Blank Confession Read Free Page A

laugh—I was one of the students who took the pledge.
    The rest of the day—the day Jon gave me the mysterious paper bag—as I
escabullirse
d from one class to the next, I didn’t think much about Shayne. My mind was more occupied with the bag in my backpack. I had this creepy feeling that something bad was going to happen, and Iwas right: Five minutes into the last period of the day, the principal’s voice came booming over the PA system telling everybody to report to the gymnasium.
    We all filed out of our classrooms like good little drones. I overheard a couple of guys saying something about a locker search. Like everybody else, I did an instant mental inventory of my locker. Nothing to worry about, except—uh-oh—was it against the rules to have Advil? Because I did have a bottle of headache pills in my locker.
    We were almost to the gym when I heard a dog bark. At first I thought,
That’s weird, a dog in the school
…then I realized what it was. Not just a dog, but a
drug sniffing
dog! And there I was with a paper bag containing who-knows-what stuffed in my backpack.
    I quick ducked into a lavatory, dug the bag out of my backpack, stuffed it deep into the trash can, then rejoined the march of the drones. The dogs never came into the gym—they were strictly on locker duty. For the next hour, we listened to a very bored cop deliver a very boring lecture on the dangers of using illicit drugs, while four other cops checked every one of the 1,300 lockers lining the halls.
    The official tally? They found a one-hit pipe in Gregg Houghton’s locker, a minibottle of Jägermeister in Brandon Sayle’s, some herbal diet pills in Yasmine Leach’s, and my bottle of Advil. I think the cops were a little disappointed.
    â€œMaybe if you tear through the back of my locker you’ll find an opium den,” I said.
    I thought that was pretty funny, but the cop I was talking to was not amused. All four of us all got hauled to the office and searched. Gregg had a little bit of something in a twistof foil in the back pocket of his jeans. The cops arrested him on the spot. The rest of us, they just called our parents. I was hugely relieved, congratulating myself on my quick thinking getting rid of Jon Brande’s paper bag, and not too worried about the Advil thing. My parents would think it was ridiculous, even though it was technically against the rules.
    I didn’t see Jon that day—my parents took me straight home. Fortunately, they were more pissed at the school than at me.
    â€œImagine that. Advil against the rules!” my mom said, shaking her head.
    â€œThey don’t make rules so you can break them,” my dad said, which made no sense whatsoever.
    I went out to the backyard to sit in the gazebo and watch the tree service guys cut up and remove our fallen tree. Yesterday it had been a beautiful towering elm, but the storm had snapped it off about six feet above the ground, revealing the inside to be hollow and rotten.
    My dad came out several times to offer suggestions to the tree guys. Dad was an engineer. He believed there was a right and a wrong way to do everything. I could tell he was kind of driving them crazy.
    After another hour or so the tree was gone. They had cut the stump down to a foot above the ground. Dad stood out there staring at that stump for a long time. I supposed he was trying to figure out how to get rid of it.
    But that was his problem. My problem was Jon Brande.
    The next morning, first thing, I went to the lavatory where I’d dumped Jon’s bag, but the janitor had taken care of that. The trash can was empty.

5. THE INTERVIEW ROOM
    â€œI started school the day after I moved here,” said Shayne. “I’d switched schools before so it was no big deal. The idea was I’d stay here with my aunt and finish up the year here, then move back with my mom in the summer, and then maybe come back in the fall for my senior