Free Breakheart Hill by Thomas H. Cook

care. The
Wildcat
had been dull when Allison ran it, and it would continue to be dull. It was like everything else in Choctaw, as I saw it, mediocre, and doomed to eternal mediocrity.
    The small room the school had set aside for the
Wildcat
was in the basement, only a few feet from the boiler, and barely larger than a closet. Inside, there were a couple of ancient wooden desks, two old typewriters, a few rulers for layout and a stack of white paper. The furnishings were so spare and run-down that it was hard for me to imagine Allison Cryer working in such a place. And yet, the signs of her long tenure and abrupt departure were also there—stacks of movie and fashion magazines, a diet book for teenagers, a broken eyeliner pencil, all of which I immediately threw out and eventually replaced with those remnants of myself that Sheriff Stone would later find in the same cramped room—a guide to medical schools in the United States, a copy of A
Lost Lady
and a picture of Kelli Troy standing in a white sleeveless dress at the crest of Breakheart Hill.
    It had become my habit to work on the
Wildcat
each afternoon after school. I would go to the room in the basement, drop into the seat behind the table and begin reading some new submission or working on the layout. It was a solitary place, the kind I liked best, and there were times when I would close the door and simply let my mind drift among life’s possibilities. The closed room freed me from the usual distractions so that my imagination could flow unhindered into the amazing future.
    I was probably doing exactly that the afternoon I heard a soft knock, then watched as the door swung openslowly. She stood in a dense shadow, backlit by the harsh light of the outer corridor, but I recognized her instantly.
    “Hi,” I said, then for some reason took off my glasses and began rubbing the lenses with my shirttail.
    “Hi.”
    I returned the glasses to my eyes. “Are you looking for somebody?” I asked.
    “You,” Kelli said.
    “Me?”
    “Miss Carver said you’d be down here. That’s why I came down. To bring you this.” She drew a piece of folded paper from the pocket of her skirt. “It’s a poem. Do you publish poems in the
Wildcat
?”
    “I publish just about anything in it,” I told her with a small, sour laugh.
    She looked at me sternly, as if in disapproval. “You mean, whether it’s any good or not?”
    I gave her a worldly shrug. “Well, I don’t have a lot to choose from,” I explained. “You know, just typical high school stuff. Choctaw High. Rah. Rah. Rah.”
    My answer did not appear to satisfy her, but she said nothing else. Instead, she simply handed me the paper.
    “It’s just a few lines. If you don’t like it, you can tell me.”
    She had crowned me with an unexpected authority, and I remember briefly reveling in it. “Okay,” I said. “But no matter what, it’s probably better than most of the stuff I get in.” I glanced toward the paper. “You want me to read it now?”
    “No,” Kelli answered decisively. “Later.”
    “Okay.”
    She lingered a moment longer, perhaps reluctant to leave her poem behind. “Well, I have to get to the bus,” she said finally. She stepped away from the door, out into the full light of the corridor and stood facing me. “I guess you’ll let me know.”
    “Tomorrow,” I told her, my hand involuntarilyjerking up, as if reaching for her as she fled away, “I’ll read it tonight and talk to you tomorrow.”
    She nodded briskly, turned and headed down the corridor.
    I rose immediately, stepped into the hallway and looked after her.
    She was already several yards away by then, her figure disappearing up the stairs at the far end of the hallway.
    I returned to my desk, unfolded the paper she’d given me and read what she’d written, my eyes following the lines in a room that still gave off the sense of Allison Cryer’s tenure there, and with it, all that through countless generations had felt safe and