I haven’t either. Every year there’s some little grassroots movement to start a student walkout, but most often it turns out to be a few burnouts who would have been smoking pot in the cemetery across the street anyway.” Sir John A. Macdonald High School is located, a bit morbidly, directly across the street from Vancouver’s largest public final resting place. It is known as a great place to drink, smoke pot, and party. “What do you think they’ll do?”
“Admin? I’m surprised they’re not up here yelling at me.”
“Yeah. You do seem to have a way of getting under their skin.” From below I could hear a steady bass thump as one of the students moved his car close to the crowd to showcase his auto’s audio abilities. Thankfully, most of the school’s neighbours wouldn’t be complaining, not in this lifetime, anyway. Their protest anthem was no “Dust in the Wind,” but Eminem had more ‘F’ words.
“Whatever they do, they’d better do it quickly.” Two floors below, on the sidewalk directly in front of the school’s main entrance, two television news vans had pulled up, greeted by Sara, who was still on her cell phone, no doubt gathering more press to cover her rally.
“God, she’s good,” I said, shaking my head in amazement. Sara seemed to have the know-how of a PR agent. Across the street, a Vancouver Sun newspaper car arrived, taking in the growing crowd of students beginning to spill out onto Fraser Street to disrupt the tail end of the morning’s rush hour traffic. Just ahead of the front entrance of the school stood the three administrators, and they didn’t have to turn around and look up for me to feel their anger.
It took a little less than half an hour of press coverage and chanting students before the school’s beleaguered principal, Don McFadden, slowly approached the ten or twelve students forming the command centre around Sara, who by that time, by my count, had given at least half a dozen interviews. If she hadn’t already had a date for the graduation dinner and dance, she would be in high demand after today’s performance. McFadden appeared not to make any pretense of bravado, standing with his head bowed slightly and talking quietly to her. After a couple of minutes, I saw her offer her hand to the principal, who reluctantly shook it in front of the entire student body and the Lower Mainland’s assembled media. Sara broke ranks from her friends and approached the sidewalk, where a gaggle of reporters quickly surrounded her. Like a seasoned pro, Sara spoke to the media scrum without taking questions, then turned to the crowd of classmates and announced loudly enough for me to hear even from the third floor, “Let’s go to school!”
It was probably the only time the school would ever experience a cheer from a group of teenagers as they made their way towards the building.
Because both our social lives had little activity, particularly on a weeknight, Andrea had decided she was coming to my house for dinner. I was not to do any cooking — she wanted it to be a good meal — but I would be responsible for having food on the premises. But in honour of no occasion I could readily think of, I opted to order in pasta rather than pizza. Even non-romantic female friends need to be wined and dined on occasion.
“I ran a check on your student,” she told me as she sucked down a lasagna noodle with less daintiness than I would have thought possible, “to see if he had any priors. He doesn’t.”
“He just turned eighteen. Any criminal activity as a young offender wouldn’t show up on background check.” She looked at me as though I were an idiot for assuming things like sealed records were actually sealed for her.
“Right. What was I thinking?” She shrugged. She was used to me forgetting how powerful she deemed herself to be.
“Anyway. It was his locker that was victimized. Why look for criminal activity from him?”
“Cuz if he was arrested for something, I would be able to see who was arrested with him, what types of people he hung with, and look for any patterns of vandal-like behaviour from his peers.”
“Who you’re assuming have turned on him.”
“Because he’s turned different from the rest of us.” There was a certain logic to this I had not thought of, which is why she’s the VPD’s star detective and I’m the principal’s pain-in-the-ass teacher. As I opened my mouth to reassert my dignity, Andy suddenly raised a hand, palm forward, to shush me. Her head was cocked with her left ear towards the entrance hallway. “Did you hear that?” she whispered.
“I heard you whisper ‘Did you hear that.’”
She glanced at me for a fraction of a second, just long enough to remind me I was not to make jokes when she was in police mode. She was probably just showing off. Or paranoid.
“That hissing sound,” she whispered again, though I recognized she wasn’t really talking to me any more. She slipped off the stool she was occupying on the kitchen side of my pass-through and walked silently to the edge of the hallway, slowly poking her head around the corner. I crept around towards her from the dining room side of the wall and strained to hear whatever was sending her into combat mode. As I approached, she raised her fist, pointed to her eyes, then to the front door, just like I’d seen Kiefer Sutherland do on 24. It was television re-run season already, but as I recalled it, she was indicating that she alone was going to check what was going on behind my apartment’s front door. A sudden burst of manhood grabbed me, and I opted to seize the moment. I quickly marched past Andrea towards the door. At that same moment, I became aware of footsteps running down the exterior hallway away from my apartment. Quickly throwing open the door, I was in time to see the backs of two teenagers as they rounded the corner at the far end of the hallway and went into the emergency exit stairwell.
Without thinking, I bolted down the hallway after them, pulling open the stairwell door just in time to hear the emergency exit door two floors down crash open, allowing the two runners to flee into the night. I halted my pursuit, knowing not only that they’d be long gone by the time I reached the ground floor, but also that I’d look like an idiot standing there looking up and down the back laneway, trying to determine in which direction my prey had escaped. I’d learned that from 24 too. By the time I returned to my own end of the hallway, Andrea had pulled my door further open and was examining the outside. It had been spray-painted with the word “fagit,” a reference to what I assumed the vandals were indicating as my own sexual preference.
“Now do you believe this is a police issue?” she scolded me. “This is a personal attack on you.”
“I’m not terribly worried,” I replied with more calm than I actually felt. “We’re not exactly dealing with master criminals here.”
“How do you know?”
“Look at their spelling. How clever a plot could these two concoct against me?”
“They managed to find your home,” she insisted.
“I’m in the phone book. Even my dumbest students could pull that off.”
Andrea gave me a scathing look. “What? You’re still listed? Why the hell are you listed when you’re a high school teacher?”
“I’m a friendly guy.”
“That seems to be what they’re implying.”
The thing about teenagers, I told Andrea repeatedly throughout the rest of the evening, was that despite how much they claim to value secrecy, they are notoriously poor secret keepers. I had been trying to convince her that using taxpayer resources to involve the VPD in the investigation of the misspelled graffiti on my door was, in fact, unnecessary. I figured
