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   This story is copyright 1999 by Mark Meiss.  All rights reserved.

   You are welcome to read this story online, but please do not make
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	http://death.uits.indiana.edu/~mmeiss/writing/

   If you enjoyed this story, want to contribute criticism, or if you
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   e-mail me at mmeiss@indiana.edu.
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		  The Passion of Pitt Elementary
  			   by Mark Meiss

1.

When Garret clanged his carefully debarked stick against the side of
Cinderella's stagecoach, there was no doubt in the mind of any member
of the sixth grade class at Pitt Elementary that his action was the
same as that of a stern, black-robed judge slamming his gavel upon an
elevated bench.  Well, if truth be known--and the truth /will/ come
out--there were a few stray sheep in the flock who had their doubts,
but it was undeniable that every member of the class was present for
the trial.

The stagecoach had been charmingly modelled on the brave concept of a
very large passenger pumpkin with seating for four inside (on bumpy
sheet metal like the steps of the playground slide), and elevated
seating for another four outside (on yellow planks that were pregnant
with splinters).  There was a bent section of green pipe on the top
that both served as a metaphorical stem and allowed one or two more
children--two only if they were very good friends--to cling to the
top, privding they were careful not to relax their grips.  All in all, 
it was the most incongruous of all the playground equipment in the
wooded park next to Pitt Elementary, and that somehow elevated it to
being the natural site for a trial.

Right now, Garret was the only child inside the pumpkin; the otrhers
knew by instinct that the bench on which Garrret sat was the judge's
bench; that the bench opposite him was for witnesses; that the sandy
patches of ground in front of the two side openings were for the
plaintiff's and defendant's counsel; and that the yellow masses of
splintery wood were for witness waiting to be called.

In keeping with their instincts, everyone was in their proper places.
The sandy-haired and excessively freckled plaintiff, Jason, sat next
to his one-time best friend, the skinny brunette Ralph, who also
happened to be a co-defendant.  There was no love lost at the moment
between the two boys, as evidenced by the continuous flow of nasty
corner-of-the-eye glances the two were exchanging as they waited for
the trial to begin and contemplated whether a punitive round of "two
for flinching" would cause a full-fledged fight.

It was not a misunderstanding of courtroom procedure so much as a
concession to the powerful force of gender segregation that kept the
blonde pony-tailed codefendant, Beverly, on the opposite bench, away
from her fellow accused.  The particular circumstances behind these
procedings made the separation of the two defendants a social
necessity, anyway, so there was little debate among the rank and file
of the class as to whether this constituted unfair treatment of girls.

The red-haired judge inside the pumpkin had banged his gavel against
the orange sheet metal of the pumpkin's shell as soon as he finally
saw David trudging to the park from the school.  The pudgy youth
carried a legal pad in one hand, which he almost dropped as he
struggled with the twin obstacles of an untied shoelace and the metal
chain around the border between the school's parking lot and the
park.  He arrived at the stagecoach red-faced and out of breath, and
the crowd of children surrounding the coach parted to let the chubby
court reporter take his seat next to Garret.

"Sorry I'm late," he said.  "Mr. Foley wanted to talk to me about--"

"Whatever," said Garret, waving his hand in dismissal.  The crowd
tittered; it was both thoroughly accustomed to David's words being
ignored and thoroughly amused by the perpetual lack of respect.  He
was elected to the office of court reporter because he wrote too damn
much, not because he was a popular hero.

"You should have run faster," Garret said, eliciting more scattered
giggling from the spectators.  He glanced fiercely at the crown
through the doors of the stagecoach, barely able to cover his joy at
being important and the center of attention with a thin sheen of
annoyance.  "We don't have a lot of time.  In fact," he said
solemnly, "this trial could take /days/.  Any you should call me 'your 
honor'."

"Sorry," said David again as he carefully wrote the day's date across
the top of a fresh sheet of lined yellow paper.  "I'm ready."

For a moment silence hung over the playground after that; instinct had 
guided the class as they arranged for this trial--well, instinct and
daytime television--but no one was exactly sure exactly how the
procedings ought to begin.  After all, their leader had become judge
by cocky force of personality, not any particularly robust knowledge
of the legal process.

"Um," said Garret.  Then the proper direction occurred to him, and he
straightened his posture as he clanged his stick against the side of
the pumpkin again.  "Will the two lawyers please approach the bench?"

Andy approached the west side of the stagecoach; he had prepared for
the court date of his friend Jason by wearing his 'No Fear' T-shirt.
And the class did have to admit in their undercurrent of murmurs that
he looked a hell of a lot more confident standing before Garret in his 
Nikes than he did whenever Mr. Foley asked him a question about
sentence conjugation.

On the other side of the coach stood the diminutive Troy, the class's
sole black student and the most smoothly spoken of any member of the
class by far.  He had earned respect for his rhetorical skills on the
day last year when he convinced the lunchlady that the incidents of
thrown food would surely decrease if only they were allowed to expend
some energy in outdoor recreation following their meals.  Andy would
have to be more than just a kickball star if he expected to achieve a
judgment against Beverly and Ralph with Troy in charge of their
defense.

"Okay," said Garret.  "State your name for the record.  Last names,
too."

"I'm Andy.  I mean, Andy Swanson.  Your honor."

"Your honor, I am Troy Baxter, attorney for the defense.  I'm going to 
show that Jason is filled with all kinds of--"

"We're not there yet," said Garret quickly, wanting to be the sole
source of humorous profanity in these procedings.  "I have to
introduce the case."  He cleared his throat, unused to being expected
to say so many words at one time in front of other people.

"Okay," he said.  "Well, I guess that everyone knows what this is all
about, pretty much, but this should be on the record."

David looked up at that point, his face screwed up in confusion.  "Am
I supposed to write that part down?"

"What?" snapped Garrety, covetous of his spotlight.

"When you talk about whether it should be on the record, and stuff
like that," David said.  "Am I supposed to write that down too?
Because I don't think I can write that fast."

"They write it all down in, like, TV courts, don't they?" said
Garret.  "Why can't you write it all down?"

Sara averted the creation of an unimaginative fat joke by calling out
from the crown, "The ones on TV have a special typewriter thing that
they use."  A murmur of approval followed her statement.

"Okay," sighed Garret.  "Look, just make sure you get the important
parts.  Use a lot of abbreviations, or something.  And shut up
already, okay?

"Anyway, so we're here because Beverly and Ralph are accused of
breaking the proper code of conduct.  Jason and Ralph were best
friends, and they both liked Beverly.  But Jason says that he liked
Beverly before Ralphn did, so Ralph got the idea to like her from
him.  But Beverly says that she likes Ralph better than Jason... I
mean, she /likes/ Ralph.  So Kason says that she should like him
instead because he was first.  That's the basic stuff, anyway.

"So we're here to learn the facts in this case and how they pertain--" 
(this is a word which made him proud) "--to the matter at hand.  So
it's going to be like this... they all agreed to have a trial--Jason
and Ralph and Beverly did--and so I'm going to dcide after all the
evidence is heard whether Beverly is supposed to like Jason or Ralph."

After hearing the way in which her affections would become subject to
Garret's judgment, Beverly sighed loudly and slumped down in the
yellow bench, risking the penetration of her denim shorts by a
weathered dagger of a splinter.  Putting her hand to her forehead, he
said, "I said it was okay if we were going to have a /jury/.  Why
can't we have a jury?"

"You already said it was okay to have a trial," Garret said.  "And
besides, if we have a jury, they're justd going to vote by boys and
girls.  We have to have an unbiased decision, or this is just silly.
I mean, we want to do this right, not just like a bunch of kids,
right?  Next year is junior high."

Having successfully invoked the diety of maturity--after all, any
action which implied that the class was comprised of short adults was
beyond question--Garret moved the procedings along.  "Okay, Andy, are
you ready to do the opening argument for Jason--for the plaintiff, I
mean?"

"Sure," said Andy, cracking his infamous grin underneath his reversed
Cubs cap.  "Your honor.  See, it's pretty obvious that my client is
right here.  We know that Jason and Ralph are best friends, or at
least they were.  We're going to show that Jason liked her before
Ralph ever did, and that Beverly knew that.  And she decided to like
Ralph instead of Jason anyway.

"But I think we all know that's not how it's supposed to work.  If
she's going to like either of them, it has to be Jason, because he
liked her first, and /especially/ because Jason and Ralph are best
friends.  That's the rules, and I think everyone here knows that.  I
think that Ralph and Beverly knew it just fine and decided to break
the rules anyway.

"And I think that it's time for us to tell them that you don't break
up friends like that and you don't do that to your friend.  We have
rules in this class, and they're for the good of everyone.  What makes 
Beverly and Ralph think they're so special?"

The audience of the trial made various semi-verbal signs of approval.
The prevailing sentiment behind the nods, grunts, and thoughtful looks 
was clearly that Troy--smooth talker or not--was going to have to work 
pretty damn hard to justify such an egregious breanch of preadolescent 
social etiquette.

Even Garret seemed momentarily captivated by Andy's appeal to the
basic structure of the social fabric of sixth grade until he shook off 
his unintended interest and swung his wooden gavel against the side of 
the stagecoach again.  That stick certainly did make a fine noise.
"Troy," he said.  "What do you have to say?"

"Your honor," Troy replied, sliding smoothly into the speech he had
been rehearsing in his head for three days now.  "What Andy has to say 
is certainly something that we should all listen to.  He's right, you
know--there are certain ways you gotta do things and if you don't do
them that way, it affects all of us.  All of /you/."

The crowd, pleased at having been addressed directly and curious about 
Troy's purpose in agreeing with his nominal rival (although in real
life they often played one-on-one together), stdood in quiet attention 
now, waiting raptly to see what would unfold.

"There's a real problem if someone gets to thinking that they're
special," Troy continued.  "Like they don't gotta do all the shit that 
we gotta do.  That's what Andy is saying here, and what I have to say
to that is that I agree with my brother Andy.

"But there's one thing, man," he said, shaking his head as if to
emphasize the utter vapidity of the thought process that had lead to
the state of mind he would describe next.  "There's one thing that
Andy's just not getting here.  See, Beverly and Ralph--they don't
think they're any different or special from the rest of you.

