By the time school opened almost a month had passed since the shooting. Janice still had her arm in a sling, still had to use a cane, and was still bruised, but she had put on some weight and was noticeably better. Everyone, including her, thought she was capable of making it through a full day of school, or at least giving it a fair try.

It was a far different Janice who walked into school at Cody’s side than she had been the month before. First off, she was decently dressed – nothing spectacular, just slacks and a sweater, but still better dressed than the slob clothes that some of the girls around the school affected. A few days beforehand Candice had taken her to a hairdresser, again not to do anything spectacular but even things up a bit. She was wearing a bit of makeup, mostly to cover a bruise on her face that still hadn’t quite gone away, and Candice had taught her a few things about improving her appearance, which she hoped would improve her self-esteem. She was wearing a warm jacket rather than a ragged hand-me-down, and she had an attitude of confidence about her. The end result was that there were kids who didn’t even recognize her as Cody carried her books to her locker, and then walked with her to her first class.

People recognized Cody, though; he hadn’t changed much, although he had a serious air about him, at least more serious than usual. He was afraid that he and Janice were going to take some teasing, or worse, after all that had gone down, and he was on guard and ready to deflect it from her as best he could. But for the most part, nothing much happened. A few people said “Hi,” and he spent half a minute talking with Wyatt Curtis, who was about as close a friend as he’d had in school, if not particularly close. Mostly, he was pleasantly surprised and relieved that nothing much happened, although he wasn’t about to let his guard down yet.

Cody didn’t know that Shay had added his own twist to the rumor mill at the basketball tournament right after Christmas, and if there were any kids in the school who hadn’t heard some of the revised stories going around, they soon got caught up. There were kids who might have hassled either Cody or Janice about the incident back in December, but there were also second thoughts about hassling a guy who had shot two people to rescue his girlfriend. Without many people stating it aloud, no one particularly wanted to be number three, so it wasn’t any wonder that people kept their distance and kept their mouths shut.

However, Shay’s stories had reached more than just the kids. School hadn’t been in session for ten minutes before Harold Hekkinan, the principal, got a visit from a very irate parent, Irene Polanyra. “I can’t believe you let that Archer boy come back to school,” Irene shrieked to him.

“No reason not to,” Hekkinan shrugged.

“How can you say that? He shot and killed two men. What happens if he decides that he doesn’t like someone else? How can you expose children to that kind of danger?”

“What danger?”

“He’s a killer!” the woman replied, her voice even shriller than before. “He’s killed people! How can you let a monster like that loose among innocent children?”

“OK, look,” Hekkinan said, trying to pour a little oil on troubled waters. “Yeah, he did kill two people, there’s no doubt about that. He did it in self-defense and to rescue a girl whose life was clearly in danger. The prosecutor carefully considered the case and decided not to prosecute. Therefore he’s not guilty of anything. Now, if he had been convicted, even if he’d had charges filed on him, I couldn’t have him in school, which is policy. But he did the brave thing in a tough situation, and I can’t fault him for that. He’s never been a threat, never been a discipline problem, so there’s no reason he shouldn’t be in school. If I tried to expel him, the case would have to go in front of the school board, and frankly, since there’s no grounds, he’d have a legal case against us. I happen to know the kid’s family has a lawyer and he’s a good one.”

“That shouldn’t matter,” the irate woman screamed. “He’s a danger to every child in this school. I think I’ll take my daughter out of here and transfer her down to Albany River before he starts shooting everybody.”

“Suit yourself,” Hekkinan sighed. He wasn’t about to say that Mandy Polanyra was a worse discipline problem than Cody had ever been, and that Bruce Castor down at Albany River was welcome to have both the mother and the daughter, along with all the headaches that came with them. “I can’t stop you from doing that. But ask yourself one question: if it had been your daughter getting beaten and raped when Cody showed up, should he have shot those two or should he have just walked away?”

“That’s not the same thing,” the woman huffed as she went out the door. Hekkinan just shook his head; it was exactly the same thing, but some people never learn, and Irene Polanyra was one of them.

That wasn’t the only call or visit on that subject the principal had that morning, although he wasn’t exactly flooded with them, either, and one of them was from the school superintendent, Charles DeRidder, who was concerned about all the calls of that nature he had been getting. “Really, there’s nothing much we can do,” Hekkinan said, glad to be talking to a reasonable adult. “We’d have to expel him, and there’s no grounds to do that whatsoever, so we’d be leaving ourselves wide open for a lawsuit if we tried.”

