Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [68]
‘I wouldn’t report you,’ said Ricky. He felt somewhat off-balance and dizzy and it wasn’t just the nicotine in the air.
He’d just come out of his last morning class, double-maths, when a trainee teacher stopped him in the hallway and handed him a slip of paper. Printed on the slip was a formal request for him to go and see the principal. The slip was initialled by Miss Marcroft, Pangbourne’s fat secretary.
Luckily no one in the hallway noticed, otherwise Ricky might have begun to attract attention, something he tried to avoid at all cost. He’d hurried down the central stair-well, happily anonymous in the crowd of kids laughing and talking as they headed towards the lunchroom.
At least, most of them had been talking and laughing.
Sitting on one of the landings reading a tattered paperback, apparently oblivious of the crowd pouring past her, had been the kid he’d started to think of as Sad Girl.
Sad Girl was about the same age as his sister, but obviously not the member of any of the trendy cliques which seemed to so readily embrace Cynthia. Sad Girl looked like she didn’t have a friend in the world and she spent most of her time between classes sitting in the stair-well reading or staring into space. She seemed to be even more adept at avoiding eye contact than Ricky himself.
Ricky had gone to the principal’s office thinking he knew what was waiting for him. The rules and routines of such an encounter were fairly rigid and formalized, and Ricky had plenty of experience in being called to see the principal.
Basically you could expect three things: a lecture, a pep talk, or a warning. But his encounter with Mr Pangbourne had not yielded any of these three so far. Indeed, it hadn’t yielded anything recognizable from his extensive past experience.
He wasn’t accustomed to a school principal who smoked cigarettes, said ‘shit’, or called him a man.
All in all, it had been a pleasant surprise, and therefore it was a bit of a disappointment when Mr Pangbourne finally buckled down to business and began to behave in a more familiar fashion.
He stubbed out his cigarette in the big glass ash-tray on his desk and looked at Ricky. ‘Well, I guess I’d better tell you what this is all about. You’re new here in my school. I could give you some crap about how I like to talk to all my new students when they start, to get to know them a little better.
But you’d have to be pretty stupid to believe that — why?’
The question came out sharply and suddenly, taking Ricky by surprise. ‘Why?’ he repeated, playing for time.
‘Yes. Why would you have to be stupid to believe that?’
‘Because of the number of kids you have here,’ said Ricky, quickly doing some calculations in his head. ‘You must have hundreds of new kids every fall. Just talking to each one of them would take you a good part of the year. And that’s assuming you didn’t have anything else to do.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mr Pangbourne with satisfaction. ‘And we both know that I have much more pressing things to occupy my time. Like smoking.’ He pulled open his desk drawer and took out the packet of cigarettes again. ‘Don’t ask me why I insist on putting them back every time I light one up. Maybe this way I can fool myself into thinking I don’t smoke so many.’ He lit another cigarette, inhaled gratefully and stuffed the pack back in the drawer. ‘Or maybe it’s just a tidiness compulsion. Anyhow, I’d offer you one but if I did I’d really get into trouble with the school-board.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Ricky. ‘I don’t smoke.’
‘You know,’ said Pangboume, ‘it’s funny. I wasn’t even tempted to offer your mother one.’
‘She doesn’t smoke either.’
‘Please don’t interrupt when I’m making a clumsy attempt to get down to business. I mentioned your mother because we had a long talk about you the other day.’
Pangbourne watched Ricky tense up at the mention of his mother. For the first time since he’d come into the office he shot a direct glance at the principal.
Pangbourne was startled by the burning intensity of those adolescent eyes. Like a lot of shy kids, and