"In fact, they would agree that it's important to show some respect to 
our way of life.  You see, the thing is, what we're going to show you
is that in everything they did, they were in fact acting in the best
interests of the class and giving props to all of the rules.  In
short, your honor, what Ralph and Beverly did is exactly what they
were supposed to do.

"That's what I'm going to sign, seal, and deliver!"

By the end of Troy's carefully rehearsed speech, even Garret and Andy
were listening with delighted smiles at the seemingly effortless folow
of Troy's words.  On the other hand, Andy didn't seem terribly alarmed
behind his easy grin; it was difficult to see what set of
circumstances could possibly justify the open social disregard of the
defendants.  Of course, there was also the fact that should Andy lose
the case, his momentary loss of social status would last only until he 
kicked a homer in the next kickball game or kissed Jenny during the
truth-or-dare game at Ashley's house.  Jason, however--without a
doubt, he would have a bright red virtual 'L' for 'loser' on his
forehead for a month at least if he lost.

But before the juvenile court could proceed into the testimony that
would make or break the social lives of the three youths, Sara saw
Mr. Foley begin to pace around the edge of the park with his
clipboard, and she called out the disappointing news that their time
for the legal process today had elapsed.

Garret banged the stick against the side of the pumpkin twice this
time, as if to emphasize the finality of his next address, but
actually to produce that sound two times in rapid succession.

"The court is in recess," he said, "until recess."


2.

The next day at recess, the class wasted no time in getting down to
business.  Everyone in the class, with the possible exception of the
still-sullen Beverly had been chattering about the opening procedings
and the posssible direction of the trial almost incessantly since the
court had last adjourned.  The excitement generated by the procedings
had already caused a total of one big brother and two big sisters to
tell their siblings to shut the heck up, one fifth-grader to attempt
to sneak out of class and join the sixth-graders at recess, and an
untold amount of amusement, chuckles, and condescending interest
around dinner tables.  In the case of Jason v. Ralph and Beverly, the
class had definitely found itself an event like they hadn't had since
Amanda had asked to be excused to go to the nurse's office in October
and everyone knew exactly why because she had picked the wrong day to
wear white jeans.

As everyone assumed their positions, Garret took a few test swings
with the stick that he had left carefully hidden underneath the
pumpkin.  The attorneys were proving to be entirely too interesting,
and only by making a loud, metallic sound in new and intriguing ways
could he hope to maintain his iron control over the trial.

With a long Whonnnng! that actually actually caused David to wrinkle
his head in pain at the sound waves inside the resonant shell of the
pumpkin, the courtroom was called to order.

"Hear ye, hear ye," said Garret, noting with satisfcation that the
prange shell was still vibrating just a little bit.  "This honorable
court is again in session, and I'm presiding.  Okay, so we had the
opening arguments yesterday.  Do either of the attorneys have
something to add?"

"Nah," said Andy easily, trying to get a side view of Sara out of the
corner of his eye--might she be developing?  Yes, he thought that
slight bend could possibly be a curve... and then, remembering
himself, he met Garret's irritated and expectant gaze and added, "Your 
honor."

Garret languidly rolled his head toward the opposite door and raised
his eyebrows at Troy.

"Nothing to add right now, your honor," said Troy.

"Okay," said Garret.  "It's about time then.  Does anyone else want to 
say anything before we start doing testimony?"

"Yeah," Beverly said from her uncomfortable elevated perch on the
splintery bench.  "I say we just knock this off already.  It's totally 
immature."

"We can't quite now," said Garret, and he was actually quite correct.
There was far too much precociousness, intrigue, and pretension
wrapped up in the procedings now to make simply casting them aside a
thinkable proposition.

After flashing the outspoken defendant a look of quick contempt that
was echoed by quite a few members of the class, Andy said, "Your
honor, I ask permission to call my first witness."

"Permission granted."  /Claang./  "Um, who is your first witness?
State it for the record."

Garret turned to David.  "You're getting all this, right?"

David bobbed his head in confirmation too quickly to be discrete about 
it.  Clearly, he was all too aware of the vulnerability of his newly
raised position in the social hierarchy of Pitt Elementary.  (You see, 
he was 99% certain that Carrie had been looking at him prior to that
morning's restroom break.)

"I'm gonna call Jason, first," said Andy.  "Um, Jason, will you come
on down and take the stand, please?"

Jason was in fact almost uncontrollably eager to leave the side of his 
former best friend and get to participate in the magical process of
testimony.  Quickly he clambered down from the bench, using the thick
metal axle of the pumpkin as a staging point for his final leap to the 
ground.  He climbed into the pumpkin and sat himself across from
Garret and David with a nervous and excited grin across his freckled
face.

"Um, swear him in," said Garret.

After a brief silence, David happened to look up and realize with a
small rush of adrenaline that he was the intended executor of the
judge's command.  Nervously, he pushed his classes back up and said,
"O-okay... raise your right hand, Jason."

Following a permissory nod from Garrret, JAson did as he was told.

"Um... do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth, so help you God?"

Jason nodded vigorously, impatient to begin.

"Good," said Garret.  "Because if you lie about anything, we'll have
Chad beat the shit out of you."  Chad, one of the spectators, grinned
in response; he was a stocky boy with a small face on a big head who
would in fact be ecstatic to beat the shit out of anyone he was
directed at with a sanction of violence.

"Counsel, your witness," said Garret.

"Cool," said Andy.  "Your honor.  Okay, um, please state your name for 
the record."

"Jason.  Jason Edgewood."

"Cool.  So, I heard that you're pretty pissed at your friend Ralph
these days.  Is that right?"

Jason's eyes flared with indignant passion.  "That jerk isn't my
friend right now.  Because of what he did."

"And what did he do?"

"Well, it's like you said before.  I started liking Beverly way back
in November--I mean, that's four months ago--and then Ralph decided to 
like her too in January."

"So how did that make you feel?"

"Well, I was actually kind of cool with it, y'know?" said Jason as he
shrugged his shoulders.  "I mean, I figured that what I would do is
write her a poem on her Valentine's Day card and then maybe she would
go with me.  So, it's not like I had really told her yet or anything.
I just called her on the phone a bunch of times."

"But still," pressed Andy.  "Your best friend started liking her too?"

"Well, yeah," said Jason.  "I know.  But it was like, she didn't like
either of us yet, and it was okay for him to like her too, as long as
she didn't start liking him back all of a sudden."

The pauses between each bit of testimony were gradually becoming
longer and longer; all parties concerned desired on a subconscious
level for Troy to raise an objection.  After all, when you got down to 
it, the very coolest part of any courtroom drama on TV was really all
the objection stuff.  But Troy stood there, impassively viewing the
drama as he scratched at a scab on his elbow.

"But she /did/ start liking Ralph, didn't she?" Andy asked
sympathetically.

"Yeah," said Jason.  "She sent /him/ a poem on Valentine's day, and
then they went to the movies over spring break while I was on vacat
on in Dodge City with my family."

The class hummed as its members tried to grasp the enormity of the
significance that Beverly's actions naturally held on the friendship
between Ralph and Beverly.  Still, didn't the possibility exist that
this could all be a mistake?  Surely, one of /them/ wouldn't act that
way /knowingly/... but that was exactly where the young proto-lawyer
was headed next.

"Wow, that really sucks," said Andy, the voice of sympathy.  "Still,
though, it sounds like maybe Beverly didn't know that you both liked
her, so maybe it's not that big a deal."

"She /did/ know," replied Jason as he struggled to conceal the
contempt he felt behind an expressionless face.

"Hey, hey, buddy," laughed Andy, holding his arms out in front of
himself in a gesture of faux defense.  "How can you be so sure about
that?"

"Because Ralph told her everything.  At the beginning of February, he
wrote her a note and told her that both of us liked her, and that he
hoped that she would pick him instead of me."

"Is that all the note said, Jason?"

"No.  It also listed ten reasons why she should go with him instead of 
me."  The words were clearly spiced with venom as they flew from
Jason's mouth now; clearly, this was the utterance of a soul scarred
by betrayal.

"Ten reasons?  You mean, he made a list?  Like a top ten list?" Andy
pressed.

"Yeah," said Jason.  "And one of the reasons was that he didn't care
if Jason liked her first, because he liked her better."  The final
words of the sentence oozed with mockery at his former friend's
perfidious language.

"Damn, my friend," said Andy, twistding his smile to the side and
shaking his head in admiration.  "You really got shit on.  Well, I
don't think that I have--oh, wait.  There is one more question.  How
did you find out about this note?"

"Kara passed the note to Beverly for Ralph, but Scott knew that I
liked Beverly, so he asked Kara to tell him what was in it."

The crowd buzzed at this news, not because it constituted a
particularly dramatic revelation, but because the members of the class 
finally sensed that the opportunity had come for Troy to make an
objection.  After all, Jason was basically saying that he knew about
all this from someone to talked to someone who peeked at a note she
was passing, which was a serious breach of etiquette in and of
itself.  In all fairness, that was still plenty good enough for their
standards of evidence, but they had seen _Law and Order_ on television 
enough times by their age so that they knew that it was /objection/
time, darn it.

But Troy still just stood there, watching the passionate testimony
with frank interest but showing no inclination to intervene on behalf
of the defendants.

Garret wanted there to be more legal procedure stuff happening more
than anyone else--after all, what good would it do to be remember as
the guy who was the judge if the trial just turned out to be boring?
With this in mind, he pressed the attorney for the defense for some
more action.

"Troy," he said, unsure of how to express his fervent desire for a
higher level of courtroom antics.  "Um, did you want to object to that 
or anything?  I mean, he says he heard it from someone who heard it
from someone, and everything..."

An inscrutable smile spread itself across Troy's lips, and he let
Garret's words trail off into the air for a moment before replying
with enthusiasm, "Your honor, the defense does not object to any of
the testimony we have heard so far.  My clients have authorized me to
tell you that the note Jason's talking about is real, and it said just 
the stuff he says it did."

Garret peered suspiciously at Troy.  "The note is for real?"

"Yes, it's for real, your honor," Troy said.  "Everything that Jason
has said so far is the truth."

