Second Chances in New Port Stephen - Chapter 23

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Second Chances in New Port Stephen - Chapter 23

They went deeper into the library. Except for the way that nature had forced its way inside, it
was surprisingly untouched. The round tables where students had studied were still where
they’d been left, boxy padded wood chairs pulled up along their edges. At the console tables in
the center of the library, where the card catalog used to be, dozens of computer monitors stood
silent and dark,
keyboards choked with sand. Eli ran a fingertip along the edge of a shelf as he passed and felt
the silt on his skin.
Nick went to a section of the stacks they used to frequent, the one low shelf containing the
library’s tiny collection of books on paranormal topics. Nick reached down and pulled out an
ancient hardcover with a drawing of Bigfoot on the front, the protective plastic cover flashing in
the lights from their phones. “Can you believe they still have this? We must have checked it out
once a month when we were freshmen.”
“I still say the swamp ape is real.” Eli kept moving, wanting to see more. Nick stayed behind.
“Do you remember how we used to mess with Vine?” He was no longer whispering. “We’d wait
until his back was turned and then straight up steal shit from the checkout desk. That time we
took the stamp thing—” Eli looked over his shoulder and watched as Nick mimed making a fist
and punching it down against unseen papers. “The thing he used to stamp the due dates on the
cards. He was so pissed.”
“We were little shits,” Eli said.
Nick moved over to the place where the outdated microfiche machine used to live, behind the
encyclopedias. “We really were. The way we…” He trailed off. The hand not holding his phone
went to his hip as he looked around at the walls and the floor.
Eli wondered if he was remembering how they used to go back there, when the bulky
microfiche viewer could hide them from sight, and make out until their lips went numb. He was
very sad, all of a sudden. Nothing would ever feel like that again.
Grow up, he told himself. Get over it. It’s not like these were the best days of your life or
anything.
Although maybe some parts had been.

-- 110 of 228 --

Eli ducked down an aisle in the reference section before he did something foolish and asked
Nick what he was thinking about. His flashlight moved up the wall and landed on a startling
framed photograph. A ghost with a round white face and a wealth of brassy red hair stared back
at him, her creepy smile not reaching her eyes.
“We meet again, Principal McGoin.” He could recall nothing about her except how nasal her
voice sounded over the morning announcements, but Eli remembered this part of the library
vividly. The long line of framed pictures hung above the windows, showcasing every principal
who had served at Port Stephen Preparatory. He moved his flashlight to the right and saw the
future: white woman after white woman all the way to the present day, he supposed. He
tracked back to the left and went into the past. Before McGoin there had been a string of white
guys, each more joyless and hatchet-faced than the last. And then, all the way back to the
beginning: the Black men who had been principals in the sixties and seventies.
He remembered staring at the portrait wall as a kid and asking Mr. Vine, “What happened
there?” He had pointed at the time jump between Reginald Brown, Jr. (1969–73) and Geoffery
Billings (1981–88), to the gap between the last Black principal and the first white one.
“The school was shut down and then reopened as a desegregated institution,” was all Vine had
said, and as a fourteen-year-old, Eli hadn’t thought to question it. He’d learned the truth years
later from a podcast, of all things. He’d been sitting on a stalled D train on his way to Brooklyn
while someone with an NPR accent informed him that his alma mater was one of hundreds of
excellent schools operated by the Black community that had been turned into a majority white
magnet school. Desegregation as an excuse to steal a school with a sterling reputation and a
sprawling campus.
They hadn’t taught that shit in history class.
Their history teacher had, in fact, been a huge dickhead who complained vocally every time he
was “forced” to teach one section a year—one! Like the equivalent of a paragraph—about
either a historically significant woman or a person of color. Eli didn’t remember anything about
the begrudging lesson he’d received on Eva Perone, but he did remember the exact words Mr.
Green had said: “No woman has ever done anything worth studying.”
Meanwhile, they’d spent three weeks on the JFK assassination. Green had been a total gun nut,
so. Priorities.