School Days - By Robert B. Parker Page 0,23

. . ."

"In the rain?"

I shrugged. Rita grinned.

"Besides," she said. "I'm using it to sit on."

"What a waste," I said.

We each drank.

"Maybe they just hated school," Rita said.

I nodded.

"I was talking to some kids yesterday," I said. "One of them said something."

Rita waited quietly. For all her mouthiness, she had a great capacity for intelligent silence as needed.

"She said that everybody's walking around in school barely able to stand it, and these guys just went a little further and couldn't stand it. `These guys went kaboom,' she said."

Rita nodded.

"My brother," she said, "married a nearly perfect knee-jerk upclass suburban mom. She's dreadful. But the poor bastard loves her, and there it is. When my nephew was three, she was worrying about getting him into the right preschool. Kid's fifteen now. He's under pressure to make sure he gets good grades so he can get into a good school. He needs to show good extracurricular activities to get into a good school. He needs to be popular with his classmates. Which means be just like them. Dress right, use the proper slang, listen to the proper music, go away on the proper vacations. Live in the right neighborhood, be sure his parents drive the right car, hang with the right group, have the right interests. He has homework. He has soccer practice and guitar lessons. The school decides what he has to learn, and when, and from whom. The school tells him which stairwell he can go up. It tells him how fast to move through the corridors, when he can talk, when he can't, when he can chew gum, when he can have lunch, what he is allowed to wear. . ."

Rita paused and took a drink.

"Boy," I said. "Ready for corporate life."

She nodded.

"And the rest of the world is telling him he's carefree," she said. "And all the time he's worried that the boys will think he's a sissy, and the school bully will beat him up, and the girls will think he's a geek."

"Hard times," I said.

"The hardest," she said. "And while he's going through puberty and struggling like hell to come to terms with the new person he's becoming, running through it all, like salt in a wound, is the self-satisfied adult smirk that keeps trivializing his angst."

"They do learn to read and write and do numbers," I said.

"They do. And they do that early. And after that, it's mostly bullshit. And nobody ever consults the kid about it."

"You spend time with this kid," I said.

"I do my Auntie Mame thing every few weeks. He takes the train in from his hideous suburb. We go to a museum, or shop, or walk around and look at the city. We have dinner. We talk. He spends the night, and I usually drive him back in the morning."

"What do you tell him?" I said.

"I tell him to hang on," Rita said.

She was leaning a little forward now, each hand resting palm-down on the table, her drink growing warm with neglect.

"I tell him that life in the hideous suburb is not all the life there is. I tell him it will get better in a few years. I tell him that he'll get out of that stultifying little claustrophobic coffin of a life, and the walls will fall away and he'll have room to move and choose, and if he's tough enough, to have a life of his own making."

As she spoke, she was slapping the tabletop softly with her right hand.

"If he doesn't explode first," she said.

"Your jury summations must be riveting," I said.

She laughed and sat back.

"I love that kid," she said. "I think about it a lot."

"He's lucky to have you. Lot of them have no one."

Rita nodded.

"Sometimes I want to take him and run," she said.

The wind shifted outside, and the rain began to rattle against the big picture window next to us. It collected and ran down, distorting reality and blurring the headlights and taillights and traffic lights and colorful umbrellas and bright raincoats into a kind of Parisian shimmer.

"I know," I said.

Chapter 23

SINCE WE WERE WALKING through a park arid down by the lake, away from any roads, I took Pearl off the leash and let her bound about like a rhebok. The rocks were an outcropping of basalt left by some vast meltdown some eons back. Scattered in the area were some boulders, probably deposited by a glacier some other eons back. The basalt sloped over the lip of a hill and down