Now the class was literally abuzz with excitement.  Spectating friends 
turned to one another and began to speculate aloud with animated
gestures and anxious words.  Had Troy betrayed his clients?  No, they
were still sitting up there on the yellow planks, and they didn't look 
particularly pissed off at Troy in spite of the fact that they had
heard the open confirmation of their guilt.  So what the heck could
Troy be thinking?  Yeah, he was one hell of a smooth talker, but no
one could possibly dig Ralph and Beverly out of a pit like this.

The stir caused by Troy's surprise admission threatened to remove all
attention from Garret and his throne within the pumpkin, so he began
to beat his stick against the side of the pumpkin in at attempt to
restore order and a Garret-centered universe.  The deep metallic gong
still resonated with authority in the heads of the sixth graders, and
so he had almost resumed control over the situation by the time that a
red-faced Mr. Foley arrived at the pumpkin to tell the class that he
had called them idoors /three/ times already, and that they had better 
begin showing some more respect if they hoped to maintain their recess 
privileges or survive in the sinister world of junior high school.

And so, restless and discontented, the class filed back into Pitt
Elementary for a lesson on plane geometry that none of them would pay
a bit of attention to.


3.

The entire class--David included, though that was more the effect of
peer pressure than anything else--ran rather than walked to the park
the next day.  Visibly nervous about whether it might be that Troy had 
in store for him as an explanation for the previous day's surprise
concession, Jason headed for the relative safety of the yellow bench
instead of the witness stand inside the pumpkin.

When Garret noticed the witness attempting to circumvent the
courtroom, the shade of his face became noticeably more similar to his 
spiky red hair.  "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he
snapped.  "There's still the cross-examination to do."

Jason couldn't very well make a convincing argument that he had
forgotten about that particular feature of legal procedure, not with
the way that his face had been flushed and his pulse racing for the
hour before recess.  Any hope of pretending ignorance had already died 
twenty minutes ago when Mr. Foley had paused the lesson to ask Jason
whether he was running a fever.  So instead, he simply emitted a
non-committal "oh" and scrambled back down the side of the pumpkin and 
into the courtroom.

Garret whacked his sdtick againstd the side of the pumpkin a few times 
once Jason was seated.  Before the metallic vibrations had left the
air, he was ready to get the trial moving along again.  Christ, they
were on the third day now and they hadn't even gotten through the
first witness--how in the world could he expect to keep the class
interested through more than another day or two of this?  He could
only swing that stick so hard before the damn thing finally snapped.

He really needn't have worried, however; far from being over, the
trial was actually just starting to get interesting for his audience.
(Though they did wish that he'd hurry things along just a bit,
especially if he accomplished that by yelling at the counsel or a
witness.  The class shared a common vicarious joy at seeing a figure
of authority chew someone out whenever that someone wasn't them.)

"Okay, I think that Andy was done with you, and you're still sworn in, 
so it's Troy's turn to have a shot at you," Garret said.  "Troy, your
witness."

Troy, who had been leaning against the side of the pumpkin, grinned
lazily and moved himself to an erect position.  "Thank you, your
honor," he said, nodding to the official source of honor within the
rank and file of Pitt Elementary.

Now he clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace slowly back 
and forth across the opening of the stagecoach.  A frown entered his
expression and his brow furrowed as he said, "Well, Jason.  I bet
you're surprised that I didn't take issue with any of your testimony
yesterday.  Is that right?"

It was scarcely the question he had been expecting.  "Well," Jason
said, "not really.  Or, I mean, I guess I was.  A little."

"That's okay if you were surprised, man," said Troy.  "I mean, this
trial stuff is pretty heavy.  Still, though, you didn't have anything
to worry about, really--you were telling the truth, just like you said 
you would.  Well, Jason, I'm counting on you to keep on telling us the 
truth today.  Can I do that?"

Garret had his mouth open, ready to remind Troy that the witness had
been sworn in already, come on, for Christ's sake let's get /on/ with
it already, but before he could speak, Jason had already answered with 
a tentative, "Sure."

Troy smiled.  "That's great, Jason.  Okay, what do you say we start
really digging down into things now?"

He turned to Garret and said more softly, "Look, it's gonna look like
I'm way off-topic here for a while, man.  Just trust me that I have
good some shit in mind, okay?"

Garret hesitated before responding, reluctant to give permission for
any sort of digression.  The class was clearly becoming restless, with 
a few students eyeing the playground equipment enviously.  Well,
without whatever Troy had in mind, the trial was effectively over
anyway, so he didn't have much of a choice.

Deliberately picking his words so as to draw the stragglers in, he
replied in a low voice that he nevertheless knew everyone could still
hear, "Okay.  But if this turns out to be a bunch of bullshit, I'm
going to hold you in comtempt of court."

Troy nodded without paying much attention--like anybody would bother
to sit through another trial for him later on.  Garret was seriously
misjudging the attention span of the audience.  Besides, this was
Troy's moment.

"Jason," he said.  "I bet you've watched a whole bunch of court shows
on TV before, especially lately.  Am I right?"

"Well... sure," Jason said.  "With the trial and all."

"Did you ever hear of 'extenuating circumstances' in any of those
shows before, Jason?"

"I guess so.  I mean, yeah, I've heard of that."

"Could you tell us what it means, dude?"

"Um... it's like stuff that..."  Jason's hands grasped futilely at the 
air, searching for a concrete way to define a term that he understood
only subconciously through contextual clues.

"That's okay, Jason," Troy said.  "What it means is that sometimes
when somebody does something that everyone says is supposed to be
wrong, it's actually really okay because there was other stuff that
people didn't know about before.  So it's like, you wouldn't usually
do that, but because of this other shit, it was alright for you to do
that anyway.  Are you following me, bro?"

"Ye-eah..."

"So let me give you an example," Troy said.  "Let's say that you were
late for school, and you come in at, like, ten o'clock.  Mr. Foley
gets really pissed at you and you're going to get in big trouble.  Is
that fair, do you think?"

"Well, yeah.  You're not supposed to be late for school.  Everybody
knows that."  And heads bobbed all around the area of the courtroom;
they were following this line of questioning in their hands along with 
Jason, replying in their heads, subconsciously nodding, coming to
consensus.

"Sure.  Just like you say, man; you're not supposed to be late for
school.  But say that the reason you're late is that your mom was
driving you to school, and you guys got into an accident, and it took
two hours to get everything sorted out.  Do you think that it would be 
fair for Mr. Foley to be pissed off now?"

"No."

"Extenuating circumstances," Troy said.  "It depends on the
situation.  So what do you think, man--are we talking about the same
thing here?"

"Yeah, I think so."  Jason's brow was furrowed in confusion, but on
the whole that had to do with the situation rather than the question.

"Okay, so we're doing good so far here.  I just want to get this
absolutely straight, though.  What we're saying here is that sometimes 
there's a rule that somebody breaks, but they have a good reason for
it.  So the rule isn't absolute.  There are special cases."

Jason nodded his head vigorously, having finally managed to conceive
of a personally satisfying analogy.  "It's like when they kill
somebody, but it turns out to be in self-defense."

Troy's eyes shone with unexpressed laughter.  "Yeah, man, just like
that... but, shit, murder is pretty heavy stuff.  I'm thinking that
maybe we should make our next example a little bit closer to our
day-to-day life.  Is that alright with you?"

"Sure," Jason replied guilelessly.

"Okay, let's say that your friend has a brother.  Do you have to like
his brother, too?  I mean, we're supposing here that they get along
really well, and his brother seems like a nice guy and everything."

"Well, yeah, I guess so," Jason said.  "But it sounds like you'd want
to like him anyway, if he's such a good guy."

Troy nodded.  "Right--it's a case where you don't even need a rule to
cover the case.  His brother is a cool dude, so you'd probably get
along with him pretty well even if y'all weren't friends to start
with.  Shit, man, you're doing pretty good with all this.  You been
studying up on all this testimony stuff behind our backs?"

Jason, pleased with the implicit accusation of being devious in the
ways in justice, blushed slightly and replied, "No.  It's just common
sense."

"It's just common sense," Troy echoed.  "Okay, I'm going to change it
a little bit now, so listen carefully.  Now let's suppose that your
friend gets a long great with his brother, and they're great
friends--they tell each other secrets, go everywhere together, that
kind of shit.  But for some reason, you just don't like the guy very
much.  Do you let his brother hang around when you two are together?"

"Well, sure," said Jason.  "I mean, it's just not right to tell him to 
leave his brother home when they're friends, too."

"I agree," Troy said.  "But still, hanging out with the brother is
still something you don't really wanna do.  You're just putting up
with it because there's a rule that says that's what you're supposed
to do.  How's that grab you?  Pretty close?"

Jason shrugged.  "I guess.  But what the heck does this have to do
with--"

"Just be patient, man.  I'm getting there, I swear.  Now, let's add on 
another part: say that the brother thinks that you're the bomb.  I
mean, he just thinks that you're a great guy.  Does that change
anything for you?"

"It makes it a little easier.  You'd be making two people happy
instead of one, right?"

"That's right," Troy agreed.  "So we have that one settled too.  But
now let's say that your friend's brother--man, let's just say that
there's something just wrong with him.  In fact, let's say that he
picks his nose and eats it.  Do you still let him hang out with you?"

"No," said Jason definitively.

"Really?  Even if your friend thinks his brother is the shit?"

"Doesn't matter," Jason said.  "You just shouldn't have to put up with 
that kind of shit.  That's just gross."

"So you wouldn't hang out with his brother, whether they were good
friends with each other or not?  Even though we decided there's a rule 
that says you should?"

"Yeah," said Jason.  "It's one of those--what you said earlier."

"Extenuating circumstances?" Troy supplied.  "Okay, I can see that.
In fact, I'm agreeing with you exactly so far.  What we're saying here 
is that sometimes there's a situation in which you're supposed to like 
someone, but you don't really have to if they're gross.  Is that an
okay way to put things?"

"Yeah."

"Could you say that a little louder?  I just want to make sure that
David is getting all of this down."

At that point, David looked up, eager to deliver his assurance that of 
course he was getting all of it down, that come hell or high water,
this was one court reporter they could all count on.  But he soon saw
that no one was expecting any sort of response from him, so he
dejectedly shoved his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and went
back to his legal pad.

"Yeah," repeated Jason.

