“She’s a kid who made a stupid mistake,” I said, in case he was trying to come to a decision. “You don’t have to forgive her, but you can’t go and hurt her or anything.”

“I wouldn’t have…” he said, and he didn’t finish the sentence. Because he might have, or because he didn’t know what he wouldn’t have done.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s good.”

“Go. Work. Don’t let me keep you,” he said. “I’ll be straight with the police there.”

“I’ll stick around for the cops and then duck out.”

The police cars had appeared at the edge of the block, but with traffic on the narrow road slowed by the girl’s car, they’d stopped there. The cars couldn’t progress, but the police were getting out.

One officer went to talk to the girl, another to the old man. I waited around a minute, then gave a statement and my info.

As in most things having to do with law or bureaucracy, it took longer than it should have, for a relatively simple process. I hurried to the high school once they were done with me, and I arrived rather late.

High school.

We still weren’t at the point where we had nice lawns and yards. This schoolyard was no exception. We had grass and fields, yes, but it was coarse and the ground beneath wasn’t usually landscaped. The area was large with large trees left untouched in the corners, chain link fence separating the field from the roads on two sides, the grade school formed the third boundary to the west, and the high school formed the fourth boundary to the north. The ground was uneven, more hilly than flat, and there were still large stones here and there, and a seemingly out of place play structure for the grade schoolers.

It was an odd thing. So often, nature was transplanted into a city, and it was new and inauthentic, made overly neat. Trees, lawns, flowers. Here, the nature was rough and unpolished, the city itself new and somewhat artificial in how overly tidy it was, untouched by time or elements.

A sports field in the middle section separated the grade schoolers’ area from the theater. It was a stage in the old Roman style, slabs of stone set into the ground like stairs, stepping down as they got closer to the stage, where the platform sat.

Hundreds of students had gathered on the stone seats, and more stood around the top edge of the theater, watching and listening. They were our survivors, our next generation. Not so different from the crowd I’d had to deflect earlier. A third of them still wore the very simple clothes that were handed out with supplies in the tent cities. Some had even taken to strategically ripping and dressing up those clothes. I didn’t fault them for it. It was hot.