I am not a man who writes letters. I am writing this one somebody on this board kept telling all of us how highly recommended she came and nothing else.

You ran a cheerful little notice before the prom. You said Silverwolf had secured a returning DJ, that she comes highly recommended, that she keeps to herself, and that she works exclusively after sundown. I read that to my wife over supper and we both thought, how nice, the school has it handled. I want to know now who recommended her, and I want to know what they think she was hired to do, because my daughter walked through our door at dawn the morning after prom the color of a bedsheet, swaying on the step, and no memory of the last two hours of the dance.

She was not the only one. Every child we’ve talked to came home the same way. Pale, cold, slow in the head. The Critch boy slept a day and a half. The Vellum girl still cannot climb the stairs without resting. And every one of them tells the same story, which is no story at all: the music got very good, the room got very warm, the lady with the cold hands asked them up to the front, and then it was morning.

Here is the part that has me writing past midnight. The school took our coin for this. There was a line on the prom slip we all signed, down at the bottom, that called it a hospitality levy, three coppers a child, payable to the school before the doors opened. We paid it. We thought we were paying for cake and a hall and a chaperone with quick reflexes. We were paying the toll on our own children. The school took money from every family in the outer reaches and then opened the gymnasium door and let that thing do what it pleased (and we don’t even know what!), and it has the gall to call the arrangement hospitality.

I went up to the school. I stood in the office and I asked plainly what she is and what she did to my daughter. I got the same three sentences off the notice, recited back at me like a charm. Keeps to herself. Works after sundown. Comes highly recommended. When I asked recommended by whom, the clerk looked at her papers and would not answer. When I asked where the levy money went, she said it was a matter for the school. It is a matter for me. It is my girl on the daybed who cannot finish a sentence.

I want the levy returned, and I want the name of whoever first wrote her down as highly recommended, because they have some explaining to do to every parent whose child went to prom.

- G. Thornby

Garrick Thornby farms the thin acres past the second creek on the outer strip and has two children at Silverwolf High, one of whom is upstairs resting as he writes this. Replies, and the school’s account of where the levy money went, may be sent by owl.