Crimes and Misdemeanors

Baranyk takes a step back. He has heard reports from cafeteria workers that sometimes the boy picks up food from the cafeteria line and conceals it. When he feels himself spotted, the boy puts the food back on the cafeteria counter and walks away, according to the workers. A couple of exasperated employees have told Baranyk that they can't sell the food after the boy has handled it. They've asked him to intercede.

Since he has seldom seen the kid with any money, Baranyk guesses that he's almost always broke. He occasionally offers the boy a couple of bucks to buy food, careful not to patronize him by expressing sympathy or by asking about things at home. He makes certain that no other students are around when he extends help. His discreet approach wins out sometimes. On those days, this kid accepts a couple of dollars and hurries into the cafeteria line; though other times, the kid quietly refuses the money. Baranyk will tell him: I've got a slush fund; it's money dropped off at Lost and Found.

And that is the truth: At that moment, there's $180 in the security department's slush fund. Ultra-casually, Baranyk says: "I can't wait for spring break. What are you doin' on the break?"

The kid looks up, pleased by the question. "Maybe driving to see some relatives. Maybe."

"Hey, that's great." Baranyk keeps smiling. "Great." Baranyk takes a last look around, whispers: "Hey, you sure you don't want a couple bucks from the slush fund? You know me -- I gotta give it away."

"I'm fine," the kid says firmly.

"Okay, well, keep doin' great. Good to see you."

The boy lifts an index finger.

Baranyk's walkie-talkie reports that "three unidentified young men are running across the lawn trying to escape."

And, the report adds, a kid is wandering alone outside.

The loner concerns him more. A couple of weeks earlier, a distraught kid whose girlfriend had broken up with him dropped to his knees in front of the school and began pounding his head on a sidewalk. He didn't hurt himself badly, but Baranyk still had concerns. "In security, we had to ask ourselves: Could this kid come back to school with a weapon?"

Baranyk offers no guarantees about security at Oakton. "We take every reasonable precaution, but we're not a prison," he says, "and there are ways in and out of here, which means there are limits to what we can do."

Besides, preventive measures get you only so far with many teenagers. By the end of Monday, Baranyk is still concerned about the kid who said he was assaulted, and maybe since threatened, determined to get to the bottom of the story by week's end. He worries that the boy will get beaten up again if he doesn't disclose what he knows to security. But he has no idea how he's going to get this kid to talk.

Like all Fairfax public high schools and middle schools, Oakton has a single armed uniformed officer from the county's police department on campus -- known as the school resource officer -- whose responsibilities include arresting student lawbreakers. With the school resource officer and his own four-person team, Baranyk likes security to be seen but not felt, if such a thing is possible.

Oakton High is synonymous in the Washington area with safety, stability and success. Its high-achieving students include a senior girl recently named a winner in a national high school essay contest sponsored by Oprah Winfrey. The school parking lot is sprinkled with the occasional Mercedes and Lexus, and among the student body have been the children of a congressman and other governmental officials. Most of its kids, like the surrounding community, are middle class, but there are some students from poor and working-class homes, with 9 percent of students receiving federally funded school lunches. Oakton's majority is white, but the school has significant blocs of African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanics. More than 400 of the school's approximately 2,400 students are foreign-born, speaking 45 languages and coming from 83 countries, including Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Pakistan, India, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Russia, Uzbekistan, Thailand and Vietnam.

"We've been pretty fortunate in most areas," Baranyk says of his relatively serene tenure, which he says has included no spike in the indices that he pays most attention to -- fights, larceny, drug use and classic bullying. "I think this is about as ideal a situation as a public school can have. But still . . ."

The comfort of working security in the suburbs, he says, can be delusional: Baranyk believes most of the wrongdoing at suburban high schools occurs deep in the shadows.

In the wake of studies showing a national increase in school-based crime and violence, security personnel made their entrance into many public school systems during the early 1980s, including Fairfax County, the largest Virginia school district. By the mid-'90s, uniformed and armed police officers had arrived on the scene in Fairfax.

