a day with you, and I don’t intend to waste it,” he’d explained on Monday, when Josh himself had been late because he hadn’t been able to find the room. “So if you’re not going to show up on time, don’t bother to come at all. Clear?”
Josh, his eyes wide at the rebuke, had nodded mutely and slid into his seat. Now he waited to see what would happen to Adam.
Steve Conners gazed steadily at Adam, who seemed totally unconcerned about his tardiness. “Didn’t you understand what I said Monday?” the teacher asked.
Adam shrugged. “I’ve got a note from Dr. Engersol,” he said.
He handed the note to the teacher, and Conners glanced at it briefly before nodding Adam into his chair, making a mental note to talk to the director that afternoon. “Okay, let’s pick it up where we left off. Adam, you take over the part of Polonius. We’re on page twenty-seven.”
The reading began again, but when Polonius’s next line came up, there was only silence from Adam Aldrich.
Conners frowned at the boy. “Adam?”
“I lost my place,” Adam replied. He read the line, but
with absolutely no expression to his voice, stumbling over the rhythm of the speech. When his next line came, he missed it again.
“What’s going on, Adam?” Conners asked. “Didn’t you read the play last night?”
Adam slouched low in his chair. “I didn’t have time,” he muttered, so softly that Conners could barely hear him.
Conners eyed the boy. Every day, it seemed, Adam was showing less and less interest in the class. Yesterday, in fact, he’d spent the entire hour staring out the window, taking no part at all in the discussion of Shakespeare and the theater of the Elizabethan era. Yet last year, he knew, Adam had been involved in both plays the Academy had staged, and even tried out for one of the productions the university drama department had put on.
“What were you doing that was more important than your homework?” Conners asked, keeping his voice mild.
“I was just doing something else, that’s all,” Adam replied, his normally placid expression turning sullen. “It’s none of your business.”
Conners frowned. “Come on, Adam. If it affects what’s happening to you in my class, I think it is my business.”
“Then maybe I won’t be in your class anymore,” Adam said. As the rest of the students watched in astonished silence, Adam Aldrich picked up his book bag, pulled his English text out of it, and stood up. “I hate this class,” he announced. “It can get stuffed, for all I care.”
He walked out.
As a tense silence hung over the class, Josh gazed at the door through which his friend had disappeared, wondering what was going to happen. Would Mr. Conners go after him and bring him back? And the way Adam had talked to the teacher …
“All right, gang,” he heard Mr. Conners saying. “Just go on with the reading. Brad, you pick up Polonius’s lines, okay?”
Brad nodded silently as Steve Conners hurried from the room. At the end of the hall he could see Adam Aldrich just starting out of the building. Breaking into a run, Conners caught up with the boy as he was reaching the last step down from the building’s porch and heading across the lawn toward the mansion.
“Adam?” Steve said as he came abreast of the boy. “Hey, come on, you can’t just walk out like that.”
Adam kept going, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his book bag hanging from his right wrist, barely clearing the ground. Conners put his right hand on the boy’s shoulder, stopping him and turning him around so they faced each other. “You want to tell me what’s going on, Adam? I’m on your side, you know.”
Adam’s eyes shifted away from the teacher’s. “Nothin’s going on. I just don’t like your class, and I’m not going to it anymore.”
“Oh, you’re not, huh?” Steve said, trying to keep his voice light, though the fleeting worries he’d felt about Adam all week were suddenly coalescing. “How do you figure you’re going to get out of it? English isn’t an elective, you know.”
“I’ll get out,” Adam announced, his eyes shifting away from Steve Conners and fixing on the large cupola that formed the fourth floor of the mansion. “Dr. Engersol will get me out.”
Conners frowned, his own gaze following Adam’s. Was that where Adam had been that morning? Up in Engersol’s private aerie atop the mansion? “What’s going on, Adam? How did you get that note from Dr. Engersol? He knows