finished. 'You're going to turn out your pockets yourself.'
'Fat fucking chance,' Buddy said. He was standing against the back wall of the shop so that the bulge in his hip pocket wouldn't show. His shirt-tail hung in two wrinkled flaps over the crotch of his jeans. His eyes darted here and there like the eyes of an animal brought to bay.
Mr Casey glanced at Moochie and Don Vandenberg. You two boys go up to the office and stay there until I come up,' he said. 'Don't go anywhere else; you've got enough trouble without that.'
They walked away slowly, close together, as if for protection. Moochie threw one glance back. In the main building the bell went off. People started to stream back inside: some of them giving us curious glances. We had missed lunch. It didn't matter. I wasn't hungry anymore.
Mr Casey turned his attention back to Buddy.
'You're on school grounds right now,' he said. 'You should thank God you are, because if you do have a knife, Buddy, and if you pulled it, that's assault with a deadly weapon. They send you to prison for that.'
'Prove it, prove it!' Buddy shouted. His cheeks were flaming, his breath coming in quick, nervous little gasps.
'If you don't turn out your pockets right now, I'm going to write a dismissal slip on you. Then I'm going to call the cops and the minute you step outside the main gate, they'll grab you. You see the bind you're in?' He looked grimly at Buddy. 'We keep our own house here,' he said. 'But if I have to write you a dismissal, Buddy, your ass belongs to them. Of course if you have no knife, you're okay. But if you do and they find it . . .'
There was a moment of silence. The four of us stood in tableau. I didn't think he was going to do it; he would take his dismissal and try to ditch the knife somewhere quickly. Then he must have realised that the cops would hunt for it and probably find it, because he pulled the knife out of his back pocket and threw it down on the tarmac. It landed on the go-button. The blade popped out and winked wickedly in the afternoon sunlight, eight inches of chromed steel.
Arnie looked at it and wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand.
'Go up to the office, Buddy,' Mr Casey said quietly. 'Wait until I get up there.'
'Screw the office!' Buddy cried. His voice was thin and hysterical with anger. Hair had fallen across his forehead again, and he flipped it back. 'I'm getting out of this fucking pigsty.'
'Yes, all right, fine,' Mr Casey said, with no more inflection or excitement in his voice than he would have shown if Buddy had offered him a cup of coffee. I knew then that Buddy was all finished at Libertyville High. No detention or three-day vacation; his parents would be receiving the stiff blue expulsion form in the mail - the form would explain why their son was being expelled and would inform them of their rights and legal options in the matter.
Buddy looked at Arnie and me - and he smiled. 'I'll fix you,' he said. 'I'll get even. You'll wish you were never fucking born.' He kicked the knife away, spinning and flashing. It came to rest on the edge of the hottop, and Buddy walked off, the cleats on the heels of his motorcycle boots clicking and scraping.
Mr Casey looked at us; his face was sad and tired. 'I'm sorry,' he said.
'That's okay,' Arnie replied.
'Do you boys want dismissal slips? I'll write them for you if you feet you'd like to go home for the rest of the day.' I glanced at Arnie, who was brushing off his shirt. He shook his head.
'No, that's okay,' I said.
'All right. Just late slips then.
We went into Mr Casey's room and he wrote us late slips for our next class, which happened to be one we shared together - Advanced Physics. Coming into the physics lab, a lot of people looked at us curiously, and there was some whispering behind hands.
The afternoon absence slip circulated at the end of period six. I checked it and saw the names Repperton, Vandenberg, and Welch, each with a (D) after his name. I thought that Arnie and I would be called to the office at the end of school to tell Ms Lothrop, the discipline officer, what had happened. But we weren't.