LA MORENITA, Chapter 16

When Chad was in the seventh grade, Mr. Hickey, the Mathematics teacher, told him to stay after school. Chad couldn’t think of a way to get out of it without Mr. Hickey notifying his parents, so he waited for the last bell to ring. Then he walked into Mr. Hickey’s classroom.
Hickey looked up and smiled. “What am I going to do with you, Chad?”
Chad shrugged.
“Why is it that you’re my best basketball player and my worst student in Math? How canI get you to concentrate on Math the way you concentrate on basketball?”
Chad shrugged again.
“If I could just get you to understand how important Mathematics will be for the rest of your life.”
“Is that why you wanted to see me?” Chad asked.
“No,” Hickey said. “I wanted you to explain to me what was going on with you and Butch Barber at lunch.”
Chad bristled and turned away.
“Well?” Hickey said.
Chad looked up. “Butch Barber’s a fat-ass bully,” Chad said. “He thinks he can pusheverybody around because he’s bigger. I ain’t afraid of him.”
“I didn’t say you were,” Hickey said. “But I don’t want you to get in trouble. We’ve got a big game coming up next Tuesday against Lee Junior High, and I don’t need you to get thrown out of school.”
“Tell that to Butch Barber,” Chad said.
“I did,” Hickey said. “I told him that, if he couldn’t get along with you, he should just stay away from you. Now I’m telling you to stay away from him. Do you hear me?” Chad folded his arms across his chest and stared at the green chalkboard in front of him. Hickey grabbed his wrists. “Did you hear me, Chad?”
Chad dropped his eyes to the floor and nodded.
The next day, Chad went through the morning like a dazed robot. He ignored the teachers, and the teachers didn’t waste valuable class time calling on him.
In two of the three classes he and Barber had together, he watched Barber pummel the smaller kids and force them to give up their quarters and dimes in exchange for him leaving them alone. If Chad hadn’t made a promise to Mr. Hickey, he would have done something right then. But he stayed away from Barber until just before lunch, when Barber charged into Jimmy Casey
from behind, slamming him up against a locker door. “See?” Barber yelled. “See what happens when you don’t pay me my protection money?” As Casey crashed against his locker, he turned his face away, but not before the metal handle cut a gash in his temple.
Chad reached into his lunch bag and grabbed a hard green apple. Taking careful aim, he flung it as hard as he could. It bounced off Barber’s right eye and shot down the hallway. One of the students in the onrushing mass stepped on it and fell on her backside.
“What the fuck!” Barber shouted. He charged blindly at Chad, who landed a punch in the same eye that he had just reddened with the hard Granny Smith. Both of Barber’s hands went to his injured eye as he kept charging. Chad didn’t back up. Instead, he stepped forward and
launched a hard kick into Butch Barber’s groin. Barber grabbed himself, groaned, and toppled over like a felled tree.
That night, Norm didn’t have to work overtime. This put everyone at the dinner table together for a change. The others sat quietly, waiting for Norm’s reaction after he read the suspension notice.
Norm set the note down and smiled. “You’ve got the family temper, son. I had to go to school for your sister once when she bloodied some other girl’s nose. And that’s all I ever had to go. Once.”
Chad folded his arms, nodded, and stared at the tablecloth in front of him.
“I want you to realize,” Norm continued, “I can’t be called off my job every time you get into a little bit of trouble. So both of us will go over there tomorrow, and we’ll listen to your teacher. I’ll nod a lot, and then I’ll tell her I’ll see that you never do it again. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Chad said quietly.
“Good,” Norm said. “Then it’s settled.”
But it wasn’t settled. Norm had to go to school several times after that, not just to help settle disputes between Chad and Butch Barber, but to discuss Chad’s lousy grades with his teachers.
At the end of the school year, Mr. Hickey mailed a detailed letter to Mr. And Mrs. Norman Schmidt at their home. In part, it said, “Your son is the most frustrating student I’ve ever taught. I’m sure you know how bright he is, but he refuses to do his daily assignments. I think that if he didn’t have sports, he’d be perfectly content to flunk out of school. I hope the two of you can get him motivated somehow, because I’ve tried everything I can think of, and nothing I’ve done has made any difference.”
By the time Chad reached high school, even his interest in sports had waned. He dropped out of sports completely during his sophomore year. Then, two months into his junior year, he dropped out of school. After that, he spent most of his time roaming the streets and hanging out in Howard Amon Park with the white gangster wannabees.