Dead on Arrival. Mike Lawson

Miami had been delayed because security was so tight, or that …

      Aw, screw it. He’d make up something when the time came.

       15

      He watched the boy for three days before he approached him.

      The first day that he followed him, he saw the boy enter the public school he attended, but three hours later he left it. He was holding books in his hand when he left the school, just as he had been when he’d left his home that morning. He wondered why the boy was leaving school so early in the day.

      The boy walked a block from the school – but not in the direction of his home – put his books down in an alley behind a Dumpster, and covered them with old newspapers. Then he began to walk.

      He appeared to walk aimlessly, no destination in mind. He would stop occasionally and sit at a bus stop or on a park bench or on a stoop. But he would just sit, looking down at his feet, not even paying attention to the people around him. The boy was unhappy and something was weighing heavily on his spirit. This was good.

      The next day when the boy left his apartment building, he put his schoolbooks down behind another Dumpster, this one right near his apartment, and began walking again. For five hours he either walked or sat. He did nothing, participated in no activity, spoke to no one, ate nothing, then returned to his apartment, picked up the schoolbooks he’d hidden, and went into the building where he and his mother lived. He had obviously decided to stop going to school but didn’t want his mother to know.