After The Dance_(1)

It had been a very long day and evening. Being an assistant principal at a high school all day is draining enough. Add supervising a spring dance to the day’s workload and I was more than ready to call it a day, or a week for that matter. At least the dance was on a Thursday, so I’d only have to struggle through one more day before the weekend was ahead of me.

The dance had gone well enough, I suppose. I had only needed to send three students home for being under the influence, a phone call home that is never fun to have to make, especially with those parents, increasing in number, it seemed, who felt like being suspended from school for being drunk at a school dance was an unreasonable breach of school authority.

But the remainder of the night had gone as well as could be hoped for, and I was waiting around while the student council volunteers completed their cleanup of the gym, ensuring the school was ready to open again in what seemed like just a few hours away. As the last of the work was done, I hovered near the main entrance to the school, ensuring all the students had rides home as it was now after ten. As I was locking up the door, I noticed the student council president, Natasha, heading towards the bus stop. “Natasha,” I called after her. “Do you not have a ride?”

“No,” she replied, casually. “I’m going to catch the bus.”

I sighed inwardly. If her parents were cool with her taking the bus home from a school event at this time of night, who was I to worry? On the other hand, I was sure that I would. I knew enough about Natasha that she lived a fair way across town, attending our school instead of her neighbourhood school because of a special academic program that we offered. I don’t take a lot of public transit, but I knew enough that she was probably looking at least a forty-five-minute bus ride home, if not longer.

“I’ll give you a ride,” I told her.

“Oh, no,” she protested. “It’s all right. I take the bus all the time.”

“I’m sure you do. But it’s late, you’ve worked hard and I don’t want to give you an excuse to not come to school tomorrow,” I said, jokingly.

“You’re sure? It’s not on your way home.” That she knew I lived in the neighbouring town and commuted to work was not a surprise. As a student leader, we chatted a lot and I’m sure it came up how traffic was sometimes a drag to get to and from work.

“It’s no problem. At this time of night, traffic won’t be an issue. I’d feel better knowing that you got home okay.” After a couple of additional assurances it would be no trouble, she acquiesced and got into my car, providing me directions to her house. And I was glad that I did. The twenty-minute drive from the school would surely have translated into a significant trip by bus, especially given the reduced service provided during the later evening hours. On the drive, we chatted pleasantly enough about her plans for post-secondary, graduation being just a few months away. Her plans were ambitious, but not at all grandiose or beyond what I knew she would be capable of achieving. She really was one of the brightest students with whom I had ever worked, either in the classroom or since I had made the switch to administration.

We pulled up in front of a nice townhouse complex that sat deep in a forested area. Her townhouse was in complete darkness. “Looks like everyone’s gone to bed,” I said casually.

“No one’s home. My parents are away,” Natasha replied.

“What about your younger brother?” Now that I thought about it, I realized that I hadn’t seen Nathan at the dance that evening and it just occurred to me that it was strange they weren’t together to take the bus home.

“He’s away with his volleyball team at a tournament.”

“Oh, right,” I said, as though just remembering. Truthfully, her younger brother was a nice enough kid but I hadn’t paid that much attention to his whereabouts and didn’t know that he was away on some kind of trip. There’s a thousand kids to keep track of.

Natasha, almost always bright, cheerful and occasionally sarcastic, suddenly turned serious. “Can I ask you a favour?”

“Sure.”

“Would you mind coming in for just a minute? It sounds stupid because I’ve been staying here alone for two nights already but I don’t normally come home in the dark, and, well….” Her words drifted off, as though she was embarrassed to admit she found the notion of entering into her darkened home eerie. “Never mind,” she continued. “It’s stupid.”

“No,” I tried to assure. “It’s fine. I can pop in and make sure everything is okay.” Minor alarm bells were going off in my head about the propriety of entering the young student’s home, knowing as I did that no one was home. Really, even driving a student home alone would have been considered inadvisable in this day and age but I had done it many times throughout my teaching career. I wasn’t about to let something happen to a student based on the notion that someone might think something inappropriate was happening. I shut off the engine, stepped out and walked to the front door, as Natasha put her key in the lock.