself.

On the morning that school started again, Doug Swieteck's brother got to Camillo Junior High early. This should have warned somebody. If Mr. Guareschi had been in the halls trying to track down Sycorax and Caliban, he might have intercepted him. But he was probably supervising the unloading of multiple boxes of the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests—which I hadn't been preparing for because Mrs. Baker refused to give us practice exams to do during the holiday break. So Mr. Guareschi never saw him, and Doug Swieteck's brother was free to change his inspiration and ambition into reality.

He went up and down the halls taping up pictures of Holling Hoodhood as Ariel the Fairy Soaring Onstage—all in bright, vivid, living, impossible-to-take-your-eyes-away-from color—even though a lot of it wasn't in the lines. He stuffed some in the eighth-grade lockers. He taped some to the asbestos tiles on classroom ceilings. He put them in all the stalls of the boys' restroom, and in all the stalls in the girls' restroom, too. (I heard that from Meryl Lee.) He put them over the drinking fountains, and on every classroom door, and on the fire escape doors, and on the walls of the stairwells. He put them on the arches over the doors of the main lobby (no one figured out how he got that high without a ladder), and on the backboards of the basketball hoops in the gym. He even got them on all the trophies in the locked glass cases by the Main Administrative Office, and found a way to tape them to the Administrative Office counter, so that they were the first thing you saw when you walked in.

By the time he was done, every place you looked was bright yellow. It was high noon in the halls. The only thing that could have been worse was if the pictures had shown the white feathers on my butt. If they had, I would have had to leave the country.

As it was, when I walked into school, I figured this would be my last day at Camillo Junior High.

Maybe I'd try the Alabama Military Institute.

Can you imagine what it's like to walk down the halls of your junior high and just about every single person you meet looks at you and starts to grin, and it's not because they're glad to see you? Can you imagine what it's like to walk into the boys' restroom before the eighth graders have cleared out? Can you imagine what it's like to go to Gym and have Coach Quatrini, the pied ninny, announce that morning exercises will be stretches so that we can all practice soaring like Ariel the Fairy?

No, you cannot imagine this. But let me tell you, it was a long first Wednesday back.

And to top it off, Mrs. Baker gave me a 150-question test on The Tragedy of Macbeth.

"Let's keep you on your toes," she said cheerfully.

Sometimes I still think that she hates my guts.

By the next morning, Mr. Vendleri had torn down almost all of the pictures. He hadn't gotten to the ones in the trophy case yet, or the ones in the main lobby. Meryl Lee took care of the ones in the girls' restroom.

Good old Meryl Lee.

But Doug Swieteck's brother had an ample supply. They showed up in the halls again that Friday. On Monday in the cafeteria. On Tuesday across the stage front in the auditorium. Mr. Vendleri could hardly keep up.

And when Tuesday was over and I walked home, figuring that I would be free of the picture for at least the evening, my sister was waiting for me at the front door of the Perfect House, and she was holding one in her hand, complete with yellow oil paint.

"This," she said, "was taped to my locker."

So it had migrated to the high school, too.

"Do you want to tell me why this was taped to my locker?" she said.

"Because someone wanted to be a jerk," I said.

"Someone?" She looked at the picture, then held it out to me again. "Who looks like a jerk in this picture, Holling?"

"I didn't take it," I said.

"You're the one wearing the yellow tights! I told you this would happen. I didn't care as long as it was just you. But it's not just you now, is it? This was taped to my locker. And now I'm the one who has a baby brother who wears yellow tights."

"I'm not your baby brother."

"No, you're right. You're my brother who is all grown up and wearing yellow tights." She shoved the picture into my chest. "Fix this or you die," she said.

I never thought being in seventh grade would mean so many death threats.

I considered my options. Cream puffs were not going to work again. The Alabama Military Institute was looking pretty good. Maybe Dad would even like the idea.

That hope lasted until suppertime, when my father announced that the town had decided to build a new junior high school, and that Hoodhood and Associates had been invited to bid to become the architect.

He looked at my sister after making the announcement. "You see what being named Chamber of Commerce Businessman of 1967 can do for you?"

"Gee," she said, "I thought it was getting the nifty magnetic sign for the side of your car that was the big deal." She smiled.

My father looked at me.

"Just swell," I said.

"That's right," he said. "And having a kid in the school is a big plus in making a bid like this. It makes the board members think that we have a deep commitment already. And if Hoodhood and Associates gets this contract, we'll really be going places."