Fairfax's reputation for secure schools is enhanced whenever mayhem befalls other school districts in the Washington area. The fatal stabbing of a teenage girl in the parking lot of Montgomery County's Blake High School was just one of two deadly teen attacks tied to football games in that county last September. A month earlier, two students were stabbed outside Montgomery's Springbrook High School in what reports characterized as a gang-related incident. In April, there were drive-by shootings of two students just outside the District's Roosevelt High School.

State agencies in Maryland and Virginia have reported a five-year increase in the number of weapons confiscated at schools, despite a national trend that shows a decrease in seized weapons. Baranyk hasn't had to seize a single gun, knife or shank. Oh, once he confiscated a machete from a kid, but that's only because the kid had brought it as a prop to a drama class. Similarly, despite national worries about youth gangs, Oakton has never been plagued by organized crews, although Baranyk believes there are gang members among the students, as evidenced by graffiti that has appeared on campus over the last year.

Oakton's challenges, and approach to security issues, differ strikingly from those in many urban school systems. The D.C. system's chief of security, Theodore Tuckson, has dealt long enough with gang problems to have created conflict resolution programs for mediating disputes. That school system touts a slogan that encapsulates a multi-pronged anti-gang strategy: "Intervention, Prevention, and Suppression." While much of the rule-breaking at Oakton occurs out of sight from faculty and staff members, insubordination at D.C. schools is more often on public display. "I think our biggest problem here is lack of respect by kids for teachers and adults and for other kids," says Michael Ilwain, a school resource officer at Eastern High School in Northeast Washington. "It leads to disrespect and bad behavior in classrooms, and it leads to fights, too. Almost all our problems start from there . . . But I also think that, in these times, we have some of the same things to face as other schools."

Those things include the spectacularly dire. At Oakton, as at any other 21st-century high school, Baranyk must ponder scenarios that once would have been unthinkable. He has had to devise meticulous plans for how Oakton staff members and students would respond in an emergency or a catastrophic event, including a terrorist's biological or chemical strike, or the spread of a potentially lethal virus. "Security at a school means something different now than 20 years ago . . ." he says. "You can try preparing for problems, but it's hard to know what they all will look like . . . I guess you're trying to imagine the unimaginable."

Tuesday

The next morning, Baranyk receives a report that the allegedly assaulted boy has disappeared from school.

Baranyk, who has heard now that three kids have threatened that boy, suggests to Rick Mey, the uniformed school resource officer, that they go looking for him. Before they leave, Baranyk runs into one of Oakton's assistant principals, Mark Penn, who says he has had a brief conversation with the boy. Penn says the boy now has a possible explanation: that he recently found some marijuana at the playground of a subdivision bordering the school but then threw the drugs away. And perhaps they belonged to his tormentors.

"This isn't sounding any better," says Baranyk, who decides to search some playgrounds that Oakton kids frequent. He gets into Mey's squad car, and the men cruise a few blocks to the first of two townhouse complexes, where they park in front of a small playground with a swing set. The kid is not around.

After checking out another empty playground at another subdivision, Mey and Baranyk drive a couple of blocks to a bridge that overlooks Interstate 66. They get out of the car and scramble down a slope to another known teen hideout. An empty discarded backpack lies in a heap alongside a cigarette pack, a crushed beer can and an orange juice carton.

Baranyk turns to Mey. "Where else could we look for this knucklehead?" Mey shrugs.

The men climb back up the slope toward the squad car. At that moment, the boy whom Baranyk questioned the day before about having allegedly threatened this missing kid appears out of nowhere, strolling in their direction.

"Look who's here," Baranyk shouts, laughing. "Look who's here."

The kid keeps walking toward them.

"How're you doing?" Baranyk asks him.

"Okay," the kid says calmly. "My classes are over."

