All That Work and Still No Boys

Prank

6 6 Prank The press had the names in time for the evening news. Chan, leaving the hospital with one hand lightly bandaged and his tanned face untouched, checked his cell phone and saw he had fifteen calls. The ER nurse had told him that reporters were calling. You’re a hero, she had said, saving that girl like you did. The phone rang again, and he grabbed it. “Is this Kang Yan Chan?” The woman said his name like a rhyming ditty. “Chan,” he told her. When he let them say “K.Y.,” the joke “Jelly” usually came next. “Who’s calling?” “The Daily News. What can you tell me about the students who did it?” P r a n k 6 7 Chan readjusted the ear bud for better reception. “It was senior prank day,” he explained. “I don’t know who did it. Maybe a whole group of them. I saw a girl on fire and I rolled her in the dirt before I knew what I was doing.” Normally, he liked to plan things out on the quarter system. He hadn’t known that he could act like that, on instinct. “They were all high school seniors. That’s what I’ve been told.” Chan heard the sound of pages flipping and then the reporter yelling across the room, “I’m talking to the guy. Right now. I’m talking to him.” She came back on, and Chan checked his collar and smoothed his hair, another instinct, more natural to him than heroics. “A boy named Jamie Phipp,” said the reporter. “Brad Millgrove, he was there too. And a third kid, the ringleader. A boy named Anthony Gao.” Chan sat down abruptly on a low cement wall, vaguely aware of the dust and the seat of his trousers. He turned his back to a couple of people walking by. Phipp he knew well—Principal Shunt had suspended him last year when he persuaded two freshmen to hang a dead skunk by its paws in the band shack. And Millgrove was too thick to say no to Jamie. But Anthony Gao he knew only by reputation. A model pupil and a violinist with an unblemished record and a four-year scholarship to Steuben College in the fall. Not the kind of student who spent time in Chan’s office. “Are you sure it was those three?” “They’ve already come forward. How about Anthony, what do you know of him?” “May I ask you to call Principal Shunt?” said Chan. Shunt would yell down the roof if Chan messed up with a reporter. Jesus H., he would shout. This looks bad for me down at the district. “Just give me some background then. You must know something of this boy, since you’re of like disposition.” “Come again?” said Chan. Didn’t she have any questions about what Chan had accomplished? He was still amazed that he had raced across the quad and tipped Cherry Edgarton over. He had rolled her all the way to the bushes like the bundle of sod he had laid on his lawn last weekend. She wasn’t all ablaze, the way you see those monks in the pictures, who have set themselves on fire to protest one thing or another; it was just her jacket that had sprouted a tongue of orange, but still it was incredible how 6 8 P r a n k quickly Chan had reacted and then how gently he had lowered her while she was screaming. Wasn’t the reporter going to ask him about that? “I hope you’re not suggesting that I would set off a bomb in the middle of the schoolyard.” “Like condition, if you will. Like situation,” said the reporter. Chan, still waiting, made a noise in his lean brown throat. “Like race,” said the reporter, exasperated. “Oh right,” said Chan, and he started to laugh, the presumption being so ludicrous. As if Chan the Californian might have some special insight into Anthony Gao, the Chinese immigrant, who had just blown a classmate, and his future, sky high. “He wasn’t the ringleader,” said Principal Shunt. He had summoned Chan to his office and told him to shut the door. It was two days later; the reporters had stopped calling. Principal Shunt had done all the talking and sent them away when he was fed up with their questions. It was a prank, he’d insisted. Nobody was seriously hurt, not...