"I've been thinking of military school," I said.

Dad took a sip of his coffee.

"I'm not sure Kowalski will even bother to put in a bid," he said.

"I'm thinking of military school," I said again. "In Alabama."

"You don't have to say ridiculous things twice, Holling. Once is more than enough."

"Why is military school ridiculous?" asked my sister.

"Today the Mets decided to pay Buddy Harrelson eighteen thousand dollars a year to play baseball. Can you imagine that? Eighteen thousand dollars a year ... just to play baseball. This for a player who can't hit the ball out of the infield. Holling going to military school isn't quite as ridiculous as that, but I'll give him this—it's pretty close."

"It's not any more ridiculous than going to our high school," said my sister.

My father closed his eyes. He took another sip of coffee. I think he was fortifying himself.

"Girls can't wear their hair too short, boys can't wear their hair too long," my sister said. "We can't wear skirts that are too short, or slacks that are too long, or sweaters that are too tight, or jeans that are too—and I'm not making this up—too blue. We can't even wear a turtleneck because it's too something—no one knows what, but it's something. Now, that's ridiculous. That a principal even cares about this stuff while bombs are dropping on people who hardly have any clothes is even more ridiculous."

"You don't wear those things because you're not a hippie," said my father. His eyes were still closed.

"What's all that got to do with education? Why can a principal just make all those rules up?"

My father opened his eyes. "Because he can," he said, and put down his cup of coffee. "Eighteen thousand dollars. They are out of their minds."

The Alabama Military Institute faded right away.

After supper, my sister came into my room.

"So you don't think you need to knock?" I said.

"Holling, going to military school is a ridiculous idea."

"That's not what you said at supper."

"It's not a ridiculous idea because of why Dad thinks it's a ridiculous idea. It's a ridiculous idea because it's military school, and because the next stop after military school is Saigon."

"So?"

She put her hands on her hips. "Sometimes I wonder if you're even worth trying to save," she said. "There's a war going on in Vietnam, Holling. Have you noticed? A war. Two hundred soldiers die every week. They come back home in black body bags stacked into planes. And after they're buried in the ground, their families get a new American flag with fancy folds. And that's it."

She stopped.

"And I couldn't stand it if..."

She stopped again.

"It's a ridiculous idea, Holling," she said, and left.

Pete Seeger began to play loudly in her room.

The next afternoon, after everyone had left for Temple Beth-El or Saint Adelbert's, and after Doug Swieteck and Danny had waited around until the last minute in case Mrs. Baker had arranged for Whitey Ford to show up, Mrs. Baker handed me back my Macbeth test.

"Macbeth and Malcolm are not the same person, though their names share an initial consonant," she said.

"I know," I said.

"Nor are Duncan and Donalbain, who also share an initial and, for that matter, concluding, consonant, the same person."

"I guess not," I said.

"Malcolm and Donalbain are the king's sons, not..."

"You know," I said, "it's not so easy to read Shakespeare—especially when he can't come up with names that you can tell apart."

Mrs. Baker rolled her eyes. This time I was sure.

"Shakespeare did not write for your ease of reading," she said.

No kidding, I thought.

"He wrote to express something about what it means to be a human being in words more beautiful than had ever yet been written."

"So in Macbeth, when he wasn't trying to find names that sound alike, what did he want to express in words more beautiful than had ever yet been written?"

Mrs. Baker looked at me for a long moment. Then she went and sat back down at her desk. "That we are made for more than power," she said softly. "That we are made for more than our desires. That pride combined with stubbornness can be disaster. And that compared with love, malice is a small and petty thing."

We were both quiet.

"Malice is not always small and petty," I said. "Have you seen what Doug Swieteck's brother put up in the halls?"

"I have," said Mrs. Baker. "A wonderful picture of you playing a wonderful part."

"In yellow tights," I said.

"Well," she said, "you may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on you."

"That doesn't sound like it's from Macbeth."

"It's not. But I promise you, people will soon forget about Ariel."

I sighed. "It's a whole lot easier saying that than seeing yourself in that picture."

"I suppose that would be true," she said.

"It's not like it's your picture in the halls, or that you have all that much to worry about," I said.

I know. Dumb.

Mrs. Baker's face went suddenly white. She opened her lower desk drawer, put her copy of Shakespeare into it, and closed it. Loudly. "Go sit down and fix the errors on your Macbeth exam," she said.

I did.

We said nothing else to each other that whole afternoon. Not even when I left.

