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thous and wherefores, that he wanted to climb up the trellis onto her balcony, shove her into the bedroom and jump on her. But Juliet wouldn’t shut up. She was yapping away so much that I knew Romeo would never get near her.
    “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” she complained. What the hell was he supposed to say? “I didn’t like the name Humphrey”?
    Just as old Romeo started into another long hearts-and-flowers speech, a tinny voice from the front of the room cut in.
    “Excuse me, is Steve Chandler present this morning?”
    Ms. Cake, our English teacher, stood and pushed the pause button on the VCR, freezing Romeo with his mouth open. “Yes, he is,” she said to the intercom speaker.
    “Would you send him to the office immediately, please?”
    Cake looked down the row of desks to me. “They’ve tracked you down, Steve. Away you go.”
    When I got to the main office the secretary told me to sit down and wait. It was at least twenty minutesbefore Mrs. Davis, the vice principal, came out of her office behind a scared-looking niner and, when the kid had left, she ushered me into her office like a stuffy head waiter in a snobby restaurant.
    She closed the door behind me and I sat in the chair opposite her desk. She sat down too and began to look through the file in front of her.
    Davis was one of those middle-aged women who thought they had to be tough or you wouldn’t take them seriously. She dressed very severely—a dark skirt and jacket, white blouse buttoned up to the neck, a short no-nonsense hair-do. There were granules of make-up in the crows-feet at the corners of her eyes.
    She closed the file and looked up. Her voice was flat and her look was firm. Boy, was I intimidated.
    “Where were you the last couple of days?”
    “I wasn’t here,” I said.
    She offered me a cold smile. “That is obvious, Steve. That’s why I asked where you were.”
    My mother had refused to give me a note to keep the school off my back. She said I had skipped school and would have to pay the price. I wasn’t going to lie about where I was. I wasn’t going to say anything. It was none of Davis’s business.
    She gave a hard stare to scare me to death and waited for me to speak. I looked out the window at the cars moving down Kipling Avenue.
    She gave in first. “Well?”
    “Well, what?”
    “Look, Steve. Let’s not fool around. You were truant for two days. You’re in deep trouble,” she said in a tone that suggested I had just murdered all the janitors inthe school with a chain saw. “Now, where were you?”
    Teachers are really funny sometimes. Just because they think something is a big issue they figure you feel that way too. If they think you’ve committed some major crime like skipping school for a few days, they think
you
should be sorry. You’re supposed to look contrite—we learned that word in vocab study before we started
Romeo and Juliet
—and you’re supposed to feel guilty. The thing was, I didn’t feel guilty at all. I was glad I’d gone to Quebec City, even though I went all that way for nothing, so why should I pretend otherwise?
    But let’s face it. I was an athlete and I knew a game when I saw one. I also knew how to play it. You didn’t have to be a genius.
    “I admit I skipped, and I’m ready to take the punishment,” I said. “I had to go somewhere important, but I’m not going to talk about it.” I gave her what I hoped was a hurt, I-need-understanding-not-discipline look. I had seen Hawk use that look a dozen times. He was a master at it. “It’s … it’s not something I can talk about.”
    Davis picked up a pencil and tapped the eraser end on her desk blotter. Her voice softened a little. “You’re not in any kind of trouble, are you? Drugs, maybe?”
    “Oh, no,” I said. “It’s something personal.” Then I tried a line that always seemed to work on TV. “Please try to understand.”
    She tapped her pencil some more. “Okay, Steve. I’ll go easy on you