"Good.  Now let's change the situation a little bit.  Let's say that
you're Beverly, that Ralph is your friend, and you're the brother.
Did you get all of that?"

"I think so."  Hesitation was creeping into his voice again.

"Good.  So--Beverly is you; Ralph's the friend; you're the brother.
But instead of being brothers, you and Ralph are friends, just like
you were in real life, and both of you like Beverly.  We have a
situation here where Beverly's supposed to like you.  Is that right?"

Jason agreed a little too emphatically to come off as being
particularly suave.  "Yeah," he said with righteous indignation.
"She's supposed to like me."

Troy had resumed pacing back and forth across the entrance to the
pumpkin.  "But we agreed that you don't really have to like someone if 
they're gross.  Isn't that correct?"

"Yeah, but only if they're gross.  And I'm not gross."

Troy whirled around to face Jason, his eyes wide open and blazing with 
anger.  To any watching adult, the short youth would have been
hilarious, but to the students of Pitt Elementary, at this moment he
was the living spirit of social justice.

"But you /are/ gross, aren't you?" Troy demanded.

"No way, man!" cried Jason, offended to the core.  "I'm not gross!"

"But you yourself said that someone who picks their nose and then eats 
their boogers is really gross--too gross to hang out with," said
Troy.  "Which is it going to be?"

"But I don't pick my nose!"

"You don't?"

"No!"

"That's funny," said Troy.  "Because both Angie and Stan are ready to
testify that on several occasions they've seen you pop a big juicy
booger in your mouth when you're walking home from school."

Jason's face was contorted into a rictus of horror; never had he
thought that the trial could come to this, that his position in the
social hierarchy of the class could be threatened so grievously.

"Let me remind you that you promised you were going to tell the
truth.  You even said that Chad could beat the shit out of you if you
were lying."  Chad smiled gleefully at that, his pug nose catching the 
whiff of a righteous ass-kicking in the breeze.

"So," Troy said.  "Let me ask you this again.  Have you ever picked
your nose?"

Jason sighed, unable to avoid the truth and the inexorable grinding
force of juvenile justice.  "Yeah."

"And eaten it?  You've picked your nose and /eaten/ it, man?"  Troy
threw in a note of "say it ain't so" in the previous words to
underscore the gravity of Troy's offense to the standards of civilized 
twelve-year-old society.

Another sigh.  "Yeah."

"Jason?"  Troy leaned forward.  "Do you still pick your nose?"

Jason waited until the danger point before replying sulkily,
"Sometimes."

"So you're /gross/, Jason, isn't that right?" Troy said jubiliantly,
tasting victory and the sweetness of his kill.  He had Jason by the
nuts, and the whole class, wide-eyed and astonished, understood that
no one, Beverly included, could be expected to like a snot-eater, no
matter what the rules were.

"Yeah."  Jason's shoulders hunched as he reconciled himself to total
defeat and wished himself to be anywhere but inside that pumpkin.  "I
guess so."

But escape had already arrived for Jason just as he began to
contemplate ways to make himself invisible through sheer force of
will.  Unfortunately, it took the form of a furious Mr. Foley, who
informed the class that this time he had called them a full half-dozen 
times, and if this sort of snotty (no pun intended for the unfortunate 
witness) behavior kept up, there would be no class trip at the end of
the year.

But no threat can dishearten sixth-graders who have smelled blood, and 
it was with high hopes for further social carnage on the following
days that they filed back into Pitt Elementary.


4.

As luck would have it, this most recent session of the court had taken 
place on a Friday; thus, an entire weekend passed before the
justice-frenzied students could again assemble.  As much as the
extended recess grated on the hearts and souls of all right-thinking
sixth graders (or at least those who enjoyed seeing their peers called 
booger-eaters in front of the whole class), it did have salutary
effects on the progress of the trial.

First, had that latest session not had the good sense to position
itself on the boundary of the academic week, the simmering rage of
Mr. Foley would have put an end to all this legal tomfooley.  A
balding man in his late fifties with a reputation for fussiness and an 
abounding but badly expressed fondness for children, he must perferred 
for the class to occupy themselves with an organized sport instead of
whatever the hell was going on in that damn hideous orange
monstrosity.

Besides, if the class was playing kickball during recess, as it
certainly ought to be doing during spring, he would be the umpire, and 
this would allow him to further cement his chosen order for the class
through a carefully selected series of arbitrary calls and judgments.
(He might have been disturbed to know that a certain red-haired
student of his was also contemplating the value of arbitrary calls and 
judgments at that very moment.)

However, the weekend, as it usually did, had a moderating effect on
Mr. Foley.  He slept in late on Saturday, took his wife out to a nice
meal that evening, celebrated his masculinity by catching a movie with 
copious amounts of "go-boom" on Sunday afternoon, and retired to bed
that evening with the sentiment that, what the heck, it was spring,
and kids might as well get to do whatever the hell they wanted to
during recess.  Junior high would probably put an end to that for the
rest of their lives, anyway--so, what the heck indeed, as long as they 
got it through their heads that when he called them in, they had damn
well better come running.

The members of the class never knew how close Mr. Foley had come to
declaring an end to their adventure, though; in fact, the thought that 
their teacher had the power to unilaterally declare an end to the
procedings hadn't really occurred to any of them.  They concerned
themselves instead with the tumultuous issues in their personal lives
raised by the events of the previous three days.

Jason was understandably the most agitated child in the neighborhood
that weekend.  He had understood at the outset of the trial that there
would be a loss of social prestige connected with losing, but he had
never in a million years expected to be exposed as a debase consumer
of mucus, unfit for liking, and exempt from the affections of any
right-thinking girl on the basis of "extenuating circumstances".

Before going home that Friday, Andy had assured his worried client
that he would figure out some way to breathe life back into the
faltering case, but Jason had no confidence in his friend's ability to
downplay documented boogerphagy.  As a result, he spent the weekend
fretting over what popular mucal synonym would be used as a form of
personal address for him until his dying day.  "Snots" was his best
guess.

On the other hand, maybe Jason worried a little too much and thought
too little of the talents of his attorney.  Andy had found himself
getting increasingly interested in this legal thing over the course of 
the last three days, and as the weekend opened, he threw himself into
the task of finding the the weak spot in Troy's defense that would
allow him to vindicate his client and deliver to him the legally
obligatory like of Beverly.

After innumerable phone calls and personal conversations over the
course of a Saturday afternoon, he did indeed uncover the sort of
evidence he had been looking for, and so he felt no compunction about
arranging for a Sunday afternoon game of one-on-one with his friend
Troy.

Troy was hardly worried about the outcome of the trial at that
point--after all, he had done his homework on this one, and it had
paid off.  In fact, it was one of the first rhetorical efforts of his
life to date in which he hadn't had to develop the full speech while
waiting for an angry figure of authority to deal with him.  He was
enjoying this lawyer business one heck of a lot, but he didn't figure
that he had much to worry about from here on out, so it didn't take
much force of will to avoid the subject of the trial altogether when
he went to his friend Andy's house to shoot some hoops.

Garret, however, found himself in a situation of some discontent,
since the legal antics of Friday had brought home to him the sad truth 
that although the position of judge brought a modicum of authority,
the lawyers were the ones that everybody was all really watching.
Therefore, he spent most of the weekend trying to contrive ways in
which he, like Mr. Foley, could leverage his judicial position in
calculated ways.  His goal, in contrast to Mr. Foley's at least
well-intentioned onme of maximizing harmony and minimizing headaches,
was to keep the spotlight centered on the spiky red hair, where it
rightfully belonged.  But aside from swinging the stick, using Chad's
brawn as a deterrent to prevarication and coming up with a real doozy
of a speech for his final judgment, Garret wasn't sure what he could
do.  He felt cheated by his choice of occupation.

Beverly also felt cheated by her occupation, especially because she
hadn't had much hand in selecting it.  Ralph had been the one to
convince her that the trial was a good idea, but Ralph was also always 
jabbering on about adventure and romance and running around the world
looking at stuff and want he wanted to grow up to be and a thousand
other things that Beverly didn't particularly care about.  She did,
however, possess the convinction that it was a necessity for a
socially mobile twelve-year-old to be in possession of a boyfriend,
and the fact that her intended rode a nice ten-speed and took her to
movies without being too embarassing made Ralph a nice choice.  She
also had to admit that the notes he sent her were flattering in a nice 
way, even if they were pretty cheesy.

All that we can say about Ralph that weekend and do the youth justice
is that he would have been crushed to know the exact nature of
Beverly's feelings for him, especially if he knew that she had picked
him without any consideration for the social rules she was accused of
violating, and was only dimly aware that he and Jason had been
friends.  He had thoroughly convinced himself of the romantic notion
that not only had he bravely sacrificed his friendship with Jason for
the women he loved, but she was also courageously casting aside the
iron conventions of society in order to be with the man for whom her
heart burned.


5.

As had been just mentioned, Mr. Foley had mellowed sufficiently over
the course of the weekend so that the class did not lose their recess
privileges, and so the trial resumed at the customary time and place
on Monday.  Prior to recess, the class had actually been reluctant to
discuss the trial among themselves; the leval of social stigma that
Friday's events had attributed to the fairly common habit of nasal
spelunking had been frankly unnerving, and no one was quite sure what
would happen next.  Although everyone accepted that Troy had delivered
what promised to be a fatal blow on Friday, the nature of the trial to
date implied that such a lead might be tenuous.

The procedings were not opened by the standard swing of the stick
against the side of the pumpkin, however; Garret had in fact broken
his stick by accident while practicing on Sunday afternoon, and to
replace the beloved gavel had brought in a section of metal pipe from
his dad's plumbing supplies in the garage.

Now, brandishing the metal club, he swung it against the side of the
pumpkin and relished the feeling of the shell resonating around him.
Now the swing of the gavel was loud enough so that David dropped his
pencil and raised his hands to his ears with his brow furrowed in
pain, which was even more satisfying to the young tyrant.

"This court is again in session," he announced in triumph as his
classmates gaped at him and marvelled at the intensity of the sound
which he had produced.  "Okay, so on Friday Troy cross-examined
Jason.  Troy, are you done with him?  Boogerboy, I mean?"