I walked home under gray clouds whose undersides had been shredded. They hung in tatters, and a cold mist leaked out of them. The cold got colder, and the mist got mistier all through the afternoon, so that by suppertime a drizzle was making everything wet and everyone miserable—especially my sister, who believed that she had hair that belonged in southern California, where it would be springy and bouncy all the time, instead of in gray, cold, misty Long Island, where it just hung.

So dumb.

Lying in bed that night, I listened as the drizzle turned to a rain, and then the rain started to spatter thickly on the window, and then all sounds of it faded away, and my room began to grow cold. I got up and looked out, but the glass was covered with a sheet of thin ice, and the only thing I could see was the crazed pattern of the streetlight outside.

In the morning, ice covered the town. If the sun had been shining, it would have been a spectacle, like something Prospero might conjure up. But as it was, the tattered gray clouds hung even lower, and the mist was leaking out of them again, and the town looked more like the kind of foul heath where Macbeth's Three Weird Sisters lived.

As I walked to school that morning, the mist laid down a fine, light coating of water on last night's ice, and by the time I got to the library, I could stand on the sidewalk, give a little push, and slide. By the time I got to Goldman's Best Bakery, I didn't even need to push: The last block and a half was all downhill, so I pointed my feet, leaned down a bit, bent my knees, and let myself go. Since there wasn't a single car anywhere, I didn't even stop at the corners. By the time I reached Camillo Junior High, I had enough speed to take out Doug Swieteck's brother—if he'd been anywhere in sight.

And then, suddenly, there he was—just like the Three Weird Sisters appearing because Macbeth had thought of them—Doug Swieteck's brother, on the other side of Camillo Junior High, waiting for a school bus to turn the corner so that he could grab on to its bumper and have it pull him along on the icy roads.

It was what eighth graders whose career goal was the state penitentiary did.

The school buses were driving around town even though no cars were because Mr. Guareschi was principal of Camillo Junior High, and Mr. Guareschi wouldn't have let the school close right before the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests even if the Soviet Union had started raining atomic bombs on the entire east coast of the United States. I heard that from Mr. Petrelli himself, and it's probably true.

So the buses were driving on ice, and they all pulled in late, and you only had to look at the drivers' faces to see they were all mad at Mr. Guareschi, and Mrs. Baker was mad because we straggled in throughout the morning because the buses were late. I figured that the only one who was happy in the whole school was Mr. Ludema, Doug Swieteck's brother's teacher, because Doug Swieteck's brother stayed out until the last bus came in.

"It's the dictator-of-a-small-country thing," Danny said when he finally got to class—he was on the last bus. "Mr. Guareschi thinks he can control the weather! He tells us to come to school in the ice, and we come. He tells bus drivers to drive in the ice, and they drive! He controls all the school buses of the world!" He held his hands up high in the air. "He controls us all!"

Danny Hupfer can get carried away.

But even if Mr. Guareschi could control the school buses like the dictator of a small country, he couldn't control the Long Island Power Company, which that morning was spending its time not giving electricity to most of its customers—including Camillo Junior High. You couldn't have raised a spark of electricity anywhere. Any light that came into the classrooms was from the windows, and on a day of gray tattered clouds, that wasn't much.

So we sat in the half-dark, in our coats, in the cold. We could hear Sycorax and Caliban scurrying in the walls, climbing down from the ceiling to find someplace warm to burrow in. Like a human body. I figured they probably could sense us, and soon the walls would start to shred, and we'd see claws and nails, and there would be clacking yellow teeth, and before Birnam Wood could come to Dunsinane, we'd all run screaming out of the room into the misty cold.

That's how we spent our day preparing for the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests. In Mrs. Baker's class, we drilled on sentence diagramming. In Mr. Samowitz's class, we drilled on mathematical sets. (We didn't tell his homeroom class, who were coming into our room for sentence diagramming, about Sycorax and Caliban. We figured we'd hear if anything happened.) In Mr. Petrelli's class, we recited European borders and exports. And as we drilled, our hands got colder and colder, so that by noon it was hard to feel our pencils with our fingers.

But at lunch, Mrs. Bigio came into the classroom carrying a tray of thick paper cups, steaming with the hot scent of chocolate—probably because she felt guilty about the Something Surprise from before the holidays. "Don't ask how I got them hot," she said to Mrs. Baker. "But if Mr. Guareschi is looking for his desk, he might have a hard time finding it."

