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guys seem young for high school.”
    “They’re all ninth-graders,” Mrs. Bondo said.
    “Ninth?” Ray repeated, then got it; none of these kids were from the bunch that had stood him up for the last three days running; Egan had most likely jettisoned that whole crew and shanghaied a batch of more malleable freshmen, those less savvy to the ways of the Hook, less sure of how to get out of things. Fine with him.
    “Ninth grade. Great. So, OK. I’m going to tell you who I am, what I’m doing here, and then we’ll go around the horn and give names, whatever else you want to say, OK?”
    Nothing.
    “First off. Everybody knows this class is creative writing, right?”
    Two hands went up.
    “Yes, you know, or . . .”
    “I thought this was supposed to be a club,” the Latino boy said. He wore gold-framed glasses and had a pretty good likeness of The Rock drawn in ballpoint on the cover of his three-ring binder.
    “It’s a class, it’s a club. OK, it’s a club. Next week I’ll give out membership cards and teach you the secret handshake.”
    Unable to read this manic spritzing, the kids looked at him, then at each other, Ray telling himself, Slow down, slow down.
    “In any event, my name is Ray Mitchell. I grew up across the street in Hopewell just like some of you.”
    “For real?” one of the girls drawled.
    “For real. You heard of back in the day? I was there in back of in back in the day. Sixties, early seventies. I went to this school right here, not a great student, went to college, taught high school for a while, quit”—leaving out why—“and started driving a cab. And I drove that cab for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was because I wanted to be a writer and I figured that’s where the stories were, in the backseats of taxis. But unfortunately that’s not exactly how it works, so I must have put a million miles on that thing without ever really writing anything worth killing a tree for.” That one went over everyone’s head including Mrs. Bondo’s, the “Mrs.” already set in his mind as hard and fast as if he were a ninth-grader himself. “Then I became a . . . Does anybody here know what a polygraph is?”
    “Algebra?” the chubby kid ventured.
    “Not, no . . .” His voice hanging.
    “Lie detector.” One of the black girls, dark black with big Bo Diddly–framed eyeglasses, the lacquered waves of her hair arranged in a sequence of arches like the roof of the Sydney Opera House.
    “Exactly. Thank you. I worked for a small outfit which gave lie detector tests to people looking for low-end jobs which required them to be around money or merchandise.” Ray gave that girl a second look; the way she had calmly given the answer, no “Ooh-ooh” with her hand in the air.
    “And let me tell you, if you’re a big fan of weird in this life, tying people up with rubber tubing eight hours a day, then scaring them into ratting themselves out, is definitely a way to go.”
    Off-balance blankness all around the table. Ray wondered how he had ever done this full-time for five years without getting fired—recalled, then, that he sort of had . . .
    “Anyways, after that I went back to driving a cab, and then through a series of circumstances, mostly embarrassing, I finally became a writer—but not the way I envisioned it. I got a writing
job,
wrote for a TV show, which is to say, I went from driving a hack, to being one.”
    Stares and more stares; Ray once again telling himself, Calm. Down.
    “Well, in any event, I became one of the writers on
Brokedown High.
”
    “The TV show?” the Latina girl said, the table slightly coming to life.
    “The TV show.”
    “You wrote that?”
    “Myself and others.”
    “Whoa.”
    “Yes, I’d have to say, that was fairly phat of me.”
    Mrs. Bondo threw him another restrained smile that made him want to end this as quickly as possible; drop the one-fifth of an Emmy nomination altogether.
    “In any event . . .”
    There was