"You seen your buddy walking back here?" Baranyk mentions the missing boy's name. "We're lookin' around for him. He really wanted to get out of school for some reason. He was bookin' it." Baranyk mentions the name again.

"I don't know who he is," this kid says.

"Really?"

"Never heard that name."

Baranyk takes a long look at him. "All right then. Stay straight."

Baranyk watches the kid saunter off. "That is a very cool kid," he says softly. "But on the other hand it could be, I don't know, maybe he isn't involved in any of this." He considers it within the realm of possibility that the missing boy, whom he also regards as clever, has orchestrated these stories about threats made against him to bring heat on these other boys, to get them to leave him alone about a drug debt.

Baranyk returns to the school and swiftly does a hallway patrol before stepping into the cafeteria. He is pleased to see that the kid to whom he tried giving lunch money yesterday has some company. "Hey," he says to the kid, who is seated across a table from a disabled boy Baranyk recognizes, a boy beaten up earlier in the year by a kid since expelled for the assault. The disabled boy is happily munching on a sandwich and jabbering nonstop as the other kid, who has no lunch in front of him for a second straight day, contentedly nods, sometimes smiling.

Their friendship was born of trouble: Friends of the bully had continued mocking the disabled boy long after the assault. Baranyk worried that the boy might be attacked again by someone wanting payback for the bully's expulsion. It was about then, according to Baranyk, that this other kid intervened out of nowhere during yet another day of mocking, ready to fight in defense of the disabled boy. In spite of his duty to prevent such confrontations, the moment revealed a streak of character and compassion that has endeared the protector to Baranyk.

"You guys look like you're doing good," he says. "Spring break's almost here, almost here."

When the disabled boy runs off to say hi to somebody else, Baranyk bends. "Need anything?" he asks the other kid.

A shake of the head.

Baranyk smiles, gives him a pat on the shoulder and heads off. His walkie-talkie squawks: The missing boy whom they'd looked for alongside I-66 is back. He was at McDonald's.

Wally Baranyk had a rowdy period as a teenager, which he suspects makes it easier for him to relate to kids who've run into a little trouble and to believe that most of them will settle down in time. Growing up in little Sayre, Pa., he played high school football but also had a fondness for, as he puts it, "raising some hell, doing things like egging cars. My brothers did, too." The local police paid several visits to the Baranyk home. "If something happened nearby, the police usually had good reason to think one of the Baranyk boys had something to do with it," he says sheepishly. "Maybe those visits had some effect on what I did after that." What he did was attend York College in Pennsylvania, where he got a degree in criminal justice. "I guess I must have liked the police officers I met," he says.

He's standing in an Oakton hallway, alongside a restroom, watching students walk between classes. If you want to know something about the difference between school security now and a generation ago, start by watching the restrooms. Even during breaks, restrooms are relatively quiet at Oakton. Back when Baranyk was in high school in the late 1960s, you would enter a crowded boys' restroom at lunchtime to find music blaring and a nicotine cloud thick enough to rival that of a good blues club. It was the closest thing on school grounds to a bowery.

That was in the days before school security specialists like Baranyk, who came to Oakton after a grueling 27-year career with the Fairfax police. Throughout the childhood of his two sons, he worked 60- to 70-hour weeks, ascending to oversee divisions that included organized crime and narcotics. "I was never really off duty," he says. The hours took a toll on him. "I knew I didn't have the energy or interest to jump into a chief job somewhere, even if one were available . . . It was time to reassess things."

His personal life had reached a crossroads, too: He was going through a divorce and feeling guilty over not spending more time with his sons who, by then, were teenagers. In 2002, he retired from the police department. "I needed to find the kind of employment that would enable me to have a life where I could be around my boys as much as possible," he says. "A school seemed like the perfect job."

Baranyk got a teaching credential and was hired as a government and history teacher at Osbourn High School in Manassas. He lasted a year before deciding the job wasn't for him. "I found out I was more comfortable dealing with anti-terrorism than a classroom," he says.

