tell your folks, too, but they missed Parents’ Night—”
“They’re pretty busy,” Jake said.
Mr. Bissette nodded. “Well, I have enjoyed you. I just wanted to say so . . . and that I’m looking forward to having you back for French II next year.”
“Thanks,” Jake said, and wondered what Mr. Bissette would say if he added, But I don’t think I’ll be taking French II next year, unless I can get a correspondence course delivered to my postal box at good old Sunnyvale.
Joanne Franks, the school secretary, appeared in the doorway of the Common Room with her small silver-plated bell in her hand. At The Piper School, all bells were rung by hand. Jake supposed that if you were a parent, that was one of its charms. Memories of the Little Red Schoolhouse and all that. He hated it himself. The sound of that bell seemed to go right through his head—
I can’t hold on much longer, he thought despairingly. I’m sorry, but I’m losing it. I’m really, really losing it.
Mr. Bissette had caught sight of Ms. Franks. He turned away, then turned back again. “Is everything all right, John? You’ve seemed preoccupied these last few weeks. Troubled. Is something on your mind?”
Jake was almost undone by the kindness in Mr. Bissette’s voice, but then he imagined how Mr. Bissette would look if he said: Yes. Something is on my mind. One hell of a nasty little factoid. I died, you see, and I went into another world. And then I died again. You’re going to say that stuff like that doesn’t happen, and of course you’re right, and part of my mind knows you’re right, but most of my mind knows that you’re wrong. It did happen. I did die.
If he said something like that, Mr. Bissette would be on the phone to Elmer Chambers at once, and Jake thought that Sunnyvale Sanitarium would probably look like a rest-cure after all the stuff his father would have to say on the subject of kids who started having crazy notions just before Finals Week. Kids who did things that couldn’t be discussed over lunch or cocktails. Kids Who Let Down The Side.
Jake forced himself to smile at Mr. Bissette. “I’m a little worried about exams, that’s all.”
Mr. Bissette winked. “You’ll do fine.”
Ms. Franks began to ring the Assembly Bell. Each peal stabbed into Jake’s ears and then seemed to flash across his brain like a small rocket.
“Come on,” Mr. Bissette said. “We’ll be late. Can’t be late on the first day of Finals Week, can we?”
They went in past Ms. Franks and her clashing bell. Mr. Bissette headed toward the row of seats called Faculty Choir. There were lots of cute names like that at Piper School; the auditorium was the Common Room, lunch-hour was Outs, seventh- and eighth-graders were Upper Boys and Girls, and, of course, the folding chairs over by the piano (which Ms. Franks would soon begin to pound as mercilessly as she rang her silver bell) was Faculty Choir. All part of the tradition, Jake supposed. If you were a parent who knew your kid had Outs in the Common Room at noon instead of just slopping up Tuna Surprise in the caff, you relaxed into the assurance that everything was A-OK in the education department.
He slipped into a seat at the rear of the room and let the morning’s announcements wash over him. The terror ran endlessly on in his mind, making him feel like a rat trapped on an exercise wheel. And when he tried to look ahead to some better, brighter time, he could see only darkness.
The ship was his sanity, and it was sinking.
Mr. Harley, the headmaster, approached the podium and imparted a brief exordium about the importance of Finals Week, and how the grades they received would constitute another step upon The Great Road of Life. He told them that the school was depending on them, he was depending on them, and their parents were depending on them. He did not tell them that the entire free world was depending on them, but he strongly implied that this might be so. He finished by telling them that bells would be suspended during Finals Week (the first and only piece of good news Jake had received that morning).
Ms. Franks, who had assumed her seat at the piano, struck an invocatory chord. The student body, seventy boys and fifty girls, each turned out in a neat and sober way that bespoke their parents’ taste