Harry came to get me in his police cruiser, in uniform. He listened to the outraged assistant principal, who described the scene, quoted the student handbook, and demanded to know what Harry was going to do about it. Harry just looked at the assistant principal until the man's words dribbled away into silence. He looked at him a moment longer, for effect, and then he turned his cold blue eyes on me.

"Did you do what he says you did, Dexter?" he asked me.
There was no possibility of evasion or falsehood in the grip of that stare. "Yes," I said, and Harry nodded.

"You see?" the assistant principal said. He thought he was going to say more, but Harry turned the look back on him and he fell silent again.

Harry looked back at me. "Why?" he said.
"He was picking on me." That sounded somewhat feeble, even to me, so I added, "A lot. All the time." "And so you taped him to a table," he said, with very little inflection.
"Uh-huh."
"And you picked up a scalpel." "I wanted him to stop," I said. "Why didn't you tell somebody?" Harry asked me. I shrugged, which was a large portion of my working vocabulary in those days. "Why didn't you tell me?" he asked. "I can take care of it," I said. "Looks like you didn't take care of it so well," he said.

There seemed to be very little I could do, so naturally enough I chose to look at my feet. They apparently had very little to add to the discussion, however, so I looked up again. Harry still watched me, and somehow he no longer needed to blink. He did not seem angry, and I was not really afraid of him, and that somehow made it even more uncomfortable.

"I'm sorry," I said at last. I wasn't sure if I meant it-for that matter, I'm still not sure I can really be sorry for anything I do. But it seemed like a very politic remark, and nothing else burbled up in my teenaged brain, simmering as it was with an oatmeal-thick sludge of hormones and uncertainty. And although I am sure Harry didn't believe that I was sorry, he nodded again.

"Let's go," he said.
"Just a minute," the assistant principal said. "We still have things to discuss."

"You mean the fact that you let a known bully push my boy to this kind of confrontation because of poor supervision? How many times has the other boy been disciplined?" "That's not the point-" the assistant principal tried to say. "Or are we talking about the fact that you left scalpels and other dangerous equipment unsecured and easily available to students in an unlocked and unsupervised classroom?" "Really, Officer-" "I tell you what," Harry said. "I promise to overlook your extremely poor performance in this matter, if you agree to make a real effort to improve."