something the chem kids were supposed to take care of before they left for the weekend but hardly ever did. Ms. Hargensen paused, smiling. Maybe a little embarrassed. “Science folks aren’t immune from superstition, Craig. I don’t believe in messing with what I don’t understand. My grandmother used to say a person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer. I’ve always thought that was good advice. Why do you ask?”
I wasn’t going to tell her Kenny was still on my mind. “I’m a Methodist myself, and we talk about the Holy Spirit. Only in the King James Bible, it’s the Holy Ghost. I guess I was thinking about that.”
“Well, if ghosts exist,” she said, “I’ll bet not all of them are holy.”
* * *
I still wanted to be some kind of writer, although my ambition to write movies had cooled. Mr. Harrigan’s joke about the screenwriter and the starlet recurred to me every now and then, and had cast a bit of a pall over my show biz fantasies.
For Christmas that year Dad got me a laptop, and I started to write short stories. They were okay line by line, but the lines of a story have to add up to a whole, and mine didn’t. The following year, the head of the English Department tapped me to edit the school paper, and I got the journalism bug, which has so far never left me. I don’t think it ever will. I believe you hear a click, not in your head but in your soul, when you find the place where you belong. You can ignore it, but really, why would you?
I started getting my growth, and when I was a junior, after I had shown Wendy that yes, I had protection (it was U-Boat who actually bought the condoms), we left our virginity behind. I graduated third in my class (only 142, but still), and Dad bought me a Toyota Corolla (used, but still). I got accepted at Emerson, one of the best schools in the country for aspiring journalists, and I bet they would have given me at least a partial scholarship, but thanks to Mr. Harrigan I didn’t need it—lucky me.
There were a few typical adolescent storms between fourteen and eighteen, but actually not that many—it was as if the nightmare with Kenny Yanko had in some way frontloaded a lot of my adolescent angst. Also, you know, I loved my dad, and it was just the two of us. I think that makes a difference.
By the time I started college, I hardly ever thought of Kenny Yanko at all. But I still thought of Mr. Harrigan. Not surprising, considering that he had rolled out the academic red carpet for me. But there were certain days when I thought of him more often. If I was home on one of those days, I put flowers on his grave. If I wasn’t, Pete Bostwick or Mrs. Grogan did it for me.
Valentine’s. Thanksgiving. Christmas. And my birthday.
I always bought a dollar scratch ticket on those days, too. Sometimes I won a couple of bucks, sometimes five, and once I won fifty, but I never hit anything close to a jackpot. That was okay with me. If I had, I would have given the money to some charity. I bought the tickets to remember. Thanks to him, I was already rich.
* * *
Because Mr. Rafferty was generous with the trust fund, I had my own apartment by the time I was a junior at Emerson. Just a couple of rooms and a bathroom, but it was in Back Bay, where even small apartments aren’t cheap. By then I was working on the literary magazine. Ploughshares is one of the best in the country, and it always has a hotshot editor, but someone has to read the slush pile, and that was me. I liked the job, even though many of the submissions were on a par with a memorably, even classically bad poem called “10 Reasons Why I Hate My Mother.” It cheered me up to see how many strivers out there were worse at writing than I was. Probably that sounds mean. Probably it is.
I was doing this chore one evening with a plate of Oreos by my left hand and a cup of tea by my right when my phone buzzed. It was Dad. He said he had some bad news and told me Ms. Hargensen had died.
For a moment or two I couldn’t speak. The stack