The morning sun shining upon the red cliffs above the school stained them like copper. His heart thrilled. They went to the school and waited for nearly an hour before classes started at 8:30.
He sat out by the concession stands as the sun rose, a dry morning wind rising from the valley floor. For a long time, no one came. There was no reason to be early.
Then cars began winding up through the canyon, while parents dropped off students in their uniforms. There were a lot of girls, Bron decided, a sea of girls. Most of them were pretty, many downright beautiful.
The guys, Bron didn't care for so much.
Most of the new students lounged around the concession stands or the green theater or the Indian statue, and just talked. They didn't separate into the normal cliques, with jocks, social snobs, geeks and dopers.
Oh, they had cliques, he just couldn't quite tell what united most of them. The dancers he spotted easily enough, and a couple of kids sat down with sketch pads and began to draw, forming another small group.
A young man came and asked, "What's your name?"
"Bron Jones," he replied.
"Are you the one living with Olivia Hernandez?" he asked.
"Yeah," Bron said. He thought the young man would sit and talk. Instead the kid turned and went to a large group. He whispered to a girl, who picked up her cell and texted furiously. A dozen phones around the school rang at once.
There were a lot of kids peeking at him for the next thirty seconds. News of Bron's identity spread as if a rock had dropped in a pool. He heard muttered whispers and tittering laughter.
I've been through this all before, he told himself.
But he'd never been dressed this well. He'd never had his hair cut and dyed. He'd never looked cool.
He sensed that it was making an impression. He remembered Olivia's suggestion, that he act as if he were king of the school, and so he sat alone, threw his shoulders back casually, and smiled with genuine affection at his beloved subjects.
It had an effect. The kids at school all greeted one another with hugs and squeals, but he saw a lot of questioning glances thrown his way, heard bits of whispered conversations. One pretty blonde ventured that he was "Cute." A Mexican girl just stared at him with wanton eyes. He tried not to get his hopes up, and when the doors opened, he hurried inside, grateful that he didn't have to be on display.
The first day at Tuacahn was like the first day at just about any other school. Aside from the freshmen, there were maybe a dozen other new students, all dressed alike. Though Bron wore the uniform, he felt like a stranger.
His first period, mythology class, was full of freshmen, mainly, with a surprising ratio of good-looking people to the plain folks, and more girls than he'd even been led to expect. He sat next to a brunette who chewed bubble gum in secret, and did a great job of texting under her desk.
The class was all introductory stuff: here's the book. I'm the teacher, Mrs. McConkie. This is our schedule. I hope that you're excited to learn! The teacher seemed devoted to her subject, not your average cheerleader for education.
Sometimes, Bron thought, teachers get the idea that the best they can hope for is to prepare you for a life of drudgery.
"We'll be learning about gods in this class," Mrs. McConkie said, "but in learning about them, we'll learn about entire cultures as well, about their hopes and aspirations. Maybe by learning about them, we'll even raise our own sights, and learn to dream greater dreams."
She looked so cheerful when she spoke. She finished her intro early and started talking about her Star Wars club, where she'd be showing movies at lunch. They couldn't watch a movie in just an hour, of course, so sometimes they had to spread it out over days. She made sure to let the kids know that everyone was invited.
Bron thought that the Star Wars club sounded entirely too weird for him. He wasn't that into science fiction, and he didn't want to embarrass himself.
Class was half over when two guys and a girl came in to deliver a "one-minute musical" to the students. One boy carried a lute and was dressed as a troubadour, while the other two were dressed in medieval garb—the boy in tights, the voluptuous girl in an archaic dress.
They presented a play called "Lassiter's Lament." The troubadour, a tenor with red hair and freckles, played the lute expertly and sang of how "In ages past, our semester last," Sam Lassiter sought to impress the fair Ophelia Bascom by leaping from the landing of the stairwell to the bottom of the atrium here at Tuacahn High School. The boy and girl danced their parts as the tenor sang:
"But the maid was not impressed,
and indeed was quite distressed,
at the fateful leap that did occur.
For John fractured many bones,
And in traction stayed at home,
For the rest of the se-mes-ter!"
The song ended with Sam Lassiter lying on the ground in pain, while the troubadour sang a dire warning:
"So obey the safety rules,
Don't get hurt like some darned fool!
Don't end up like Sam Lassiter."
At the end of the song, the troubadour took the arm of the girl and escorted her away, while her injured Romeo looked on helplessly.
Cheers erupted from the class, and the three stood together, took a bow, then sang in harmony, "Remember: Hyperion Club Auditions begin tomorrow!"
They left amid applause, and Bron asked the gum-chewing girl, "What is the Hyperion Club?"
"It's a club for musical theater," she said. "You have to be a triple threat: singer, dancer, actor. Only the coolest of the cool make it in."
Bron frowned. He was just getting ready to take beginning dance. He'd never sung in public, and his acting experience consisted of playing The Great Pumpkin in a Charlie Brown play in third grade—if you can call rising from a pumpkin patch acting.
I'll never make it, he thought. At least not this year.
His second class was mathematics, and Mr. Hayward, a bespectacled old gentleman, explained that, "I know that you all think that you're artists, and you'll never need math, but as artists of course you'll need to learn to invest your money wisely. So this semester, I'll be adding a lot of interesting story problems to the curriculum. You will learn, for example, how movie studios use legal loopholes to steal money from both their actors, directors, and their investors."
That led to a lively discussion and demands from students for examples, so the entire class became a blur of story problems based upon things like, "How Arnold Schwarzenegger landed a cool deal on Terminator 3," and "How Peter Jackson learned, after he directed Lord of the Rings, never to take money on the back end."
The teacher had students nearly in tears as they begged for "story problems," which taught as much about cutthroat entertainment practices as they did about math.
Bron decided that the class he had expected to be the one most likely to put him to sleep would now be his favorite.
In the midst of a story problem, three teenage girls entered the room dressed as witches in black, with very dramatic green makeup, and presented a "musical memo."
The girls sang a cappella. In a mock-operatic tone, one witch warned, "There are scorpions in the lockers!" while the next young lady chimed in during mid-sentence, "And rattlesnakes in the halls!"
The first shrieked her lines as soon as she was done, so that the warnings came in French Rounds, growing louder and more frantic.