Jason cringed in his seat within the pumpkin, hoping that this
appellation wouldn't follow him the rest of his days.  He had been
sure enough of the idea that he would be called 'Snots' that he hadn't 
even considered 'Boogerboy' as a viable possibility, which made the
epithet more dreadful to him.

But the careless way in which his classmates seemed to receive
Garret's words indicated that they hadn't taken the word as an
ordained christening so much as a natural description of Jason's role
within the universe at the moment.

In fact, Troy didn't even so much as look in his direction as he
approached the pumpkin and said, "No further questions, your honor.
In fact, given what we all heard on Friday, are there any objections
to just going ahead and dismissing the case?"

Andy had been waiting anxiously for this moment to jump in.  "Yeah, I
have an objection to that," he said.  "I have another witness to call, 
and her testimony is going to change the whole outcome of this thing."

Troy shot an accusatory glance at his friend and legal rival.  "You
didn't tell me any about other witness," he said.

Andy shrugged.  "It didn't come up, man.  Look, Gar--I mean, your
honor, can I call my witness or what?  I swear that it's relevant, and 
all that stuff."

Garret shrugged, but internally he approved heartily of this turn of
events.  He had grown to desire any circumstance that led to a
reversal of fortune for its positive effect on the interest that his
classmates held in the trial, and thus on his role as judge.  "Go
ahead," he said.  "Jason--you're dismissed.  Get outta here."

The young lawyer-athlete waited a suitable amount of time for the
disgraced witness to climb out of the pumpkin and ascend once more to
the yellow bench where Ralph was animatedly pretending to have his
entire hand lodged in his nose before continuing.  "Your honor," he
annouced.  "I call Sara to the stand."

His announcement caused a buzz among his classmates.  Sara, with her
long black hair and pound and a half of attitude, was inarguably known 
to be the smartest girl in the class.  But she didn't have a whole
heck of a lot of friends, and the ranks of those she /did/ have didn't 
include Beverly, Ralph, or Jason, so what the hell could she have to
do with this trial anyway?

But Garret had already granted permission, and so that class couldn't
do much besides bite their tongues and wonder as Sara marched to the
pumpkin with an expression of amused confidence on her face and took
her position within the pumpkin.  Without waiting for David to pose
the crucial question, she told him, "I promise to tell the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

David, who had a crush on Sarah to begin with, had this affection
elevated to a low earth orbit by this sensual display of
self-sufficiency and rugged individualism.  He resolved internally
that he would redouble his efforts to cut out the after-school
snacking and practice free throws and work on the best love poem ever
in an attempt to gain the affection of his clever vixen.

"Okay," said Andy.  "Um, please state your name for the record."

"Sara," she signed, impatient to get to the stupid point, already.
"Sara McKinley."

"Thanks, Sara.  Now, Sara, you've been out there every day, watching
the trial along with everyone else, right?"

"Yeah," said Sara.  "It mean, it's kind of juvenile, but it's still
really kind of interesting anyway."

Andy ignored the implicit slur on the value of his legal services and
the importance they played in the global scheme on things.  "So you
know how all the testimony has gone?"

"Well, yeah.  I'm not deaf, you know."

Garret was unable to abide this sort of insolence within his
courtroom.  "I suggest that you answer with a little bit more respect, 
young lady," he said with as much of an imperious tone as he could
hope to muster.

Sara eyed him scornfully.  "First of all, my birthday is a month
before yours, so don't you even call calling me 'young lady'.  Second, 
what the hell are you going to do to me?  Have Chad try to beat me up
if I don't play right?"

Garret's face flushed with embarassment and anger, David's reddened
with escalating love, and the class tittered with amusement to hear a
bit of comeuppance fall in the direction of the arrogant young judge.

"Just try to stick to answering the questions," Garret snapped,
consciously aware of his inability to compete in a verbal duel with
the likes of Sara McKinley.

Sara shrugged.  "Okay, I'll try."  Turning to Andy, she then added,
"So what's next?"

Andy had given himself over to good humor enough so that it was
actually difficult for him to recall his progresion through his
questioning.  Eventually he ascertained what his strategy had been and
continued, "In particular, you caught everything that Troy was saying
on Friday?"

"Yeah.  All the nonsense about 'extenuating circumstances'.  That was
pretty funny."

"It was kinda funny," agreed Andy.  "But this is still a serious trial
, so let's try to stay on-topic here."  (This was actually a jest
which elicited a fair number of giggles from the crowd, owing to the
number of times similar words had come out of Mr. Foley's mouth during 
the preceding year.)

"Now," Andy said, leaning against the pumpkin on one straightened arm,
"did you agree with all with the arguments on Friday?"

"You mean what Troy was saying, and his examples and everything?
Well, I guess that was okay as far as it went, but I don't really
think that he went far enough with it."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Well, he said that if there's a rule, and you break it, there's a
chance it might still be all right because of extenuating
circumstances.  And that I can go with.  But this is different from
that--this case is different, I mean."

"Gosh," mouthed the young legal ham.  Smiling at the jest at the
affectations of a previous, hopelessly unhip generation of children,
he continued, "So how is this case different?"

"Because the rule involves more than one person," Sara explained.
"Not that I really agree with the stupid rule here, but just think
about it.  Troy was saying that there might have been an extenuating
circumstance for what Beverly did, but maybe there could have been
some for Ralph or Jason, too."

"So what are you saying?  That these other things could cancel out and 
make the rule apply after all?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying," said Sara.  "Say that you tell your
friend that she can borrow your bike, and then you don't let her do it 
after all.  That breaks a rule.  But it turns out that she only wanted 
to borrow your bike so that she could go over to the house of a boy
you like, and she knows you like him.  So there's an extenuating
circumstance.  But then suppose that the actual reason you said no was 
that you didn't want to be friends with her any more."

"That would go in her favor," commented Andy.

"Right.  So they cancel out, or something like that.  Whichever way
you look at it, it becomes a 'who cares' kind of thing.  If you're
going to be fair about it, you probably have to say that you really
did break the rule by not letting her use your bike."

"Well, Sara," said Andy.  "That's kinda complicated, but I think I get 
what you're saying.  Still, though, I don't think I see what this has
to do with the trial going on now."

"I damn sure don't see what it has to do with /anything/," Troy
interjected with a trace of irritation.  "Your honor, this is just
getting stupid here.  It doesn't have anything to do with the
case--he's just trying to go through the same kind of thing that I did 
on Friday."

"Is this going anywhere?" asked Garret suspiciously.

Sara made a loud groaning sound with rich undertones of contempt for
the testosterone-poisoned antics of the opposite gender.  "If you just 
let me /talk/ instead of going through this stupid questioning thing,
we'd have gotten to the point already.

"Look, just /pretend/ that Andy is asking me all the questions, and
here's what I'm going to say, okay?  I'm here to testify that it
doesn't matter if Jason is gross if turns out to be that he's not the
only one that's gross, and he isn't the only one that's gross.
Beverly is gross too, because I know for a fact that at least two
times this year she's farted in class bad enough to make me want to
throw up, and I should know, because I sit next to her.

"There, are you happy?  Jason is a nose-picker, but she farts all the
time, and they cancel each other out, so your stupid rule about who
has to like whom still applies.  End of story, end of my
testimony--can I /go/ now?"

But as soon as she had launched into the personal request at the end,
everyone in the class had stopped listening to her.  There were far
more important things to worry about than whether Sara cared to
continue her testomony.  She had made a horrific accusation against
one of their own, one that promised to be even more damaging than the
charges already levelled against Jason, should it turn out to true.

That was the real question, though, wasn't it?  Jason had sealed his
fate by openly admitting (though under duress) that he had partaken of 
the forbidden fruit of the nose, but Beverly hadn't made any much
admission yet.  True, Sara had sat next to Beverly for most of this
year and was certainly in a position to know, but how much could
anyone be expected to trust the world of a brain, anyway?  Besides,
there was a larger, more difficult to identify, doubt that lingered in 
the minds of many members of the class--something that seemed subtly
wrong about Sara's testimony that they couldn't quite put their
fingers on.

"Holy shit," said Garret, having been blindsided by the torrent of
testimony that had poured into his courtroom and into the permanent
record in absence of any judicial control.  Having no idea of how to
deal with the tempestuous witness sitting across from him in the
stagecoach, he craned his head out the door on Troy's side of the
pumpkin and called out, "Beverly, is that true?"

"Is what true?" Beverly asked sulkily over crossed arms, her voice
carrying clearly the news that Sara had better not expect attention to 
even the most minute social nicety from her, here on out to both of
their dying days.

"Did you fart in class?" Garret asked.  "Like Sara says?"

"Don't answer that, Beverly!" shouted Troy, his voice colored with
alarm.  Speaking hurriedly before Garret could begin to berate him for 
the interruption, he added, "Your honor, in light of recent events, I
move that the court take an early recess today.  I, um, need time to
confer with my clients and figure out what the fuck we're going to do
about this."

The class merely stood in silence.  Although that particular mix of
phonemes had entered their vocabulary already at points in the past
that varied from individual to individual, no one was yet fully
accustomed to hearing that word spoken at normal speaking volume in
public between the hours of nine and three.  The word /fuck/, in these 
tender pre-teen years, was still the province of slumber parties,
dirty jokes, and lunchtime insult fights, and was indeed quite common
in all of those arenas.  However, it still was not so common to hear
it used in such a natural, fluid, and, well, adult, manner."

By his outburst, Troy had managed both to elevated his status in the
eyes of his classmates by several measures and let them know that not
only hadn't he been expecting the contents of Sara's testimony, but it 
had also rattled his bejeezus out of him.  There hung in the balance
all of last week's carefully prepared testimony, and indeed the whole
of his clients' case.

When he received no immediate response from the equally flustered
judge, Troy quickly added, "Besides, I think that maybe most of us
could use some regular recess time.  You know, a little break from
this shit.  Is that okay with you, Andy?"

The direct address started Andy, who had become spellbound during the
impassioned rant of Sara, despite having known the important points of 
the content a couple of days in advance.  The power of such a
dangerous accusation seemed so much greater when it was spoken in
front of everyone and immediately transcribed onto a legal pad.  "Um," 
he said, and soon after followed it up with another, "Um."

