The Bluestone Review 2025

Prose

Segment from Forthcoming Novel: The Secret of Hill Grove

Larry Ellis

MY LIFE has never again been as privileged as it was in my senior year in high school. I was an honor student, at the very top pf my class, and I admit now only for the purpose of telling this story, one of the prettiest girls in the school. One of the many benefits of my status was that of being an aide to Miss Delaney, the school librarian. At the end of many of those school days, when the afternoon had been long and the last classroom seemed like a prison cell, some office aide would carry a note to my teacher, asking her to release me to report to the library upstairs. Since I had the highest grade in Spanish III, my teacher never objected to my absence. That may not sound like much now, but then and there it was a ticket to freedom. In the library I could come and go as I pleased. The “work” was next to nothing and on most days, I’d be finished in twenty minutes and receive the praise of an overworked and lonely Miss Delaney and then be free to relax. It was my habit then to walk down to the end of the hallway and stand in front of the tall window and look out across the back campus. My window was directly above one of the rear exits. Beside the walkway that led from that double-doorway a bald circle had been worn in the lawn where boys regularly congregated to smoke. That place was most crowded between classes and during lunch break, but it seemed that there was almost always a little knot of boys there, every minute of the day. This day was no exception. There was a gang of guys there and the meeting was being orchestrated, as usual, by Benny Kinder. He was a super-senior, having been held back a year as a sophomore, and he was bigger and heavier than anyone else in the group and had a reputation for being a mean fighter. He held court at that spot on a regular basis. The others in the little klatch knew to laugh at his jokes and to go along with his proposals. This afternoon I was going to be shown a bit of drama that was far outside of my normal ambit. It was such a revelation that now as I think of it, I wonder if I had a premonition and knew in some wordless way that something new was coming.

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