Can you believe it? Hot chocolate!

Mrs. Baker laughed—a real laugh, not a teacher laugh—and sat down behind her desk with the cup Mrs. Bigio gave her. She held both her hands around it to warm them.

Mrs. Bigio walked down the aisles, and we each took a cup from her tray. Doug Swieteck tried to take two, but when Mrs. Bigio put her heavy and sensible shoe on his sneaker, he put the extra cup back.

Mai Thi did not reach for the chocolate when Mrs. Bigio came beside her. She did not raise her head.

And Mrs. Bigio did not pause. She finished the rest of the aisles, and left with one cup still steaming on her tray.

"Let's begin the next sentences," said Mrs. Baker.

We groaned.

"Now," said Mrs. Baker, "while the sugar is coursing through your veins."

She walked up and down the aisles to watch us work. I don't know if anyone else saw her put her cup of hot chocolate on Mai Thi's desk.

Not that she had suddenly become filled with the milk of human kindness. (That's from The Tragedy of Macbeth, by the way.) Mrs. Baker did not even let us outside after lunch. We kept drilling.

In midafternoon, the clouds pulled up their tatters and started to thicken. Then they began to billow out toward the ground, as though they were carrying some heavy load and were about to split. They billowed further and further, until a few minutes before we finished school they finally did split, and huge wet snowflakes fell from them onto the icy roads—just as the bus drivers were pulling into the parking lot, probably watching for signs of Doug Swieteck's brother.

Before we left, Mrs. Baker read a memo that Mr. Guareschi had sent around to all the classrooms. "Since the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests are to be administered tomorrow throughout the entire state, plan on attending school. No student will be excused without permission from the principal. Weather will not be a factor. The school will be open for the administration of the tests."

Mrs. Baker put the memo on the desk. She looked outside at the snow that was already gathering on top of the ice. "I will see you all tomorrow," she said.

It was like Mr. Petrelli had said: Even if atomic bombs had started raining down.

When I left, I realized that for the whole day Mrs. Baker had not said a word to me.

So dumb.

Through the late afternoon and evening, the wind sculpted the snow first into low mounds and then into strange, sharp shapes. And when the wind was finished with the snow, it threw itself against our house, wailed under the eaves, and looked for any chink it could push through. At times the Long Island Power Company would muster up some electricity and send it out, and suddenly all the lights in the house would flick on, along with my sister's radio turned up to full volume, and the light over the stoop would show how deep the snow had become. But then the electricity would flit away again, and we were left in the candlelight and cold.

If you think the four of us huddled together under blankets like the pioneers and told stories and sang old western songs in front of a roaring fire, you're wrong. And not just because houses on Long Island don't have fireplaces—at least, none that give off heat.

It was more like this:

Every half-hour when the shows switched, my mother walked over to the television and tried the on-off button several times. Then she turned the channel and tried the on-off button again. "You'd think that at least this would work," she said. Then she turned the channel and tried again. When nothing happened, she went out to the kitchen and opened the windows so we couldn't tell that she was smoking. We tried to ignore the cold billows that swept through the house and made us clutch the blankets around us even tighter.

My father raged by the phone. He couldn't believe that employees of Hoodhood and Associates were already calling, wondering if the firm was going to be closed the next day. "Don't they know we have a contract to compete for? And they're going to let a little snow get in the way? They must not want to work for me much longer," he said. "It's not like I'm the Mets and I can pay Ed Kranepool twenty-four thousand dollars next season. Twenty-four thousand dollars! For Ed Kranepool! Next thing you know, they'll be paying Tom Seaver twenty-four thousand dollars too. Are they out of their minds?"

My sister was tormented, absolutely tormented, absolutely, positively tormented by three things. First, she could never hope to put on her makeup without lights, and she'd die before she went out anywhere without her makeup. Second (and these are supposed to be getting worse as we go along), the Beatles television special, which was at eight o'clock, was starting right now—Right Now!—and was being seen by every single person in the country except for her, and somehow Ringo would find out about that and never, ever forgive her. And third, because the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests would take an hour longer at the high school, she would be walking home at the same time as her brother—the one who wore yellow tights—who, if he knew what was good for him, would walk home on the far side of the road, far enough away from her that no one would ever suspect any sort of family connection.

So it wasn't pioneer songs by firelight.

It snowed all night, and in the morning we looked like Alaska. Northern Alaska.

