Branded - Eric Walters [18]
“Neither did I, but really, what did you think he’d do?” Oswald asked.
“I thought he’d cancel the uniforms.”
The PA crackled to life. There was going to be an announcement.
“Could I have your attention, please! ” Mr. Roberts said.
We stopped moving. Everybody in the hall stood still.
“I have an announcement to make about the school uniforms. Due to some supply issues,” Mr. Roberts continued, “it may be that not every student will have a complete school uniform by Monday. Every student and staff member will have received a jacket and tie. It is expected that everyone will wear those items. Any student or staff member not in a uniform on Monday morning will not be admitted to the building and will be subject to a one-day suspension. No exceptions. Thank you and have a good afternoon. ”
Oswald and I looked at each other. There was no doubt. He knew, he understood, and he’d decided to ignore the whole thing.
But could I ignore it?
Julia always gave me a hard time that Mr. Roberts was my hero. Maybe in some ways he had been. Things change.
chapter twelve
I slipped outside, quietly closing the door behind me. My parents had gone to bed, and I didn’t want to wake them. They would want to know where I was going at eleven thirty at night, and I didn’t have an answer.
I didn’t know where I was going, but I needed to walk to try to clear my head. If I told them that, they would have wanted to know what was cluttering it, and I didn’t want to tell them. I hadn’t told anybody. Not Julia, not my parents, nobody. Oswald had sworn to do the same. Oswald and I had talked about it a lot, but that hadn’t lead to answers, just more confusion.
I walked along trying to make sense of what had happened. Or, I guess, what hadn’t happened. Oswald had told me that I’d expected too much from Mr. Roberts. He was right. I had expected something. He was the principal. He had taught us so much about social justice and becoming global citizens, about thinking globally and acting locally. Now it was more like think globally, do nothing locally.
I felt so disappointed—in him for doing nothing and in me for not coming up with a plan. I guess it wasn’t realistic to think Mr. Roberts would cancel the uniforms— that he could cancel the uniforms.
It was cool, and I started to feel sprinkles coming from the sky. Great, it was going to start raining. If I started home right now, I could avoid getting completely soaked. I didn’t need to feel as miserable on the outside as I did on the inside. When I got home maybe I could talk to my parents about the whole thing…no, not tonight… They were asleep, and I wasn’t going to wake them. Calling Oswald would mean just rehashing the same things again.
That left Julia. Should I call her? Once I told her, there was no way of getting the genie back into the bottle. She was like an avalanche, and once it started downhill nothing could stop it…stop it from doing what though? I didn’t have any better answer now than I did three hours or three days or three weeks ago. The uniforms were going to happen, and it didn’t matter where or how they were made.
I was almost directly in front of our school. It was completely dark except for one window at the front of the building… was that Mr. Roberts’s office? He couldn’t be in there working, could he? He did say he had a lot to do.
I cut across the grass, and at that same instant the rain started to come down more heavily. The storm made the dark seem darker and the light coming from the window brighter.
It was definitely his office. I could tell by the big Dr. Martin Luther King quote on the wall—Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. It was Mr. Roberts’s office, but was he there? He may have left the lights on, or the caretaker was cleaning his office.
I crept through the bushes outside the window. I peeked in and—Mr. Roberts was sitting at his desk, working. He looked up, saw me and startled!
His expression changed from shocked to familiar as he recognized me. He motioned toward the front door. “Go around,” he