When Oakton's security position came open, in 2003, Baranyk accepted. "It was just what I wanted to hear: 194 [working] days a year, with summers and school vacations off. And I get to wear this."

He laughs, fingering his Oakton Security polo shirt, a uniform underscoring the impression of a loose and contented man. He remarried in 2004 and now has two teenage stepdaughters. Not so long ago he imagined that working in a high school security office would help him grasp the thinking of the teens living under his roof, to read their moods and motivations. "But, if anything, my working at a high school has maybe made it harder to understand them," he says. "Or maybe it's that I've begun to think it's harder to ever understand teenagers completely -- because I see so many different kinds of [incidents] and kids."

What works at Oakton does not always work at home, and vice versa. He remembers a family dinner during which he told his youngest son, a senior at another Fairfax high school, about an Oakton boy who had received a three-day suspension for fighting. Missing so much school might jeopardize the suspended kid's performance on tests and, in turn, harm his grades and college admission chances, Baranyk said. He reminded his son that, if for no other reason, he needed to avoid fights to protect his own chances.

Dad, if somebody is being a jerk and getting in my face, I'm going to pop him, Baranyk remembers his son telling him.

No, when you're angry in those situations, you gotta stop and show restraint, Baranyk responded.

I'm going to stand up for myself, Dad.

"I'm fortunate," Baranyk says. "He's stayed out of trouble, and he's been admitted to a good [college]. But I'm also aware that only so much I say is going to make it through to him or any other kid that age."

When Baranyk talks about teenage life, it sounds like an underworld. He has deeply personal reasons for wanting to penetrate it, especially when he suspects that drugs have entered a kid's life. His youngest brother died under suspicious circumstances last month after a 10-year battle with drugs, Baranyk says. He still struggles to understand where his kin went off the path.

"I've had a good life, and my [other siblings] have had good lives, but it's a risk even for a good person once he starts using drugs," Baranyk observes. "It can be difficult to stop. We all warned him to get the hell away from it, but it was too hard for him. He had other problems; he went the other way. It's one of the reasons why I'm tougher on our students and tougher on my own [children]. If I can do anything to keep anybody away from that stuff, I'm going to do it."

He wants to connect however he can. Most of the time, this means catching wrongdoers. His resolve can be maniacal when tested, as it was one morning earlier this school year. He had been at his home in Centreville, getting dressed for work, when he looked out the window and saw a young man running down his street and knocking over curbside mailboxes, including Baranyk's. "I went outside, and the guy screamed something crazy at me," Baranyk remembers. "He looked wild; he looked like he'd been living in the woods. I knew he was on drugs." Without shoes on, Baranyk started chasing him.

The young man was fleet, but Baranyk stayed close, as he tells the story. He felt a tad silly conducting a chase along pavement in his socks; self-consciousness eventually gave way to pain. The pursuit consumed the next hour and 20 minutes, he says, off the streets and into woods. Along the way, he occasionally flagged down motorists. "Please call 911," he asked. "Tell them Wally Baranyk is chasing a suspect."

A police helicopter was soon circling overhead. Now and then, the young man stopped and turned around to see his older pursuer still there. He resumed running while bellowing painfully at Baranyk, who was in his own acute distress by then, his right foot throbbing from stepping on rocks.

The young man turned again and screamed at him: "Why are you chasing me? Go away."

"I'm sorry, I can't," Baranyk yelled back.

Finally, with the helicopter circling, the young man gave up. Baranyk and his neighbors declined to press charges for the toppled mailboxes, on the condition that the young man get himself treated for substance abuse. "But making people face up to what they've done and get themselves help is what you have to insist upon," he says. "And to do that you usually have to catch them first."

Wednesday

Baranyk has gone two days without setting eyes on the kid who said he was assaulted. But today, while walking through the halls between classes, he runs into him. "Hey, there. You all right?"