Garret glared at him, trying to urge acquiesence to Troy's suggestion
and share the information that he didn't really know what the hell to
do now, either.

"S-sure," said Andy finally.  "Let's take a break."

Troy narrowed his eyes.  "I'm gonna want to cross-examine her
tomorrow."

"Whatever," replied Sara, who was already climbing out of the pumpkin
on Andy's side.  "That's tomorrow.  I'm tired of this nonsense right
now."

Garret shrugged and gave the pipe a half-hearted tap against the side
of the courtroom wall, and the class enjoyed respite from the
pressures of the modern legal system for the ten minutes they had
remaining in that day's recess.  Slides were slid on, merry-go-rounds
were rotated at only marginally safe velocities, and balls were kicked 
(not in the physical sense; though Jason might have argued that he had 
been struck in the emotional balls during the previous week).

The early suspension of further procedings also meant that for once,
the class was prepared to come running when Mr. Foley called a halt to 
the festivities, and so there existed no official impediment to
continuing the trial for yet another day.

And quite a day it would turn out to be tomorrow.


6.

Although the trial hadn't affected the friendship between Troy and
Andy before this point, that night their usual phone call in which
they excghanged views on the state of the world and the estimated
contents of various classmates' training bras did not take place.
Andy, once he had recovered from the shock of losing control of his
witness (a failure for which he also expected reprisal from Garret),
had become steadily more pissed at Troy over the course of the
afternoon for having managed to get a recess declared vbefore he had a 
chance to strike the death blow.

And Troy, in his turn, regarded his friend as somewhat of a traitor
for having failed to alert him that Sara was coming to testify, and
especially for not having shared the content of that testimony.  Over
the course of that evening, Troy actually managed to hone that
resentment to quite a fine edge.  He theorized that if Andy had just
come clean with him earlier, then they could have planned the course
of the testimony together and played it for better effect.

Now, Garret was pissed off, which would make him unpredictable, and
neither one of them could reasonably expect to know how the trial was
going to end.  Well, if Andy wanted to play rough, he would get
it--the trial from here on out would be serious business.  A budding
legal reputation was on the line.

And so it was with a sense of new and ruthless competition that Troy
and Andy took their places on opposite sides of the pumpkin at the
beginning of recess the next day.  Both of them were studying Garret
suspiciously, hoping that he would not open the procedings in a way
that favored the other in any way.

As it turned out, however, the initial task that faced Garret today
was not how to deal with the conclusion of the previous day's
testimony, but rather, how to get this day's started.  Sara had not
entered the pumpkin when the class had gathered around the pumpkin;
instead, she stood defiantly behind Andy, her arms crossed in front of 
her and a pouting expression on her face.

"You haven't been dismissed yet," said Garret when he realized that
Sara had indeed arrived in the park and knew full well that it was
time for the trial to start again, but was refusing to take the
stand.  "You have to keep coming back to the witness stand until
you're dismissed."

"I don't have to do anything," Sara responded.  "Yesterday was bad
enough.  I don't see what else you could have to ask me."

"I don't know either," said Garret.  "But Troy gets the chance to
cross-examine you.  That's how it works.  You should know that."

"And /you/ should know that the whole thing is a stupid and immature
way to get attention," Sara said.  "In fact--"

David hurriedly interrupted her by tentatively raising his hand and
saying, "Pardon me, your honor, but does this count as testimony?
I--I mean, I just want to know if I should be writing this down."

But the damage that Sara had intended to cause with her words had
already been done; Garret had been struck directly in the ego, and his 
reaction was the emergence of a desperate need to assert himself as
the leader of this motley crew.  Maybe Sara had hoped that her
rebellion could extinguish this courtroom, but if so, she was
mistakened.  Garret's identity now depended on these procedings moving 
along to their legal conclusion, and nothing Sara could say or do
could sway him from this obsession.

"Just get the hell in the courtroom," Garret snapped, his face red
with anger.  "Stop trying to pretend like you're better than the rest
of us just because you know a lot of stupid words.  You're not
special, so just shut up and take your seat."

Sara had colored almost equally in response, but she realized that
Garret had the better of her in this situation.  The accusation of
conceit was impossible to defend oneself against without worsening the
situation, and in every school across America, there is no swifter
social death than to be caufght considering oneself better than one's
peers.  (Assuming, of course, that one does not number the variety of
social outcasts among one's peers--of course everyone is better than
the misfits.)  Therefore, Sara just sighed angrily, puffed out her
lower lip to blow air up at her bangs, and climbed into the pumpkin.

"Don't write down the words for that part," Garret told David.  "Just
make a note of the fact that the judge was forced to repremand the
witness."

Unbeknownst to Garret, however, no note to that effect ever entered
the official transcript.  David was not paying the slightest bit of
attention to Garret at that moment, because Sara had accidentally
brushed his knee with her own as she climbed into the pumpkin.  Lost
in ecstasy at the very thought of physical contact with a goddess made 
flesh, David had indeed made no notation so far today besides a long,
unintentional line that ran from the center of the legal pad, off the
edge, and onto the leg of his shorts.

Avoiding the icy glare of Sara that would convey the uncomfortable
information that she knew exactly what he was up to, Garret turned his 
head to the side.  "Your witness, Troy."

"Thank you, your honor," Troy said slowly and clearly, wishing to
emphasize the fact that his gratitude at being able to question the
witness was far greater than any sentiment the charlatan across the
way could possibly muster.

"Miss McKinley," Troy said.  "May I call you Miss McKinley?"

"You can call me whatever you want to," said Sara.  "It's not like
Garret's going to stop you, and he's running the show, right?"

"Ah--"  Troy cleared his throat.  "All argument aside, Miss McKinley,
let's just proceed with the testimony."

"Yes, let's.  Are you making this up as you go along?"

Of course he was just making this up as he went along--how the heck
did this stupid girl think the legal process worked, anyway?--but Troy 
still became incensed by the willful tone of Sara's comment.  "Damn
it, just answer the questions!"

"Sure.  What's the question?"

An idea began to form in Troy's mind.  He knew that if he began to
explore the concept slowly, it would take form and become his ally in
the end; that was the nature of his rhetorical gift.  He just had to
make this take long enough so that he could figure out exactly what it 
was that his mind had cooked up for him this time.

"Yesterday, Miss McKinley," he said, "didn't you promise to tell the
truth and nothing but the truth?"

"That's right, I did.  I'm sorry that I didn't give David the chance
to go through the whole procedure, because he's a nice guy, but I did
say it anyway."

"And have you told us the whole truth, Miss McKinley?"

"Yes, I did," Sara retorted.  "And don't think that I particularly
wanted to, either.  I mean, you all know that Beverly and I aren't
exactly great friends, but I'd still rather not have to tell everybody 
that she farted.  Andy asked me to testify as a personal favor."

"I see," Troy hedged.  "So everything you said was the truth?"

"Yes," she groaned.  "Like I just now said, it was all true."

The once-nebulous strategy was beginning to materialize in Troy's mind
now, and he had the premonition that it would be a masterstroke.  "But 
how can we be so sure of that?  Don't people lie sometimes?"

"I'm /not/ a liar," Sara said.  "And if you don't believe me, you can
ask anybody else who was sitting near me.  Beverly farted."

"But all of them could lie also," Troy said.  "Isn't that right?"

"What?"  Sara screwed her eyes up in disbelief at the direction the
questions had taken.  "Okay, sure.  It's all just a big conspiracy and 
everybody got together and decided to pretend that Beverly cut one.
I'm their leader.  I'm just doing it to be mean."

"Behave yourself," growled Garret.  It was a classic Mr. Foley line,
and the class tittered nervously, anxious to dispell some of the cloud 
of hostility that had begun to descend onto the playground.

"Just answer yes or no, Miss McKinlewy--is it possible for everybody
to lie?" Troy asked.

"Well, /duh/.  Of course, everybody /could/ lie.  But it's stupid to
think that just because everybody /could/--"

But Sara was silenced by Troy's raised hand.  "Thank you, Miss
McKinley; you've already answered the question.  Now, let me ask you
something else.  Are you good at science?"

Andy, who had been chewing his thumbnail down to the quick while
alternating between intense anger at his friend and a panicky
desperation at the direction of today's procedings, finally saw a way
to make his voice heard.  "Objection, your honor!" he shouted.  "What
does this have to do with anything?"

"I'm almost there," said Troy, forgetting to make his form of address
sufficiently respectful to the red-header authority.  Compounding his
transgression but failing to wait for any sort of judgment from
Garret, he continued.  "Just answer the question--are you good at
science?"

Seeing that Garret, for whatever reason known only to him, had decided 
to allow Troy to keep on going, Sara answered, "I guess I'm okay at
it."

"Then, tell me," said Troy.  "Do you think that science is more
reliable than testimony?  I mean, they do all that stuff with DNA
now.  That's pretty solid stuff, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Sara suspiciously.  "It's not wrong very often."

"It's not wrong very often," Troy repeated.  "Science isn't wrong very 
often, but we both know that people can lie pretty easy.  Sounds like
it would be good for us to have a way to prove all of this
scientifically."

Troy's point had managed to elude Sara completely, but she was making
the mistake of assuming that the purpose of the trial at this point
was actually to render the most fair verdict under the circumstances.
By this time, Troy had no such goal in mind, and he didn't
particularly give three whiffs of a shit about either of his
opponents.  He did, however, want to win the case, and he stdood
impassively as Sara asked, "What the hell are you /talking/ about?"

"I'm talking about science, Miss McKinley.  Don't you think that if
there's a scientific fact that can resolve this dispute, we ought to
trust it?"

"What scientific fact?  What /dispute/?  Look, I said that Beverly
ripped one, and I don't hear anybody out there telling me it's not
true, except for Beverly, and it's not like she's going to stand up
and say, 'Oops, yeah, you're right, I farted.'"

While it is true that Beverly did not stand up and echo those
particular words, she had slumped down even father in the wooden bench 
on the outside of the pumpkin and mutter, "Bitch," loudly enough for a 
fair proportion of the class to hear.  (The rest of the class, of
course, heard this comment repeated by their closer peers within
seconds, so Beverly's volume was irrelevant.)

