Beau Stevens woke to a flood of golden light streaming through his bedroom window. It took him a drowsy moment to realize that there shouldn’t be this much sunlight if he was just waking up on a school day.
AAAHH!! He was late!
He fell out of bed in a tangled heap, shot out of the pile of covers, landing in his closet where he hurriedly grabbed clothes and threw them on. The clock radio by his bed (the one with an alarm he forgot to set last night) read 7:55. His first-period class started at 8:15. Luckily, he lived close enough to McKinley Elementary to ride his bike, but he was super late and cutting it awful close.
Beau flew out the back door of the house, walked ten steps, groaned loudly, and ran back inside. Seconds late, he emerged again with an oversized backpack strapped on his back with a lunch bag clipped to one side.
The old rusty gate in his backyard initially refused to open. Beau grunted and struggled with it for a few minutes before it flew open, causing him to fall on his face. He jumped up, unchained his bike, hopped on, kicked the stinking gate open again, and finally rode out onto the sidewalk of Dunson Drive.
Morning commuters idled and crawled along on the road to his left side in bumper to bumper morning traffic. Beau flew past them, pumping his legs furiously as he angled for the cross street at Garth Circle.
That’s when he saw Jake Moran lurking in the alley between two houses on Horseshoe Cove. Jake looked like he was trying to find something or catch something. He was in no hurry to get to school, even though he was late for the same class as Beau.
To be fair, tardiness and absences were familiar territories for Jake Moran.
His absence list was massive. Jake managed to attend enough school to avoid the truancy police, but his attendance on any given school day was a perpetual question mark. It was not at all unusual to see the stocky, pointy-haired boy walking to school in the morning, but fail to see him in any classes.
Beau saw Jake stop suddenly and thrust his hand into the tall grass. His hand emerged and went straight into his coat pocket. Jake looked surreptitiously from side to side and ran back in the direction of his house.
Beau wobbled on his bike and almost rode into morning traffic. He managed to regain his balance just in time to ride into the parking lot at McKinley Elementary, quickly tie his bike up to the rack and run through the double doors at the front of the school.
As he ran towards Mr. Bustamente’s math class, he made a mental note to try to find out what the heck he just saw.