The Orchard . . . You Know, Behind the Tennis Courts

Today the sophomores and juniors had to take the PSAT (interminable and the script that admin made for us was riddled with typos and errors-- it was actually difficult to read-- you had to correct spelling, verb tense, and actual wrong wordage on the fly) so we had a half day, and to escape traffic quickly I brought my bike-- right when the test ended, I ran out of the building and jumped onto it and rode over to the used book sale at the mall and bought some books . . . when I returned I saw one of my friends from the History Department walking to his car and stopped my bike and entered into a very strange conversation:

"Hey what's going on?"

"I just rode over to the used book sale at the mall, got some good cheap books . . . now I'm headed over to the orchard to bike the trails"

"The orchard? I don't live around here . . ."

"The orchard . . . behind the tennis courts? where the track team runs?"

"Cranbury Road is behind the tennis courts"

"Not exactly . . . you go over a bridge, there's a large piece of land, that used to be an orchard-- with trails-- it's high school property"

"I've never been back there"

"Behind the tennis courts? There's a bridge over a little stream?"

"I don't know man"

"How long have you worked here! Twenty years?"

"Twenty years"

"Well . . . there's an orchard-- I used to walk across it to the old Blockbuster if I needed a movie for class"

"Alright, sounds cool, maybe I'll eat my lunch back there"

"Watch out for ticks"

and then I went biking in the orchard, a place I often run, walk, and bike . . . wondering how he made it twenty years without hearing about the orchard, a large chunk of multi-use land on our high school campus . . . weird . . . I wonder what stuff I don't know about our high school.