Chapter One: [Excerpt]
Chapter One: [Excerpt]
Lucy Darby awoke on a July morning in 1967 in Oxford, England, fully intent on reporting for class in the final week of a foreign-study program at the university. Then she got a better offer—to play hooky. It came from her chaperone, Chuck Walls, a 22-year-old English teacher at her high school in Bloomington, Indiana.
Chuck gathered a half dozen students, all free spirits and authority-snubbers he figured would be up for going AWOL from the Oxford reservation. Among them were Jim Sutton, brooding son of an Indiana University administrator and an early druggie; Scott Kragie, a cool-hand kid from Chicago who introduced the radical idea of wearing dark socks with loafers to Binford Junior High; Jana Kellar, whose creepy short story about an unborn child Walls published in the school paper; and Darby, a cheeky blonde with an irreverent streak who was never at home as a rah-rah varsity cheerleader.
“He said, ‘You want to see a trial? It just happens to be...Mick Jagger,’ and we all went, ‘Oh, get out of here!’”
And so they did. Chuck and his merry band of escapees slipped away without a word to the other Bloomington High kids or his co-chaperone, Virginia Elkin, head of the English department who was shepherding half the BHS delegation. Elkin was 54, dowdy, with short bobbed hair, silver-frame glasses and a steely demeanor that made her look even older, “Sixty, 70, 80, 100 years old” to Rick Smith, one of her charges.
9/19/17