Once the buses arrived and students started filing in, there was heavy action. Metal detectors going off. Fights picked up where they had left off the previous afternoon. Open drug transactions. Before you knew it, they were calling Hammermeister to put out one brushfire after another and another and another—all day long. Although he thrived on adrenaline, the pace of events at Du Bois was getting to be relentless. Harold was racking up some more big numbers on the Hans Seyle Stress Scale. Points that took you beyond the limits of human endurance! His stomach had become a volcano from all of the aspirin he was swallowing, and his tongue was black with bismuth from the cherry-flavored Pepto-Bismol tablets that he constantly chewed.

The high school was overcrowded, and after the first few weeks of timidity, the students mostly threw their good intentions (“I be goin’ to Princ’sun!”) out the window. The joint became as bad as it had been advertised: The Lord of the Flies. The chaos at Du Bois made it seem far more dangerous to Harold than his well-regulated penal institution back in Canada, where Hammermeister had fond memories of courteous and compliant murderers, rapists, and stick-up artists. These American kids were savages. And those candy machines—all of that refined sugar was just adding fuel to the fire. It was in Harold’s thesis, the magnum opus; you could read all about it there, or you could wait for the movie. Heh heh heh. Harold didn’t know if he would have all that much say-so in the casting, but he needed to throw a glamorous woman into the picture—a kind of gal Friday. Something along the lines of a…Whitney Houston, say. Janet Jackson would be a stretch but…maybe Gloria Estefan. Or you could get a tough bird. Oprah Winfrey? He wondered if Whoopi was lined up with commitments.

Sean Duffy was giving the head custodian a hard time about Hammermeister, the custodians’ new boss. Who was this asshole? Who did the motherfucker think he was? “Just because he’s a vice-principal, does he think he’s running the place? And Dr. White is letting him get away with it. That’s what really riles me!” Duffy said. “White’s going to retire, and he just doesn’t give a shit anymore.”

Mike knew that Duffy was hitting the juice pretty hard, but he could never quite catch him with liquor on his breath. Not that he really cared to—not as long as the man did his work. Was Duffy drinking vodka or something odorless? He always looked fairly fresh on Mondays, but as the week wore on, Duffy would get red-faced, with bloodshot eyes. Increasingly, he would launch long tirades against Hammermeister—tirades that went beyond normal fury. Tirades inspired by alcohol.