Chapter Six

BEN SQUINTED at the sheet of paper lying on his desk, covered with barely legible pencil scratches, then turned to look at the boy standing by his elbow. Cole was a great kid and had a good mind, as long as he was able to respond verbally or physically. If he had to actually write something down? Chaos ensued.

“Tell me what’s going on here,” Ben suggested. “Walk me through it.”

But Cole hadn’t even started talking when a commotion arose in the far corner of the classroom. An overturned chair, a desk skidding noisily across the floor— “Peyton and Ty,” Ben said. Well, possibly he yelled, but only because he needed to be heard, not because he was on his last nerve with these two. “You will not start that nonsense again. There is no fighting in this classroom. Not in this whole school. And you both know it.”

“He called me a slut!” Peyton responded. Ah, yes, the charming innocence of fifth grade. And Peyton was nice and loud, of course, so every kid could go home and tell their parents about the kind of language Ben allowed in his classroom.

“Totally unacceptable,” Ben said firmly. “But you respond with words or you come get me for help. You do not get physical.” Of course, that wasn’t enough. Cole would have to wait to get help with his work. “Both of you. Hallway. Now.”

They exchanged glares but did as they were told. That was a bit of a victory, at least.

In the hallway, he positioned himself so he could still see the classroom but the classroom couldn’t see Peyton or Ty. An audience was never a good thing when working with misbehaving kids. “Ty, did you really call her that?”

“It’s just the truth. You know what she—”

“No,” Ben said. “That’s not any of my business or any of your business so we’re not going to talk about it.” Although Ben would try to make it his business later, or maybe ask one of his female colleagues to intervene. Hopefully Ty just meant Peyton had held hands with two boys in the same week, but it could be something much more serious. “We don’t call people names, Ty. You know that.”

“He’s been saying that stuff about me all year,” Peyton said. She was crying now, not even trying to hide the tears. Damn, what would it be like to show emotion so plainly, so fearlessly? “And my mom said I don’t have to take it. She said he can’t talk to me like that.”

“She’s totally right. You don’t have to take it.” Ben caught himself before he asked the but did she tell you to start a fight with him in the middle of the classroom question, because knowing Peyton’s mom it was totally possible she had. “But there are different ways of stopping him. Using your words, and if your words don’t work, asking for help. You know I wouldn’t let him call you that, not if I knew it was happening. Right?”

Peyton glared. “I can handle it myself! I don’t need to go running to some teacher for help.”

“You can’t handle it with violence. Not in my classroom.”

“So if someone called you a fag, you’d just take it?” she retorted.

This wasn’t going well. Ben could practically hear the mother’s words in Peyton’s voice; this was a discussion that had been well rehearsed at home. He needed a new strategy. “Ty, go back inside and sit at the desk next to mine. Start writing. Explain to me why it’s inappropriate to call classmates names. If you do a good enough job, I’ll be able to tell your parents you seem to understand the problem. If you do a bad job, I’ll have to tell them you don’t have a good grasp of appropriate behavior and will be spending your recesses with me, talking it through, until you do understand.”

“You’re going to call my parents?”

Good, that was still a consequence that meant something. “I am. What I tell them when I call? Well, some of that is up to you. Get writing.”

Ty returned to the classroom, chastened at least temporarily. Ben turned back to Peyton. “If you’d told me he was using that language, he’d be in trouble and you’d be back in the class with your friends. But you didn’t tell me, and you lost your cool. It’s okay to be angry, Peyton, and that language is absolutely something worth getting angry about. But as soon as you get physical, as soon as you start a fight, especially with a kid who’s about six inches shorter than you are, you lose the moral high ground.”

“And if someone called you a fag, what would you do?”

“You’re presenting it like it’s a hypothetical… if someone did that, what would I do. But, Peyton, I’ve been called that name lots of times. And sometimes I get mad when it happens, sure.” He leaned into the classroom and announced, “I’m just outside the door. Stay focused on your work, please.” Then he looked back at Peyton. “But other people aren’t in charge of me. They can’t control me like that. They say a word and I have to start a fight? No way. I’m in charge of me. Nobody else.”

