Page 5 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Road Kill

But the driver had opened the rear door as well, and a general
stampede toward it was already in progress. My words were lost in
the commotion of distressed teenagers looking for an outlet, literally
and figuratively. Once loose on the school grounds, they would
spread the news like vectors of an airborne disease. Ah, well, I
thought. Better to get it over with than spend the next few hours
dealing with rumors.
I picked up the attendance sheet the bus driver had been using to
count noses. Quite a few of the names were familiar: Dusty Moten, a
ghetto kid who came to school on a motorcycle and had made a
name for himself on the track team; Stew Potter, a sallow introvert
with a pocket protector for his ballpoint pens; Carol Christian, a self-
contained “good” girl who disdained anything smacking of the
counter-culture; Selma Sohl, a gossipy type probably expending too
much energy on vamping the adolescent boys around her; Lisa
Kondo, one of my favorites, a sweet and serene sansei honor student;
Bill Harzia, for whom sports and male bonding were the primary
reason for attending school; Heather Heath, an arty flower child born
a decade late; Juan Olivia, bused in from the barrio and trying with
mixed success to blend in with the mainly white middle-class student
body; and Herb Schnorr, the class clown, an unfortunate boy whose
antics may have been motivated by a desire to distract attention from
his acne.
Then I spotted the names of the two girls requiring special
attention. Couldn’t let them get away: “Just a minute!” I shouted.
“You, there, Sherrie Cook! You’ve got to come to my office, right
now. You, too, Labelle.”
Sherrie Cook, a conventionally pretty blonde in a stylish orange
safari shirt and khakis, turned to face me. She was clutching what
looked like an oversized purse; probably something to do with the
field trip, I guessed. Ronny Knowles, her boyfriend and ‘big man on
campus,’ had his arm around her shoulder. She had obviously been
crying.
“Aw, Mr. Holloman,” said Ronny, a pained expression mildly
distorting his clean-cut features, “does she have to? This has been a
terrible experience for her.”
“Yes, she does. Don’t worry: she just has to give a brief statement
and then she can go. It’ll all be over in half an hour or so.”

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