The second afternoon class was English, with Mrs. Rock, a hard-faced bitch if there ever was one.  She was so mean she made Angolano, and even Pratt, look kind in comparison.  As we walked in, she silently pointed to a particular seat while looking at me, then did the same for Tom and Win.  But there was someone new and different in the room besides us.  I was sitting right behind Kate, and she looked at me with a peculiar grin that was typical of her, sort of a mixture of cynicism and conspiratorial pleasure, and she gave a very slight jerk of her head towards the front of the room before she sat down.

There she was.  Mrs. Rock had a student teacher, and she was a knockout.  Tall, leggy, slender, and absolutely beautiful.  The smile on her face was not cool, not distant, not unapproachable, but warm and friendly.  When her eyes met mine, I was assured that I was the most important person in the room, maybe in all the world.  I could not look away until she broke eye contact.  Kate was trying not to laugh out loud and I hate to think what I looked like.

I looked around to find Tom and Win; they were mesmerized.  Rock knew what was going on, and she quickly took charge, forcing us all to pay attention to her, not to her student teacher.  She wasn’t going to bother to introduce her to the three of us, but her name was on the board – Miss Delisle.

Well, I don’t think we learned much in English class that day.  Our new blonde goddess was all we saw and all we remembered.  We didn’t have a chance to talk about her; I mean the three of us, because they wouldn’t let us near each other.  I wondered why no one had told us about her.  Clearly she was the most fantastic thing that had ever happened in our school; why wasn’t everyone talking about her?

As it happened, Tom had heard about Miss Delisle at lunchtime, but no one had told me or Win anything.  They all said afterward that they wanted to see the looks on our faces, and I guess they weren’t disappointed.

The thing about Miss Delisle was that she was so charming.  The girls all knew, of course, what she was doing to us boys, but they liked her anyway.  She was really nice to them as well, and someone they would rather look up to than the stodgy old witches.  Of course, all the stodgy old witches hated her, especially Mrs. Rock, who had to be with her all day.

Rock was in a tough spot.  Nobody was more insistent than she about maintaining the appropriate separation between teacher and pupil, and the proper level of respect.  So she had to treat Miss Delisle with courtesy and respect in front of the kids.  How it must have galled her!

Of course, I wanted desperately to find out more about her, and I tried to get a message to Win to meet me down in the basement between classes.  The boys’ urinals were in the basement at the east end of the building.  At our primary school, Summit Street, the toilets were in the basement, too, so the euphemism we grew up with for using the toilets was “going to the basement.”  Not bathroom, or boys’ room, or rest room, but basement.  Anyway, I tried to communicate with Win to have him meet me down there, but the teachers were too sharp watching us that first day.  When I did manage to get to the basement, I ran into Old Ben, the janitor.

Ben was tall and thin and old.  Well, I think he was tall; but almost all adults looked tall to me.  I have no idea how old he was, but I knew he had a grandson at Summit Street School, just a couple years behind me.  What we knew about him was that he had showed up in Essex sometime during the war, without a cent to his name and very little English, started working at the school and had been there ever since.  He still had an accent, which I guess was French Canadian.

Old Ben could be gruff sometimes, but mostly he was friendly to us kids, and he was living proof to most of us that adults didn’t have to be so mean all the time.

Anyway, I had made friends with Ben the previous school year, and when he saw me coming out of the boys’ room, he stopped me with a smile and a friendly question.

“You put one over on them, didn’t you?  You and your friends.”

I smiled back at him, and said, “I’d like to tell you where we were, Ben, but I can’t.”

“I know, I know.  They’re going to make it hard on you, though.  I see what they’re doing.”

I shrugged.  “We knew we’d be in for it; it was worth it to us.”

He laughed.  “I bet it was!”

I managed to talk with Kate and Jackie after school for a few minutes.  Tom was waiting across the street from the school, to walk home with the girls, and a couple of the teachers were standing outside watching to make sure I didn’t talk to Tom.

“She’s a senior at UVM,” Kate told me, knowing before I asked what I wanted to know.  “Her name is Sally Delisle, she’s from California, and she has a double major in English and Education.  She’s been with us since the first week of school, and she’ll be here until Christmas vacation.”

I started to say something, but I stammered, looked embarrassed, and I think I might have blushed, because they both laughed at me.

“She’s driving all the boys crazy,” Jackie said, “and Mrs. Rock obviously doesn’t like that.  But she knows her English, and she does whatever Rock tells her to.”

“Well,” I said, rather lamely, “if she’s a good teacher…”

“Yeah, yeah, we know,” Kate said, “That’s what’s important.  We gotta go.  See you tomorrow.”

“Bye,” Jackie said as they walked away. 

We didn’t end up making any contact that first day, but we knew things would loosen up soon.  In the meantime, even though the four of us couldn’t talk to each other, the teachers couldn’t keep us from talking to the other kids.  Jimmy and Larry were under a lot of pressure, still being questioned regularly, as they were suspected of being involved in our adventure.  Those two were in sixth grade, a year behind us, and they had been, along with our friend, Roy, our primary helpers and suppliers all summer, while we were building the cabin, and during our six weeks hiding in the cabin.