“Like it’s so easy.”

“You know all the exercises we do in class? You know they have a purpose, right? They’re not just a fun way to get out of doing work for a few minutes. They’re designed to help us be in charge of ourselves, so our emotions don’t take us over. And I don’t just make you guys do them. I do them myself. They work for me, and that’s why I encourage you guys to try.”

“Ty calls me a slut and I’m supposed to do deep breathing?”

“If you can use the deep breathing or anything else to keep yourself under control, fine. If you can’t, you tell me and I help you out. But he’s saying mean things to get you upset. You know that. So as soon as you get upset, you’ve given him what he wants. He’s won. Do you really want Ty to win this?”

She’d stopped crying, at least, and she was listening. But they’d had similar conversations in the past and she’d seemed to listen to them, too, so Ben wasn’t expecting any miracle cures.

“I don’t want him to win,” she admitted. “But my mom says emotions are good. We’re supposed to have emotions.”

“It’s about controlling them, not deleting them. You might even say I experience my emotions more than some other people because I can recognize them and appreciate them as they occur.”

“You can appreciate being mad because someone calls you a—”

“Wait. I let you use the word a few times because it seemed like part of a larger point you were making, but you’ve used it enough now. It’s not a word that’s allowed in this school, and you know it.”

“My mom says—”

“Let’s have a meeting. You, your mom, and me. I’ll call her today and see what we can set up.” He looked back into the classroom. “I have to get back in there before someone sets fire to the curtains. But this isn’t over. This conversation? It’s going to keep going. I promise. In the meantime, though, stay cool. It is not okay for you to get physical, no matter what words someone uses. Clear?”

“My mom says—”

“I’ll hear from your mom when we have our meeting. But this isn’t her classroom, it’s mine. No violence.”

He’d let his student repeat hateful slurs, interrupted her multiple times, and essentially issued a challenge to her mother. Great work. His Teacher of the Year award was probably waiting in his mailbox at home.

Still, the kids calmed down and made it through the rest of the day without anything serious happening. He made his phone calls, got mortification and promises of retribution from Ty’s mom and vitriol from Peyton’s, and packed up his regular banker’s box of journals, workbooks, and miscellaneous projects. He had an exciting weekend of marking and lesson planning ahead of him.

Behind the wheel of his battered Toyota, he headed out toward Main Street. He walked to work whenever he could, but he always seemed to be lugging too much stuff. Maybe he could get some sort of—not a baby stroller, not a wagon, not a damn shopping cart, but some sort of contraption that would let him carry more stuff. That would be good. A good example to the kids too—

He stopped at the Main Street stop sign, looked both ways, then pulled out into the intersection, turning right as the car from the other side of the intersection waited to turn left. The car—the Mercedes sports car—with Liam Marshall behind the wheel.

Liam Marshall.

Liam Marshall.

A horn blared and Ben jerked the wheel, but he was too late. A jolt he felt in his whole body, the screech of metal against metal, and he wasn’t sure if his car stopped because he’d slammed on the brakes or because it was hopelessly entangled with the front panel of the—

Oh shit. Entangled with the front panel of the police car he’d just sideswiped.

Everything stood still for a moment, and then Liam—Liam Marshall!—appeared at the hood of Ben’s car, peering in through the front windshield, eyes wide. “Are you okay?” he yelled.

Ben tried to figure out an answer to the question. He must be fine—he hadn’t been going more than ten or fifteen miles an hour, and he was pretty sure the police car had been stationary.

On the other hand, he’d just run into a stationary police car, so “okay” didn’t really seem like the right word to describe his state.

“I’m uninjured,” he said, but not very loudly.

“What?” Liam yelled back at him.

Liam. Liam Marshall was standing outside Ben’s car, yelling at him.

