Summer of Night Read Free

Christmas.
    Dale sighed and shifted in his seat. 2:52 p.m.
    There was the slightest movement in the dark hall, a furtive shifting and pale glow there, and Dale recognized Tubby Cooke, Cordie's fat and idiot brother, moving across the landing. Tubby was staring in, trying to catch his sister's attention without being noticed by Old Double-Butt. It was no use. Cordie was hypnotized by the sky outside the window and wouldn't have noticed her brother if he had thrown a brick at her.
    Dale nodded slightly at Tubby. The big fourth grader in bib overalls flipped him the bird, held up something that might have been a bathroom pass, and disappeared in the shadows.
    Dale shifted. Tubby occasionally played with him and his friends despite the fact that the Cookes lived in one of the tarpaper shacks up on cinderblocks out along the railroad tracks near the grain elevator. Tubby was fat and ugly and stupid and dirty and used more profanity than any fourth grader Dale had ever known, but that didn't necessarily disqualify him from being part of the group of city kids who called themselves the Bike Patrol. But usually Tubby didn't want any part of Dale or his friends.
    Dale wondered fleetingly what the dope was up to and then looked back at the clock. It was still 2:52.
    Bugs in amber.
    Tubby Cooke gave up trying to wave at his sister and headed for the stairway before Old Double-Butt or one of the other teachers noticed him out on the landing. Tubby had a bathroom pass from Mrs. Grossaint, but that didn't mean that one of the old bags wouldn't order him back to his classroom if they caught him loitering in the halls.
    Tubby shuffled down the wide stairs, noticing where the wood was actually worn into ruts where generations of kids' feet had passed, and hurried down to the landing beneath the circular window. The light coming through was red and sickly from the storm building up outside. Tubby moved under rows of empty shelves where the city library used to be on the landing and the narrow mezzanine surrounding this in-between floor, but he did not really see them. The shelves had been empty for as long as Tubby had gone to school there. He was in a hurry. There was less than a half hour of school remaining and he wanted to get downstairs to the boys' bathroom before the day ended and they shut up this damn old place forever.
    There was more light on the first floor and the hum of activity from the primary grades, one through three, made the space here seem more human, even with the dark stairwell opening overhead into the darkness of the upper floors. Tubby hurried across the center of the open space before a teacher saw him, passed through a door, and hurried down the stairs into the basement.
    It was weird that the stupid school had no restrooms on the first or second floor. Only the basement had Johns and there were too many down there… the primary and intermediate restrooms, the locked John off the hole-in-the-wall room labeled teachers' lounge, the little toilet off the boiler room where Van Syke took a leak when he had to, even rooms that may have been other bathrooms down the unused corridors that led away into darkness.
    Tubby knew what other kids knew-that there were steps leading down from the basement-but, like the other kids, Tubby had never gone down there and had no plans to. There weren't even lights, for Godssake! No one but Van Syke and maybe Principal Roon knew what was down there.
    Probably more bathrooms, thought Tubby.
    He went to the intermediate boys' restroom, the one marked boy's. That sign had been like that for as long as anyone could remember-Tubby's old man told him it was that way when he went to school in Old Central-and the only reason either Tubby or his old man knew that the whatchamacallit, the apostrophe, was in the wrong place was that Old Lady Duggan in sixth grade bitched and moaned about the stupidity of it. She'd whined about it when Tubby's Old Man was a kid. Well, Old Lady Duggan was dead