studying
buy a soda.Good boys, like bad ones, are shaped. The process is not perfect, and goes astray often enough. The mold is crooked, often warped, cracked—but it’s still a mold.
Grantville, West Virginia was the mold that produced Jeff Higgins. All things said and done, it was as good a mold as any and a better one than most.
Add to that the boy himself. Sitting alone, now, at the cafeteria table, staring at a window. There was nothing to see in the window. Night had fallen on the countryside beyond the glass.
The others were all gone. Melissa had ushered Gretchen and her family into the classroom which was being used, temporarily, as a refugee quarter. The floor was covered with mattresses and blankets donated by the town’s inhabitants. She had shown Gretchen how to operate the toilets nearby, and then hurried to the council meeting.
Jeff’s friends were gone too. They were not far away—not more than a few yards. They were in the school’s library. The library, like much of the school, was open twenty-fours a day now. Such a valuable resource could not be kept out of circulation for a moment. They were in there, heads hunched together, studying one of the school’s few copies of a German language textbook. They also had the school’s only copy of a German-English dictionary.
Under any other circumstances, Jeff would have been there also. But tonight he had a much more pressing problem to deal with. A German herself, not the language. A decision was before him, and he knew that it had to be made quickly. Gretchen would wait, for a bit, to hear his decision. She would not wait long. She had people to care for, and nothing to care for them with. She did not have the luxury of waiting. So, at least, it would seem to her. In truth, she had entered a world in which old courses of action were not necessary—but Jeff knew that she would not believe it. Not yet. Not soon enough.
Jeff Higgins was very far from stupid. He was innocent, more or less, but not really naive. Certainly not that naive.
Like all teenage boys, he had his fantasies.