Zipped by Laura McNeal

class: “It’s from his daddy. His daddy’s driving him home after school.”
    This played to smirks and chuckles all around.
    â€œAt least I know who my daddy is,” Mick said, which kept the smirks coming.
    Mr. Cruso, the history teacher and Mick’s adviser, was popular. He had dark, longish, perfectly groomed hair and a trim black beard. Some of the girls who hung around his class before school called him “the happy bachelor,” and it seemed as if he was. He was an easy grader, wore more or less cool clothes, and drove a vintage emerald green Porsche. But mostly he just seemed to like people, students and teachers alike, fat ones and slim ones, smart ones and slackers—they all seemed to amuse him. His chief weapon of classroom restraint was irony, and for this occasion he said, “Civility, children, is the outer garment of inner peace.”
    â€œWhatever that means,” Brittany Allen said, which drew a few more laughs and a mugging frown from Mr. Cruso. Everyone, student and teacher alike, was glad to be released by the last Friday bell.
    Mick shuffled books at his locker, went to the second floor, and gazed out at the playing field—empty—then headed for the windows that gave onto the south gate. His father’s optic yellow 2002 was there, parked along the curb. He started to step away from the window and head down to the car, but something stopped him, something not quite right. He looked again. There were two heads in the front seat, not one.
    Nora.
    It was his father and Nora.
    Mick moved away from the window, hurried downstairs to the north exit, and fled the campus by back streets. He wandered around Plan B for a while, went to Bing’s for fries and a Coke, then went to a phone booth and looked up “Doyle.” There were nineteen of them. He found addresses for three nearby, jotted them down, and walked by each, trying to stare into the windows without appearing to stare in the windows. He didn’t see anyone inside any of them.
    Finally he walked to the Jemison library and sat down with
The Eternal Husband,
which was on the World Literature extra-credit list. It was by the same guy who’d written
Crime and
Punishment,
which Mick had liked even though after the crime it seemed to take an awful long time to get to the punishment.
    This one was much shorter, but it was confusing to start with. The narrator was a cranky upper-class guy who realized he was being followed around by a little ordinary man wearing black crepe on his hat, which meant he was in mourning for someone who’d died. But after that it got interesting, and Mick kept turning pages until the lights flickered on and off—the sign that the library would be closing in ten minutes.
    Mick walked home in a cold drizzle. Nora and his father were sitting in the living room when he came in. Nora was stiffly holding a pair of knitting needles and counting stitches, which always required moving her lips. His father had his hands wrapped around a full cup of coffee, as if for warmth.
    When Nora stopped counting, she said, “We waited for you after school. We thought we’d drive out to the Glassworks for dinner.” It was an old-factory-turned-Italian-restaurant his father liked, mostly because you had to drive way out of town to get there. Two-lane country roads were what the 2002 was meant for, he said.
    â€œSorry,” Mick said without a trace of sorrow in his voice.
    â€œYou didn’t get the message?” Nora said. “No one delivered you the message?”
    â€œYou sent a note? How did you send it?”
    â€œSchool courier.”
    â€œSorry,” Mick said again, “but school courier’s pretty much a message in a bottle.” Nora wasn’t buying this, he could tell, but before she could pin him down further, Mick’s father said, “Where were you tonight, Mick?”
    â€œLibrary,” Mick said.
    â€œOn a Friday