Gentlemen by Michael Northrop Page A

day. I had a denim jacket on but I probably didn’t even need it. I could see from here that Mixer had left his jacket in his locker and was out there in just that Nosferatu T-shirt of his that has the hole in the front. I always thoughtthat was kind of gay, having a big hole in your shirt like that. It was just like a little too close to his nipple, which no one needed to see.
    So I sat down and gave them the report: “He’s not there. His mom’s like waiting by the phone.”
    We started talking, not whispering exactly but not talking full volume, either. We were all talking at once for a little while, because I guess we all had something to say. I’ll spare you the play-by-play on that, because there were a lot of lines like: “Is that bleeping bleep-head bleeping bleeping with us?” It’s not like I mind the swearing, but there’s not much sentence to sentences like that, and we were kind of beating around the bush.
    Finally, Mixer laid it out, just to get it out into the open. “I mean, he wants us to think he killed him, right? ‘A student is missing’…‘it’s murder.’ Am I reading that right? He’s saying Tommy was wrapped up in that barrel, we carted it to the car for him, and now we’re guilty, too?”
    â€œHe didn’t say he killed him,” said Bones. “Just that someone did.”
    â€œWho the hell do you think he was talking about, dumbass?” said Mixer. “He said it happened in his classroom.”
    Bones shrugged. “Yeah, I was just saying.”
    There was a red notebook on the table in front of Mixer, the kind with the thin plastic cover and the metal spiral binding. He picked it up, opened it, and started reading. He was doing a pretty good imitation of Haberman’s voice.
    â€œâ€™Say someone, or some ones, help this murderer get rid of the body, aren’t they also, in some sense, guilty?’ ”
    â€œThat could’ve been the barrel,” he said and sort of tossed the notebook down on the table.
    I still wasn’t sold on all this, so I said, “Since when do you take notes?”
    I thought that was pretty funny, but the others didn’t laugh at all, so I could see they were taking this more seriously.
    Bones goes, “That is so screwed up. I mean, first of all, Tommy would kick his ass. I mean, it’s ridiculous, right?”
    But he wasn’t telling, he was asking. The question just kind of hung there for a bit. I guess we were all thinking about it. The evidence we had at this point basically boiled down to this:
    Tommy, who was missing: It wasn’t the first time, but it was still unusual.
    Haberman, who was weird: Always had been but was reaching new heights lately.
    The barrel: It was the first time Haberman had done anything like that in class.
    Whatever was in the barrel: Could’ve been a deer, could’ve been a dude, but it seemed like some sort of a dead body to me.
    What Haberman said about disposing of a dead body: See above.
    What Haberman said about crime being “a matter of opinion”: Sounded like something a killer would say.
    What Haberman said about a murder in the classroom: Sounded like something a killer would say.
    Haberman talking about “the victim’s friends” and sort of singling us out: Sounded like something a killer would say if he was also an ass.
    So anyway, that’s what we were turning over in our heads, all filtered through standard-issue high school paranoia and our natural belief that everything was basically about us anyway.
    â€œKnickerbocker, please,” I said finally. It was like this joke expression we had, and the three of us laughed a little, just at how out there this whole thing was. I mean, it wasn’t exactly funny, because Tommy really was missing, and even if he’d just run off, that was still pretty dangerous. But the easiest thing to do with something that was bothering