"But science says that you're lying," said Troy.  "Your honor,
opposing counsel, my fellow classmates, I put it to you as a
scientific fact that girls cannot fart.

"Girls cannot fart," he repeated, "and so all of Sara's testimony is
for shit.  There's nothing left to do but acquit my clients now--we've 
already seen that Jason is a goddamn nosepicker, and nobody has to
like him if they don't want to."

The class merely stood there and gaped at him, Garret, Andy, and
plaintiff and defendants included.  Troy had expressed in so many
words the vague apprehension that many of them (all male) had
experienced yesterday--the suspicion that Sara's testimony justd
couldn't be true because farting just wasn't something that girls
did.  Or so the males were thinking; the girls were reacting with
pleased shock that their years of hushed conspiracy had paid off to
the point that Troy was willing to believe them physiologically
incapable of passing gas.

Every male sat or stood and mentally searched their past experiences
for a single instance of feminine flatulence.  Had there ever been a
time when they'd known a girl to fart, even once?  Their classmates,
their teachers, heck, even their mothers?  Way back in their toddling
years, had their mothers ever forgotten themselves and let that
familiar ripping sound emit from their cheeks?  Not a one of them
could fasten their minds around a memory, and Andy was a scant moment
away from embarassedly conceding the trial to Troy and beginning to
work on ways to repair their damaged friendship.

But Sara broke the silence before Andy could take the trial to such a
quick and merciful conclusion.  "You are /so/ full of shit.  Girls can 
too fart.  Jesus, everybody farts.  It's just that not everybody does
it in the middle of class."

Every eye, rounded with surprise, was fixated directly on Sara.  Anger 
began to rise in the girls of the class as they realized that Sara's
subsequent words might betray the very basis of the idea that Troy had 
suggested was scientific fact.  Clearly, the well-being and quality of 
life for the entire gender was elevated by having the boys believe
that girls had no intestinal gas; couldn't Sara see that, for crying
out loud?  This was clearly a time for truth to take a back seat to
sexual politics, for the good of all concerned.

"What... did you say?" asked Garret.  He was fairly certain that Troy
was correct, but it didn't particularly matter to him one way or the
other.  What he did know was that this uppity bitch sitting across
from him had spoken to him in a way that no one else in the class had
ever dared to (though this had much to do with his friendship with
Chad).

Even worse, she had done so at a point when he was in the spotlight,
ready to ride the crest of authority into junior high school, where he 
would naturally become the president of the class and so on through
graduation.  He was the leader here, damn it, and Sara's lack of
respect for his position caused him to hate her more passionately than 
he had ever bothered to hate anyone before.

"Look," said Sara.  "Everybody farts.  Everybody has an asshole,
right?  So everybody farts.  This whole thing about girls not doing it 
is just because we want you to think that boys are a lot grosser than
us.  Which you are, but that's because you do it all the time, as loud 
as you can."

If Sara had thought that speaking the truth about the situation would
help to soothe flared tempers or even go a little way toward resolving 
the case, she was sadly mistaken.  Instead, the entirety of the sixth
grade class of Pitt Elementary--save David, who had always assumed
that girls must fart, too, and Ralph, who didn't believe her--was
ready to throw her to the dogs.  The girls were livid with anger
because Sara had proved herself a traitor to her own gender; the boys
were consumed with disgust at having had one of their most cherised
illusions shattered.

Troy wasn't really so much angry as panicked, however.  For just about 
the first time ever, one of his persuasive arguments had backfired,
and he could not see any way to recover the situation.  "Um," he
stated valiantly.  "Um... um..."  He looked pleadingly at Garret, as
if to say, "Your honor--you're the honor here.  Fix this!"

Garret caught that look and interpreted it correctly, and somehow this 
finally freed him from any sense of obligation that he oughtn't take
complete and absolute control over the procedings.  Seeing the way
clear to cause Sara the maximum possible amount of social pain, he
swang the metal pipe against the side of the pumpkin hard enough so
that students in the other classes inside the school turned to stare
enviously in the direction of the park, wishing they could be sixth
graders, too.  He had everyone's attention almost immediately, but he
swang the pipe again anyway to emphasize that this attention was in no 
way optional.

"We're going to settle this once and for all," Garret said.  "And
here's how it's going to be.  This afternoon when Mr. Foley sends us
out for our bathroom break, me and Sara and Chad and some other
witness from the girls--Tammy, how about you--are going to go to the
kindergartners' bathroom.  And Sara is going to have to prove whether
she's telling us the truth or not."

"What?!"  Sara's outcry was a blend of exasperation and disgust mixed
with a quickly escalating quantity of terror.

"If she's telling the truth, she's gonna fart.  If she can't fart,
then she must be a liar.  And what I say is, if she turns out to be a
liar, then nobody should be allowed to talk to her for the rest of the 
year."

"And what if she's telling the truth?" asked Andy.

"If she's telling the truth, then Troy wins the case," Garret
declared.  "This shit has been going on for too long, if you ask me.
Beverly will just have to get over it and start liking Jason if Sara
turns out to be right."

"But what if we get caught in there?" asked Tammy fearfully.

"There's only morning kindergarten this semester," said Garret.  "So
there's no way that we can get caught."

Sara was looking out among her classmates, searching for some glimmer
of sympathy, some indication that there was a single soul among her
peers who would put an end to this travesty of justice.  But David and 
Ralph were the only two who did not consider Garret's idea a capital
suggestion, and they both knew better from hard experience that it was 
suicidal to oppose Garret when Chad was involved.  This lack of
support was chillingly confirmed when Kara asked, "Is she going to
have to pull her pants down?"

Garret considered this question briefly and decided that although he
did have full control of the class at the moment, he might lose
critical support if he indulged his desire on this particular issue.
"No," he said.  "As long as we can hear it."

"Or smell it," Chad said.  These were his first words of the trial,
and they hoevered in the air along with his immediately following
moronic laughter for several moments.

But then there was Sara again, trying one more time to plead her
case.  "Forget it!  This is completely humiliating.  There is no way
that you can honestly expect me to /do/ something like this.

She was wrong.  The class most certainly did expect this of her by
this point, and his words were meant with stony silence.

"You're just doing this to get back at me," she pleaded.

She was right.  But no one in her opposition felt that it was uncalled 
for to them to indulge their revenge in whatever way they saw fit, and 
at this point in time they were all seeing fit in the same way as
Garret.  Again, only silence greeted Sara's words.

Sara opened her mouth again to continue her defense, but before she
could come up with the appropriate words, she realized that her
situation had become hopeless, and she burst into tears.  As Sara
sobbed into her hands, the class looked about a little bit nervously,
but this anxiety turned into foul amusement when Beverly clearly and
distinctly hissed again, "Bitch."

Then someone noticed that Mr. Foley was standing at the park entrance
and alerted everyone else to this news, and so the class filed slowly
back into the school.  Sara walked behind everyone else, dejected and
resigned to her fate, trying to stifle the flow of tears before
Mr. Foley saw and the magintude of her problems with her peers was
magnified tenfold.

Yet Sara's was not the only moist face as they trudged along behind
Mr. Foley.  A single tear traced down the rounded cheek of David, who
could not bear to see his beloved Sara mistreated and who was praying
devoutly that he would not be required to participate in that
afternoon's plan.

A tear was also shining on the face of Ralph, who had just been
shocked into the realization that his classmates had willfully
committed themselves to a course of cruelty.  He had imagined his
friends to be comrades in the dashing and glorious adventure of life;
now he was beginning to learn the harsh truth that inside of his jolly 
companions there lurked a considerable amount of petty meanness.

But he did not speak up; nor did David.


7.

As it turned out, Tammy did not accompany Garret, Chad, and Sara to
the fateful demonstration.  The rest of the girls had taken her aside
and advised her not to go in the hopes that in the absence of another
female presence, the examination would become even more invasive and
traumatic.  Tammy was all too willing to comply with their wishes;
although she counted herself among Sara's friends, she was not quite
loyal enough to risk social annihilation.

But when Garret, Chad, and Sara rejoined the class after the bathroom
break, none of them would say a single word.  Sara's eyes blazed with
fury, and they could tell that she had been crying again, but no one
had the courage to ask her what had happened.  Chad was walking a bit
strangely, and that provoked some curiousity, but it was a certainty
that no one but Garret could have the gumption to question the silent
enforcer.

And Garret wasn't talking, either.  With a grim expression on his
face, he informed the two junior attroneys that nothing would be
revealed until the next day at recess.  Andy and Troy both begged for
a hint about what had transpired, but Garret refused all such requests 
and would not even initiate a conversation with anyone else.

Therefore, by the time the class filed out to enter the park during
recess the next day, the level of suspense had reached an almost
painful extreme in every member of the class.  All of them were
quietly horrified that their official court had gotten away with
ordering and carrying out an examination of this nature, and they were 
desperate to find out if they really did hold this collective power.
If they could force one of their own to reveal the behavior of her
anus, what more could they accomplish?

Garret took his seat within the pumpkin first, and David and Sara both 
climbed in next without having to be told.  Ralph, Jason, and Beverly
did not bother to climb onto the splintery benches, however; they
sensed that the danger of their testifying any more had passed, and it 
was imperitive that they witness all of the procedings personally.
Today, most likely, a verdict would be rendered.

Garret bashed the side of the pumpkin with his precious length of
pipe, and the class fell completely silent within a fraction of a
second this time.  Garret studied each one of his classmates in turn,
his eyes glittering with a fierce passion that could only be caused by
a successful struggle for power.  He consciously avoided the steady
and withering gaze of Sara, however, and, noisily clearing his throat, 
he began to speak.

"I know that all of you want to know exactly what happened yesterday
afternoon, and don't worry--I'm going to tell you.  But before I get
into this story, I've got to give you a warning.

"We started this court because we were worried that there wasn't
enough respect being paid to the way you're supposed to act.  Well,
now I'm worried that maybe we were a little bit too late.  It's worse
than just whether Beverly didn't follow the rules.  It's about whether 
we can allow someone like this /bitch/ here to spit on the rules the
keep everything running.

"I don't know about the rest of you," Garret said, "but I think that
things are usually pretty good.  I want things to keep on going pretty 
good.  But that can't happen as long as we have some people thinking
that they're above the rules and that they can just ignore what the
rest of us think."

