Zog Goes to School

At twenty to eight on Friday morning, Principal Hendricks sat under two posters that had been making promises to the occupants of his office for twenty years, and read a form.

The posters had come with the job. The first said BELIEVE! and did not say in what, which Hendricks had come to respect as the only honest position available to a poster. The second said REACH FOR THE STARS! over a photograph of a night sky, and at some point before his time somebody had set a coffee mug down on it, so that the brightest star wore a brown ring. It looked reached. It looked as if somebody had reached it, put a drink on it and gone home.

His own coffee sat at his elbow in a mug from a leadership conference in Columbus. Nine years of the staff-room dishwasher had taken most of the slogan off the side and left the word LEAD. He had poured it at ten past seven, and since then it had cooled at the rate of all things in Bakerfield, slowly, without complaint, and with a skin forming on top.

The form was the first thing in his IN tray. It was a transfer of enrollment. The letterhead belonged to Stjärnhamn Gymnasium, Gothenburg, Sweden, and carried a crest with a small star over a smaller harbor. Stjärnhamn means Star Harbor, a fact available to anyone in Bakerfield who cared to look it up, and therefore to nobody.

Student: Zach Ogden. Host family: Whitmore, Starfighter Lane. Country of Origin: SWEDEN.

Every field was filled in. The emergency contact had the right number of digits. Somebody had signed where it said sign and dated where it said date, and had left the box marked OFFICE USE ONLY empty with a restraint Hendricks found almost moving. In nine years the only other complete form to cross this desk had been a requisition from the chemistry lab assistant for eyewash solution, submitted in triplicate, for an eyewash station nobody had ever used.

A photograph was stapled to the corner.

The student in it had an enormous smooth head, two huge black eyes, and a baseball cap on backwards. Along the bottom edge of the picture, where a collar would have been, somebody had written NOT AN ALIEN in black marker. And the student was green: past the green of somebody feeling unwell, past any greenish cast that might be blamed on the light, all the way out to a green you could have read by.

Hendricks looked at the photograph for some time.

Then he did what he had done every school day for nine years, and what he was better at than anyone in Dunmore County: he took the thing that was wrong and found, one at a time, the reasonable thing standing next to it.

The printer, for a start. Every photograph that came out of the chemistry prep room had been green since spring, when something inside the machine had given up on the other colors. The science department’s staff lanyards made them look like a group of people recovering from the same boat trip. It was, in fact, the printer this photograph had come out of.

Then there were the Swedes. Swedes were pale, as Hendricks understood it, and pale people photographed strangely. In the staff directory Hendricks himself looked like a boiled egg somebody had drawn a tie on.

The eyes were very large and entirely black. That was the flash, or Europe.

The shirt he did not need to explain to himself at all. He had been principal of a high school for nine years. He had confiscated worse shirts.

What he did not do was wonder how the form had got into his tray. He had gone home at four yesterday, the tray had not been checked again, and here it was, which was how most things arrived at Bakerfield High, including most of the students. Wondering would have led to a question. A question would have led to a phone call. A phone call would have led, as surely as rain led to a bucket under the gym roof, to a form, and the form would have been his.

He read it again.

Hendricks sighed. It was a long sigh, with a middle to it, and it did the work that in a younger principal would have been done by a meeting.

“Okay,” he said, to nobody.

He signed it. He put it in the OUT tray. He picked up the coffee, looked at the skin on it, and put it down again.

The next paper in the tray was a complaint from the Parent-Teacher Organization about the vending machine outside the gym, which had been jamming since the renovation twelve years ago. According to the complaint, a bag of pretzels had been hanging by one corner from coil C4 since March. Three separate students had tried to shake it loose, one had tried to reason with it, and a parent at the spring open house had lost a dollar and a quarter and some of her faith in institutions.

Hendricks read it twice as carefully.