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- CHAPTER 1
-
Ryan Cooperman was fifteen going
on thirty to life, and he was mine for the next couple of hours.
I was just waiting for his mother to come out of my husband's
office. He was trying to stare the skin off my nose.
- Had he been a less formidable
opponent, Muhammed Ali perhaps, I'd have told him "Stop
it" forcefully enough to return the favor, but since this
was the infamous Terror of Bryn Derwyn Academy, I chose to assert
my authority in a more mature manner. I struck up a conversation
about upholstery.
- "Kind
of worn," I remarked, rubbing my finger along a thinning
edge of cording. We were seated on two blue sofas separated by
a coffee table strewn with recent yearbooks. I
had selected the furniture myself only two years ago, but
the reception area of even a fledgling private school like Bryn
Derwyn gets plenty of use.
- "Maybe burgundy and light
blue would look nice next time." A committee would probably
redecorate now that the school had a larger community body, but
that wasn't the point. The point was to show this surly mutt
that he couldn't get to me.
- Of course, it was possible
that I simply knew too much about him; for example, why he had
been expelled from his previous school.
- Ryan Cooperman had stolen a
pair of hundred-dollar running shoes from a kid who had saved
months to buy them. The proud owner, a track star who made the
mistake of boasting about his purchase, had initialed the heels
with big block letters; but that didn't deter Ryan, who simply
unloaded his booty (for $20) on a runner from another school.
Subsequently, the two track teams had a joint meet, the victim
recognized his stolen property, and the new owner fingered our
boy as the thief.
- Ryan's only remark at his expulsion
hearing: "The kid shouldn't have bragged."
- I also knew that his Bryn Derwyn
Academy application had been accompanied by three testimonials
stressing his intelligence, young age, and willingness to learn
from his mistake.
- Unfortunately, the letters
were true. Getting caught had taught Ryan to hurt others without
incurring such a high price. Teachers were now insulted via double
entendres, female classmates teased to tears. Plus in and of
themselves none of his many physical pranks merited expulsion;
they simply earned him the title of Least Loved Student.
- "What do you think?"
I inquired mildly, referring to the upholstery.
- The homely teenager sneered
with exactly the deprecating superiority I had expected, so I
countered with my Cheshire smile. Men, especially young men,
hate that even more than they hate upholstery conversation, and
this afternoon I would need any advantage I could manufacture.
- For
as soon as my husband finished talking to the boy's mother, Ryan
and I would take a train into Philadelphia for a meeting with
Federal Judge Gerald Rolfe. Rip regularly
tapped Bryn Derwyn board members for their professional expertise-that
was part of the deal--and when Ryan's latest questionable endeavor
came to light (call it the second-to-last straw) Rip immediately
thought of Gerry. A father of five boys as well as a hard-nosed
proponent of justice, he was the ideal person to scare the hell
out of an arrogant, self-involved erstwhile criminal.
- The chore of escorting the
teenaged miscreant to his downtown appointment had fallen into
my lap the usual way-I volunteered--but that didn't mean I was
happy about it. Married to the head of an understaffed, under-endowed
private school, I was dangerously susceptible to suggestion,
especially when Rip got that crooked little wrinkle between his
eyes, as he had last night at dinner.
- "Why tomorrow?" he
groused, giving his mashed potatoes a wicked poke, "when
everybody-and I mean everybody-is tied up with the mid-year faculty
meeting?"
"Any reason I can't take Ryan
to Gerry's office?" I foolishly wondered out loud.
- Rip's face had widened with
endearing astonishment, but he tried not to sound too eager.
"No reason at all. Can you spare the time?"
- Unfortunately, we both knew
I could.
- So now it was Tuesday afternoon,
the second day back to school after New Years. Ryan and I were
locked in a generational faceoff, while Rip was busy correcting
Mrs. Lawrence Cooperman's view of reality as it applied to her
son.
- Finally, the office door opened
and a woman emerged. A winter-pale champagne blonde with no defining
edges, Ryan's mother had chosen the stunned-speechless response
to Rip's ultimatums when tears might have demonstrated a better
grasp of the situation.
- I did my best, her expression
apologized to her son.
- Not good enough, Ryan's
tightly pressed lips complained. Glaring angrily, he deposited
his book bag at her feet.
- "We better get going,"
I remarked with a glance at my watch.