“Yeah, there is that,” the DeRidder agreed, “but what if the kid really is a danger?”

“Look, back over the break, I had a long talk about the kid with an old friend, Gil Evachevski. Gil has talked to the kid extensively and knows him a lot better than I do. Gil says that Cody is a very responsible kid, and I know he’s not a discipline problem. Cody is a competitive shooter and very good, which means that he has a lot of self-discipline and isn’t going to go flying off the handle. Gil is of the opinion that Cody is one of the most level-headed kids of that age he’s ever seen, and while I don’t know the kid as well as Gil, I have to pretty much say that I agree with him.”

“Yeah,” the superintendent said, “you’re probably right, but the fact remains that he killed those two people and that’s got people concerned.”

“You know, in a way that almost gets me angry,” Hekkinan replied. “Look, you know I was a platoon leader in Vietnam, don’t you? I’ve killed people! Does that mean I’m likely to grab an M-16 and start blowing apart everybody in the cafeteria?”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“The hell it’s not, although most people don’t understand it unless they’ve been there, or at least close to there. Cody was faced with a combat decision, bluntly, either do something or let the girl be killed. He did something. What he did was give proper warning, fire a warning shot, and then when Jack and Bobby Lufkin dove for a shotgun, Cody resorted to his training and stopped them. That’s not exactly like he was walking down the street looking for someone to blow away for the hell of it.”

“Well, we have to do something, because there are a lot of concerned parents out there. Has the kid had any counseling over this issue?”

“Yes he has. I talked to his mother, and he and the girl are seeing a professional on a regular basis. They both have some issues about what happened, not the shooting but about what happened to the girl. I don’t know any more than that, that’s just what she told me.”

“Just as a thought,” DeRidder suggested, “maybe you ought to at least cover your bases by having the school counselor talk to him.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Hekkinan sighed. “You know I don’t think much of her, and I don’t think she’ll do much good in this situation.”

“Yeah, but if something were to happen, at least we’d have that on the record.”

“All right, I’ll get it set up,” Hekkinan agreed. Not for the first time in the last few months, he glanced at the school calendar and noted the number of days left in the school year. He’d already made up his mind to retire at the end of the year; he could have done it years ago but for the most part he liked the job and liked working with the kids. But he was getting too old for this stuff, and more and more he thought that it was getting to be time for someone else to have some of these headaches.

The principal had good reason to not like Heidi Blauwurst, the school counselor. First off, she was barely qualified for the job, with relatively little psychological training and a lot of education related bull. She was competent enough to administer a few tests and give preliminary evaluations of possible problems, even though her evaluations were often wrong and sometimes only had the slightest contact with reality. But she had tenure, and that meant that Hekkinan and the rest of the school had to put up with her. She was, in fact, just the kind of bleeding heart that Candice had wanted to avoid when looking for a counselor for the kids, and Candice knew her well enough to not even begin to consider her at the time. Of course, typical of that kind of person, as far as she was concerned she was smarter than everyone else and anyone who held any kind of opinion that differed from hers was obviously wrong.

Cody already knew he didn’t like Mrs. Blauwurst, and within a few minutes realized that she knew little about what had happened but had plenty of opinions about it. But she pushed at him relentlessly, mostly on the question of why he didn’t feel any remorse for the two deaths. He tried to be respectful, tried to answer her questions, but realized before long that she wasn’t accepting anything that didn’t fit her obviously superior notions.

Finally, about the fourteenth time she came back to the question, “Don’t you feel any remorse about it?” Cody had enough. “Look, Mrs. Blauwurst. Let’s suppose there was a cockroach walking across the floor. Would you stomp on it?”

“Of course,” she sniffed. “I hate roaches.”

“Would you feel any remorse over its death?”

After that exchange, Mrs. Blauwurst sent Cody back to class, then wrote in her notebook, “Student is intransigent, uncooperative, and shows no remorse over killings.” However, not having any concept of confidentiality, she also commented in the teacher’s lounge that Cody had likened the deaths of the Lufkins to killing cockroaches, which wasn’t quite the point that Cody had been trying to make, not that she would have known the difference.