“I may have bumped my head,” he said, louder this time. Because it made more sense for all of this to be some sort of hallucination than for Liam to be back in town. Didn’t it?

The police officer was out of the car, now. She must have slid across the front seat and exited from the passenger side, since the driver door was still jammed up against Ben’s.

Laura Doncaster. Damn. There weren’t that many North Falls police officers to choose from, but any of the others would have been better than Laura Doncaster.

“Sir,” she said now, as loud and officious as if she were teaching a “how to intimidate civilians” course at the police academy. “Please get out of the car. Now.”

Well, that was a reasonable request. But his driver side door was jammed and the passenger seat was piled high with the box of schoolwork, his lunch containers, the snow pants he’d worn on yard duty all winter and was planning to take to the cleaners’ when he got around to it, a variety of fabric shopping bags, some of which might have stuff in them—

He hit the button to lower his windows, and miraculously, they worked. “It’ll take me a minute,” he called through the new opening. And then, because the officer was scowling as if she was about to pull out her gun and fill him with lead, he added, “Sorry, Laura. I’m sure this isn’t exactly—”

“Sir. Get out of the car immediately.”

“Laura?” Liam said from outside the car. He sounded pleasantly surprised, even charmed. “Laura Doncaster? Wow, it’s you!”

“Liam?” she replied. And it became clear that his reaction hadn’t been because he was charmed, it had been because he was charming. Laura dimpled like a little girl staring at her first crush. “Holy smokes, Liam, it’s really good to see you!”

“You too,” he gushed. And behind his back so only Ben could see he made a frantic sort of hand gesture that clearly meant hurry up and get out of there before I run out of ways to be interested in Laura Doncaster. “You look great—and you’re a police officer! That’s fantastic! You always were a leader, so it’s a great career for you. Are you enjoying it?”

Ben was temporarily distracted by trying to figure out any way Laura had ever led anything but her little clique of mean girls, but he managed to call himself back to the job of maneuvering around the pile of crap in his front seat. Some of it he jammed into the back, but the banker’s box would probably be harder to move than to just slither over—or so he believed until he found himself stuck partway across, his back arched as he braced against the headrest and tried to figure out what his jacket was caught on, how he could get his left foot up and over the gearshift, whether it was too late to reach down and slide the seat back to give himself more room….

Then the passenger door opened, and someone—no, not someone, Liam—eased the banker’s box out from beneath him, and suddenly everything got five times easier. Still not exactly simple, because Ben was tall and the car was small and he really hadn’t planned things out too smoothly, but definitely a lot better than before.

“I have no idea how else to help,” Liam said, and it was the amusement in his voice that pushed Ben over the edge.

“You’ve done enough already,” he snapped. “More than enough. What the hell are you even doing here?”

“Have you been drinking, sir?” Laura demanded.

“Oh my God, Laura, enough with the sir! We went to school together for fourteen years! I used to take piano lessons from your mom and you hit me with a baseball bat in third grade—you knocked out two of my teeth!”

“They were baby teeth. And none of that answers my question about drinking. Sir.”

“No, I haven’t been drinking! I was at work. Yeah, at the same school you and I spent so much time at together. I teach in the old eighth-grade classroom, the room where you and that blonde girl who was only here for a couple years—what was her name?”

“Stacey Martin?” Liam suggested.

“The room where you and Stacey Martin got caught drinking wine coolers before the spring dance. But, no, I don’t drink in that classroom. That’s not my trick.”

“Sir,” Laura started, and there was enough chill in her voice that Ben knew he needed to stop or he was going to end up in handcuffs. Not because he deserved it, just because he was dealing with Laura Doncaster. Well, also because he’d just sideswiped a police car for no good reason.

Except there had been a good reason. Liam Marshall.

Liam fucking Marshall.

“Why are you here?” he demanded of Liam. At least he managed to squirm the rest of the way out of the car as he said it.

“I’m trying to help,” Liam said.

“Sir. Please pay attention. I will be administering a field sobriety test—”

“I’m not drunk!”

