Shadow Kids

Chapter 4-Behind Closed Doors

Chapter 4-Behind Closed Doors

                The hallways of Jack’s school should have been lined with caution tape and hidden from the eyes of the public. Jack would describe them as danger zones and so would anyone else who had the misfortune of seeing them.

                But in order to get to her current event class, she had to go through them. She had originally signed up for current events because it had seemed like an easy A, and it was an easy A for the most part, but it still had its hard parts. One, for example, was that the class required participation and discussion with other people, two things which Jack was not at all fond of.

                She came into class late, like always (it wasn’t her fault that she had to cross the entire campus between periods four and five) and found her usual seat between the kid who smells like oatmeal and the girl who had a twitchy habit of looking at her eye makeup in the mirror every seven seconds.

                The current event class room was organized differently than most classrooms. There were no desks, just metal folding chairs all arranged in a circle. A projector was set up in front of the class to play occasional news clips and a stack of newspapers sat in a crate by Mr. Carl’s puny desk. And that was about it. Jack didn’t mind though. She liked the simplicity of it.

                “Okay class!” Mr. Carl called with a clap of his hands. The hustle and bustle around them slowed to a stop. “Today, we’re going to start off with a nice hot debate.” He maniacally rubbed his hands together. “We’ll begin with a short article…” He gave a stack of papers to a kid to his right and the stack was passed around the circle.

                As Jack read, she found it was about an eleven year old boy who stole three boxes of cereal, some bottles of water and a few Snickers bars from a local convenient store, actually right down the street from the school. When asked why he did it, the boy said that he was trying to make his family happy. He’s being held in a local police station before his trial. Apparently, his family is “devastated” and “demands justice and fairness.”

                “So!” Mr. Carl declared, taking a seat in his big leather spinning chair. “Demands justice and fairness, huh?” He paused for dramatic effect, lifting an eyebrow. “What exactly is just and fair in this scenario? A little, tiny eleven year old kid stealing for his lower class family. How should the police and courts handle this? How about his family, huh? How should this all play out?” A few hands shot up.

                Jack never was the first to raise her hand, in any of her classes for that matter, but especially not this one. She liked to observe the majority opinion and see what other points her fellow classmates had to offer and basically sit back and relax until Mr. Carl made her speak. Which was a little too often.

                “Matt?” Mr. Carl asked. “Would you like to start us off?” Jack groaned internally. Matt Evans, the super star of the school himself. Bubbly, funny, charming and the all-American wonder boy every single person in the school loved. He could starve and kick twelve different puppies but once he smiled, forget it, the entire school would forget his heinous acts. Not that that scenario would ever come up. Matt never acted out, never did anything wrong, tried hard in school and was friends with basically everyone. Quite frankly, it made Jack want to puke.