Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗

just as I was tossing one kid — the one whose larynx I collapsed — onto another. When my head stopped thumping and I could stand up, I was taken to this office and left alone. Through the glass panel of the closed, probably locked door I saw paramedics rolling stretchers down the hall.

Mr. Comstock had been on the phone since I got there, talking with various people including the police. After a few minutes of silent contemplation as to the source of the pain in my head, I heard Mr. Comstock begin to wind down the conversation and then he hung up the telephone and looked to me, himself seeming frazzled and anxious to say something. He started to tell me then about the collapsed larynx and broken nose until the phone rang yet again. He apologized and answered it.

“Yes?” he spoke into the handset parked on his face.

“Yeah… he… it’s here,” he continued, spinning his chair around and facing the window.

I looked around at the pictures in the office, each with a smiling teenager in front of the same grayish backdrop; other students of his who donated wallet-sized prints of their school pictures. In any other job, having a collection of photographs of underage minors would seem somehow inappropriate.

The desk between him and me was littered with papers of various colors; a keyboard and an impressive flat screen monitor sat in the corner next to a black and silver Swingline stapler and a navy blue New England Federated Bank mug stuffed full of capped roller ball pens, probably Bic.

Comstock was still one the phone. Looking at him, I guessed he was probably in his mid-forties. There was no wedding ring on his finger, and he had deep pinkish eyeglass pad imprints on the bridge of his nose which he rubbed occasionally. I noticed a bottle of saline drops on the shelf behind the desk and figured he must have just switched to contacts now that the contacts-are-for-chicks stigma had finally worn thin. I looked back at the flat screen monitor again, it was a Sony and the school’s computers were all Dell; he must have bought the monitor himself and brought it in so he’d look better than everyone else. Or maybe he just had eye fatigue.

It seemed like these small details were flooding my consciousness. It felt unusual and slightly amplified the headache.

On the shelf in the back were a few books, one of Yeats poetry and three Tolstoy novels; all of their spines were in perfect condition having probably never been opened. This guy seems to spend a lot of time worrying about what people think of him.

“That would seem a bit strange,” he said to the phone, “I don’t know if I can make that float. It’s not my job. It might be expensive.”

There was a pause, and he hung up.

“Okay,” he said to me at last. “The student handbook specifies that fighting in school results in suspension or expulsion, you probably know that.”

I sighed, and started to unscrew my predicted life outline from the wall of my mind for the third time since my dad died.

“Obviously,” he continued, “that doesn’t make any sense. If we followed that rule, some kid who gets punched in the face for no reason and pushes back would have to be punished for it. I guess we’re trying to raise people to get punched and just stand there.

“Except in, say, Sharks versus Jets style fights or petty adolescent boy/girl jealousy bouts, usually in a fight there’s one guilty party and one guy getting pummeled. Punishing someone for getting attacked is just dumb. So we usually don’t. It’s in the book because it’s hard to explain the stance of ‘it’s okay to get in a fight unless you’re a bad person’ in print.”

He stopped and thought for a second.

“So. You certainly put the hurt on those kids, but you obviously didn’t go down that hall looking for trouble. Plus, we found the… illicit beverage Marcos had. That’s illegal, bringing alcohol into a public school. So four gang-types with contraband alcohol attack you, a kid with no administrative record or any history of violence and who recently suffered a death in the family — which might explain the unusual torrent of aggression. As far as we’re concerned we’ve got no real beef with you. The kids’ parents might press charges against you, but that seems unlikely. They’ll be going from the hospital to the police station.”

“Huh,” I said, a bit surprised. My head was starting to clear up.

“You probably don’t want your mom finding out about this anyway, so on the administrative front I can just pretend you weren’t even involved.”

“I guess I could get in fights more often,” I said.

He let out a tight laugh. “The way you tore those guys up, I’m surprised to hear you haven’t been in any. Have you taken karate classes or something?”

“Umm… no.”

“Weird. Well I guess there’s no telling how someone will react when he’s about to get pummeled on. The fight or flight response is pretty powerful. I read a story about some guy who was mugged, never thrown a punch in his life, but he puts the mugger into a coma. He says his guardian angel helped him. Weird stuff.”

Weird indeed.