- "After you," Ryan
replied with a pseudo-charming sweep of his hand.
- I narrowed my eyes. Behind
me the nimble teenager could duck out of sight in a second. Searching
the school would cause us to miss our train and also Ryan's appointment
with Judge Rolfe. To prevent this I crooked my arm around his
bony elbow and aimed him toward the door.
- We were Felix and Oscar, the
oddest of couples, me a thirtysomething substitute authority
figure with an acorn cap of nutmeg hair. I was dressed in leather
boots, brown wool slacks, a fuzzy turtleneck, and an overcoat.
- Ryan, my virtual opposite,
wore an expensive, multicolored down jacket over the school-required
khakis, white collared shirt and emblemed green pullover. My
height, about five foot six, he would never be considered a handsome
boy-too much nose, too little chin, and a thick crop of wooly
brown hair chopped into a wedge below his ears and bleached unevenly
on the surface by both bottle and sun. He looked like an exotic,
ungainly baby bird until he fixed you with those laserlike black
eyes.
- As I was not about to taxi
him home after what was essentially a punishment, I told Mrs.
Cooperman I would let her know where and when to meet our return
train.
- Her flicker of hesitation reminded
me that she had a much younger daughter to care for, so I caved
in and mentioned the local train station I knew to be more convenient
for her than for me. At eleven and thirteen my own kids would
be okay without me for a couple hours. They were also quite used
to an erratic dinner schedule.
- I jostled Ryan to get him moving.
Left, right. Left, right. Joined as artificially as an usher
and a wedding guest, we marched forward like two thirds of a
Three Stooges routine.
- Loose on last-period errands,
half a dozen other students paused to watch. I couldn't guarantee
any were Ryan's friends, but they comprised an audience, so he
smirked and wiggled his fingers good-bye over his shoulder. Three
steps back mother dear tortured the strap of her Coach bag and
bit her lip.
- "Mrs. Barnes," she
called just as we reached the door. She had extracted a twenty-dollar
bill from the purse and now hurried to press it into my hand-for
trainfare.
- Ryan snatched at the money,
but I grabbed it back.
- "Thank you," I told
the boy's mother. The gesture had been an attempt to take some
responsibility for her child, and I felt a pang of pity for the
woman. No spine, this habitual screw-up for a son, and a husband
too infatuated with his corporate success to care a fig about
either of them. It was all in Ryan's file, not that the knowledge
suggested any easy solution. If this afternoon's outing worked,
anybody ever connected to Ryan would throw up his hat and cheer.
- "That's very thoughtful
of you," I added. "And please call me Ginger, or Gin."
Ryan snorted at this, but his mother's features softened.
- "Thanks," she said.
"I'm Krystal."
- I was mentally answering, "Of
course you are," when a sob and a ragged gasp of breath
drew everyone's attention to the inner edge of the lobby. One
of the teachers, Geraldine Trelawny, scurried by crying and biting
her fist. She disappeared into the women faculty's rest room
so swiftly we observers had to check each other for signs of
a group hallucination.
- Ryan Cooperman's eyes glinted
with amusement over everyone else's concern. He actually laughed
when I lifted his arm to hustle him along, and I began to gloat
over the pleasure it was going to be to dump this kid at Gerry
Rolfe's doorstep.
- Outside, an unkind breeze stung
my eyes and parted my hair with an icy comb. I dug gloves out
of my pockets and put them on. Overhead a depressing roof of
dirty dove-gray clouds promised an early twilight without the
reprieve of snow.
- My tan Subaru wagon waited
in the school's front circle, so our walk was mercifully brief
and silent.
- "Seat belt," I reminded
my charge before shutting him into the passenger seat. Even through
the window I heard Ryan's derisive grunt.
- His latest desperate bid for
attention had been a departure from the usual peeing in somebody
else's sneakers/tossing a cherry bomb onto the playground syndrome.
It was a moneymaking scheme involving the Internet, not coincidentally
the medium in which Daddy had made his bundle. A concerned eleventh-grader
confided to Rip that Ryan had been buying A papers from his fellow
students for months. Five dollars cash. Any topic. The informant
claimed that our young entrepreneur intended to sell these highly
marketable documents via e-mail as soon as he owned a large enough
selection.
