But I could see the fear growing in Knotcher’s eyes, subsuming his anger. Maybe he could tell from the look in my own eyes that I was on the verge of coming unhinged.
“Psycho,” he muttered under his breath. Then he turned and sat down, flipping me the bird over his shoulder.
I realized my right fist was still raised. When I finally lowered it, the entire class seemed to exhale in unison. I glanced at Casey, expecting him to offer me a nod of thanks. But he was still cowering at his desk like a whipped dog, and he wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
I stole another glance at Ellen. She was staring right at me this time, but she immediately looked away, refusing to meet my gaze. I scanned the rest of the classroom. The only two people who would make eye contact with me were Cruz and Diehl, and they both wore expressions of concern.
That was when Mr. Sayles finally looked up from his crossword and noticed me hovering over Knotcher like an axe murderer. He fumbled with his hearing aid and powered it back on; then he looked back at me, then at Knotcher, then back at me again.
“What’s going on, Lightman?” he asked, leveling a crooked finger at me. When I didn’t respond, he frowned. “Back in your seat—now.”
But I couldn’t do that. If I stayed here one second longer my skull was going to implode. So I walked out of the classroom, passing right in front of Mr. Sayles’ desk on my way out the open door. He watched me go, eyebrows raised in disbelief.
“You better be on your way to the office, mister!” he shouted after me.
I was already sprinting for the nearest exit, disrupting one class after another with the staccato screech of my sneaker soles on the waxed corridor floor.
After what seemed like an eternity, I finally burst out of the school’s main entrance. As I ran for the student parking lot, I swept my gaze back and forth across the sky, from one horizon to the other. To anyone watching from inside the school, I must’ve looked like a complete mental case, watching some tennis match between giants that I alone could see—or maybe like Don Quixote, sizing up a few windmills before he gave them the beatdown.
My car was parked near the back of the lot. It was a white 1989 Dodge Omni that had once belonged to my father, covered in dents, dings, peeling paint, and large patches of rust. It had sat neglected under a tarp in our garage throughout my childhood, until my mother had tossed me the keys on my sixteenth birthday. I’d accepted the gift with mixed feelings—and not just because it was a rusted-out eyesore that barely ran. It also happened to be the car in which I was conceived—while it was parked in the very same lot where I now stood, coincidentally. An unfortunate bit of trivia that my mother let slip one Valentine’s Day, after too much wine, and one too many back-to-back viewings of Say Anything. In vino veritas—doubly true in my mother’s case when a Cameron Crowe movie was added to the mix.
Anyway, now the Omni belonged to me. Life is a circle, I suppose. And free wheels are free wheels, especially to a broke high school kid. I just did my best not to think about my teenage parents going at in the backseat while Peter Gabriel crooned to them on the tape deck.
Yes—the car still had a functioning tape deck. I had an adapter cable for it, so I could play music off my phone, but I preferred to listen to my father’s old mixtapes instead. His favorite bands had become my favorites, too: ZZ Top, AC/DC, Van Halen, Queen. I fired up the Omni’s mighty four-cylinder engine, and Power Station’s cover of “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” began to blare out its half-blown speakers.
I hauled ass home as fast as I could, weaving through the maze of shady suburban streets at what was probably an unsafe speed—especially since I spent most of the trip looking up instead of at the road in front of me. It was still only midafternoon, but a nearly full moon was already faintly visible overhead, and my gaze kept locking onto it as I scanned the heavens. As a result, I almost ran two stop signs during the short drive home, then came within a few inches of getting broadsided by an SUV when I coasted through a red light.
After that, I put on my hazard lights and drove the last few miles at a crawl—still craning my neck out the window, unable to keep my eyes off the sky.
I parked in the empty driveway and killed the engine, but I didn’t get out of the car right away. Instead I sat there gripping the wheel with both hands, peering silently up at the attic window of our little ivy-covered brick house, thinking about the first time I’d gone up there to dig through my father’s old possessions. I’d felt like a young Clark Kent, preparing to finally learn the truth about his origins from the holographic ghost of his own long-dead father. But now I was thinking of a young Jedi-in-training named Luke Skywalker, looking into the mouth of that cave on Dagobah while Master Yoda told him about today’s activity lesson: Strong with the Dark Side of the Force that place is. In you must go, mofo.