Watchers

Hell on Earth

Summer school started the last week of June. It was six weeks long. Six whole weeks of suffering in school when I should've been at the pool or Sloppy Soldiers. I didn't see Adam again until the first day of torture began. He called me the night before school started and asked if I wanted to walk with him. I told him no problem. We didn't even mention that he'd been hiding in his basement for practically two weeks. I was so relieved, though, to have him call. I'd started to get kind of worried. I mean, being moody is one thing, but sitting in your room for two weeks? Well, that wasn't even like Adam, and he could be strange.

We talked like nothing had happened (and nothing really had). He was the one that mentioned the tree house. He told me he'd been there and grabbed the rest of the papers and started reading them. That was actually a really comforting thought. The whole time I'd been sitting in my room reading those stories, he'd been doing the same. It was good to know he wasn't just lying around moping about who-knows-what.

Goldenrock High was where the summer school was being held. I didn't know the building too well, but it wasn't difficult to find our way around in it. There were signs up, and teenagers were wandering around. All the middle school classes were in one particular hall; of course, it was at the butt-end of the building. We had to practically walk a mile to get to the end of it.

I recognized faces here and there, but none of them belonged to kids I spoke to. Then Adam and I had to split. He went to the reading room, and I went to the math room. It was an hour-and-a-half of suffering. I could tell right from the beginning that the math teacher was just going to be a robot for the next six weeks. She was a boring forty-something, and within the first ten minutes, I was struggling to stay awake. It didn't matter. She only talked about discipline for the whole class period. With all us horrible kids who were so bad we had to go to summer school, she must have felt she had to. I wanted to tell her that she'd have no discipline problems if she was this dull the whole time; we'd all be too busy sleeping to cause trouble.

Gym was no better. In fact, gym was worse, even with Adam being there. First off, he didn't change out. His excuse was that he'd forgotten his clothes, and the gym teacher let him off, saying it was only the first day so he'd be excused. I knew Adam, though. He wouldn't bring gym clothes the next day . . . or the next day . . . or the next. He'd be sitting on the bleachers for the whole six weeks. Not me, though. I didn't want to get in trouble. I really needed to work on passing gym, as much as I didn't want to.

Another reason I could tell that gym was going to be like my own personal Hell was that the jerk of the universe, Dylan Doyle, was in it too. The loser leprechaun who enjoyed making life difficult for me. I noticed through a sneaky sideways glimpse that he kept his mouth shut the whole while. Even when the teacher did role, Dylan just raised his hand and nodded. I wondered if he'd gotten the brackets of his braces replaced yet.

When I thought about it, I couldn't recall seeing a story about him. Maybe there had been one and his name had been disguised. But all the stories were about people who had good things about them. Dylan didn't have anything good in him. He was pure trouble. It was no wonder there wasn't a story for him.

Gym plodded on. We ran. We did jumping jacks. We did stretches. All that dumb stuff. I was so wet with sweat you'd have thought I'd just gotten out of a pool. And the teacher said we'd be playing sports outside. Part of me thought that wouldn't be so bad; it was probably cooler outside under the sun than in the stuffiness of the gym. Maybe there'd at least be a breeze out there. The only good thing about gym was that it didn't take brains to get through it. We just had to run the mile, do so many pull-ups, complete the rope climb, and participate in few other things to get through it. I realized I'd at least be able to pass the rope climb. One small little speck of a star in the black-blotted sky that was turning into my summer.