But it didn't matter. A whole new Ice Age could have started, and it wouldn't have mattered. Because Mr. Guareschi was as good as his word. My sister's transistor radio announced that all the schools would be open, this despite more snow overnight than we had seen the last three winters combined. Students were advised to leave early, as travel might be slowed by the snow—like this was the most astonishing observation of the century.

So I did leave early, and I hiked through knee-deep drifts to school, the wind still wailing and throwing itself against me, three sharpened Number 2 pencils for the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests in my pocket. Since the power was still off at the school, I wore thermal underwear—top and bottom—plus an extra T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and two pairs of heavy socks. I was sweating by the time I reached Camillo Junior High, but I figured that I would be warm and cozy through the tests, even if I couldn't move my toes in my boots.

None of the roads had been plowed yet, but enough buses had come down Lee Avenue that it was packed hard and slick. And Doug Swieteck's brother was riding the bumpers again, heading for the state penitentiary, all happy, as if he hadn't spent the last week with newspaper pictures and a jar of yellow oil paint, ruining my life.

When I saw him riding by, holding on with just one hand, something in me snapped. I'm not sure what it was. I guess Presbyterians would call it sin, but I don't think it was sin. It was more like the human need for revenge—sort of what Malcolm and Donalbain were thinking. (Please note that I do know the names of the king's two sons.) By the time I saw Doug Swieteck's brother come by again, my plan was fully formed. A snowball had appeared before me, a fatal vision. I dug down into the snow and pulled up some of the slush underneath. I packed the snowball tight. I rounded it so that it would fly straight. Then I spit on it a few times to give it a frozen overcoating.

The next bus started to come down Lee Avenue.

In my mind I could see it all: I pull back my arm, plant my left foot, Doug Swieteck's brother comes sliding into sight, I release the fastball, his face turns toward me at the last moment, and the snow-ice-slush-spitball splatters against his nose. Perfect.

I didn't really think it would happen that way. The snowball would hit the bus. Or I'd miss entirely. Or it would hit someplace that he'd hardly feel. Or maybe he wouldn't even be holding the bumper. Or maybe I wouldn't even throw it.

But I did.

And it all happened exactly as I'd imagined it.

Really.

By the time he could get the snow and slush and ice-spit out of his eyes and look for who'd thrown it, I was hanging up my coat in the Coat Room, feeling like Jim Hawkins aboard the Hispaniola, putting her before the wind and so paying back all the wicked pirates of Flint's crew.

Vengeance is sweet. Vengeance taken when the vengee isn't sure who the venger is, is sweeter still.

I went into the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests happy.

I stayed that way through the morning, filling in bubbles with my three sharpened Number 2 pencils like you wouldn't believe, working through Parts of Speech like I was Robert Louis Stevenson, and making decimals look like playground stuff. I had the Falkland Islands down pat, and when there was a long Reading-Comprehension passage about the Mississippi River, I thanked the good Mr. Petrelli, who had made me get to know it personally.

Then at lunch recess—during which we all sharpened our three Number 2 pencils again—the power came on. This brought as many cheers as Mickey Mantle. Right away the radiators began to clank and pound as if Mr. Vendleri was going at them with a wrench, and the room started to grow warmer. Pretty soon we couldn't see our breath anymore. Even Sycorax and Caliban scampered back up to their asbestos ceiling tiles.

We took off our coats and hats and gloves and scarves and settled in for the second half of the achievement tests. Vocabulary first—mostly words that even William Shakespeare wouldn't have known.

Halfway through the afternoon test, I took off my sweatshirt. The radiators were giving off that hot iron smell, sort of like a southwest wind that blisters you all o'er.

Then Spelling. The parts of the radiators that rust had worn down began to glow softly. They took on a color that you can usually see only in sunsets.

I kicked off my boots and one of the pairs of thick socks. (Danny was already barefoot.) It felt good to be able to move my toes again.

Then a short section on Roman numerals, and on to fractions. The room was now downright tropical. And I had on thermal underwear—thermal underwear that was supposed to keep me warm in minus-ten-degree temperatures. I was starting to sweat everywhere—even my fingernails—and I think that I was probably turning the color of the rusted radiators.

On to Imperfect Verb Forms—which I had down, let me tell you.

But I thought I was going to pass out. My fingers were sliding on my sharpened Number 2 pencil. And I could hardly see the little bubbles anymore. I think my eyes were sweating.

I raised my hand and asked Mrs. Baker if I could go to the boys' restroom.