The kid, clucking his tongue, exudes surprise. "Yeah. Fine. Why?"

"Really? Everything good?"

Arching his eyebrows, the boy stares quizzically at Baranyk and sighs every few seconds. He has mastered the passive-

aggressive thing. "Yeah. Why?"

"Why were you bookin' it out of here yesterday?"

"I didn't like [a class] is all. It bores me."

"So you don't like a class, and you just leave?"

The kid shrugs.

"Everything okay with you and these other guys now?"

"I don't care, like, what's their problem?" the kid says coolly. "It's stupid. I just wish they'd leave me alone."

"Why won't they leave you alone?"

The boy takes his time before responding. "I don't know," he mutters.

Baranyk steps closer to the boy and bends to eye level. "You know, you don't owe these kids anything. So if you have a disagreement with them -- if you need to come to us and let us know something they're doing to you, then you should do it. They haven't been friends to you. You don't owe them anything. So if there's anything to tell us --"

"There isn't." The kid drops his head. "It's fine. I can take care of it."

"You know we're always here to help you." Baranyk says this so earnestly that the kid lifts his head and looks him over for a moment. "Always here. You should know that."

Maybe the security team can still reach him, Baranyk thinks, which in this case would mean getting the boy to ask for help and spill the entire story. Or perhaps some eyewitness -- say, a disgusted buddy who overheard something between the other boys involved -- will come forward. As in his police days, Baranyk will promise to give anonymity to any informer. Without that pledge, he says, many of his best sources of information at Oakton would have dried up long ago, just as on the streets.

Except here, different rules apply. Having a circle of students confidentially feeding him information also means that Baranyk sometimes hears pained admissions from kids about their own lives. "If kids let me know they've done something knuckleheaded, and they've come to me in confidence, then what do I do?" he asks. "My feeling is that if it's an immediate health issue or problem, I will call [the students' parents]. Otherwise it's a judgment call. If I called a parent each and every time somebody confided, then those students would never talk to me again. And if I did it, and word got out about it to the rest of the school, no other student would talk to me, either."

Later, a girl approaches and taps him on the arm.

"What's up?" he asks.

She shows off her scanty tank top, whining when Baranyk says that her bare midriff violates the dress code.

"Hey, I need to tell you something," she says.

"What?"

She whispers something to him.

"Okay, thanks," he says as she walks off. She has given him news about something happening on campus.

Even with his resolve and his sources, Baranyk can't hear about everything. In a hallway, near the school trophy case, a 16-year-old junior, with his hands plunged into the pockets of his jeans, walks by and says hi. "He's pretty cool," the boy later says of Baranyk. "People like to be helpful to him. But this is a big place. Kids know he and the other security guys can't be everywhere."

The main building at Oakton has two floors, and the boy says students know that the security personnel, whose office is on the first floor, spend far less of their time patrolling the hallways on the upper level. "Security worries about students trying to get off campus, but a lot of kids don't even try to get off campus when they skip [classes]," he says. "Sometimes they just skip and hang out upstairs because they know security doesn't come up there as much."

Upstairs is a tougher world, he says. "Sometimes kids get shoved around up there by bigger kids, but that's just high school, right?"

Even when an altercation is happening on the floor where Baranyk and his colleagues are patrolling, the boy says that security often doesn't see it. "If two kids want to fight inside the school," he explains, "they go to the end of a hallway, as far away as they can get from security, and then their friends get in a circle around them. That way it's harder for security and teachers to see them fighting. See, security wants to catch kids, but kids are looking around at what security does, too. They can be tricky, like security."

The caginess also applies to the way students deal with one another, he says. The boy doesn't hear students talking about their own drug use at Oakton. Stiff penalties for possession of drugs have had an impact. "You hear gossip about other people, but it's from guys talking about rumors of people in other groups they don't really know," he says. "You really only know what's happening in your own group . . . Security knows a lot more about drugs than kids do. It's weird: Security finds out somehow. People probably talk to them. Mr. Baranyk knows how to get information."

