Monday

The air is sweet and the stars are out, the milky streetlamps still lit at 5:45. It would be a great morning to be fishing. The school doors are already open when principal Pat Voss pads up the front steps in her cranberry Goofy T shirt and heads for the main office. Nancy Giessmann is in the cafeteria making breakfast, Vron Murphy is in the office doing photocopying left from the night before. The flag next to the front steps is still flying at half-staff, in honor of the teacher who dropped dead in the hallway between periods two weeks ago.

Voss, universally known as P.V., climbs up to the windowless weight room above the gym for her morning workout: abdominal crunches in sets of 20, leg presses and toe raises, free weights for working her obliques. She's thinking about tonight's school-board meeting. A survey last year found that most people in town are happy with the schools--which she considers a challenge. "That could mean they're less willing to spend more to improve them."

The building is brick and stone, sprawling in all directions, additions stapled on here, an annex there, accidental courtyards created in between as the building grew to accommodate 1,300-plus kids and their growing appetites. Just two years ago, if you plugged in a computer, it might have blown out a circuit. The school has been rewired since then. Chief custodian Frank Schaffer is already inspecting the premises, moving back the picnic tables that the skateboarders clear out every weekend. He knows every inch of the place, from the mile of utility tunnels in the basement to the old attic that was once used as a rifle range. "This building is a living organism," he says. "It lives for the people inside it."

The first wave of students arrives at 6:55 a.m. Six buses from downtown St. Louis pull in bearing the "deseg" kids, most of whom head for the cafeteria. The band members have practice most days before school; drowsy musicians start stumbling onto the field across from the entrance. Jacob Myerson is upstairs in a dim hallway, sitting on the floor outside Room 319, some 40 minutes early for class, studying vocabulary words. Histrionic. Poignant. Unkempt. Loquacious. He wants to go to Princeton.

By 6:45 a.m. Detective Dave Dreher has already been briefed by the Webster Groves police department about the weekend. "If no crimes were committed over the weekend, no juvenile matters, nobody arrested, nobody hurt, no traffic accidents, nobody locked up that I have to go interview, then that's a good morning. We're having a good morning." His loaded Smith & Wesson, his badge and his beeper are all hidden under his brown sports jacket, but he carries the school's ubiquitous power symbol, a walkie-talkie, and it will crackle and sputter plenty before the day is safely started.

Nurse Lynn Buss is preparing for the Monday flood. Her "clinic" is tucked away on the first floor of the pre-1935 extension that she calls "the North Forty" because of its remoteness. The first wave consists of girls who march straight into one of three exam rooms, where they throw down their bookbags, turn out the lights and flop onto cots, asleep before they hit the pillow. Nurse Buss is unfazed. "These kids who get bused in from the city get up before 5," she explains. "They come here to sleep for half an hour before class."

The rest of the population begins to stir. The students come from every direction, by bus, on foot, in every size and shape of car. Some slouch through the doors, some bounce, some seem so fully grown, others are toddlers; they wear shorts and parkas and black trench coats; they are dyed and pierced and bespectacled and mascaraed and pumped up and wasted away; and none of them are typical--there is no such thing as average.

As they come in the front doors, they pass a big display case holding a new mural that is under construction by some seniors. THE THINGS WE VALUE AND BELIEVE IN, it says in bright letters, with white clouds and smiling kids made of construction paper and all the students' names and thoughts pasted on in little fortune-cookie strips of revelation. DREAMS, says one. MIRACLES. LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. ART. But lest anyone mistake this for a giant Hallmark card, there is much more here. LONELINESS. GREED. AN EYE FOR AN EYE. PARTIES. WEAKNESS. DRAGONS. ABSTINENCE. JUSTICE. WEALTH. PEOPLE CAN CHANGE.

Nurse Buss slips down to the cafeteria to haul back a bucket of ice. "My major cure," she notes. "When in doubt, put ice on it." She flushes an amorous couple from the girls' room in the back. "We were just talking," the boy protests. The kids are already lining up outside her office: one girl is there for iron pills to treat her anemia--a poor substitute, notes Buss, for what she really needs, which is a decent diet. Another has a bruised hand from a fight over the weekend; a boy wants Tylenol for a stomachache; she gives him baking soda and water.

A girl who forgot her inhaler is having an asthma attack. Buss draws her a glass of tap water and instructs her to gulp it down quickly; the shock of the intrusion, she says, often releases the asthmatic constriction. Part 2 of this home remedy is a shot of Diet Coke; the caffeine sometimes has a similar effect. Outside, the marching band is rehearsing the borrowed strains of On Wisconsin. Buss predicts, "By November I'll be able to walk out there and play it myself."