Blue Bloods Read Online Free PDF Page A

expelled?”
    “Maybe,” Oliver said, savoring the thought.
    Last year almost the entire crew team had been banished for illicit behavior on school grounds.
    To celebrate a win at the Head of the Charles, they had come back to school that evening and trashed the second-floor classrooms, leaving graffiti’d expletives on the walls and proof of their night— broken beer bottles, piles of cigarette stubs and several cocaine-laced dollar bills—to be found by the janitors the next morning. Parents petitioned the administration to change their decision (some thought expulsion too harsh, while others wanted nothing less than criminal charges filed). That the ringleader, a toothy Harvard-bound senior, was the Headmistress’s nephew only added to the fire. (Harvard promptly recalled his admission, and the expelled coxswain was currently yelling himself hoarse at Duke.)
    Somehow Schuyler didn’t think that a simple case of bad behavior over the weekend was the reason the entire upper school was being called into the chapel that morning.
    As there were only forty students in each class, the entire stu dent body fit comfortably inside the room, taking their respective seats organized by grade: seniors and freshman in the front section separated by the aisle, juniors and sopho mores respectively behind them.
    The Dean of Students stood patiently by the podium in front of the altar. Schuyler and Oliver found Dylan in the back, at their usual perch. He had dark circles under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept, and there was an ugly red stain on his button-down shirt and a hole in his black jeans. He was wearing his signature white silk Jimi Hendrix–style scarf around his neck. The other kids in the pew gave him a wide berth. He beckoned Schuyler and Oliver to his side.
    “What’s going on?” Schuyler asked, sliding into the pew.
    Dylan shrugged, putting a finger to his lips.
    Dean Cecile Molloy tapped the microphone. While she wasn’t a Duchesne alum, like the headmistress, the head librarian, and almost the entire female faculty—and it was rumored that she’d been the recipient of a public school edu cation—she had quickly acquired the velvet headband, knee-length corduroy skirts, and rounded vowels that marked the true Duchesne girl.
    Dean Molloy was a very ade quate facsimile, and hence was very popular with the board of directors.
    “Attention, please. Settle down, boys and girls. I have something very sad to share with you this morning.” The dean inhaled sharply. “I am very sorry to inform you that one of our students, Aggie Carondolet , passed away this weekend.”
    There was a shocked silence, followed by a confused buzzing.
    The dean cleared her throat. “Aggie had been a student at Duchesne since pre-kindergarten.
    There will be no classes tomorrow. Instead, there will be a funeral service in the chapel tomorrow morning. Everyone is invited to attend. Afterward, there will be a burial at Forest Hills inQueens , and a shuttle bus will be provided to take students who would like to attend, to the cemetery. We ask that you think of her family at this difficult time.”
    Another throat clearing.
    “We have grief counselors on hand to assist those who need it. School will conclude at noon, your parents have already been informed of the early dismissal. After this meeting, please return to your second-period classes.”
    After a short invocation (Duchesne was nondenomina tional), and a devotion from the Book of Common Prayer, as well as a verse from the Koran and a passage from Khalil Gibran were read by the Head Boy and Head Girl, students streamed out with quiet trepidation, a low feeling of excite ment mixed with nausea and real sympathy for the Carondolets . Nothing like this had ever happened at Duchesne before. Sure, they’d heard of other schools’ prob lems—drunk driving accidents, child-molesting soccer coaches, senior boys date-raping freshmen girls, trenchcoat –
    wearing freaks wielding machine