said. Word was clearly already out that somehow I had been enlisted in this current battle. McFadden placed his hand briefly on Tim’s shoulder and walked away towards his office. When it was clear the principal was out of earshot, his underling again approached us.
“Don’t make this any worse,” Owen scolded me without stopping to wait for a sarcastic comeback. “Just let it go.” Then he was gone.
“Mr. Patrick?” Tim asked after the silence had hung between us awhile. “Mr. Owen might be right. We should probably just let it go.” He said it, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“I might have agreed, but the first part of your statement I just can’t go along with.” Confusion crossed Tim’s face then quickly abated when I added, “I will never concede that Mr. Owen is right.”
Chapter Five
Andrea Pearson is my best friend. And I don’t just say that because she could kick my ass without breaking a sweat. Truthfully, that feat wouldn’t be all that much. I’ve seen eighth graders who could probably do the same. But we’ve been friends since we were both little, and she would kick my scrawny butt each and every time I made a comment she perceived to be smart-assed, which was often.
When we were very little, my comments were of the “girls can’t do” variety, and she would promptly demonstrate that I was wrong by ably completing the task and would also spend a little ass-kicking time punishing me for making the suggestion. As we grew into adolescence, the ass-kickings came following comments about how her body was failing to develop at the same rate as the other girls in our school. In our teenaged years, they were delivered in response to suggestions of how she and I might enjoy the developed parts of her body that had finally caught up to her peers in a way most teenaged boys in our school did not fail to notice. It was a history destined either to make you best friends or worst enemies. Andrea was sitting across from me in Las Margaritas Restaurant on Fourth Avenue, tossing back Coronas at a pace I didn’t bother attempting to match, interrogating me, as usual, about decisions I made in my life.
“You’re really gonna piss Owen off,” she told me unnecessarily.
“I know. It can’t be helped.”
“Yes, it can,” she scolded. “Why do you insist on alienating yourself from everyone in authority?”
“You’re still here. You have authority.”
“Don’t you forget it.” In addition to being best friend and self-appointed guardian of my best interests, Andrea was also a prominent detective in the Vancouver Police Department, with a clearance rate unmatched by any of her peers. “But I can only fire at you. This Owen clown can fire you.” She smiled at her clever play on words.
“No, he can’t. And that was awful.” Her smile didn’t fade: once she had decided her joke was funny, it really didn’t matter what I thought. “I’ve got the union. And, of course, my secret weapon.” Andrea raised her eyebrow as she tossed back the last of her Corona.
“My charm,” I told her.
She put the bottle down on the table and indelicately tossed the lime wedge — rind and all — into her mouth. With anyone else I would be appalled by her table manners, but with Andrea it had a certain perky wholesomeness. “I’ll be sure to save the want ads from tomorrow’s paper for you,” she said. “What about this ‘faggot’ thing on the kid — what’s-his-name’s — locker? You want me to look into it?”
I chuckled. “You gonna shake down the student body, Detective Pearson?”
“I’m just saying I could pick out the biggest, dumbest looking hoser of a guy and put the fear of god into him.”
“That would be the Owen vice-principal clown.”
“He wouldn’t have vandalized a kid’s locker.”
“Not now, but I suspect it would have been about his speed when he was in school.”
“You really got a hate on for this guy, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? What’s the story with you two?”
“He offends my sensibilities.”
“That’s it?”
“You need more?”
She shook her head. My sensibilities were not easily explained, even to me. “You got any kids’ names I could work with?”
“Don’t worry about it. That’s the clown’s job.”
“What about the kid? What are you going to do about him?” I thought about that for a moment. Following my initial conversation with Bill, I had almost convinced myself that I would wash my hands of the issue. But I felt I owed Tim more. “Yo, Winnie,” she barked to bring me back into focus. “Stay with me at least until dessert.”
“Yeah. Sorry. I was just thinking.”
“Planning how you’re going to save the world?”
“Something like that.”
“What can you possibly do if the VP refuses to let the kid bring his male date to the dance? He outranks you.”
“A court might see it differently.”
“Shit, Win. That’s just not the best way to win job security. You’ll be looking for career number three before long. You can’t sue the vice-principal because you disagree with him.”
I smiled just enough to look sly and sneaky. “Probably not. But the students could.”
“I’ll bring coffee and bagels Saturday morning. We can look through the want ads together.”
“I think I love you.”
“I think I’m uncomfortable with you loving me.”
“You’re just going to have to live with it.” Sara was, once again, speaking her mind with little regard for her audience. The class, with the exception of Sara, was speechless after listening to the task I had just assigned them: they would be taking the very administration of their own school to court to undo an injustice. As the weight of the assignment and the gravity of what was happening sank in, the stunned looks began transforming into grins, then all-out smiles and laughter. Even Tim showed no sign of discomfort at the infamy the case was sure to bring him. The vandalism of Tim’s locker seemed to have galvanized him into action. “This is exactly what we need to do to get Owen to listen to reason.”
The rest of the class was spent assigning specific duties to class members, including research for relevant statutes, articles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and any case law the textbook might have included that could be relevant to our challenge. I wanted to make sure the class focused on the legal issues at stake rather than personal attacks against my supervisor, but I couldn’t help but feign deafness when I overhead conversations in which they slagged him. Before the period ended, we had the basis of our submission to the court that I dutifully promised to file on my way home from school in the afternoon. As the bell rang to end the period and the day, only one student remained behind and, unusually, it was not Sara.
