Cory

Chapter. 10

They finally even made a movie about it. I saw it last April. When I came out, I was sick. Whenever anything important happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it. And forgetting Cory Anthony may be a bigger mistake than anyone realizes ...

Monday morning: Principal Grayle and his understudy, Pete Morton, were having coffee in Grayle's office.

"No word from Hargens yet?" Morty asked. His lips curled into a John Wayne leer that was a little frightened around the edges.

"Not a peep. And Tristan has stopped lipping off about how his father is going to send us down the road." Grayle blew on his coffee with a long face.

"You don't exactly seem to be turning cartwheels."

"I'm not. Did you know Cory Anthony is going to the prom?"

Morty blinked. "With who? The Beak?" The Beak was Freda Holt, another of Ewen's misfits. He weighed perhaps one hundred pounds soaking wet, and the casual observer might be tempted to believe that sixty of it was nose.

"No," Grayle said. "With Charlene Griffin."

Morty swallowed his coffee the wrong way and went into a coughing fit.

"That's the way I felt," Grayle said.

"What about her boy friend? The little Gray boy?"

"I think he put her up to it," Grayle said. "He certainly seemed guilty enough about what happened to Cory when I talked to him. Now he's on the Decoration Committee, happy as a clam, just as if not going to his Senior prom was nothing at all."

"Oh," Morty said wisely.

"And Hargens - I think he must have talked to some people and discovered we really could sue him on behalf of Cory Anthony if we wanted to. I think he's cut his losses. It's the son that's worrying me."

"Do you think there's going to be an incident Friday night?"

"I don't know. I do know Tristan's has got a lot of friends who are going to be there. And he's going around with that Clara Turner mess; she's got a zooful of friends, too. The kind that make a career out of scaring pregnant ladies. Tristan Hargens has her tied around his finger, from what I've heard."

"Are you afraid of anything specific?"

Grayle made a restless gesture. "Specific? No. But I've been in the game long enough to know it's a bad situation. Do you remember the Stadler game in seventy-six?"

Morty nodded. It would take more than the passage of three years to obscure the memory of the Ewen-Stadler game. Bruce Trevor had been a marginal student but a fantastic basketball player. Coach Gaines didn't like him, but Trevor was going to put Ewen in the area tournament for the first time in ten years. He was cut from the team a week before Ewen's but must-win game against the Stadler Bobcats. A regular announced locker inspection had uncovered a kilo of marijuana behind Trevor's civic book. Ewen lost the game - and their shot at the tourney - 104-48. But no one remembered that; what they remembered was the riot that had interrupted the game in the fourth period. Led by Bruce Trevor, who righteously claimed he had been bum rapped, it resulted in four hospital admissions. One of them had been the Stadler coach, who had been hit over the head with a first-aid kit.

"I've got that kind of feeling," Grayle said. "A hunch. Someone's going to come with rotten apples or something."

"Maybe you're psychic," Morty said.

Wednesday afternoon.

Brandon and fourteen other students - The Prom  Decoration Committee, no less - were working on the huge mural that would hang behind the twin bandstand on Friday night. The theme was Springtime in Venice (who picked thew hokey themes, Brandon wondered. He had been a student at Ewen for four years, had after two Balls, and he still didn't know. Why did the goddam thing need a theme, anyway? Why not just have a sock hop and be done with W): George Chizmar, Ewen's most artistic student, had done a small chalk sketch of gondolas on a canal at sunset and a gondolier in a huge straw fedora leaning against the tiller as a gorgeous panoply of pinks and reds and oranges stained both sky and water. It was beautiful, no doubt about that. He had redrawn it in silhouette on a huge fourteen-by-twenty-foot canvas flat, numbering the various sections to go with the various chalk hues. Now the Committee was patiently colouring it in, like children crawling over a huge page in a giant's colouring book. Still, Brandon thought, looking at his hands and forearms, both heavily dusted with pink chalk, it was going to be the prettiest prom ever.

Next to him, Harry Shyres sat up on his haunches, stretched, and groaned as her back popped. He brushed a hank of hair from his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a rose-coloured smear.

"How in hell did you talk me into this?"

"You want it to be nice, don't you?" Brandon mimicked Miss Geer, the spinster chairman (apt enough term for Miss Mustache) of the Decoration Committee.

"Yeah, but why not the refreshment Committee or the Entertainment Committee? Less back, more mind. The mind, that's my area. Besides, you're not even -" He bit down on the words.

"Going?" Brandon shrugged and picked up his chalk again. He had a monstrous writer's cramp. "No, but I still want it to be nice." He added shyly: 'Charlene's going."

They worked in silence for a bit, and then Harry stopped again. No one was near them; the closest was Holly Marshall, on the other end of the mural, colouring the gondola's keel.

"Can I ask you about it, Brandon?" Harry asked finally. "God, everybody's talking."

"Sure." Brandon stopped colouring and flexed his hand.

"Maybe I ought to tell someone, just so the story stays straight. I asked Charlene to take Cory. I'm hoping it'll bring him out of him self a little ... knock down some of the barriers. I think I owe him that much."

"Whom does that put the rest of us?" Harry asked without rancour.

Brandon shrugged. "You have to make up your own mind about what we did, Harry. I'm in no position to throw stones. But I don't want people to think I'm uh .."  "Playing match"

"Something like that."

"And Charlene went along with it?" This was the part that most fascinated him.

"Yea," Brandon said, and did not elaborate. After a pause: "I suppose the other kids think I'm stuck up."

Harry thought it over. "Well ... they're all talking about it. But most of them still think you're okay. Like you said, you make your own decisions. There is, however, a small dissenting faction." He snickered dolefully.

"The Tristan Hargens people?"

"And the Clara Turner people. God, she's scuzzy."

"He doesn't like me much?" Brandon said, making it a question.

"Brandon, he hates your guts."

Brandon nodded, surprised to find the thought both distressed and excited him.

"I heard his father was going to sue the school department and then he changed his mind," he said.

Harry shrugged. "He hasn't made any friends out of this," he said. "I don't know what got into us, any of us. It makes me feel like I don't even know my own mind."

They worked on in silence. Across the room, Don Barrett was putting up an extension ladder preparatory to gilding the overhead steel beams with crepe paper.

"Look," Harry said. "There goes Tristan now."

Brandon looked up just in time to see him walking into the cubby-hole office to the left of the gym entrance. He was wearing wine-coloured velvet hot pants and a silky white shirt , Brandon thought sourly, and then wondered what Tristan could want in where the Prom Committee had set up shop. Of course Caleb Sanders  was on the Committee and the two of them were thicker than thieves.

"Stop it, he scolded himself. Do you want her in sackcloth and ashes?"

"Yes," he admitted. A part of him wanted just that.

"Harry?"

"Hmmmm?"

"Are they going to do something?"

Harry's face took on an unwilling masklike quality. 'I don't know.' The voice was light, over innocent.

"Oh," Brandon said noncommittally.

(you know you know something: accept something goddammit if its only yourself tell me)

They continued to colour, and neither spoke. He knew it wasn't as all right as Harry had said. It couldn't be; he would never be quite the same golden boy again in the eyes of his mates. He had done an ungovernable, dangerous thing - he had broken cover and shown his face.

The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil and sweet as childhood, slanted through the high, bright gymnasium windows.