The Educated Heart

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

Lunch was over at the Wayne Hobart Middle School in Delran, New Jersey. The world beyond the classroom windows-newborn green foliage and pale lemonade sunshine-promised a perfect afternoon for baseball after three o'clock.

Bobbie Bloom was reading an entry from The Diary of Anne Frank to her eighth grade class. It was her tenth year of teaching, and experience had taught her that reading aloud for the half hour following lunch kept her budding adolescents from gazing out the windows. The questions they asked about the story told her they were listening, and curious about the long-ago ordeal of that thirteen-year-old girl.

Suddenly she paused, sensing a disturbance near the back of the classroom. She looked up and saw Charles Hook standing in the doorway. He'd given her a few problems-correction: many problems-but she believed he had problems of his own.

"You may come in, Charles," she called. "Since you were not here this morning, I hope you stopped in the office to get a late pass from Mrs. Banks."

He did not reply. Instead, he slammed the door so hard she heard the glass panes rattle. As he began to walk toward her desk, she gasped. His face was bruised and both eyes were blackened; one was almost closed.

A sharp icicle of fear traced a path down her spine.

"Charlie, what happened to you?"

"My old man beat me up last night after he read that letter you mailed to my house." His words were muffled by his swollen jaw. "You know, the one where you say you're gonna hold me back if I don't start handing in my homework every day, and all that shit."

In three weeks Charles Hook would reach his fourteenth birthday, but he was nearly six feet tall. His indifference to the school curriculum and his lack of respect for the faculty were legendary. Bobbie was still determined that she would find the right means to motivate him, but she had never envisioned a situation like this one. Her heart was knocking on her ribs and she drew a deep breath before speaking.

"Charles, I want you to go immediately to the nurse's office. She will give you an ice bag for those bruises on your eyes. After school today, you and I will meet with Mr. Loomis to talk about how all three of us can work together to resolve your problems. I want to see you move up to the ninth grade as much as you do."

He moved a step closer, and the look on his face caused her hands to grip the edge of her desk. She reminded herself that she was in charge. Charles might be bigger than she was, but he was still a child.

"You can't help me with my problems, lady, because you're one of them." Adolescence tweaked his vocal cords, and one of the girls stifled a giggle.

Charles reached into his jacket, pulled out a handgun, and pointed it at Bobbie's face. Several students screamed and a few crawled under their desks. In the back of the classroom, a boy named Bud yelled, "April Fool!"

Ragged laughter, mostly male.

A click as Charles cocked the gun.

Bobbie sprang up from her desk just as the gun went off, a knee-jerk reaction to fear that saved her life. The bullet passed through her left arm and hit the blackboard behind her; she crumpled to the floor. Seeming shocked by what he had done, Charles sprinted from her desk and out the door amid shouts and shrieks from the rest of the class.

Several students crowded around her, and the smell of chalk dust mingled with the metallic odor of her blood. She said with as much authority as she could muster while lying on the floor, "Seth, use my classroom phone to call the principal's office and tell Mrs. Banks what has just happened. Make sure you tell her that Charles is running in the halls with a gun."

While Seth was making the call, Bud headed for the door at the back of the room. "I'm going after him, Miss Bloom! I'm sure I can get that gun away from him!" Bud was almost as big as Charles, and he was on the football team.

"You will not take one step out of this classroom!" Using her right arm, Bobbie struggled to a sitting position; the effort caused perspiration to blossom on her face. Her left arm, oozing blood, hung useless at her side. "You're my responsibility, Bud, and I will not let you put your life in danger!"

Her words stopped Bud with his hand on the doorknob, and that's when they heard the second shot. Bud opened the door and peered into the hall.

"Jesus Christ! He just shot Mr. Loomis!"

Mr. Loomis was the guidance counselor.

Bobbie's arm was bleeding profusely, but using her right hand again, she managed to stand up. When she tried to take a step, she staggered and would have fallen if Seth's arm had not steadied her and helped her to sit down behind her desk.

Twenty-three terrified faces stared back at her, and she heard muted sobbing. She plumbed her mind for the right words, calm words to reassure them, but her brain felt like a turtle that had retracted into its shell.

At that moment, the voice of Mr. Bullock, the principal, erupted from the loudspeaker above her head.

"Attention, all teachers! This building is in lockdown mode until further notice. Help is on the way."

The principal's voice seemed to restore Bobbie's ability to address the crisis. "Bud, you heard what Mr. Bullock said. Lock the classroom door right now."

They all heard the reassuring click.

A crescendo of sirens began to surround the school. Shouts and running footsteps echoed in the halls, but inside Bobbie's classroom there was silence-as though she and her students were holding their collective breath.

Several minutes later they heard pounding on the door, and a man's voice bellowed, "Police! You can open up now!"

"Shall I unlock it?" asked Bud. He moved eagerly toward the door.

Bobbie shook her head. She would follow the prescribed protocol for teachers.

"No. The door stays locked until Mr. Bullock unlocks it with his master key."

A minute later they heard the master key bite into the lock; Mr. Bullock strode into the room, followed by the vice-principal and two emergency medical technicians. The technicians applied a tourniquet to stem the blood flowing from Bobbie's left arm and started a saline IV. The vice-principal took charge of her class as Bobbie rode out of the classroom on a gurney. Mr. Bullock walked down the hall beside her.

"Is there anyone you want me to call, Roberta?" he asked.

"Yes, please call my aunt. Her name is Patricia Griffith; she's a teacher at the Randolph Brookman Middle School in Mount Holly. I know the number but I can't think of it right now."

"Don't worry, honey, I'll look it up and give her a call," said Mr. Bullock. The gurney rolled down a wheelchair ramp beside the main entrance. "Looks like the cops have things under control," he added.

As her gurney was lifted into an ambulance, Bobbie turned her head in time to see four police officers shoving Charles Hook, now disarmed and handcuffed, into the back of a waiting police car.

The doors of the ambulance slammed shut, and the vehicle sped out of the parking lot, followed by a second ambulance which carried Robert Loomis, the other victim.

* * *

A teacher's aide was in her classroom when news of the school shooting reached Tricia Griffith via cell phone. She asked the woman to take charge of the class for a few minutes while she hurried to the teacher's...