- Technically, Ryan would have
been within his rights to re-sell material he legally owned;
but since most of his customers would have tried to pass off
the papers as their own, the morality of the scheme was a murkier
matter--conspiracy to commit plagarism, perhaps. Ryan had learned
how to get his forbidden cookies second-hand.
- As I turned out of the school
driveway, he fixed me with another, more curious, stare. "You
have kids, don't you?" he inquired.
- "Yes," I answered.
"Two."
- "I bet they never get
into any trouble," he goaded.
- Not like you, I might
have replied. Or just plain no, which would have been untrue
but the safer answer. I suspected anything I said would be tailored
into juicy gossip for Bryn Derwyn student consumption. But a
couple years of sharing my husband's limelight had taught me
that Rip's reputation would be much better off without the smear
of Ryan Cooperman's fingerprints on it.
- "Some," I replied
ambiguously, accompanying the statement with an I'm-not-biting
smile.
- Ryan raised an eyebrow--and
the ante.
- "Boy? Girl?" he pressed,
hoping to expose any exploitable weakness.
- "Yes," I answered,
which garnered a laugh.
- "The girl as pretty as
you?"
- I ignored that trap.
- My passenger pretended to scan
the passing landscape, which consisted of large, elderly homes
on mature, wooded lots. The town where Bryn Derwyn Academy was
located offered a barren and boring facade in winter, but it
never looked especially frivolous. Philadelphians, even the suburban
ones, open their arms only to trusted friends. Individuality
is protected inside exteriors that scrupulously conform. Such
reserve preserves the luxury of choice, buys time to evaluate
people, fads, anything new. Philadelphians are not cold so much
as cautious, but if you stay long enough-you've arrived. I grew
up on the wrong side of the river in a less pretentious, much
more open environment, but even I have come to appreciate the
wait-and-see approach.
- The Radnor train station was
on SEPTA's R5 run, formerly the Pennsylvania Railroad's Main
Line. If you're not a regular commuter, you park on either side
of a long drive running out toward the turn off Matsonsford Road.
Instructions insist that you park nose in to leave your license
plate exposed. I briefly wondered why before I realized that
the rule probably saved the police time searching for stolen
vehicles or escapees of any sort.
- Amazing. Half an hour with
Ryan Cooperman and I was thinking like a cop.
- After depositing three quarters
in the parking meter, I hustled my charge through the chill down
to the station, which was closed to ticket sales this late in
the day.
- We proceeded through an arched
plaster and brick tunnel to the inbound track, crunching on rock
salt meant to nullify the perpetual underground dampness. Brightened
now by graffiti-style art, the tunnel remained a dungeon I'd
never wish on either male or female after dark. Even periods
of daylight felt uncomfortably isolated down there.
- Ryan perceived my unease and
grinned.
- "So, you going to find
out why Ms. Trelawny was crying, or what?" he inquired.
- We had reached the train platform,
and I turned and told him sharply, "That's none of our business."
- Ryan smirked. "Maybe not
mine. But you care about everybody, don't you? That's why you're
here."
- My blush was so sudden and
hot that the wind on my cheeks felt good. Ryan the Kid had nicked
me, and he knew it. I shut my mouth on what would have been too
telling a denial.
- Content with his victory, the
teenager sat patiently at my side until just before the train
was due.
- I was thinking about how well
metal benches conduct cold, musing on the rotten underside of
the roof covering the far platform; or perhaps I was zoning out
even more completely, because suddenly I became aware that Ryan
was no longer beside me. He was twenty yards down the platform
leaning over the track. Should the train have come through with
him in that position, his entire potential would have been in
his past.
- "Ryan!" I called
as I trotted toward him. "What are you doing?"
- "Penny," he said,
holding one up for my inspection. "If you put it on the
rail, sometimes the train will flatten it. Looks really cool."
- "Too bad," I said.
"I'm not bringing you back here to find out if it worked."
- "Oh, it works. Unless
the vibrations shake it off first or somebody sees the penny
and picks it up."
- "That's swell," I
said. "Forget it." I hooked his arm again and led him
to a safe location behind the yellow line.
- The train arrived, and we got
on. I chose a seat that rode facing forward, one at the back
edge of a wide oval window. When I had commuted to a downtown
office job before our children were born, I discovered that only
seats to the back of the oval offered you a view. Today I calculated
that daydreaming out the window might save me from some of Ryan's
boobytrapped conversation.
