of the storm put an edge on the usual morning excitement.
There was much giggling, name-calling, teasing, talk about television
shows and homework, joke-telling, riddle-making, exaggerations about
just how much snow they were supposed to be in for, and whispered
conspiracy, the rustle of coats being shed, the slap of books on
benches, the clank and rattle of metal lunchboxes.
Standing with her back to the whirl of activity, stripping off her
gloves and then pulling off her long woolen scarf, Penny noticed that
the door of her tall, narrow, metal locker was dented at the bottom and
bent out slightly along one edge, as if someone had been prying at it.
On closer inspection, she saw the combination lock was broken, too.
Frowning, she opened the door-and jumped back in surprise as an
avalanche of paper spilled out at her feet.
She had left the contents of her locker in a neat, orderly arrangement.
Now, everything was jumbled together in one big mess. Worse than that,
every one of her books had been torn apart, the pages ripped free of the
bindings; some pages were shredded, too, and some were crumpled. Her
yellow, lined tablet had been reduced to a pile of confetti. Her
pencils had been broken into small pieces.
Her pocket calculator was smashed.
Several other kids were near enough to see what had tumbled out of her
locker. The sight of all that destruction startled and silenced them.
Numb, Penny crouched, reached into the lower section of the locker,
pulled out some of the rubbage, until she uncovered her clarinet case.
She hadn’t taken the instrument home last night because she’d had a long
report to write and hadn’t had time to practice. The latches on the
black case were busted.
She was afraid to look inside.
Sally Wrather, Penny’s best friend, stooped beside her. “What
happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t do it?”
“Of course not. I . .
broken.”
“Who’d do something like that? That’s downright mean.”
Chris Howe, a sixth-grade boy who was always clowning around and who
could, at times, be childish and obnoxious and utterly impossible-but
who could
. I’m afraid my clarinet’s also broke. cute because he looked a little
like Scott Baio -crouched next to Penny. He didn’t seem to be aware
that something was wrong. He said, “Jeez, Dawson, I never knew you were
such a slob.”
Sally said, “She didn’t-”
But Chris said, “I’ll bet you got a family of big, grody cockroaches in
there, Dawson.”
And Sally said, “Oh, blow it out your ears, Chris.”
He gaped at her in surprise because Sally was a petite, almost
fragile-looking redhead who was usually very soft-spoken. When it came
to standing up for her friends, however, Sally could be a tiger. Chris
blinked at her and said, “Huh? What did you say?”
“Go stick your head in the toilet and flush twice,” Sally said. “We
don’t need your stupid jokes. Somebody trashed Penny’s locker. It
isn’t funny.”
Chris looked at the rubble more closely. “Oh. Hey, I didn’t realize.
Sorry, Penny.”
Reluctantly, Penny opened the damaged clarinet case.
The silver keys had been snapped off. The instrument had also been
broken in two.
Sally put a hand on Penny’s shoulder.
“Who did it?” Chris asked.
“We don’t know,” Sally said.
Penny stared at the clarinet, wanting to cry, not because it was broken
(although that was bad enough), but because she wondered if someone had
smashed it as a way of telling her she wasn’t wanted here.
At Wellton School, she and Davey were the only kids who could boast a
policeman for a father. The other children were the offspring of
attorneys, doctors, businessmen, dentists, stockbrokers, and advertising
executives. Having absorbed certain snobbish attitudes from their
parents, there were those in the student body who thought a cop’s kids
didn’t really belong at an expensive private school like Wellton.
Fortunately, there weren’t many of that kind. Most of the kids didn’t
care what Jack Dawson did for a living, and there were even a few who
thought it was special and exciting and better to be a cop’s kid than to
have a banker or an accountant for a father.