That got around, of course, and just added to what Shay had intended to accomplish with his gossip mongering: he’d wanted to make the point that there was a chance that Cody could get dangerous if pushed too far. Before long, there weren’t many students around the school, especially among the barely controlled bullies, who thought about trying their luck. For the most part, Cody ignored them, which had been his policy all along.

Janice received some static too, mostly from girls who noted how much she’d come up in the world and thought it their duty to keep her in her place, which was at the bottom of the pecking order. There was some talk going around that although she’d been raped, she must have been some kind of slut to have allowed it to happen, and what would a guy like Cody see in someone like her, anyway? She heard some of that – she couldn’t help it – but she didn’t let it bother her, partly because she’d been used to being there anyway, but mostly because Cody told her to ignore them for the sub-humans they were. “They don’t give a shit for you, so why should you give a shit for them?” he told Janice. “The fact is, Jan, we’re going to be gone from here before very much longer and they won’t matter a bit, so why should we let those kinds of people bother us now? You’ve survived worse, so put up with them.”

The question of Cody’s presence in school eventually got around to the school board – not the regular meetings, which Luke Colby covered, but a couple of somewhat illegal committee meetings in the superintendent’s office, where the subject was considered informally and off the agenda. “The simple fact of the matter is that we don’t have a leg to stand on,” DeRidder told the board members. “Harold doesn’t think there’s any danger from the kid. Heidi isn’t so sure about that, but she wants to keep her ass covered either way. We are getting complaints from parents, but there’s absolutely no grounds to expel him under our current policy. He’s not a discipline problem, never has been, and is a good student. Oh, we could try it and you could even vote to do it, but all that would do is get a rather nasty lawsuit slapped on us right away, maybe with an injunction blocking the expulsion. Oh, you might make a few people happy by trying to kick him out but it’d wind up costing us a lot more than we’d gain.”

“But isn’t the kid a danger to the other students?” one of the board members asked. “From the stories going around he’s like a bomb with the fuse burning.”

“Well, do you really want to believe the stories going around? If you live in this town you know what they’re worth. What’s the truth? It’s true that there are some people who are scared of him because he shot those two hoods. Believe me, I’ve been told that we had both Jack and Bobby Lufkin in this school and we finally expelled them both after multiple incidents that were really out of hand, and the kind of people they were finally caught up with them. That’s the truth. Like I said, the Archer kid never has been a problem. Don’t we owe him at least a little of the consideration we gave the Lufkins back in their day?”

The general impression that DeRidder got back from the board members was that they had to agree that there was nothing that could be done. At the same time, the superintendent and Hekkinan had better hope that they guessed right, because if they were wrong it could be a hell of a mess. That pretty well ended that problem for the time being, although there was still a lot of talk going around.

For the most part, Cody and Janice weren’t aware of any of the discussions – they all pretty much took place behind closed doors. They were aware of the reactions from the students. By the time they’d been back in school for a while, it was clear to Cody that there were kids in the school who saw him as a stone killer, ready to start shooting anytime he felt like it. For the most part he was amused by it, for most of the kids who felt that way were kids he didn’t want to have anything to do with anyway. There were a few who tried to put him down because of the shootings, for whatever reason, but mostly he ignored them. There were still a few kids he was friends with, like Wyatt Curtis, but he’d never been all that close to Wyatt anyway. He’d always been pretty isolated and a loner among the students at Spearfish Lake, so that was nothing new. However, he’d never had anyone like Janice before, and she’d become a close friend. While she felt isolated from her classmates – and didn’t care much about them either – she and Cody still had each other, and that made them feel closer to each other than ever.

A couple weeks after Christmas break ended, semester finals came down. Cody wasn’t the top student in the high school, but one of the top ones and would probably have been ranked higher on discretionary grades if he was an athlete, so his mostly A’s on the finals came as no surprise. However, to everyone’s surprise but his and Janice’s, she did very well on them, proving that all the time the two of them had spent studying over the break had been well spent. Because of her lousy grades earlier in the semester when she’d been having trouble, her final grades for the semester were mediocre, but a far distance from the failing or nearly failing grades she’d had at the end of the first quarter. She was a little disappointed at that, but Cody just told her to keep studying, just so she could blow everybody away the next semester.