The hatred concentrated in Sara's gaze on Garret by this point had
intensified enough so that the students who could see it glanced away
and studied the ground instead.  But most of the class was nodding
slowly, agreeing that only through strict attention to social
structure could they hope to maintain their way of life on through
that mysterious and fearsome place called junior high school.  Ralph,
on the other hand, was examining the faces of his classmates, as if he
was pondering what ideas could possibly be ratting around in their
skulls at this moment and wondering how it could be that his did not
seem to match.

"Here's what happened yesterday," Garret said.  "We went into the
kindergarten bathroom and told Sara that she had to try to fart now.
But she just stood there, and we couldn't tell what the hell was up.
You know, whether she was even trying or not.

"So I went ahead and asked her.  All I said was, 'Well, are you going
to fart?'  And then she called me a fucker--"  (gasp from the
audience)  "--and said that she wasn't going to do a damn thing that I 
said.  She told me to go to hell, and she told all of /you/ to go to
hell, too."

Garret paused for effect then as the class slowly digested the
information that not only had Sara dared to defy their will as
expressed through the orders of Garret, but had also struck at them
directly.  She had told them that their desire did not count for
anything, that she had no responsibility as a member of the class.

"Oh, go on," snapped Sara.  "Please, tell them what happened next."

"You be quiet," ordered Garret.  "It's not a good idea for you to be
acting like this right now."

Addressing the class again, he continued, "At this point, Chad and I
weren't actually sure what to do.  I mean, we had a responsibility to
make sure that what the court says gets carried out, because that's
really what /you/ say.  We didn't want to let any of you down.

"So we decided that maybe if Sara wouldn't agree to at least try to
fart and settle this issue, we would have to try to force one out of
her.  You know, like a hostile witness."

"Stop the bullshit around all this," Sara said.  "You had Chad try to
pull my pants down, you asshole."

"I authorized Chad, as a deputy of the court, to try to create a
situation in which you would be more likely to provide us with
evidence," Garret said, his jaw set and firm.  "And you responded by
striking him in the balls."

"Ha!" retorted Sara.  "I retaliated.  That moron even popped the
button off my jeans when he was trying to do it."

"He was acting under the authority of the class when you did that to
him," Garret said.  "You had no right top do what you did.  In fact,
it was reckless and dangerous."  (Without realizing it, Garret had
fallen almost directly into the speech pattern of Mr. Foley--but the
class didn't notice either.)  "Don't you know that it's possible to
kill a guy by doing that?"

"Oh, please."  Sara folded her arms in front of her and leaned back
against the wall of the pumpkin.

The class was viewing this spectacle in a state of collective shock.
They had already been uncertain that they held the group authority to
sniff out a fart; now Garret was telling them that they had the power
to examine any emission directly at the source, as it were.  The
thought of legal depantsing was deeply disturbing, yet maybe this
escalation of seriousness was a natural consequence of their becoming
more adult.  Besides, the nature of their will was secondary to the
fact that it had been violated.  And rebellion that was fierce enough
to strike at the unprotected testicles of Chad--that was dangerous
rebellion, indeed.

"So everybody listen up," Garret said.  "I'm going to go ahead and
issue the verdict now.  First, I do what to thank the both of you,
Andy and Troy.  You did a great job representing your clients, and
none of this mess is your faults.  David, I haven't seen the record
yet, but I guess that you must have done an okay job, too.  At least
you've been writing a lot of shit down.

"Okay, now the verdict.  Jason, Ralph, Beverly--I'm going to do your
part last.  Sorry about that, but Sara seems to think she's so
important, so I'm going to deal with her first.

"We can't let this go on.  When we get to junior high, we're going to
be mixed up with kids from four other elementary schools.  We don't
stand a chance unless we stick together, and we don't stand a chance
of sticking together unless we can all agree on things.  And there's
not much chance of that happening if some of us won't even /try/ to
agree.

"Sara, I warned you yesterday that unless you cooperated with the
class, no one was going to talk to you for the rest of the year.
Well, you should have thought about that before you did to Chad what
you did.  So my verdict--the verdict of /all/ of us--is that you're
not a member of this class any more.  Nobody is going to talk to you
from here on out.  You're not allowed to have any friends, unless you
want to get all friendly with the fifth graders or something.

"Sara McKinley, you're banned."  He spoke the final word in as
dreadful a tone as he could conjure up, and it came out with exactly
the mixture of utter finality the indisputability that he had been
aimed for.  The will of the court was starkly clear.

Sara stared at her classmates with disbelief, but whenever she met the 
gaze of one of the boys or girls she had been sitting among for years, 
they would look away, perhaps a trifle uncertain but still willing to
conform to the judgment that had just been rendered.  Even one-time
friends such as Tammy looked away apprehensively as if afraid that
even eye contact would be construed as betrayal of the court's order.
Only Ralph did not avert his eyes, but he did not look sympathetic so
much as terribly, terribly confused by this events.

Garret was ready to begin speaking again, but Sara cut him off by
saying, "I can't believe you're actually doing this."

He shot her a dangerous glance and again opened his mouth to talk, but 
again she pierced the silence first.  "Who the hell do you think--"

"Miss McKinley," said Garret.  "You no longer have the right to
address this court.  You don't have the right to talk to any of us
any more.  In fact, why are you still in this courtroom?  Chad, will
you please escort--"

"Oh, just shut the hell up!" Sara shouted, her eyes screwed up with
tears emerging at the edges.  "Just shut the hell up!"

Garret struck the side of the pumpkin with his length of pipe.
Shouting above the resonant metallic clang, he said, "You are out of
order!"

"Goddamn!" cried Sara.  "Just shut up shut up shutup--"

Again he struck the side of the pumpkin and barked, "You will behave
yourself, Miss McKinley."  Again he pulled his arm back to swing the
makeshift gavel against the orange wall.

But before this swing could take place, Sara grabbed his arm by the
wrist, pried the pipe from his grasp, and hurled it outside the
courtroom.  Several onlookers had to dive out of the way of the
spinning metal cylinder to avoid being hit.

"Garret Wayne, you are the meanest, most despicable piece of living
shit that I have ever met in my entire /life/!  What the fuck do you
think you're doing here, anyway?  You think thaty you're just doing
what the class wants you to do?  That's /bullshit/," she howled.  Her
necks bulging with tendons and her voice choked with tears, she
repeated to the class, "/Bullshit/."

"He's just doing what he wants to do and making you think that it's
all your idea.  Who cares whether Beverly likes Jason or Ralph?  Who
the fuck /cares/ besides Beverly, Jason, and Ralph?  How is it any of
your business, anyway?"

"The rules," protested David, whose world view was beginning to
crumble.

"/Fuck/ the rules," screamed Sara.  "Fuck all of the rules to hell and 
back.  Why can't any of you just think for yourselves?  Did anybody
here actually consider that maybe Beverly and Ralph might be in live
with each other and that's what really matters?  It's not whether
she's supposed to like Jason or not, it's who she /cares/ about.

"You know, I /liked/ most of you.  I know I don't have a lot of
friends, but that doesn't mean that I didn't /want/ to be friends with 
all of you.  But you don't care.  About everything.  You don't give a
shit about whether Ralph and Beverly really like each other, you don't 
give a shit about whether you all pick your noses or fart too, and you 
don't give a shit about me.

"So I'm not one of you any more?  Fine!  That's great!  That's just
fucking great!  Because I don't want to talk to any of you
ever. fucking. again."

And at the conclusion of those words, Sara launched herself out the
door of the pumpkin and began to run to the cover of the trees and the 
picnic shelter, her face buried in her hands and her shoulders heaving 
with tears.

The class just stood there, uncertain as to whether they had actually
caused the events that had just transpired to happen.  Never before
had any of them witnessed an outburst of such ferocity, a tirade of
such anger, so pregant with profanity and unmitigated contempt.  And
yet what mostd of them felt in reaction was not remorse, but rather a
sense of dismay that this evil force had been living among them for so 
long without their knowledge.

The silence held until Garret broke the quiet by saying, "Well, we're
not done yet.  Somebody give me my gavel."

Ralph bent down to pick up the requested length of pipe.  But instead
of returning it to Garret immediately, he addressed his one-time
partner in crime, Beverly.

"Beverly, do you like me?" he asked, swallowing hard after the
conclusion of the question in an effort to conceal the magnitude of
the emotions swimming around inside of him.

"What are you talking about?" said Beverly.  "Of course I like you.
Like, I already told you that.  I went to the movies with you."  But
she did not move to approach Ralph.

"I mean, do you /like/ me?"  Breathing deeply, he summoned the courage 
to use the forbidden synonym for /like/ that Sara had uttered moments
before.  "Do you love me?"

Beverly appeared to be both distressed and disgusted.  "We're in sixth 
grade," she said.

The meaning behind those words was clear enough for Ralph.  His
shoulders slumping under the weight of her statement, he said, "That's 
what I thought."  Then he flang the metal pipe farther back among the
trees, away from the class, the pumpkin, and the waiting judge.

"I'm going with Sara," Ralph said, and then he turned and walked
slowly away from the class in the direction of the shelter house.


8.

The moments following the departure of Ralph can only be described as
anticlimactic.  In the absence of one of the defendants and in light
of the dissolution of the very relationship that was under
investigation, Garret was no longer able to render a verdict.  All
that he could do was to say to the class, "What I said about Sara goes 
for Ralph too," and climb out of the pumpkin.

His classmates, aware that Garret's exit indicated the conclusion of
the trial, wandered off in various directions to use the playground
equipment for the rest of recess, anxious to relieve their vague
distress through physical activity.  Even Andy and Troy left with
their arms on each other's shoulders, and soon no one was left
standing in the vicinity of the empty courtroom except for Jason and
Beverly.

Looking hesitantly and shyly at Beverly, Jason said, "Um... Beverly?
I mean...  Well, since Ralph is gone now, do you think that maybe you
and me...?"

Beverly looked at him scornfully.  "Nosepicker!" she snapped and
wandered off to join her friends standing by the jungle gym.

"Farter!" Jason shouted out and walked off to the basketball courts,
leaving the unlearned lesson hanging in the springtime air for others
to grasp.

			T H E   E N D