Chapter 14: Monday at School I

The school was a zoo. The parking lot was worse than usual, with news trucks, police cars, and a huge assortment of government vehicles. Some of them were marked, some of them weren’t, but nobody drives cars like that except government people who get that car assigned to them. It was just like a big game. If I didn’t have my own assigned space I’d have had to park down the street and walk in.

Although, the three guys standing around the assigned section with baseball bats might have had something to do with it, too. That was pretty much SOP, standard operating procedure, for when we had a big crowd. Football games, graduation, a riot, the investigation after a riot. We had a couple of our football players hang out in the parking lot smashing up every car that parked in an assigned spot.

Most drivers figured it out after a couple of big dents in their hood by a guy yelling “This is an assigned parking spot and it ain’t assigned to you!” I was pretty sure that only the out-of-town drivers tried it. Everyone local should know better. We’d been doing it for years.

The walk in was almost a riot. Students wanting to know what was going on, as if they didn’t know. Police wanting to talk to us. News people screaming questions that couldn’t be heard over all the other people screaming questions.

I told Alice to hold my hand and told Melanie to hold hers, and tried to wade through the crowd. “Make a hole! Coming through!” and “Girls, slap the shit out of anyone who touches you. Just punch anyone who grabs you. If they don’t go down, I’ll punch them for you.” and “Make a hole!” about twenty more times before we got to the coaches’ office.

The coaches’ office was always crowded. We had three desks between five of us. Not that we were ever all in the room at the same time during the school day; we all taught various courses and we were mostly either out in the classrooms or in the gym or out on the fields. That meant that at most two or three of us would be in the office trying to grade papers. Having three desks was usually enough. We had several extra chairs for short meetings. Any more people and they had to stand up. It did tend to keep the meetings short.

It would have been even worse if Irene didn’t have her own office over by the girls’ locker room. Nobody called Irene Sanders ‘coach’ except for her girls. To everyone else, she was Ms. Sanders, the extremely fit female athletics instructor and government teacher.

Irene hadn’t grown up in the ‘hood, she was from Chicago, but she fit right in with the rest of us at West Central. She mostly stayed on her end of the gym with the girls, but sometimes she came over to argue with us male coaches about something. After what happened Friday night, though, Irene was spending half her time this morning in our office complaining about all the investigators. I ran into her outside my office and got to hear her version of what was going on.

The rest of her time this morning was in front of girls’ locker room door. No, you CANNOT go in there. Men don’t go in the girls’ locker room. There are girls changing in there. Get some woman cop if you gotta go in there.

In desperation, Irene had ended up grabbing a pair of our biggest boys and put one at each door as guards. Her girls could go in the locker room to change. No one else could, without her express permission.

“These two men are police. They got an investigation to do and you need to be respectful of them. However, they don’t need to go in the girls’ locker room. There are girls changing in there. If they, or anyone else besides our girls try to go in there, they’re just perverts and I want you to beat the shit out of them.”

Getting stuck guarding some stupid door for the girls? That’s bullshit. Getting told to beat the shit out of the police if they get pushy? Yeah, that’s priceless.

I told Irene that she’d done the right thing except that she needed to grab several more guys so they could trade off going to the bathroom and they could stay there as long as we needed them to. No baseball bats, though. Someone would get hurt a lot worse than necessary if they started swinging bats around. One of the girls would pick right then to come out the door and they’d hit her.

Anyway, my office doubled as an athletics staff meeting room, and today was one of those standing-room-only days. Only, this meeting looked to take all day. We had me, Alice, Melanie, and three other coaches, as well as Irene, two of her roundball team, a city police investigator, a state police investigator, and two more people I couldn’t identify all in my office with most everyone talking and nobody at all listening, when Beverly showed up.

Mrs. Huffman was officially the school secretary, but we had several office workers trying to deal with all the paperwork, and as the senior one Beverly was effectively the Principal’s secretary and right-hand woman. She was one of our two white females working at West Central. Probably three-quarters of the teachers there were female, but all of them were black like almost all of our students except Beverly and Mrs. Thorpe.

Mrs. Thorpe taught History. That was all she did. She was pretty old, but she knew her subject pretty well. A lot of the students thought that she’d been there watching for most of what she taught. And probably telling everyone that they were doing it wrong. Maybe not the Magna Carta, but certainly the Revolution and the Civil War. She probably wrote Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for him. She was pretty skinny.

Beverly Huffman wasn’t exactly fat, but, well, stocky is good. Sturdy is good, too. She was about my mother’s age and she didn’t interest me at all, but I’d be the first to admit that she had a pleasant disposition. Her most noticeable attribute was an enormous rack. She could feed an entire army of babies.

If you liked tits, Beverly had more than you’d ever need. She was like Dolly Parton, her tits got wherever she was going long before her face did. Everyone noticed them, and this was a high school filled with hormonal teenagers. It was pretty much inevitable that a couple times a day she’d have to shake some kid who’d gone into a trance just staring at her rack. She’d end up slapping a couple, too, when they reached for them.

She didn’t even bother reporting it any more. It was what it was. She probably didn’t even notice any more. I’d seen her walk down the hall talking to a teacher and slap a kid without a hitch in her talk.

Our Principal was a wiry guy named Horace Davis. You couldn’t call him skinny because what little he had was all muscle. I’d seen him pick up troublemakers by their hair and just hold them up there off the ground until they calmed down. I had a lot of respect for him. Being responsible for keeping just under 1400 screaming teenagers under control long enough to learn something was more than I’d ever want to do.