Neither Cody nor Janice had ever been much for after-school activities, and that didn’t change, either. After some discussion with Carole Hunt, it had been decided all around that it would be good if they had some other activities to make up for it, something they could both learn from, and for that matter, something that would give Janice more self-confidence. They had already started going to the shooting range on Thursday evenings, where Cody worked out his frustrations on the targets. Janice was responding to coaching, too – more from Cody than from Gil – and was getting to be a pretty good shot with the Ruger although it was becoming clear that she’d never be in Cody’s class. She was actually looking forward to trying out the nine millimeter, at least to say she’d done it, but that was going to have to wait till her cast came off so she could use a two-handed shooting grip.

Gil had already been working on them to join the group at the dojo downtown on Tuesday evenings, located in the back of the Spearfish Lake Appliance and Furniture building. Most of the people who showed up there were a lot older than Janice and Cody, and for the most part they were people who had been there and done that. Although Janice still had the cast on her arm and was a bit fragile, that didn’t stop her from learning some basic self-defense techniques, things that were good for a woman to know. Cody got a lot of coaching in police hand-to-hand techniques from Harold Novato, who had retired as Spearfish Lake police chief several years before. He had spent any number of years breaking up barroom brawls on Friday nights. He was able to pass along the basic techniques quickly, and Cody soon picked up on them, but he also picked up plenty of pointers from the other regulars, including Mr. Clark, the husband of their history teacher who was smaller than Cody but awesomely good at what he did.

It was Mr. Clark who filled up their Monday evenings. He was a paramedic on the Spearfish Lake Fire Department Ambulance Service, and had led the crew that picked up Janice following the shooting and took her to the hospital in Camden. He remembered both Cody and Janice well from that evening, and was very complimentary of how well Cody had handled the situation and how well Janice was coming along. His martial arts work and his being a paramedic were both mostly hobbies for him; he actually was the owner and manager of Clark Construction, the largest construction company in the area. Since this time of year was slow for him, he tried to find some other things to do to stay busy, and one of those things was teaching a First Responder first aid course in February and March.

Cody thought that between the shooting and the martial arts they were already a little busy, but after thinking about it he decided that first aid would be useful to know, especially if he decided to go to the police academy sometime. Besides, he reasoned that Janice was still considering being a nurse, and picking up a little basic training wouldn’t be a bad idea for her in general, anyway.

So Monday nights were spent down at the fire department training hall with Mr. Clark, who soon asked Cody and Janice to call him Randy. Again, they were the youngest people there, but it was useful knowledge for them, and both of them enjoyed the classes. They both thought they were getting more out of them than they were getting out of high school.

Shortly after starting the First Responder class, Janice got the cast off her arm, which freed her up considerably. Her ribs no longer needed to be wrapped and the dressing changes that she’d had to face around the holidays were a thing of the past. After a series of dentist appointments in January she now had implants replacing her broken and missing teeth, which improved both her appearance and her attitude about herself. The bruising was gone now too; while she was still weak and tender and needed to put on some more weight, she was now well on the road to recovery from her ordeal. She was filling out and taking more care with her appearance; as Carole and Candice had expected, she was well on her way to becoming an attractive young lady, especially around people who didn’t know or didn’t care about her past.

But that was in public; in private, she was still very deferential to Cody, still very much wanting to know that he was protecting her. They still slept in the same bed, Cody’s bed, and the P226 was still on the bedside stand even though she hadn’t had nightmares for a while – she didn’t want to risk them. Several times Cody asked her if she wouldn’t like to quit the arrangement, but she became rather upset at the suggestion, so after a while he just quit asking. Besides, it was pleasant to spend the time with her. Still, there was no suggestion of sex between them, and neither of them brought it up. However, now they were kissing each other good night, but not letting things go farther than that.

They still met with Carole Hunt, mostly on an irregular basis when Carole happened to be in town and wasn’t involved with other things. Cody could see a little more independence in Janice, if not a lot more, and he was willing to encourage her. Carole had never mentioned to either of them her “master/slave” thoughts about the relationship, and it never crossed their minds to think of it that way.

As time went on, they both felt that Janice was getting better, slowly putting her experience behind her, and Cody was getting more comfortable with Janice’s deference toward him. Both of them thought that the worst of things were soon going to be over.

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