Beating a Dead Stick

A student at an urban high school is raped in the book room, but won't identify the rapist. Near the school, another student is murdered during a robbery at a convenience store. There are rumors of a call-girl ring involving the students, but the faculty remains comically oblivious. When English teacher Barbara Butler's best friend, a transvestite math teacher, is badly beaten but too frightened to identify his attacker, Barbara turns to a former student, now a grown-up detective, to discover the truth. While this book is about teenage gangsters and buffoonish educators, it is also about the way cultural changes tend to outrun our ability to describe them accurately, accounting for our indecisive and illogical efforts to cope with them.