Beverly said that Mr. Davis had come down earlier to talk to me, but there was no sense in his waiting around when he could be dealing with paperwork so he went back to his office and had just sent her to get me if I was available. Well, shit. Do I take both girls? Can I leave them here safely?

I decided to take Alice with me to meet Horace and leave Melanie seated behind my desk where she could maybe not have flashbacks to the riot from all the people in my office. I grabbed one of my coaches and put him on one side of my desk, then the state policeman on the other side. That was after I looked at his ID and wrote down his name and badge number. Eldon was black, of course. The state trooper was white.

Them first. “This wonderful young woman has gone through a horrible traumatizing event. She doesn’t need to go through it again. She needs some space, and with all these assholes in here back there is about the only place she’s gonna get it. I want you both to stay right there and just cold-cock anyone who tries to get near her, okay?”

“Melanie, honey? I’ve gotta go see the principal and it’s gonna be just as bad as when you get sent to see the principal at your school. I want you to stay right there where you’re safe. I’ve got to do my job and that means go see the boss when he says to. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Why does Mom have to go? Why can’t I go with you?”

“I’d like to take both of you just because I feel like I’m abandoning you, but I can’t protect you both out in the halls. It’ll be worse than the parking lot was. Your mother is an adult and I don’t mind her slapping the shit out of anyone who touches her. With me there backing her up, that should end it. I’m afraid that you’d just get into a fight because you’re their size and they ... well, some of them won’t back off.”

With that I took Alice’s hand and nodded at Beverly and said “Okay, let’s go.” When I got to the door, though, I stopped before I went through it and looked back at Melanie. “You know that the police are gonna start asking you all sorts of questions as soon as we’re gone, right? Well, they can ask anything they want but you don’t have to answer them until your Mom comes back.”

With that, everyone else in there should protect her from getting too much hassle. Beverly led the way, I followed her, and Alice followed close behind me. A lot closer to me than I was to Beverly, at least. I had to stay close just to take advantage of the path she was clearing in the crowd, but I didn’t want to run into her if she had to stop. Getting my crank shoved up her ass might affect our working relationship, right? Butt-fucking Beverly in the hall would probably piss both women off. I could see both women slapping me at the same time for one offense.

Although, Beverly was a lot shorter than Alice or me. I’d just run into her back. It would still piss them both off, though, so I gave Beverly a lot more room than I normally would if I was following another man.

First period was about to start and the crowd was thinning out. Still, as we walked I told Alice to “Stay close to me. We have a lot of good young people here who will be a credit to our school and make whatever they do in life better. We also have a bunch of animals, though, who we’d be better off just putting down. They won’t let me do that, though, without a good reason. So stay close. None of them will bother you as long you are with me and Beverly.”

We got up to the admin area and ran the gauntlet of counters, desks, and workspaces. And the workers and the gargoyles, the people who actually helped run the school and the people who thought they worked there but really only caused trouble for everyone else. Beverly led us to Horace’s office and said “Mr. Davis, Coach Wilkins is here” before going back to her desk.

As always, her desk was covered with paperwork. Her desk always had more than Horace’s desk did, but then almost anyone could dump stuff on her desk. They had to get past her to put anything on his desk. It seemed like there was more paperwork every year. My desk got too much, too, as AD for the whole school and all the different sports.

I pulled Alice into Horace’s office and closed the door. Then, I dropped the bar into the slots on both sides to keep it closed. The door had a lock but everyone from the janitor on up had a key. If you wanted a private conference, you had to drop the bar. The door had a small window, but that had a piece of cardboard covering it. Horace’s office was the only place in the whole school where you could be sure of your privacy.

Once that was done I turned to Horace. “Mr. Davis, this is my girlfriend Alice O’Donald. As far as I’m concerned she can introduce herself as Alice Wilkins any time she wants. I want her beside me for the rest of my life. Alice, this is Horace Davis, our Principal. He’s the poor bastard who gets yelled at whenever anyone here at West Central High gets in trouble. He’s also a very good man and I trust him almost as much as I trust you. He is a very large part of the reason why our school district is getting better.”

Alice changed the hand that was holding mine and stepped forward, reaching out to Horace with her right hand. “I think he means that, Mr. Davis. I’ve heard Larry say a lot of horrible things about a good many people, so I know he’s not afraid to speak his mind. He’s never said anything like that about you so I think he’s telling the truth.”

Horace shook her hand. “I’m delighted to meet you, miss Alice whatever-you-want-to-be-called. And if I’m a large part of the reason this school is doing well, Larry is most of the rest of that reason. He is an honorable man, if not necessarily particularly honest, and he does all the ugly little things that need done while I keep everyone’s attention on me so he doesn’t get caught. We make a good team, and the school would be a great deal poorer if we ever lost him. If you are taking care of him then I want you to do a good job. Our children need him. They may not ever admit it, or even know how much he does for them, but they need him.”

“I think it’s more him taking care of me. I just do whatever he tells me to do and we are both happy.”

That was a perfect cue to break in. “Actually, we can’t stay long. We left Alice’s daughter in my office and we need to get back there soon before something happens. However, as Alice was saying she does whatever I tell her to do and now is one of those times. Alice, take your clothes off. You can set them the desk.”

Once she had done that I put her hands up behind her head and nudged her feet apart, then told her to not move until I said to. “Horace, part of our deal is that Alice and her daughter are my bitches. They both do whatever I tell them to do, and I protect and take care of them. Part of protecting them is promising that no one else is ever going to use their pussy or their ass. From the waist down they belong to me and I’m never going to share them with anyone. From the waist up, though, I may share them with anyone I want to.”