She picked up the instruction booklet for the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests. "No student is permitted to leave his seat for any reason other than a dramatic health concern once a section of the achievement tests has begun. There are no exceptions." She set the instructions back on the desk and turned her face to the radiators, which by now were putting out so much heat that they were probably giving her a tan.

It seemed to me that we were in dramatic-health-concern territory, but you can't exactly raise your hand in class and announce that you have to go take off what I had to go take off.

When we got to Sentence Diagramming—a section that Mrs. Baker began without even giving anyone a chance for a moment of release—most of the water component of my body had been sucked into the little cotton compartments of my thermal underwear. Everything felt squishy, and the answer sheet for my test had turned soggy, sort of like how cornflakes left overnight in half a bowl of milk look, with about the same smell.

By 2:30, when we finally handed our answer sheets in, I was afraid that mine was going to dissolve into some sort of pulp.

Meryl Lee's answer sheet looked white and starched.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" she said.

"Nope," said Danny. He was putting on his socks again.

"Not bad at all," said Doug Swieteck. Even Doug Swieteck!

"Are you all right?" asked Meryl Lee.

"Anyone who needs to, may now go to the restroom," said Mrs. Baker.

I was the first one out of the room. I squished my soggy self down the hall as fast as I could, glad that there weren't any radiators there. I ran the last twenty yards or so, even though running in the halls is one of the deadly sins at Camillo Junior High, right up there with pride, envy, wrath. I burst through the door into the boys' restroom, pulling at my top T-shirt, imagining the sensation of tearing off the thermal underwear.

The boys' restroom was filled with eighth graders. All smoking.

And Doug Swieteck's brother was leaning against one of the sinks.

"That's him," said one of the eighth graders. He was pointing at me.

"Him?" said Doug Swieteck's brother. He threw his cigarette to the floor and smashed it. I think he was trying to send me a message.

He walked over to me, stuck his finger out, and poked it into my thermal underweared chest. "Did you throw that snowball at me?"

"When?" I said. This is called a delaying tactic, and is sometimes more strategic than denial all by itself.

"You"—he poked his finger into me—"are"—he poked again—"dead"—he poked again. The he wiped his wet finger off on his shirt.

This is getting familiar, isn't it? Another death threat. I could sort of understand how it must have been for Banquo, and for a moment, in my heated, sweaty brain, I could almost see him there in the boys' restroom, covered with stab wounds, looking sort of lost and shaking his head like he wanted to warn me.

"Dead," said Doug Swieteck's brother again.

I backed out. Doug Swieteck's brother's little rat eyes followed me all the way.

I went back to Mrs. Baker's classroom and sat down squishily.

Toads, beetles, bats.

"Are you feeling better?" asked Meryl Lee.

"Just swell," I said.

Outside it was still snowing, but the temperature had come up, and the flakes that were coming down were the kind that really wanted to be rain but couldn't quite get there. When they hit the snow that had already fallen, they froze into a thin crust and coated everything in sight. Mrs. Baker was looking out the window and frowning, and I knew she was wondering how the school buses would ever drive on roads with a frozen crust, and snow beneath that, and ice beneath that.

She was probably also wondering how she would drive home herself on roads with a frozen crust, and snow beneath that, and ice beneath that.

In every other class at Camillo Junior High, the last half-hour after a day of the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests was Free Reading Time or Snacks or Story Hour or something. A lot of teachers brought in brown, light, perfect cream puffs for their classes.

But Mrs. Baker—the holiday-hating Mrs. Baker—had us open English for You and Me and start in on a new unit: "Strong Verb Systems." It was hard to concentrate, fresh from Doug Swieteck's brother's rat eyes and sitting in squishy thermal underwear. But Mrs. Baker never called on me. Not even when I raised my hand. Not even when I hollered out that I could tell her why "to write" was a strong verb.

And so the clock clicked down to the end of the school day.

I headed outside, watching, watching, watching for Doug Swieteck's brother, his words hovering like the snow in the air: "You ... are ... dead." Nowhere in the halls. I left through the main lobby doors, under a picture of Ariel that Mr. Vendleri hadn't reached. Looking up at it, I felt again the thrill of the venger. But I kept looking for the vengee. Still nowhere in sight. And now the cold air struck me, and I held my coat open to it, and down below my two T-shirts, my thermal underwear suddenly chilled, and I felt the temperature of my body drop and my face cool.

"Are you all right?" asked Danny Hupfer.

"Just swell," I said, and I really meant it.

