[untitled]
an excerpt

The job of a vice principal is not glamorous. Most adults think of the Principal’s office as the ultimate center of discipline, fear, and general scholastic oversight, but any self-respecting student (or perhaps more specifically any student suffering from the torturous pendulum of self-confidence, which is nearly everyone in 6th grade) knows that it is the Vice Principal who holds the reigns of the college bound carriage, a carriage which at any and all times threatens to throw one of its wagon wheels in an act of shear unpredictability. The Vice Principal is judge, jury, executioner, and executor of the estate of gum wrappers and oddly bent paper clips after the student’s sentence has been implemented; he, or in Walter Harvey’s case, she, is the massive pin that holds the cable that catches jet fighters that land on the metaphorical flight deck of the U.S.S. Critical Childhood Development. If that cable snaps, or the pin becomes a little unseated, when the Jets attempt to land on the floating strip of asphalt, all hell breaks loose.

Mrs. Patricia Harley was just such a kingpin. As Vice Principal, she conducted the business of a junior high with precision, impunity, and invisibility. Her invisibility was made manifest in the sense that the inner workings of the school were rarely seen, and her movements from one wing of the school to the next were conducted as if she had access to a secret labyrinth of underground tunnels or zip lines that ran the length of the school, hidden above the acoustic tiles or below the shiny linoleum squares. What most of the children did not know is that she actually did.

Mrs. Harley, in as much as moving sight unseen from one end of the school to the next was a high priority, also spent 37% of her time behaving in the exact opposite fashion, being entirely visible to the student body.

In such instances where the children were testing her ability to hold the line, the Vice Principal of Walter Harvey’s school would fondly and calmly remind the offenders that if the uproar continues, “heads, may literally, roll.” And she was not joking.