Catch and Release

Principal's office. Ice bag on my head. My head still hurts, and is now kind of wet.

At my school, the role of dealing with students typically reserved for a principal is split up among a small fleet of "administrators" who are assigned to certain students seemingly randomly. I understand this is common now among modern high schools. The administrator I was assigned to was Mr. Comstock. Replacing the first 'o' with a 'u' has always been a popular teenage antic around here, and is one of the reasons I loathe admitting that I am, in fact, a teenager.

I'd never had any real disciplinary issues here and as such, I'd never been in this office before. I'd spoken to Mr. Comstock only a few times in my life, even though it seemed like he'd been around me forever. When I was in elementary school, he worked there in the office somewhere; he transferred to my middle school during my second year there, and he and I started at this high school at the same time. He must either be very easily dissatisfied or so horrible to work for that he just gets slid around the system so nobody has to deal with him for too long.

I'd apparently broken one person's nose and collapsed another's larynx. Someone had seen those Mexican kids hassling me and had gone to fetch the nearest adult, who went to fetch the nearest (and only) police officer on site. Said police officer arrived on scene just as I was tossing one kid -- the one whose larynx I collapsed -- onto another. When I came to, I was taken to this office and left alone. Through the glass panel of the closed, probably locked, door I saw paramedics reeling stretchers down the hall.

Mr. Comstock had been on the phone since I got there, with various people including the police. I was just sitting there with a sore head. He hung up the telephone and looked to me, looking frazzled and anxious to speak to me. Then he told me about the collapsed larynx and broken nose before the phone rang yet again. He apologized and answered it.

"Yes?" he spoke into the handset parked on his face.
"Yeah.. he..it's here," he continued, spinning his chair around and facing the window.
I looked around at the pictures in the office, each with a smiling teenager in front of the same grayish backdrop; other students of his who donated wallet-sized prints of their school pictures. In any other job, having a collection of photographs of underage minors would seem somehow inappropriate. The desk between him and me was littered with papers of various colors; a keyboard with an impressive flat screen monitor sat in the corner next to a black and silver Swingline stapler and a navy blue New England Federated Bank mug stuffed full of capped roller ball pens, probably Bic.

Comstock was still one the phone. I guessed he was probably in his mid-forties. There were no rings on his fingers, and he had deep pinkish eyeglass pad imprints on the bridge of his nose which he rubbed occasionally. I noticed a bottle of saline drops on the shelf behind the desk, and figured he must have just switched to contacts now that the contacts-are-for-chicks stigma had finally worn thin. He must be petty. I looked back at the flat screen monitor again, it was a Sony and the school's computers were all Dell; he must have bought the monitor himself and brought it in so he'd look better than everyone else.

On the shelf in the back were a few books, a book of Yeats poetry and three Tolstoy books; all of their spines were in perfect condition. This guy seems to spend a lot of time worrying about what people think about him.

"That would seem a bit strange," he said to the phone, "I don’t know if I can make that float. It's not my job. It might be expensive." There was a pause, and he hung up.

"Ok," he said to me at last. "The student handbook specifies that fighting in school results in suspension or expulsion, you probably know that."

I sighed, and started to unscrew my predicted life outline from the wall of my mind.

"Obviously," he continued, "that doesn't make any sense. If we followed that rule, some kid who gets punched in the face for no reason and pushes back would have to be punished for it. I guess we're trying to raise people to get punched and just stand there, like Jesus or something.

"Except in, like, Sharks versus Jets style fights or 'you kissed my girlfriend' - 'no you kissed mine' fights, usually in a fight there's one guilty party and one guy getting pummeled. Punishing someone for getting attacked is just dumb. So we usually don't. It's in the book because it's hard to explain the stance of 'it's ok to get in a fight unless you're a bad person' in print." He stopped and thought for a second.

"So. You certainly put the hurt on those kids, but you obviously didn't go down that hall looking for trouble. Plus, we found the vodka or whatever that is that Marcos had. That's illegal, bringing alcohol into a school. So four gang-types with contraband alcohol attack you, a kid with no administrative record or any history of violence and who recently suffered a death in the family which might explain the unusual torrent of aggression, and as far as we're concerned we've got no real beef with you. The kids' parents might press charges against or sue you, but that seems unlikely. They'll be going from the hospital to the police station."

"Huh," I said, a bit surprised. My head was starting to clear up.

"You probably don't want your mom finding out about this anyway, so on the administrative front I can just pretend you weren't even involved."

"I guess I could get in fights more often," I said.

He let out a tight laugh. "The way you tore those guys up, I'm surprised to hear you haven't been in any. Have you taken karate classes or something?"

Umm.. no. "Umm.. no."

"Weird. Well I guess there's no telling how someone will react when he's about to get pummeled on. The fight or flight response is pretty powerful. I read a story about some guy who was mugged, never thrown a punch in his life, but he put the mugger into a coma. He says his guardian angel helped him. Weird stuff."

Hmm. Guardian angel.