Till the End of Tom

One My mind was on Steinbeck; my foot was on a hand. I screamed. No one responded, most definitely not the man on the floor. I had wanted to escape the headmaster's annual interminable address to the student body. Neither his ideas nor his words had changed or improved over the years I'd heard them, and when I reached the limits of my endurance, I fabricated an excuse. Put more precisely, I lied. "An emergency," I'd whispered as I made my way out of the auditorium. A new wise saying: Be careful what you fabricate, because I turned the corner and there he lay, a certifiable emergency, crumpled and inert at the foot of the wide marble stairs, a thin halo of blood around his head. He was face-up, looking surprised, as well he might, be given his position and the fact that his right cheek was indented, as if it had buckled. My mind finally activated. I pulled out my cell phone to dial for help, although the man seemed well beyond any. I saw movement out of the side of my eye, and turned quickly, fearing another shock, but it was only Mrs. Wiggins, the school's most recentand again unsuccessfulattempt to find a competent secretary. She tiptoed out of the office, not exactly racing to my rescue. In fact, she approached so slowly that she was close to moving backward. She stopped altogether when she was a few feet from me. I reached the 911 operator. "This is Amanda Pepper," I said, "a teacher at Philly Prep." I gave our address and the situation and ended the call. Mrs. Wiggins remained as immobile as the man at the bottom of the stairs. "Whatwhat" she said, shaking her head as if to negate the evidence of her eyes. "What" "Pleasego to the auditorium. Tell Dr. Havermeyer to keep everybody there. Explain what's happened." "Whodo you know who that is?" Her voice was a hoarse whisper. "Better hurry. The assembly's nearly over." She shook her head again. Maybe she had a degenerative disease. "I'm not supposed to leave the office." She sounded the way a rabbit would, if it could talk. "I'm not even sure I should be out here, because what if the phone" "Mrs. Wiggins, this is an emergency." You had to spell things out for this woman, basic, primitive things, and although our recent rapid turnover of school secretaries was not a good situation, I couldn't help but hope it would continue, and that the Wiggins era was nearing its end. "I think this man's dead," I said as patiently as I could manage. "A lot of people are about to burst in herepolice, paramedics, I don't know who all else. The last thing anybody wants would be several hundred adolescents converging on this spot." "Police? Butwhy? Is this a crime? Do youdid you see something? Somebody?" "They have to be called for accidents, too." I waited. So did she. "Go, Mrs. Wiggins. Hurry!" Even Havermeyer's seemingly endless drone, "Musings on the Possibilities of Life During and After High School," ultimately concluded. "Hurry!" I said. "Do you want the students to see this?" "Well, maybe you couldI could stay, and you could go tell" "Mrs. Wiggins! You're his secretary." I didn't care if that made sense. I had gone AWOL from assembly and didn't want tRoberts, Gillian is the author of 'Till the End of Tom', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345454928 and ISBN 0345454928.