All in Good Fun
Report from the Daily Tribune, 12 March 1905:
– DOZENS DIE IN WATERFRONT CANNERY EXPLOSION
The Alton Brothers Fish Cannery was destroyed by fire yesterday evening during a night-shift of over 200 employees. It was determined that a faulty pressure-relief valve, deemed safe by the deputy engineer, caused the cannery's coal-fired boiler to explode. The force of the blast set off a chain of secondary explosions and fires that ran through the building, causing the entire structure, along with one hundred and forty-seven trapped workers, to collapse and burn to the ground. The deputy engineer was later found dead in his home after an apparent suicide.
– "Ahem!" she bellowed, using as much authority in her voice as she could muster.
Aaron Quinn's head jerked up from the table, and for a moment he thought the knives behind his eyes had severed his optic nerves. Instinctively he reached out a hand then recoiled in disgust as his fingers squished into something like warm cheese in a knit sack.
He blinked, grossed out. There in front of him, so close she blocked his view of the middle-school library like the side of a bus, stood the evening's billowy on-duty teacher.
She looked down aghast at the fold in her stomach where Aaron's fingers had blundered, then gave him a look that curled his toes and trundled back to her office, longing for the good-old-days when she would have taught the audacious punk a quick lesson in the use of hardwood.
Aaron wiped his hand on his jeans then checked the large clock on the wall across the room. 7:29 p.m. He had managed to sleep through nearly all three hours of detention.
He unzipped his sweatshirt. The air-circulator had shut down at the end of the normal school day and the library was hot and airless, as if the countless thousands of books and magazines surrounding him lived on oxygen. He did a few neck rolls to ease the tension in his shoulders, then drained his water bottle and squashed it flat.
Laid open on the table in front of him was a large, leather-bound book: Strange Disasters of the 20th Century — a collection of bizarre newspaper articles from the 1900s.
A small puddle of drool was soaking into a photograph from the article he'd been reading before he fell asleep. A gruesome image, the old photo showed the many dozens of contorted bodies that had yet to be extricated from the ashes of the 1905 cannery fire.
Aaron pulled the sleeve of his sweat-shirt down over the heel of his hand and wiped the offending spot dry, taking a moment to reread the last sentence of the article. He paused over the word suicide before closing the heavy book and returning it to its home on the shelf behind him.
He looked across to the far side of the library at his co-conspirator (seated as far from him as the proportions of the space would allow), Wilson "Willy" Abbott, a short (shorter than Aaron, at least, who was considered short for his age), round, black kid with big hands, a blinding smile, and stout glasses. Willy would have exchanged Aaron's glance if he could see that far.
Willy lived near Aaron — one minute by bicycle — in the same crumbling neighborhood in downtown's west-side. They had met the first day of first-grade when poor little Willy couldn't find his classroom. Aaron had seen the boy wandering the halls like a duckling separated from its mother and had offered to help him out, comparing his and Willy's schedules. "Room 5 — Mrs. White," he had read. "What do you know? We're in the same class." Aaron liked the kid with the big teeth and the British accent, and the two started to hang out. They'd been best friends ever since.
Brrrinnnggg! The late-bell signaled the end of detention and the release of the two detainees. Aaron and Willy grabbed their packs and fled the library through a side door.
– It was a cold, blustery evening outside, and to Aaron, after a long afternoon in the stuffy library, the air felt fresh and wonderful. The boys crossed the lawn by the gym in near darkness and headed for the front of the school — Aaron taking the straighter path, while Willy dodged around trees and hurdled bushes like one of Robin Hood's men eluding pursuit in Sherwood Forest.
"Detention sucks," Willy said, jumping down from the top of a high stone wall. "One lousy prank and you'd think we were a couple of blaggers whipping out Uzis in a bank lobby."
Aaron laughed, picturing the two of them, with masks and machine guns, robbing a bank like a couple of eighth-grade hooligans.
"It wasn't just a prank, you know," he said. "We ditched the whole first day of school!" He felt guilty about ditching (this being his first time), but only slightly. Each year his teachers seemed less and less interested in him, and the further he and the educational system drifted apart, the more difficult it became for him to return. So this year when Willy ditched the first day (as he did every year), Aaron ditched, too.
"And don't forget the forged permission slips," Willy added proudly, clearing a long concrete bench from end to end, a surprisingly agile move, considering the extra inches he carried around his middle.
"Oh, yeah," Aaron agreed. "Those, too." Willy's fake documents hadn't worked, but it was a commendable effort.
"All in good fun," Willy said cheerfully.
They crossed the middle-school's broad central plaza under a golden canopy of autumn leaves, and exited through the main gate, their sneakers tapping out a random rhythm on the polished granite as they descended the wide front steps.
– Across the boulevard from the middle-school stood Community Plaza Bank, a stately structure with a marble colonnade echoing a classic Greek temple, and a pair of grand, plate-glass front doors. Community Plaza was the largest and busiest bank in the city, but neither Aaron nor Willy had ever been inside.
Aaron checked the huge clock mounted on its towering facade and the stabbing pain behind his eyes returned with a vengeance.
"I am so dead," he said gloomily, his throat tightening at the thought of going home and facing Tom.
Willy knew that Aaron's stepdad did not tolerate rebellious behavior, and that the man wasn't the least bit squeamish when it came to tough discipline.
"I'm starving," he said. "You want to get a burger?"
"Tom would love that," Aaron said bitterly. "Unlike you, I can't come and go as I please."
To Willy that comment felt cold, considering he had no parents at all. His mother, born and raised in England, had given birth to him at the age of fifteen while living in south London, and had never told the father. At the age of twenty, she died of alcohol poisoning, leaving Willy an orphan. His grieving grandparents took him in, and together they immigrated to the United States. Willy's father would later be awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery while serving in Iraq as a commando in the British Royal Marines, but unfortunately Willy never heard about this, because he and his father never met.
"Maybe tomorrow then, mate?" he said, but Aaron was lost in thought and didn't answer.
The tubular-steel bike rack was bolted to the sidewalk next to the street, its undulating pipes shaped to spell the word SCHOOL. Aaron had parked his old BMX bike in the letter H, next to the O that held Willy's rusty beach cruiser.
Aaron knelt and tried his lock, but it was stuck. Willy removed his own lock with ease, then stuffed it in his pack and pulled his bike out of the O.
Aaron gave his lock a swift kick. The lock banged hard against the bike frame, but didn't open.
"Stupid piece-of-crap!" he yelled, giving the lock another hard kick. This time the lock opened, and he nearly broke the rack yanking his bike out of the H.
To Willy's surprise, Aaron looped his pack over his shoulder, swung a leg over his bike, and rudely pedaled off down the street without him.
Willy watched him for a moment, uncertain whether or not to follow, then set off to eat his dinner alone.