Baranyk is dogged about intelligence gathering. Using the Internet, he and Rick Mey have scanned Oakton students' MySpace.com sites, which, in some cases, offer a window into their thoughts and activities.

He will be able to point, within the next couple of weeks, to an incident in Kansas, where sheriff's deputies, alerted by a MySpace.com posting, arrested five teenage boys allegedly plotting to shoot high school classmates on April 20, the seventh anniversary of the Columbine murders. But Baranyk's principal interest in MySpace.com and the rest of his investigative tools is far less sensational: He is looking for any Oakton High lawbreaker or dangerous risk-taker who needs to be rescued. "You want to help them, and you need to hold them accountable," he says. "But you don't want to see their lives harmed by being caught, either."

When his walkie-talkie squawks, he is off to look into a new bit of chicanery: A teacher has reported that he saw a boy with a "teacher's textbook," which has answers to homework questions and possible examination topics. The book in question is not from this teacher's class. It is used by a government teacher who, since told of the allegation, has met Baranyk in the hallway outside his classroom. "Would you like me to talk to the student?" Baranyk asks him.

"I'd appreciate that," the teacher replies.

"I'll wait for him out here," Baranyk says.

The teacher steps back into the room and walks over to the boy, who looks stunned when asked to get up from his desk and speak to Baranyk.

"Am I in trouble for something?" the boy asks, in the hallway.

"I certainly hope not," Baranyk says casually, leading him toward the security office.

Once there, Baranyk conducts his interrogation at warp speed. "The witnesses in this are teachers, and I have some leeway," Baranyk says, "but if you lie that shuts the door on you. All right?"

The boy nods.

Baranyk moves his chair closer. "You have a teacher's government textbook, according to a witness. I gotta have that book back, and I gotta know how you got it, or there's a possibility you don't graduate. If it's a theft and there's any lying by you, you might be looking at a felony, too. Okay? How did you get the book?"

"I got it from a friend," the kid answers. "I gave it back to him. He got it online."

"Who's your friend?"

The boy supplies a name.

"I'm proud of you for being honest," Baranyk says to the kid. "It isn't fatal what you've done. I'm sure there'll be some repercussions with your teacher, but you'll be all right with us."

Within a few minutes, Baranyk is headed back toward the same class, ready to pluck a second boy from his desk. He likes to spare administrators and teachers the task of questioning students, in no small part because he has seen enough of their soft interrogations to know it is not one of their greatest strengths. The second boy is not in the classroom now, having just moments before secured a pass for himself from the unsuspecting teacher.

"What a knucklehead this kid is," Baranyk says, hurrying down a hallway. "I bet when he saw me take [the first boy], he decided he needed to get out of there."

Baranyk peers down hallways, pops into a boys' restroom. There, stepping away from a toilet stall, is the boy, alone.

"I'm here because of this government book, this teacher's book, that you got," Baranyk says.

"What?" the kid asks innocently.

They are standing in the middle of the restroom. The boy is beginning to say something, but Baranyk cuts him off. "This isn't a time to BS me," Baranyk says. In a flash, his typically soft voice, the one so useful in extracting information from students during gentle interrogations, can give way to the tough cop voice from his past. "You understand me?" Baranyk goes on. "Look, if we leave this bathroom without the truth, you'll have to sit down with [an assistant principal]. You don't want to have to go through that. It will get bad then. You're here now, and maybe I can help, but this is your only chance. If you BS me, that door is shut. Shut. You have to think about graduating, right? Right? So where did you get the book?"

The boy's upper lip trembles. "I got it three days ago. Online."

"Why did you do that?"

The boy shrugs.

"Where is it now?"

"At home. I threw it in a trash can. I didn't want anybody else to find it."

