John Saul - Shadows

When Amy appeared in the dining room, Jeff had waved her over, too. For the rest of the week, the four of them would sit together at every meal. To Josh’s relief, Jeff hadn’t mentioned Timmy Evans again.

The days passed quickly. Both Josh and Amy discovered that the Academy was nothing like the schools they had come from. While there was still a lot of teasing among the kids, for the first time in their lives both of them felt that they were part of the group, not outside it, and both of them had begun to join in the good-natured banter, and even to share in the laughter when the jokes were at their own expense.

Josh was finally beginning to think that maybe he wasn’t the kind of freak all the kids in Eden had made him feel he was.

Now, on Friday, he sat in Steve Conners’s English class, a copy of Hamlet open on his desk. They’d started reading the play at the beginning of the hour, with himself as Hamlet and Amy as Ophelia. At first it had been kind of boring, but then Mr. Conners — Josh still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to call him Steve, as the rest of the class did — had stopped the reading and stared at them in mock exasperation.

“What’s going on with you guys?” he’d demanded. “This is a play! It was written as entertainment. Who do you think would have paid good money to see it if the actors had read it the way you do? Come on, gang, a little ham, okay?”

They started over again from the beginning, and suddenly the play that had seemed to Josh to be incredibly dull when he’d read through it the night before, marking Hamlet’s lines in yellow so he wouldn’t lose his place during the reading this morning, came alive. As his classmates got into the spirit of it, becoming caught up in the drama of the piece, Josh began to imagine himself in the vast, cold chambers of Elsinore Castle.

But in the midst of one of his speeches, the door opened, and Josh looked up to see Adam Aldrich coming in. He faltered, then stopped, for the one thing that Steve Conners was absolutely strict about was promptness.

“I only have an hour a day with you, and I don’t intend to waste it,” he’d explained on Monday, when Josh himself had been late because he hadn’t been able to find the room. “So if you’re not going to show up on time, don’t bother to come at all. Clear?”

Josh, his eyes wide at the rebuke, had nodded mutely and slid into his seat. Now he waited to see what would happen to Adam.

Steve Conners gazed steadily at Adam, who seemed totally unconcerned about his tardiness. “Didn’t you understand what I said Monday?” the teacher asked.

Adam shrugged. “I’ve got a note from Dr. Engersol,” he said.

He handed the note to the teacher, and Conners glanced at it briefly before nodding Adam into his chair, making a mental note to talk to the director that afternoon. “Okay, let’s pick it up where we left off. Adam, you take over the part of Polonius. We’re on page twenty-seven.”

The reading began again, but when Polonius’s next line came up, there was only silence from Adam Aldrich.

Conners frowned at the boy. “Adam?”

“I lost my place,” Adam replied. He read the line, but

with absolutely no expression to his voice, stumbling over the rhythm of the speech. When his next line came, he missed it again.

“What’s going on, Adam?” Conners asked. “Didn’t you read the play last night?”

Adam slouched low in his chair. “I didn’t have time,” he muttered, so softly that Conners could barely hear him.

Conners eyed the boy. Every day, it seemed, Adam was showing less and less interest in the class. Yesterday, in fact, he’d spent the entire hour staring out the window, taking no part at all in the discussion of Shakespeare and the theater of the Elizabethan era. Yet last year, he knew, Adam had been involved in both plays the Academy had staged, and even tried out for one of the productions the university drama department had put on.

“What were you doing that was more important than your homework?” Conners asked, keeping his voice mild.

“I was just doing something else, that’s all,” Adam replied, his normally placid expression turning sullen. “It’s none of your business.”

Conners frowned. “Come on, Adam. If it affects what’s happening to you in my class, I think it is my business.”

“Then maybe I won’t be in your class anymore,” Adam said. As the rest of the students watched in astonished silence, Adam Aldrich picked up his book bag, pulled his English text out of it, and stood up. “I hate this class,” he announced. “It can get stuffed, for all I care.”

He walked out.

As a tense silence hung over the class, Josh gazed at the door through which his friend had disappeared, wondering what was going to happen. Would Mr. Conners go after him and bring him back? And the way Adam had talked to the teacher …

“All right, gang,” he heard Mr. Conners saying. “Just go on with the reading. Brad, you pick up Polonius’s lines, okay?”

Brad nodded silently as Steve Conners hurried from the room. At the end of the hall he could see Adam Aldrich just starting out of the building. Breaking into a run, Conners caught up with the boy as he was reaching the last step down from the building’s porch and heading across the lawn toward the mansion.

“Adam?” Steve said as he came abreast of the boy. “Hey, come on, you can’t just walk out like that.”

Adam kept going, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his book bag hanging from his right wrist, barely clearing the ground. Conners put his right hand on the boy’s shoulder, stopping him and turning him around so they faced each other. “You want to tell me what’s going on, Adam? I’m on your side, you know.”

Adam’s eyes shifted away from the teacher’s. “Nothin’s going on. I just don’t like your class, and I’m not going to it anymore.”

“Oh, you’re not, huh?” Steve said, trying to keep his voice light, though the fleeting worries he’d felt about Adam all week were suddenly coalescing. “How do you figure you’re going to get out of it? English isn’t an elective, you know.”

“I’ll get out,” Adam announced, his eyes shifting away from Steve Conners and fixing on the large cupola that formed the fourth floor of the mansion. “Dr. Engersol will get me out.”

Conners frowned, his own gaze following Adam’s. Was that where Adam had been that morning? Up in Engersol’s private aerie atop the mansion? “What’s going on, Adam? How did you get that note from Dr. Engersol? He knows how I feel about people coming in late.”

“We were working on something,” Adam told him, in a voice that informed Conners that exactly what they had been doing was none of his business.

“Look, Adam,” Conners said, deciding to start all over again. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I think maybe you ought to tell me about it. I can’t help you—”

Adam twisted away from him. “I don’t need any help!” he said. “And nothing’s going on with me. Can’t you just leave me alone?” He backed a couple of paces away from the teacher, then turned and sprinted across the lawn toward the main house.

Conners was tempted to follow him, but then remembered the rest of his class, still inside, theoretically reading the play he’d assigned them. Still, he waited until he saw the massive wooden door close behind Adam before starting back to his classroom. Hildie Kramer, he was certain, would have seen Adam from her office and immediately dropped whatever she might have been doing to find out what had upset the boy. Hildie’s instincts with the kids, Steve had discovered in the short time he’d been with the school, were rarely far off the mark. She often seemed to know when one of them was heading for trouble even before the child himself knew.