“So you should have no problem with the test. Please look at this pen, sir. I’m going to move the pen and you need to—Ben! Pay attention! You need to follow the pen with your eyes.”

Well, at least she’d dropped the “sir,” although she picked it up again as she ran him through the other tests. Walking heel-to-toe, standing on one foot—all on Main Street with half the town staring at him. With Liam Marshall staring at him.

Ben tried to do his breathing, tried to bundle up his emotions and store them in an imaginary glove box, tried to turn the stupid sobriety tests into mini meditations, focusing his awareness of the weight of his entire body on one foot, the way it shifted his muscles and changed his balance—

“Sir. Have you consumed any medications or other drugs today?”

“What the hell? I kicked ass on those tests, Laura. Don’t even try telling me I failed!”

“People don’t usually make that humming sound while performing the one-leg stand test. Not unless they’re high.”

“I was meditating!”

“Were you meditating when you ran into my cruiser?”

“No. I was—okay, obviously I messed up. And I don’t mean to sound—well, I guess mostly I don’t mean to sound drunk or high—but also I don’t mean to sound like it wasn’t a big deal that I ran into you. But it could have been a lot worse, right? If I’d hit a pedestrian, or an old person—”

“If there had been kids in the car,” Liam contributed.

Ben scowled at him. “The point is, considering how bad my mistake was, this is actually a pretty good outcome. Can we try to focus on the positives?”

“The positives.”

“I sense you don’t want to focus on the positives. Okay, I can understand that. You’re the victim here. I got distracted. This is all my fault. Absolutely.” Except it wasn’t all his fault, because he’d been a safe driver his entire life, and the only reason he’d messed up was that Liam Marshall had suddenly appeared where he had no damn reason to be. But that was something he’d worry about later. “What’s the next step? We’re kind of blocking the street.” Not that there was much traffic in North Falls, even on Main Street. “Do we need to take photographs or something, or can we just—”

“Sir. Please, let the professionals handle this.” Laura glowered at him. “Please step to the side of the thoroughfare and wait. I have already radioed for backup and for the assistance of mechanical operators.” She turned to Liam. “And can you stick around as well? We’re going to need a witness statement.”

“Sure,” Liam agreed easily. Of course it was easy for him.

Ben followed him grudgingly to the sidewalk, and they turned in unison and sat down on the broad steps of the post office.

“I got a ticket the other day,” Liam said.

“Was it for ramming a stationary cop car?”

“Uh, no. I wasn’t quite that ambitious. But the cop who pulled me over knew me. I had no idea who he was.”

Well, that wasn’t too interesting, but it was better than thinking about whatever the hell Laura Doncaster was up to. “You were in town?”

“No, the highway. But I think the guy knew me from here.”

“Paul Dixson is a state trooper. Do you remember Paul?”

“Maybe. Shit, yeah, it might have been him.”

“He didn’t sign the ticket?”

“I guess he might have, but I didn’t look.”

“So it’s not like you actually care who it was. Not like this conversation is of any value to you.”

“I was trying to be of value to you. I thought it might be good if you were distracted from yelling at Laura Doncaster. Officer Doncaster.”

“Don’t do me any favors.” And then, because it was even more surreal and awkward to sit and not talk to Liam than it was to sit and talk to him, Ben added, “Why are you here? What’s the sudden interest in North Falls these days?”

Liam sighed. “I’m not totally sure. I guess maybe—”

The tow truck arrived and Liam stopped talking. He and Ben watched in silence as Seth climbed out of the truck, stared at the two conjoined cars, and started laughing. Yeah, he recognized Ben’s Toyota. Asshole.

Seth looked over at Ben, did a classic double take when he saw Liam, and made a sort of exasperated WTF? gesture in his direction, then looked back at the cars and started laughing again.

Ben let himself collapse at the waist and cradled his head in his hands. “Why are you here?” he whined. He wasn’t sure if he was addressing the question to Liam or to himself, but regardless, he didn’t get an answer.