Darkness Falls Read Online Free

student stabbing another hadn’t entered into the thoughts of whoever came up with Darkness Falls School’s assorted regulations. O’Malley mused that this was a touch ironic for a town most famous for the lynching of an innocent woman . . .
    After reassuring Jeremy Winchester that the school would do everything in its power to hold off an embarrassing and costly lawsuit, the next person O’Malley had to face was Margaret Walsh.
    He sympathized with the woman, he really did. She had lost her husband and now had to raise a moody, violent child on her own.
    But that didn’t change the fact that he had to expel her son.
    “Mr. O’Malley, I understand why this may seem like—”
    O’Malley cut her off. “It doesn’t matter what it seems like, it matters what it is. Even if I could come up with a reason why I shouldn’t expel Kyle, I can come up with ten reasons why I should—and most of them would come from the school’s lawyer. Besides, Kyle has been having enough trouble since he got here. Do you really think he’d be able to continue to function even at the low level he was at before now?”
    Margaret Walsh had nothing to say to that. She just looked at O’Malley pitiably. The principal wanted desperately to be able to comfort her and reassure her. He probably could have done so far more sincerely than he did Jeremy Winchester.
    But years of facing up to irritated Southie parents and entrenched Boston bureaucracy had made it easy for O’Malley to harden his heart. “I’m afraid we have no choice, Mrs. Walsh.” He hesitated, then decided to invoke the old when-in-doubt-try-psychobabble rule. “This isn’t the first time he’s acted out.”
    “He’s been having a very hard time of it since his father’s passing,” Mrs. Walsh said. “He hasn’t been sleeping lately.”
    If she was going to whip out her own psychobabble card, O’Malley had no choice but to take the blunt route. “I sympathize with his loss, Mrs. Walsh, but it’s no excuse. He stabbed another child. The boy’s going to need stitches.”
    “He was provoked!”
    O’Malley tried not to sigh. The psychobabble defense having washed out for both of them, she was now going for the old standby: it had to be the other child’s fault, because her child would never do something like that.
    “My son is not violent—” she continued, but O’Malley interrupted with his trump card.
    “The only way for our school to avoid a lawsuit is to expel Kyle. I’m sorry.”
    Mrs. Walsh, unsurprisingly, had no reply. O’Malley was worried that she might try the we-can-fight-the-lawsuit argument, but either she knew better, or she had just lost the will to keep the argument going.
    Given how much of a troublemaker her son had been, O’Malley suspected that she’d be having a lot of these conversations. And they’d all end the same way. It was not going to be easy, and O’Malley felt a pang of sympathy.
    “If you like,” he said as he got up, “I can give you a list of schools that specialize in troubled children.”
    Mrs. Walsh also stood. “That won’t be necessary.” They exited the office. Kyle was sitting on the bench outside O’Malley’s office, staring straight ahead. To O’Malley’s dismay, he still hadn’t wiped the spittle off his chin, and it had now dried, making it almost look like a scar.
    “Come along, Kyle,” Mrs. Walsh said, holding out a hand. Kyle took it and got up from the bench.
    The two of them walked toward the door to the school. O’Malley watched them and thought that it was all such a waste.
    Then Kyle turned around and looked at O’Malley over his shoulder.
    When he was the dean at the Southie high school, there was one boy named William McGreal. McGreal was like Kyle: sullen, not too many friends, always getting into fights. There were rumors that McGreal and one of his friends—the friend was also a Southie but enrolled in a different school—were involved in an assault on three kids, though no charges