John Brandon - Citrus County

“Then how am I supposed to answer?”

“It was named to make people think it wasn’t an inviting place to settle,” said Shelby.

“You’re allowed to guess countries,” the kiss-ass told Toby. “You’re not allowed to make comments.”

“Shitland?” Toby offered. “That doesn’t sound inviting.”

“Time,” blurted the kiss-ass.

Mr. Hibma informed the class that he’d gone to a flea market that past weekend and found a man selling movie posters for a dime each. He’d purchased three hundred. From here on out, these would serve as prizes. He presented Vince with Midnight Run and handed Shelby The Milagro Beanfield War .

“Let me get this straight,” Vince said. “First place is a poster and second place is a poster?”

Mr. Hibma picked up a few stubs of chalk and shook them in his hand. “If Vince and Toby were gentlemen, they’d let the ladies keep the prizes.”

“I’m not a gentleman,” Toby said. “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a gentleman.”

The lunch bell rang, ending the discussion and prompting a swift and sweeping exodus from the room.

“By the way, Toby,” Mr. Hibma said. “You’ve got detention tomorrow afternoon for cursing.”

Toby looked toward the ceiling a moment and then gave a dispassionate nod. Detention was a part of his life he’d come to terms with.

The silence in the classroom during lunch hour was irresistible. It turned Mr. Hibma’s limbs to lead. Because it peeved some of the other teachers, Mr. Hibma had no maps or charts or timelines on his walls. Instead, he’d hung prints by Dufy and Bosch. Because it peeved some of the other teachers, he made a point not to use the computer in his classroom. He didn’t keep grades or attendance or lesson plans on it, didn’t look up sample assignments on the Internet, didn’t let his kids use it for research. As far as Mr. Hibma knew, the computer had never been turned on. Because it peeved some of the other teachers, Mr. Hibma had a cooler and a microwave in his classroom. This kept him out of the lounge.

He opened the microwave and deposited a frozen burrito. While he watched the seconds tick, he could not stop thinking about the playbooks in the drawer of his desk, the binders of formations, whirlwinds of stick-people and arrows. Princeton. Nebraska. Half-court press. The administration wanted Mr. Hibma to coach eighth-grade girls’ basketball. The old coach had retired and all his plays and drills had been dropped off to Mr. Hibma with a not so subtly worded note mentioning that he was the only teacher in the school who did not head an extracurricular activity. The note reminded him that he’d promised, last year, to run the debate team, and that this promise had proven hollow. Mr. Hibma sat at his desk and blew on his burrito. If basketball had begun when it was supposed to, back in the fall, he’d have been able to stay hidden, to keep his head down and shuffle past this coaching business, but a conga-line of hurricanes, the nastiest weather ever to invade Florida, had blown all sports to the spring, giving the administration time to browse their options, to parse out a slacker and surround him and move in for the kill. And none of the hurricanes had even hit Citrus County. They’d hit the counties to the north and south, the counties most of Citrus Middle’s opponents hailed from. Why not just cancel girls’ basketball altogether? That was Mr. Hibma’s question. The other coaches had stopped by one by one to assure Mr. Hibma that coaching was simple. You made them run, got them places on time, named a starting lineup — that was pretty much it.

Friday afternoon, when his detention was up, Toby exited the school and hiked into the February woods. He passed a clear-cut area pocked with piles of fill sand, a golf course whose construction had been halted years ago. Farther, there was a warehouse that seemed forgotten, that seemed to have been built by somebody who was now dead or had moved away. Statues of all sorts — gnomes, saints, water fowl — leaned against the warehouse’s outside walls as if pleading to be let inside.

Toby hiked on, switching from this trail to that, imagining how he’d lose someone if he were being chased. He noticed a new bird’s nest and climbed a low branch so he could look inside. Five pert eggs. They looked like toys, like decorations. Toby wished the mother bird would appear and run him off, pecking Toby’s eyes, but that wasn’t going to happen. These eggs were on their own and they’d run up against bad luck. Toby removed them one by one and slung them against the tree trunk. They didn’t shatter like he’d hoped, just left splotches and rolled to rest on the ground. A shiver of joy ran through Toby, then immediately he was disgusted with himself. No matter how many speeches he gave himself, he couldn’t keep himself in line. He was no match for his lesser urges. He was as much a junkie as those people who left empty gas cans and used rags all over the woods. He had about the same amount of purpose.

Toby lived with his uncle Neal on a few dozen acres in a concrete-block house. The property was lousy with sinkholes, but Uncle Neal said in a race between a sinkhole swallowing the house and nuclear destruction, he’d take the nukes. Toby entered the house and was enveloped by the familiar smell of fish sticks. Uncle Neal sat on a stool, clipping his nails. His hair was lopsided and his eyes watery. He always looked like he’d been shaken awake by a stranger.

“You’re like a dog,” he said to Toby. “Rattle your food bowl, you appear.”

Toby sat at the table and took out his math homework. He could’ve done it in Mr. Hibma’s detention, but Toby always made a point, when he was being disciplined, to stare at the nearest clock or out the nearest window. Toby did nothing in the bunker and he did nothing in detention, but the bunker was his nothing and detention was Mr. Hibma’s. Detention sapped him and the bunker built him up.

“I’m sick of eating,” Uncle Neal said. “Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast, lunch, dinner.” He put on an oven mitt and took out the fish sticks. He divided them onto two plates and slid one of the plates to Toby.

“I have to work tomorrow.” Uncle Neal filled his mouth with steaming fish stick and swallowed after one chew, getting it over with. “It’s an all-day thing — semi-trailer of old fruit. Two brothers owned the company and they got in a fight and halted all shipments. Back in, like, the ’80s.”

As far as Toby could tell, Uncle Neal’s business was to clean things that nobody else would clean, from grimed old engines to abandoned slaughterhouses. Toby’s uncle, it was safe to say, was a pariah. He lived in a world of regret, if not remorse — about what, Toby couldn’t say. Toby’s uncle always joked about killing himself, and Toby had begun to suspect he wasn’t joking. He didn’t have much incentive to stay alive. Uncle Neal, like everyone else, believed Toby was a run-of-the-mill punk, another angst-ridden adolescent. He had no clue what Toby was capable of.

Another week of school had passed, more quizzes and study halls and, in the case of Mr. Hibma’s class, more games. Shelby wasn’t the new kid anymore, and she was grateful for that. She’d settled in and was more or less slipping through the days. People had their own problems. Shelby had been fooled about Florida, but that was okay. She wasn’t the first. She’d imagined a place that was warm and inviting and she’d gotten a place that was without seasons and sickeningly hot. She’d wanted palm trees and she’d gotten grizzly, low oaks. She’d wanted surfers instead of rednecks. She’d thought Florida would make her feel glamorous or something, and there was a region of Florida that might’ve done just that, but it wasn’t this part. It was okay, though. It was something different. It wasn’t the Midwest. It wasn’t a place where you could look around and plainly see, for miles, that nothing worthwhile was going on. Shelby would travel to better places when she was older, when she could chart her own course. She’d go to India and France. Shelby could see the mornings of her future, the foreign pink sunrises.