I crossed the schoolyard—Doug Swieteck's brother must have already gone—and came out onto Lee Avenue, where the school buses were spinning their wheels on the ice while Mr. Guareschi stood by the fence with his arms crossed—I suppose to prevent the state penitentiary crowd from riding the bumpers. But none of them were in sight, either.

Which I'm sure that Mr. Guareschi was glad for, since on the other side of the street a Home Town Chronicle photographer was taking pictures of the buses turning onto the ice, finding a little traction for a moment, and then losing it and sliding sideways, flinging down snow from their yellow roofs.

By the time I got to the corner opposite Camillo Junior High, one of the buses was gunning its engine frantically, trying to get some momentum and, at the same time, trying to ease around Mrs. Baker's very, very slowly moving car. And that's what made the rest of what happened happen.

It took only about three seconds.

And I didn't see much of it, since the wet flakes were coming down hard again.

But here's what happened, as near as I can tell:

When I got to the corner, Doug Swieteck's brother and the state penitentiary crowd were waiting for me on the other side. They stood in line like a platoon, and each one lifted up his left arm and pointed at me. In their right hands they held snowballs as big as bowling balls. The streetlights were already on in the gray darkness, and their light glittered yellow off the snowballs' icy coating.

At least, I hoped that's why the snowballs looked yellow.

I needed about a second to take that in, I guess.

In the next second, the school bus gunned its ancient engine and then started to slide across the intersection—slide sideways, that is, and through the red light. I watched as the bus's back end went by me, moving in a couple of different directions. I could see Danny's face out the back window. He was looking kind of startled but happy. The next day, he told me that he'd never heard a school-bus driver scream that way before.

Which I can vouch for. I heard her, too.

And that leaves the third second, when I started to turn back from the bus to see what Doug Swieteck's brother and the penitentiary crowd were going to do when the bus slid across the intersection and onto their corner, but I never got to them. Because walking across Lee Avenue, in the middle of the road, her head down and her scarf pulled over her ears because she didn't want the wet snow to dampen her southern California hair, was my sister.

Walking back home an hour late because of the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests.

I took off.

I remember hearing the air brakes, and someone yelling "Mr. Hoodhood," and the "Oh" that came out of my sister when I hit her just ahead of the sliding school bus.

I remember seeing her rolling out of the way and into a snowbank by the curb—which I saw from a sort of aerial view, because the right rear bumper of the bus caught me where I had worn my white feathers, and so I was crossing the rest of the Lee Avenue intersection at a height of about five feet.

I landed in the snowbank by Goldman's Best Bakery.

When I opened my eyes, my sister was looking down at me. Mr. Goldman was looking down at me. Doug Swieteck's brother and the state penitentiary crowd were looking down at me. The bus driver was looking down at me. Danny was looking down at me. Mr. Guareschi was looking down at me. And Mrs. Baker was holding my head in her hands.

"Holling," she said, "are you hurt?"

"Not the part you're holding," I said.

My sister was crying.

Really.

"Holling," she said, "you saved my life."

"High drama does not help us right now," said Mrs. Baker. "Hold his head out of the snow, and I'll get my car."

I shifted myself around. I was starting to get cold, since the sweat in the little cotton compartments of my thermal underwear was turning to ice. "I think I'm all right," I said.

"You'll have to go to the emergency room," said Mr. Guareschi. "Mrs. Baker is going to drive us. Can you move your toes?"

Of course I couldn't move my toes. I still had on my thick socks. "No. But I think I'm really all right."

Mrs. Baker pulled up in her car. "Help him in," she said to Doug Swieteck's brother. "And you help, too," she said to the state penitentiary crowd.

They gathered around me.

"Mrs. Baker," I said.

"Be quiet," she said. And Doug Swieteck's brother and the state penitentiary crowd lifted me up out of the snowbank and hefted me across the icy crust and handed me into Mrs. Baker's back seat. Mr. Guareschi got in beside me and held my head still—though that wasn't the part of me that was hurting. My sister got in the front seat, and we careened down Lee Avenue, stopping only to let my sister off at our house so that she could tell my mother where we were going. Mrs. Baker held her hand down on the horn at every intersection, fishtailed through most of her turns, and pretty much hit the entrance to the emergency room in one long sideways slide.

When we got inside—I was limping a little, but Mr. Guareschi held on to my right arm the whole way—Mrs. Baker couldn't find the word she needed to describe the location of the injury. Shakespeare doesn't give you everything. She finally settled on "his buttocks," which the nurse understood.

