Stepping Up to the Plate

Chapter 3-3

According to the admissions letter, registration would be held at the high school the Saturday before classes began. Though Stacy didn’t really want to go alone, he wasn’t about to beg anyone else to tag along with him. Ange and Colin had to work, and he already knew what Lamar’s answer would be so he didn’t bother to ask. He caught the bus outside of the apartment complex and rode it downtown, through what used to be the center of Petersburg. But now the buildings were old, crumbling, wooden signs cracked and faded, concrete sidewalks riddled with weeds, bricks dingy from pollution and weather.

It was an old city, some parts of it dating back to the Civil War, or older—Centre Hill Mansion, for instance, had served as a hospital when General Lee was stationed nearby, and every Halloween it ran ghost tours through rooms decorated with antebellum furnishings as if frozen in time. Historical markers lined the streets and alleys, Battersea, and Pocahontas Basin, and Lafayette’s Headquarters, their silver signs reminders of what the city used to be.

Now it sat in ruin, Blandford Cemetery around the corner from a strip of smut shops, the battlefields paved over, the past roped off into small segments clearly marked for the tourists and hemmed in on all sides by drugstores, gas stations, fast food joints, broken down or abandoned factories, and subsidized housing.

Stacy stared out the bus window so he wouldn’t have to look at anyone else on board. The color of his skin was a brand in this town, and he was all too aware of how white he was, like an unfinished picture in a child’s coloring book. Looking around could be dangerous, if someone wanted to start something. Without his friends for protection—for validation, to prove he had a right to be here, on this bus, in this city—without them he was easy prey. Even from the back of the bus he could feel the hot stares from old men with raisin-wrinkled faces and plump mothers clutching small children close to ample bosoms. I don’t want to be here, Stacy thought, speaking to them in his mind, any more than you want me here. That makes us even.

The high school was on Washington Street, which started near the military base of Fort Lee and ran one-way past the interstate junction into Petersburg, past empty lots, stuttering neon signs that flickered half-heartedly, rundown motels, the remains of a railroad crisscrossing the tarmac here and there. Into the city, past one or two renovated blocks, churches mostly, the police department, city hall.

Near Market Street the passage of time reasserted itself, clearly seen in broken or boarded up windows, rusted fences, derelict homes with lawns full of weeds as tall as sunflowers and the occasional junked car propped on cinder blocks. Old oil tanks cracked like dry skin. Porches sagged into the earth, terraces torn down, whole walls disintegrated until the buildings themselves appeared to gape out at the street, toothless, bespectacled, like the aged men who sat in lawn chairs or rockers out front and watched the world go by.

Farther down Washington businesses lined the street—a luggage factory that closed its doors shortly after the Great Depression, a soda bottling plant that had been bought by a rival company and moved out of state, the gutted out husk of a Church’s Chicken that burned down years ago. A Southern States hardware store that sold feed and seed to farmers in Dinwiddie, a handful of local drugstores, a handful of tattoo parlors.

Finally Central State Hospital, all the way at the end of the street, right before Washington curved away into Boydton Plank Road and led out into the county. An asylum really, or so Stacy had heard. Nothing like the Southside Hospital down on Sycamore, with its emergency room and maternity ward and sports medicine center. One time in study hall, freshman year, Rick told everyone that Stacy’s real father had spent a few days in Central State, and hadn’t he heard that Charlie Manson stayed there once, too? Coincidence? Or—

In one swift motion Stacy had lunged from his desk and across the aisle, clambering over a second desk that separated them. He knocked Rick’s desk over on its side, trapping him in the space between the chair and the desktop, as Stacy laid into him with his fists. Rick’s legs flailed out, caught Stacy just below the ribs, but he didn’t feel that until later. All that existed for him was the blinding hate that buzzed behind his eyes like a swarm of bees and the hard body he tried to punch into silence. That landed him in trouble, and despite the bruises on his neck and cheeks Rick laughed when Stacy had to tell the coach he couldn’t make practice because he had detention after school. For what class? Study hall. Even the coach sniggered at that.