Final Assignment: A Promise Falls Novella by Linwood Barclay Page A

few days and we let it go at that?’
    ‘No!’ she said adamantly. ‘Just when Chandler’s showing signs of initiative, that’s when they come down on him like a ton of bricks.’
    ‘The beginning?’ I said, hoping at some point to get the woman on track.
    She took a deep breath, a signal that her telling of this would be anything but a short story.
    ‘Chandler’s English teacher, Ms Hamlin, asked the class to write something creative, imaginative. So Chandler applied himself and wrote this story’ – she tapped the closed laptop – ‘and now he finds himself being treated like some sort of psychotic degenerate.’
    ‘I take it the suspension didn’t happen just like that?’ I said.
    ‘There was a
meeting
,’ she said. ‘I was called
down
there, yesterday.’ She made it sound as though she’d been summoned to a thrift shop to choose a new wardrobe. ‘There was Ms Hamlin, and the head of guidance, what was her name?’
    ‘Ms Brighton,’ her son said. ‘Lucy Brighton. She was the only one I felt was on my side.’
    ‘And the principal, Ms Caldwell, was there too. This is what happens when you have too many women in charge,’ Greta Carson said. ‘They think all literature should be
Eat, Pray, Love
– which, by the way, I liked very much, but not everyone wants to read that kind of thing.’
    ‘So what happened at the meeting?’
    ‘Ms Hamlin,’ Greta said, ‘had a case of the vapors, I gather, when she read the story. She took it straight to the principal. She never gave him a chance to read it out to the class, where his classmates would no doubt have found it to be a very engaging story. Ms Hamlin and the others wanted to know why Chandler would write something like that.’
    I looked at the boy. ‘Why
did
you write something like that?’
    He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Why does anybody write anything?’
    ‘Exactly,’ his mother said. ‘How does one explain the creative process?’
    ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Chandler said. ‘The idea just came into my head and I wrote it.’
    ‘What was their concern?’ I asked.
    ‘They thought that if I would write something like that,’ Chandler said, ‘I must be like sick in the head. That I’d go out and actually kill somebody.’
    Greta Carson nodded furiously. ‘Exactly. They wanted him to go for counseling or psychiatric testing or something like that. Unbelievable! There are lots of people who write dark and creepy things! My God, if Edgar Allan Poe or H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King had had the misfortune to go to Promise Falls High, they’d have never had a writing career, because some stupid teacher would have sent them off to be tested and put them on medication. It’s beyond ludicrous.’
    ‘Have you written a lot of stories like this?’ I asked Chandler.
    Another shrug. ‘Not really. This was, you know, kind of a one-off.’
    ‘But you like to write?’
    ‘Once in a while.’
    ‘I think this may be a talent of Chandler’s that is just now rising to the surface,’ his mother said.
    The phone rang.
    ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Greta said, and reached for a cordless phone resting on a table next to the couch. ‘Hello? Oh, hi.’ Her brow furrowed. ‘No, we haven’t seen him at all. Okay. Well, I’m sure it’s nothing. Okay. Listen, I have Mr Weaver here right now, so why don’t I give you a call later?’
    ‘What was that?’ Chandler asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ his mother said. ‘Where were we?’
    I asked Chandler, ‘What made you write this specific story?’
    Again his mother jumped in. ‘Are you saying he was wrong to write it?’
    I turned and looked at her as patiently as I could. ‘I’m just trying to get the big picture here.’ I looked back at Chandler. ‘So why did you write this?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess I wanted to bring my mark up in that class.’
    ‘You haven’t been doing that well?’
    ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Ms Hamlin doesn’t like me.’
    ‘A lot of the teachers have