"Are you his father?" the nurse asked Mr. Guareschi.

"His principal."

"Then you must be his mother," said the nurse.

"I am his teacher," said Mrs. Baker. "Perhaps a diagnostic hip x-ray would be in order."

"I'll inform the doctor of your intended procedure," said the nurse, which was a nurse joke, which is worse than a teacher joke. "I'll need to speak to one of the boy's parents before we do anything."

Mr. Guareschi helped me back to the waiting room, and Mrs. Baker made me lie down on three of the chairs—"Stay on your side and be still"—while she called my father. Mr. Guareschi took off my boots so that I could move my toes, and then found a blanket—who knows where—to stretch over me.

When Mrs. Baker came back, her face was set and hard. "Your father has spoken over the phone with the nurse at the front desk. He has given approval for any necessary procedure, and says that, since everything seems under control, he will be along as soon as may be convenient." She adjusted the blanket, and sat down next to Mr. Guareschi.

We waited, and waited, and waited, since apparently being hit on the buttocks isn't that big a deal in this emergency room. Outside it grew dark, and still we waited. A nurse came in to turn on a portable television in the corner, and after a few horizontal blips, there was Robert Kennedy confirming that he was considering a run against President Johnson because of the government's war policy, and then Walter Cronkite looking about as serious as a human being can look and reporting the news from Vietnam. There were pictures of soldiers cutting through a jungle path. There were pictures of soldiers capturing a Vietcong POW. There were pictures of soldiers standing around supply caches.

It was warm in the waiting room, and close, and the blanket was heavy, and my thermal underwear had thawed and was starting to heat up again. I yawned. "I think I could fall asleep," I said to Mrs. Baker.

But she didn't answer. When I turned to see why—and this wasn't easy, since I was still lying down and wasn't supposed to move my buttocks—she was standing with her hands up to her face, watching the pictures from Vietnam like she was watching for someone she knew.

Actually, like she was watching for someone she was worrying about.

Someone she loved.

Mr. Guareschi and I left her alone.

The nurse came for me soon afterward, and my buttocks were x-rayed—and let me tell you, it's embarrassing to hold your buttocks the way I had to hold my buttocks so that they could be x-rayed. Then we waited again until the doctor came out and told us everything was fine, that I would be sore for a week or so and have a bruise that would turn purple and green, but it didn't matter since it was where it was. Then Mrs. Baker signed some papers while Mr. Guareschi put my boots back on and helped me outside to the car and settled me in the back seat—he took the blanket with us so I would be warm. When Mrs. Baker came, he got in the front seat with her, and Mrs. Baker drove me to the Perfect House. Together they walked me to the door—"Thank you so much for bringing him home on such a terrible night to drive," said my mother—and I limped out to the kitchen to eat supper standing.

On the counter was the late edition of the Home Town Chronicle.

And on the front page, there was an action shot—of me, Holling Hoodhood, flying high in the air across the intersection of Lee Avenue and Main Street, my legs splayed out as though I really was flying—which I guess I was. Underneath was the headline, which was this:

Local Hero Holling Hoodhood Soars Across Intersection to Rescue Sister

You could see her in the picture, too, but mostly just her buttocks.

The doctor was right about being sore. I'm not sure about the bruise, since it hurt to stretch around that far to see. But it didn't matter all that much, because when I got to school on Monday, someone had gone up and down the halls of Camillo Junior High taping up pictures of Local Hero Holling Hoodhood soaring across the intersection. They were on the eighth-grade lockers, on the asbestos tiles on the ceiling, on the stalls of the boys' restroom and the girls' restroom, too, over the drinking fountains, on the classroom doors, on the fire escape doors, on the walls of the stairwells, over the doors of the main lobby, and on the backboards of the basketball hoops in the gym.

Can you imagine what it's like to walk down the halls of your junior high and just about every single person you meet looks at you and starts to grin, and it's because they're glad to see you?

It's sort of like Macduff walking in with Macbeth's head in his hand and showing it to Malcolm—who, as we all know, is one of the king's sons—and everyone starts to celebrate because Malcolm will finally be king. But all that Malcolm is thinking is that now he has no more need for vengeance.

Let me tell you, it was a great day back.

And Tom Seaver had a pretty good day, too. The Mets announced that they were going to pay him twenty-four thousand dollars next season, just like Ed Kranepool.

Can you believe it?