Coal Creek High School is more than the place where Arvin Russell and Lenora Laferty study: its bus garage, buses, and basketball games become settings for humiliation, protection, and revenge. The school’s episodes show how an act of bullying draws Arvin into violence, while his graduation marks the end of this part of his life.

Setting and School Life

The narrative locates the school’s conflicts in ordinary, specific spaces. Lenora is cornered beside the trash incinerator near the bus garage, while a later Friday-night basketball game draws a large crowd to the gym and leaves yellow school buses lined up behind the building. The school is also a place where students’ social reputations and vulnerabilities are exposed: the boys who target Lenora are older seniors held back a year or two, and Tommy Matson boasts about his sexual conquests at games.

Bullying and Arvin’s Response

One day after school, Arvin finds Lenora surrounded by three boys, including Gene Dinwoodie. As they mock and close in on her, Lenora shuts her eyes and prays. Arvin attacks, but the three boys overpower him and take turns punching him. A janitor arriving with cardboard boxes to burn interrupts the beating; Arvin’s head aches for a week, and his vision is impaired enough to make reading the blackboard difficult for several more weeks.

The assault does not end with that day. Over nearly two months, Arvin catches the boys one at a time. He ambushes Orville Buckman on the road after Buckman leaves Banner’s store, striking a Pepsi bottle so its broken glass neck injures Buckman’s mouth. The revenge happens away from school, but its cause is the violence against Lenora there: Arvin turns a failed effort to protect her into a deliberate campaign against her attackers.

The Basketball Game and the Buses

A couple of weeks later, Arvin drives Earskell’s old Ford to a Coal Creek High School game against Millersburg. On a chilly, drizzling Friday in early November, he waits in the car, smoking Camel cigarettes and watching the entrance for Tommy Matson. Just before halftime, Matson leaves with freshman Susie Cox and heads toward the buses. Arvin follows with a tire iron, then opens the rear door of the bus where Matson has helped Susie climb aboard. The scene places another confrontation within the school’s grounds, but the passage stops as Matson begins pressuring Susie; it does not establish what happens next.

Graduation and Departure

At the end of May, Arvin graduates from Coal Creek High School with nine other seniors. The following Monday he starts work on a construction crew laying new blacktop along Route 60 in Greenbrier County. Graduation thus provides a clear transition from school to paid labor, even as the school’s earlier episodes remain formative: it is where Arvin’s protective response to Lenora’s mistreatment becomes entangled with the violence he uses to answer it.