- I paid the conductor and pocketed
the receipts. Villanova station came and went, and the few college
students who boarded settled around the mostly empty car. Ryan
observed them with bemused interest, then returned to peering
at me.
- "So do you work, or what?"
he asked. The deep timbre of his voice was deceptively adult,
even if the question was not.
- "Certainly," I answered.
I worked day and night, just not in a defined job.
- "No," Ryan amended,
reading my response for what it was. "I mean like in a career."
- "I make hors d'oeuvres,"
I said instead, my favorite flip reply to what was essentially
a prejudiced and rude line of questioning, especially coming
from Ryan's orientation. He, and the others--mostly ignorant
males-often sought to quantify my life in monetary terms. Relegating
a non wage-earner to the bottom of their mental earnings graph
allowed them to dismiss me before I wasted any more of their
time.
- "No, seriously,"
Ryan tried again. "What do you do?"
- My mother's words came to mind.
"You solve problems," she once remarked. "All
day every day." She had done the same during my upbringing.
- If Rip had had a less impossible
job, I might have rejoined the commercial workforce, but running
a school has been described as dancing with a bear. "You
dance until the bear gets tired." Since Rip took on the
struggling Bryn Derwyn Academy, my overriding goal had been to
relieve my husband of anything I possibly could in order to allow
for some sort of family life. However, this was nothing I saw
myself sharing with a fifteen-year-old brat.
- "What does your mother
do?" I asked instead.
- The boy's eyes narrowed. He
was enjoying this. "Shops, I think. And whines."
- And enables you, your father
and your sister to do everything you do, I wanted to retort.
Even though Krystal Cooperman had struck me as a bit of a wimp,
she clearly had the basics of maternal nurturing more than covered.
If anything, her son seemed overindulged.
- "Humph," I said.
"Sounds like you ought to ask her that question sometime."
- Ryan grunted with finality,
and I finally got to daydream.
- The rest of the Main Line back
yards rumbled by, giving way to junk piled on scabby earth and
desolate-looking buildings trimmed with either frozen laundry
or industrial equipment. Welcome to Philadelphia's ugly edge.
- The train wisely burrowed under
it. Thirtieth Street Station led to Suburban Station and then
Market East, our stop.
- Most of the remaining passengers
jostled through the doorways and down onto the platform. There
they threaded through the waiting crowd and rejoined into two
lines at the base of the nearest escalator and stairs. Others
strode purposefully toward more distant stairs or even deeper
into the building for exits more to their convenience. When I
realized Ryan had left me again, my insides sickened, my mouth
soured, and my skin became slick with sweat. My initial He
wouldn't! response quickly became He didn't. Did he?
- "Ryan! Where are you?"
I shouted into the crowd, but this time the teenager wasn't just
twenty yards away. This time he was totally gone from sight.
- Missing the appointment was
no longer my primary worry. It was the city. Predators of all
sorts spent their day hoping to snare strays, misfits like Ryan
and me who didn't know what or who to avoid. Together we had
the protection of purpose--a deadline and a destination. Wandering
loose was another matter altogether.
- I went up on tiptoe to scan
faces. I scurried around clusters of moving people. I ran toward
the next bank of stairs and back again. My purse weighed fifty
pounds. My knees were made of pasta. My eyes burned and my head
pounded. Where the hell was this kid?
- "Ryan!" I called.
"This isn't funny. Ryan! Come on. Where are you?"
- In the space of two minutes
the crowds thinned to a very few. Ryan Cooperman was nowhere
among them.
- Last I saw he had been behind
me, but now I had to accept that he may have passed me without
my noticing and taken the stairs. It didn't feel right, but the
only place left to search was on the next level up. Yet my body
didn't want to go, in part because my instincts said he was still
on the platform.
- A glimpse of bright cloth drew
my attention to a wide post-Ryan's multicolored ski jacket. I
wanted to collapse with relief; but as he was hiding from me,
the battle was still on.
- Hammering my boots loudly toward
the bottom of the stairs I shouted into the cavity, "Ryan
Cooperman! Are you up there?" Ambient city noise deadened
my voice before it reached the middle steps, but for my purposes
that didn't matter.
- Pivoting on my toes, I silently
retraced my steps to the far side of the square, three-foot wide
post. Ryan was just turning to run when he smacked into me. His
gleeful expression switched to shock. When breath returned to
his lungs, he tried my name in a mollifying voice, but I reached
out and pinched his earlobe between my fingers.
