What happened to Fischer wasn’t my fault. In 1944, the year it all started, a war between nations engulfed the world. That same year the students of New Canaan High School waged another kind of war. I, Tucker Landis, became its champion and its casualty. Back then my high school and my hometown held my entire universe. All my gods lived there. So did my demons.
Most of us had grown up in New Canaan or on neighboring farms and ranches. We had known each other all our lives, yet at school we segregated ourselves into exclusive cliques of our own making. Everyone held a defined rank and a prescribed place in the hierarchy. The rules were brutal. One misstep could ruin a reputation and doom the offender to the most dreaded of all punishments: ridicule. Ridicule had girls bawling in the restroom at school, and guys sobbing into their pillows at night
Fischer recognized all of this, but unlike the rest of us, he understood something more: the hierarchy held no power over those who simply ignored it. With that profound insight, Fischer would wage his own private war.