"If you're BS-ing, and I search your book bag and locker and it's in there, I can't help you."

The boy's chest heaves. "It's really in the trash."

Baranyk looks the boy over.

"Lots of other kids have them," the boy adds. "They're getting them online, too."

Baranyk sends the boy on his way. There will be no suspensions. Baranyk will pass the information about the compromised lesson plan on to the teacher, who will flunk the two kids on some homework assignments and consider deducting points from their next exam.

Late in the day, Baranyk walks by his office to hear an update: The assaulted boy's mother has called a vice principal to express her growing concern for him. To Baranyk, this update seems a portent of more trouble. He sighs. "Knucklehead," he mumbles. At the other end of the hallway, smirking staff members are motioning for him.

"What's going on?" he asks.

"They've wrapped condoms around the water faucets again, Wally."

"It only happens every few weeks or so, so we can live with it," Baranyk whispers. "Rumor is it's some kids' way of promoting safe sex. That's an expensive hobby, if you ask me."

One of the nice things about Oakton, he points out, is that weird humor is in no short supply. "You know, when it comes to workplaces, I don't think anything can beat a school," he observes. He looks at his watch: It is nearly 3 o'clock, the end of his workday. "Another thing about this job," he says, "the hours are great."

Thursday

Late this morning, assistant principal Mark Penn asks Baranyk to join him in a hastily called meeting with the boy who said he was assaulted. When the teenager arrives, he is twitchy, flicking at his earring.

"Have you had any more problems with anybody?" Penn asks.

"Not really, but I don't know why they [the two boys suspected of assaulting him] don't just leave me alone," the boy says, staring at his feet.

Penn glances at Baranyk and then back at the boy. "We received an e-mail from your mother. Something happened at your house."

The boy looks up.

Penn tells him that, according to his mother, somebody has vandalized the boy's car. Penn scans the mother's e-mail: "What she's saying here is that there's a smashed car window."

The boy howls an expletive.

Penn goes on: "She's also saying that you rushed out of your house early this morning . . ."

The boy doesn't seem to have heard what Penn said. "That's my car, that's my car." He screams the expletive again.

"Did you know about any of this with the car?" Penn asks.

"No," the boy moans.

"She's concerned that you might have left this morning without taking your medicine," Penn says.

The boy cups his head in his hands. "My car, my car," he mumbles.

"She's concerned you didn't take your medicine."

The boy is bipolar and regularly takes prescribed lithium. "No, I took it," he whispers, calming, lifting his head. "Why did they do that to my car?"

"Your mom says that she hopes a counselor will talk to you so that you can decompress," Penn goes on. "Would it help you to be able to see your counselor?"

"No. Why did they do that to my car?"

No one answers him. Penn and Baranyk are hoping he'll answer his own question. The boy takes a breath. "Don't worry, I'll handle it," he says.

That makes Baranyk's head whip around.

"Don't confront anybody," Penn warns. "Don't make things worse."

Baranyk slices in. "Why would someone smash your car window?"

The boy answers slowly. One of the two boys suspected of assaulting him "was pissed at me for snitching that there was an assault. He was pissed because if he gets in any more trouble, maybe he'll have to go to a [juvenile detention facility]. It's like a warning: Don't snitch again. Don't snitch about anything else."

Baranyk's eyes are rapidly blinking. "Snitch about what else?"

"Assaulting."

This isn't what Baranyk is looking for. The conversation is over, at least for now.

Alone, Baranyk and Penn try to figure out the next move, if there is a next move.

"It's getting more serious," Penn says. "They're not going to stop coming after him, I don't think."

