The primary aim of the "Novel Excerpts" blog category is to showcase my creative writing, specifically from the novels I've written. Hopefully, these posts will provide a glimpse into my storytelling style, themes, and narrative skills. It's an opportunity to share my artistic expressions and the worlds I've created through my novels.
The Boaz Schoolteacher, written in 2018, is my fifth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
In the summer of 2017, Katie Sims and her daughter Cullie, moved from New York City to Katie’s hometown of Boaz, Alabama for her to teach English and for Cullie to attend Boaz High School . Fifteen years earlier, during the Christmas holidays, five men from prominent local families sexually assaulted Katie. Nine months later, Katie’s only daughter was born.
Almost from the beginning of the new school year, as Katie and fellow-teacher Cindy Barker shared English, Literature, and Creative Writing duties for more than 300 students, they became lifelong friends.
For weeks, Katie and Cindy endured the almost constant sexual harassment at the hands of the assistant principal. In mid-October, after Cindy suffered an attack similar to Katie’s from fifteen years earlier, the two teachers designed a unique method to teach the six predators a lesson they would never forget. Katie and Cindy dubbed their plan, Six Red Apples.
Read this mystery-thriller to experience the dilemma the two teachers created for themselves, and to learn the true meaning of real justice. And, eternal friendship.
Chapter 28
After Cindy’s screen-saver fiasco during lunch on Wednesday, I was encouraged. Since she was caught red-handed in Wilkins’ office I felt sure she would abandon her Six Red Apples project. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
We had decided the first phase of the mission would take place during lunch. Cindy’s surveillance revealed that Wilkins and Greta Vickers, the school’s bookkeeper, typically stayed at their table in the lunchroom an extra five or ten minutes after the bell rang. I had stood watch in the school’s office as Cindy entered Wilkins’ office. We had guessed that he didn’t lock his office other than when he was assaulting Cindy or some other attractive female. She had retrieved a set of keys from his desk and was about to insert the thumb-drive containing a photograph of a naked woman with the words set to scroll across his computer screen, ‘Run, run. If you are a woman. Or, I will rape you.’ At that second Wilkins had exited Principal Harrison’s office with Kathy McRae, who had recently begun volunteering. Principal Harrison was in Montgomery at some conference for three days and Cindy and I hadn’t considered any interruption or obstacle from that source. Wilkins had seen Cindy standing behind his desk and questioned what she was doing. Her quick thinking saved her, since I had been powerless to help. Cindy told him she was about to write him a note about the recent Sunday School book order. Something about wanting to order an extra fifty copies for the Young-But-Maturing department. At least by the end of the day I had persuaded Cindy to abandon the second phase of our mission, which was Wilkins’ computer in his church office. It seemed we were ill-prepared to begin our criminal career. However, this hadn’t stopped her from telling me as we walked across the parking lot to our cars at the end of the school day, “we learned a valuable lesson today. Pranks are for amateurs.”
Thursday morning classes were consumed discussing Homecoming Night. It was a short-story I had assigned to my first three classes two days before the Labor Day weekend. Each student was to write a story that took place in a town of their choosing during the local high school’s homecoming. I didn’t say or imply that it should be centered around a football game. The focus of the assignment was the precariousness of life and particularly, how some innocent and fun activity could go horribly wrong.
It shouldn’t have come as a big surprise. Most students in my first two classes had written about Ellijay, Georgia and Gilmer High School’s Friday night halftime activities celebrating homecoming during the Bobcats football game. No doubt, the unofficial Facebook groups for the tenth and eleventh grade English classes were alive and well, feeding voraciously from the morsels that my five Creative Writing teams were disclosing as they had been developing the five assigned antagonistic characters.
One thing that impressed me was that each class had selected one of the five antagonists to write about. The tenth grade English class had chosen Noah Fletcher. The ninth, Daniel Taylor. No doubt, Brent Davidson and Sonya Peters were exerting their leadership in guiding the two ragtag classes forward in their quest not to be outdone by my twenty Creative Writing students.