Roy was a friend in our class who was from the same neighborhood as Tom and Rollo.  He had helped us all summer, too, but none of the adults suspected him the way they did Jimmy and Larry, so he wasn’t being watched as closely, and, for a while, he was our primary messenger and go-between.

Also, Kate and Jackie, who the teachers regarded as “the good kids,” let us know right away that they would help us out any way they could.  Even though they saw them talking to us, the Principal and the teachers regarded them as almost above suspicion and would never believe that they would sympathize with bad apples like us.  The girls also offered to help us out with the extra homework we were facing.  Kate lived next door to Rollo, and she was already helping him with his homework.  She probably single-handedly saved Rollo from Summer School.

As that first week went by, things got a little easier, except for French class.  I still hadn’t spoken to Win or Tom or Rollo directly, but, by Friday afternoon, thanks to a ton of legwork and message-relaying by Roy, we had arranged for Win and I to meet up at the Best-Ever Bake Shop at two o’clock Saturday afternoon.  Tom and Rollo didn’t think they’d be able to make it.  We all had a mountain of homework to do, plus our parents were watching us intently, but we had to talk, and we were pretty sure we could sneak away, Win and I, at least.  Some of our parents went to the Bake Shop regularly, but they were creatures of routine and we knew their schedules.

I worked feverishly on my homework Friday night, and again Saturday morning.  What else was I going to do?  They wouldn’t let me watch TV; not until I was all caught up with six weeks of missed schoolwork.  How were they going to judge that?  I didn’t really care; I had just gone six weeks without TV and learned that I could survive, so it was no big deal.

By noon on Saturday, I had made a big dent in my French homework, and finished all the other subjects.  The other teachers hadn’t loaded me down quite as much as Pratt.  I had some lunch, then, after pretending to read my French book for a while, I convinced my Mom that I really needed to go to the library.  She was a little suspicious, but, going to the library by myself was something I had been doing since I was seven or eight, so it wasn’t unusual.  My Mom wasn’t naturally mean, anyway, so she had a hard time trying to impose the rules on me.

I actually went to the library, just in case one of my brothers or sisters were watching me, then I snuck out after a few minutes and hurried up over the hill to the shopping center.  I walked into the Best-Ever Bake Shop right at two o’clock.

Win wasn’t there yet, but Amy Ducharme was.  I saw her at the other end of the shop, back turned to me, as I took a seat at the counter.  Her red hair was tied back, and she wore a little white bakery cap on her head.  In her all-white uniform and apron, she looked as perfect as a girl could look.  She turned around and saw me, and she walked towards me, her face expressionless.  Then, when she reached where I was sitting, she stopped, hands on her hips, and her face broke into the sweetest, most beautiful smile I had ever seen.

“You little shit,” she said to me, “Do you know that every kid in High School wishes they could do what you did?”

She was beaming, and I was beaming, too.  At that moment, there was no doubt that every hardship I had suffered, and would suffer in the future, was worth it.

“You want a buttercrunch, and a chocolate milk?” she asked, still smiling broadly.

“I’ll have a hot chocolate, today, please.”

At that moment, Win walked in, and he ordered a hot chocolate, as well, and a cream-filled doughnut.  He sat down and we both started talking at once, there was so much to say.

“Man, what a week,” he groaned, “It was unbelievable!”

“I know, I know.  I’ve been doing homework all night and all morning.”

“Me, too.  I’m still grounded, so what else is there to do?”

“I haven’t been able to talk to Tom, or Rollo…”

“I know; it’s crazy.  But I can’t believe it’ll last.  There’s no way the teachers can keep this up.”

“Or our parents, either.”

“Yeah.  I’m supposed to be at my grandparents, but they’re not watching me.”

“I’m at the library.”

We both laughed out loud, and Amy smirked as she set down our hot chocolates and doughnuts.  She put a finger on the counter where I had left some coins, and scooted a dime towards me with her finger.

“Put that away,” she said, and she winked at me before she walked away.

Wow!  That had never happened before, and Win and I looked at each other in wide-eyed astonishment.  Then, to top it all off, we sipped our HCs, and our eyes widened again.  She had made them with milk, not water, very much against Bake Shop rules.  We were in heaven!  

So we talked and laughed for half an hour and munched our doughnuts.  Mostly we were just relieving some of the tension that had built up over that week.  We talked a little bit about trying to get in touch with Tom and Rollo, but we couldn’t think of anything we could do other than wait for the pressure to ease up.  Win couldn’t stay long; he would have to show up at his grandparents’ pretty soon, or he’d be in deep shit.

As Win jumped down off his stool, and I tried to think of a reason to stay longer, we heard the little bell over the door ring, and we both turned to see Junior walking in the door.