In the afternoon, wearing a dark suit, Baranyk makes a short drive to a Fairfax County school district office, where separate disciplinary hearings will be held for two Oakton girls. The first, a senior, is charged with bringing a drug to school -- a painkiller prescribed to her -- and giving it to another student. The other girl, an underclassman, is accused of possessing not only the painkiller but a small quantity of marijuana found in a search of her belongings. Weeks earlier, another student heard rumors that the senior with the painkiller was offering the drug to another girl. The student shared the story with an adult, who passed it along to the school. From the beginning of the case, Baranyk and his team have worried about its impact on the senior, who, having turned 18, can no longer be treated as a juvenile by the justice system. On the day of the bust, having admitted to distributing a drug, the girl faced the possibility of a felony charge. But Mey says he pointed out to a county prosecutor that no money had exchanged hands, and the prosecutor decided not to pursue a criminal case.

Today, each of the hearings will last a little over an hour. The younger girl's session is first, and she emerges teary-eyed afterward. On the family's way out, the mother murmurs, "Thank you" to Baranyk. He recounts how the parents expressed gratitude that their daughter's marijuana use had been exposed. The hearing officer's decision will not come for a week, at which time the younger girl will be assigned to a new high school in the county. The senior who gave her the painkiller will be barred from attending classes at Oakton but permitted to finish her course work at home and graduate on time. The incident will be recorded on each girl's permanent school record. But Oakton and county school officials believe that the incident will not harm either girl's college admission chances. They say colleges seldom request more than a student's grades.

"They get to move ahead," Baranyk says. "Their lives will be better because the truth is out."

Friday

In the morning, several members of the staff surprise Baranyk by wishing him a happy 54th birthday. One woman drapes a lei around his neck. Others take turns giving him chaste hugs and kisses on the cheek. "Ladies, I never got anything like this in the police department," he says, grinning.

Once away from them, he wonders aloud, "Well, what's gonna happen today?" He always has a conflicted feeling about Friday at Oakton. On the one hand, a weekend break awaits; on the other, he can sense tension in the air, the nerves of some edgy students fraying after a week under the school grind.

During his lunchtime patrol of the cafeteria, he looks for the kid who seldom eats, happy today to find that he is munching on a sandwich and sitting across from the disabled boy. "Hey, Mr. Baranyk," the first kid calls out. He says he has some spring break news.

"I'm taking that trip," the boy says, grinning crookedly. "Driving to see my relatives and some old friends."

"Good for you," Baranyk says. "Nothing better than spring break, huh?"

"One more week," the boy says.

In the cafeteria and elsewhere on campus, there are no altercations today, and therefore, remarkably, no fights all week. For the first time in months at Oakton, it will be a week without a student suspension. By all appearances, everything is tranquil.

But even on a day as quiet as this Friday, the worried keep trickling in. A stricken-looking administrator stops Baranyk in the hallway to share a report about a girl who has been having "meltdowns" in her classes and, according to whispers, talking about suicide. Baranyk says he'll be sure to brief the counselor.

Next a German teacher rushes into the office and says that somebody in her class has stolen one of her teacher textbooks with exam answers. Baranyk agrees to talk to her students. His voice, imperious and loud, will carry right through the door of the classroom.

"Look," he says to all of them. "The person who took that book can turn it in by Monday morning, with no questions asked. But, if that doesn't happen, I will see to it that all 26 students in this class are interrogated, and I will get that book, and the student responsible will be dealt with. Understand me: One way or another, I will get the book."

By Monday morning, the book will be there.

But for now, another week is over for Baranyk. As he gets ready to leave for the weekend, he runs into Mark Penn, each wondering whether the other has heard more about the stealth life of the supposedly assaulted boy. Baranyk shakes his head.

"Nothing's changed," Penn says. "It's all so unclear. He went missing from another class."

"I don't know if he's any safer on a weekend," Baranyk says. "Maybe not."

In the hallway, the men see the smiling principal, John Banbury, who says: "Well, this was a calm week, wasn't it? Did I hear right? No suspensions?"

Penn nods. "We were just talking about it: no fights, no suspensions."

Baranyk concurs. "A very calm week."

Michael Leahy is a staff writer for the Magazine. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.