The almost universal plot for each of the seventy-five tenth grade stories was that South Citizens Bank and Trust was the bank for Stella Gibson’s newspaper, the Times Courier, and that she and the Bank’s president, Noah Fletcher, were bitter enemies. The reasons varied broadly but most of the students used a multi-generational hatred that was grounded in one ancestor killing another. Homecoming night, Fletcher was scheduled to crown the new Miss Gilmer High during halftime ceremonies but was told at the last minute that Stella Gibson had offered to do so in exchange for a generous donation to the high school. The focus was the heated conversation after the game between Stella and Noah, semi-alone in the parking lot with one of them being taken by ambulance to a local Emergency Room for an apparent heart attack. A nice angle for the story was the reader was kept in the dark until the end as to what had happened and who was the patient.
The eleventh graders pursued a similar structure. In the main. Daniel Taylor and Stella Gibson had just begun an affair two weeks earlier. Unfortunately, Daniel and his wife Rachel wound up sitting in front of Stella Gibson in the stadium at the football game. The friendly conversations between Stella and Rachel became tense when she noticed Daniel leaning back into Stella’s knees three times before the end of the first half. By the end of the story Rachel had thrown a cup of hot coffee on Stella and she had, later to her regret, made the remark, “I don’t need heating up, you’re the one out in the cold.” At midnight, Rachel, with acrowbar in hand, was attempting to break into Stella’s apartment.
By Friday afternoon, it was becoming clear that the Real Justice novel project would include an unhealthy dose of sex. Not explicit sexual language but inferential overtones, rather yet, undertones. It seemed my twenty Creative Writing students all were heavily leaning towards using the male ego and sexual desire to develop sexual tension and competition between the story’s five antagonists. I was both pleased and disappointed. My own personal novel project no doubt involved sex, heck it was pretty much a mirror image of my own life’s story, particularly the gang-rape by the Faking Five. I shouldn’t have been surprised that seventeen and eighteen-year-old teenagers were choosing to include the one characteristic common to every human. However, I had hoped the twenty highly imaginative students would have pursued something more intellectual than sex.
Friday night I was once again watching several episodes of The Walton’s with Nanny and Sammie. Cullie, as usual, was at Alysa’s. However, tonight I was multitasking, something I had promised myself I wouldn’t do when I was with Nanny. I didn’t normally scroll my Newsfeed on Facebook. I used the program as a teaching tool and thought it otherwise a waste of time. By the time John Walton found his daughter, Elizabeth, locked inside a trunk at a haunted house, I saw where Rhonda Hudgins, our ninth grade English teacher, had posted a prayer request for Glenda Williams. Reading four of the comments to her post revealed that Ralph Williams, Glenda’s husband, had died in an accident. It was the last comment that had turned my grief into outrage. Glenda had found Ralph’s body in their barn underneath the rear axle of his tractor. It seemed he had been attempting to remove both rear wheels when the tractor had fallen on him. The world might never know, but my gut was telling me that Ralph Williams had been murdered.
While Sammie and Nanny were eating popcorn, and immersed in their third episode of the night, I stepped out of the den and called Sheriff Waldrup. I only reached his voicemail. I walked in the kitchen and looked up his home number in the most recent phone book Nanny kept in a drawer under the landline phone on the wall. There was no listing for Wayne Waldrup. I was rewarded for checking the 2012 edition. This was before he was elected Sheriff. I was thankful Nanny had kept such an old phone book. I reached his wife on the third ring and was told he was in Atlanta on business until Monday. She offered to help me if it were an emergency, saying she would get word to him if it was urgent. After I told her I had left a voicemail message she told me his cell phone account had been hacked or something and that I probably would have difficulty reaching him. I thanked her and asked her to have him call me when he got back into town.
I went to bed early and didn’t awake until a few minutes before my 4:30 a.m. alarm went off. My dream had startled me awake. The noise wound up being Midnight scratching on my bedroom door. My subconscious had thought it was Cullie and me locked in my car and the sound was our fingernails scraping across the inside top of my trunk lid.
The Pencil-Driven Life 