The loss of a class system is what happened in 1953, in Wells Creek, Virginia. Six boys, who had grown up in nearby Calburn, Virginia, were well established as to who and what they were by the time they reached their teens.
Kyle Longacre was from the richest family in Calburn. To display his wealth, Kyle’s father had built a mansion on a hill that looked down on the small town. As a result of his father’s money, in school in Calburn, Kyle was the prince. People in the hallways parted when he walked by; everyone wanted to know him, be with him.
Frederick Burgess was the captain of the football team, the boy who led his team to victory—on the rare times when the team was victorious, that is.
Harper Kirkland was from old money, with his family able to trace their ancestors back to the first settlers in Virginia. It didn’t matter in Calburn that Harper’s grandfather had wasted what money the family had left on the horses, or that he’d sold the family’s run-down plantation to buy his mistress a town house. And it didn’t matter that the only thing the family still owned was a tiny local newspaper. In Calburn, the Kirkland name was treated with reverence because people knew what it meant.
On the other hand, in Calburn, Frank McCallum, Rodney Yates, and Thaddeus Overlander walked through the halls unnoticed. Sure, Frank was known to be able to “talk anybody into anything,” and people could see that Rodney was beautiful, and the teachers all knew that Thaddeus was smart, but these traits were overlooked in Calburn because of the boys’ parental origins. Frank and Rodney were cousins and had grown up in poverty. Nice girls in Calburn didn’t look at Rodney because he was a “hillbilly,” and Frank was shunned for the same reason. And Thaddeus, well, “Taddy” had parents who were of a religious sect that never allowed their son to participate in any social function. Taddy was the quintessential “nerd.”
When the six boys were sent to spend their senior year at a school outside Calburn, their pasts were both erased and magnified.
No one in Wells Creek knew about Harper Kirkland’s family being the oldest in that part of Virginia. He got no perks for being who he was. In Wells Creek, there were kids who had parents much richer than Kyle’s contractor father. And Wells Creek had several boys who were better football players than Burgess.
By the move to another high school, these three boys were demoted.
But the other three boys were promoted. In the first week in the new school, in speech class, Frank was assigned to give a “persuasive speech.” In Calburn, had he given such a speech, the response would have been tepid, after all, the other kids knew “who” he was. But in Wells Creek, Frank, probably for the first time in his life, was judged not on “who” but on “what.” He gave a speech that was so persuasive that he was given a standing ovation.
Rodney, as handsome as any matinee idol, was ignored in Calburn because of his origins, but in Wells Creek, the girls giggled and fluttered their lashes when he passed them.
Thaddeus, largely ignored in Calburn, was adored by the math department in Wells Creek because of his ability to do long, complicated calculations in his head, and the school body, unaware of his social standing, began to call him “the Whiz.”
Perhaps it was the shock of finding himself on the bottom for the first time in his life, or perhaps he just needed to prove himself, but whatever the reason, within the first weeks of entering Wells Creek, Kyle Longacre began to make his way upward in the new school. Perhaps he wanted to prove that he didn’t need his father’s money to be “the prince” of the school and that he could attain such an accolade on his own. Even though he knew only a few people at the school, Kyle Longacre ran for president of the class. He joined the yearbook staff and the debating team.
Burgess, perhaps wanting to be the star of the team as he had been in his hometown, began to arrive early and stay late for football practice, and it was said that because of his extreme effort, his game improved dramatically.
Harper joined the newspaper staff, and at the end of the first month, when the boy who had been the editor of the paper for three years fell down the stairs and broke both legs, Harper took over.
By Christmas, all six of the boys had made themselves known in Wells Creek. Three of them were on their way to establishing themselves in as high a position as they had been in Calburn. And the other three were beginning to enjoy a status such as they’d never before had.
Perhaps it was the success of these “outsiders” that made the Wells Creek students so angry, for they too had their class s
ystem. Frank McCallum was taking the place of a student who had been known for his excellent speeches since he was in the sixth grade. That boy’s father was the richest in Wells Creek.
The handsomest boy in Wells Creek High School began to hate Rodney Yates when the girls whispered among themselves that “Roddy” was a great deal better looking than he was.
Jealousy. One of the most powerful emotions there is began to rear its ugly head in the small town of Wells Creek. And to combat that jealousy, the students of Wells Creek tried to get the status back in line. They decided to investigate these intruders and use what secrets they could find to return the social structure to what it had been.
In small towns, everyone knows everything about everyone else, but, by unwritten law, it is often decided not to tell all. For example, sometimes everyone in a town will know that a child’s father is in prison, but the town will choose not to state this fact out loud in an attempt to protect the child.
And while Wells Creek had its own code of protection, it had no such code of ethics to protect the outsiders from Calburn. Some industrious students went to Calburn, got the locals talking, and found out the “secrets” of the six boys from Calburn. They then told these secrets around Wells Creek High School.
It was told at Wells Creek how Frank and Rodney had been raised in unimaginable poverty, and the name “hillbilly” was once again attached to them. In Calburn, it was an open secret that Kyle Longacre hated his overbearing father, who loved to flaunt his wealth. In Calburn people put up with Stanley Longacre’s bragging and generally obnoxious personality because they wanted to buy the houses he built. But when stories of Kyle’s father were told in Wells Creek, the students began to laugh at Kyle behind his back. The possibility of his becoming class president was abandoned.
And although no one knew for sure, it was believed that Thaddeus Overlander wore long sleeves year-round to hide the bruises that his fundamentalist father gave him. Whispers went round the school about the odd religious services that Taddy attended.
Harper was said to be “in love” with Kyle—and this was in 1953, when no attempt to understand such a love was made.
And then there was Frederick Burgess, a murderer at four years old. Everyone in Calburn knew the story of Burgess, as he was called, and his older brother, Bobbie. Bobbie Burgess was one of those rare children who possessed scholastic aptitude and athletic ability in equal abundance. He was the head of the debating team and captain of the football team, and on Sunday afternoons, he tutored underprivileged children in reading. On the twelfth of July, 1940, when he was sixteen years old, Bobbie was washing the family car while his four-year-old brother Frederick played inside. A neighbor, also outside, saw what happened. The child, playing that he was his big brother and driving, moved the gearshift. The car, parked on an incline, rolled backward, trapping Bobbie’s foot, then running over him and killing him instantly.
Frederick did not inherit the intelligence or the athletic ability that his deceased brother had had, and it was said in Calburn that his parents despised their younger son for what he’d done, for what he’d taken from them. In fact, one person in Calburn said that Burgess’s father had often expressed the wish that his second child had never been born.
Bailey looked up from the book. “I don’t think I can read any more,” she said as she closed the book. “High school is difficult enough, but what those kids had to go through was horrible.”
“But if the torture ended when they graduated, why did all the rest of the bad stuff happen to them?”
“I don’t know,” Bailey said. “Maybe it was their destiny. Are you sure you have the address?”
“Yes,” Matt said distractedly.