- "Don't bother trying to
suck up, you little worm," I said. "You will never,
and I mean never, do that to me again. Do you understand?"
- "Oww," he complained.
"Let me go. That hurts."
- "Good," I said without
releasing him. "Now I'm going to tell you what I think of
you, Ryan Cooperman. You are a spoiled, very intelligent kid
and you have no idea how lucky you are. Whole armies of adults
are trying to stop you from destroying your life, but for some
unfathomable reason you refuse to cooperate.
- "Look at yourself. Listen
to yourself. You're so angry at who knows what that you can't
see what's really going on. You're in a nosedive here, and you're
the only one who can pull you out of it.
- "It won't be easy, but
your mom, your dad, they'll get over whatever you do to yourself
now. They'll move on because they'll have no choice, but at the
rate you're going--you won't."
- He had squirmed his shoulder
around so he could stand more upright. As a result, he was probably
even more uncomfortable, but I had his attention, and I had more
to say.
- "So, you will accompany
me to the federal courthouse. You will keep your appointment,
and you will not step one inch out of my sight until I turn you
over to your mother back at Radnor station, because if you do,
I swear I will instruct my husband to find a way to make your
school year-wherever you are-pure hell. If it means telling your
father just how big a jerk you are, if it means getting a court
order grounding you until the beginning of the next decade, I
will see that it happens. Do you understand me?
- "Do you?"
- Ryan tried to nod without shifting
his eyes from mine.
- "Say it," I ordered.
- "Say what?"
- "Say that you won't leave
my sight again."
- "I won't leave your sight
again." He said it sing-song and whiny, but that was as
much reassurance as I was going to get, so I let go of his ear.
- "Jeez," he said.
"I probably have a lawsuit."
- "You would lose,"
I declared, not at all sure it was true. Still I felt much better.
I clapped the kid jovially on the shoulder.
- "Let's go," I said.
"We gotta hustle."
- I steered him toward the exit
up to the Galleries I and II, two attached urban malls stretching
between eighth and eleventh on Market.
- Eschewing the warmth of the
indoor route for the speedier sidewalk, I guided Ryan up and
out and away from City Hall. As we passed the Hard Rock Cafe,
he pretended to try to go in; but I shot him a look so nasty
he started to whistle and stroll in a silly circle around me.
- For the rest of the way he
entertained himself by gawping at the odd mixture of pedestrians,
who ranged from your typical professionals to the quintessentailly
atypical professional bums.
- When we reached the block of
Market Street commanded by the Federal Courthouse, I automatically
checked myself the way a driver who just spotted a police car
glances at his speedometer. It seemed to me even the buildings
stood up straighter, their windows scanning the wide brick sidewalk
for strewn gum wrappers or passersby wearing furtive expressions.
A row of trees growing out of tight squares of earth displayed
NO STOPPING signs, "Temporary Police Regulation, City of
Philadelphia." And yet two white squared-off police vehicles
with light bars, blue trim, and door shields reading, "Police/Federal
Protective Service" waited at the curb.
- Across the street a medium
blue banner pointed tourists toward Betsy Ross's house, Independence
Hall, and Visitor Center Parking. Other "Historic Philadelphia"
banners in red, white, and blue trimmed with four stars decorated
the light poles. The United States Constitution, which guaranteed
the right to a trial by jury, was written a mere block away;
and of the ninety-four federal courts currently in existence
I knew Philadelphia's to be one of the oldest, dating from 1789.
Yet its housing was solidly modern-brick for the first floor,
something darker and more austere for the second story and above.
- Ryan apparently absorbed none
of this, since he nearly walked right past.
- "Hey," I alerted
him. "We're here." And, thanks to all our rushing,
we were early.
- Entrance to the vast black
marble lobby involved an airport-style metal-detecting arch and
x-ray conveyor. Serious guards in serious clothing performed
the expected duties. Ryan holstered a make-believe gun, and the
black woman who had just cleared my purse rolled her eyes at
me with what I determined to be sympathy.
- "We have half an hour
before his meeting with Judge Rolfe," I confided. "Is
there an interesting trial we could sit in on until then?"
- The woman re-examined Ryan
with the detachment of a skilled professional. "We got a
fraud just starting in 6-A," she decided.
- "Perfect." I thanked
her with a smile, but it wasn't returned.
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