the third of March

The third of March marks the day Charlie Decker crossed a critical line from internal turmoil to outward, nearly lethal violence. On that rainy day, with the last snow melting into rivulets, Charlie was called to the blackboard in Mr. Carlson's chemistry class. He had been carrying a rust-clotted pipe wrench in his back pocket, hidden under a bulky sweater, for weeks. The act of being put on the spot in front of the class, combined with Carlson's mocking commentary—asking if he remembered what two and two made, calling his work "woonderful" in a tone that echoed the bully Dicky Cable—triggered a catastrophic reaction. Charlie's stomach drew up tight, and when he reached for his back pocket, the pipe wrench fell out with a clang. When Carlson reached for it, Charlie grabbed it first, and a strange, cool clarity replaced his panic. He began to smash the blackboard with the wrench, singing "It's a treat to beat your meat on the Mississippi mud" in time with each blow. When Carlson grabbed him, Charlie turned and hit him once with the wrench. The teacher fell, his tortoiseshell glasses skidding across the chalk-dusty floor, his face bare and defenseless. The sight of those glasses sliding away broke the spell. Charlie dropped the wrench and walked out, going directly to the administration office to confess what he had done. Mr. Carlson was taken to Central Maine General Hospital, where an X-ray revealed a hairline fracture above his frontal lobe; surgeons picked four splinters of bone out of his brain. Charlie was suspended, and the incident led directly to the series of conferences with Principal Denver, the school psychiatrist Don Grace, and his parents that culminated in his expulsion and transfer to Greenmantle Academy—the decision that, on the morning of the hostage crisis, pushed him over the edge into murder.