Read Online Out of the Blue by Sally Mandel - Free Book Online Page A

remained a pale chip frozen to her face. A bizarre remnant of her rhinoplasty, I suppose. She reeked of nicotine. A lot of the girls turned to smoking as a diet aid.
    Michelle looked at me for a moment through swollen eyes, then buried her face in her hands. “I hate my life!” she wailed. Her rings hung loose on her fingers. What had happened to the healthy solidity of only two months ago?
    “Is it the physics quiz?” She’d flunked another one yesterday, and the rest of her grades were pretty dismal.
    That only set her off on another paroxysm of weeping. I handed her a bunch of tissues. “Come on, Michelle, wipe your face and take a deep breath.”
    I waited. She gave me a pitiful shudder, but it was a start. At least her color returned to normal.
    “Okay, good girl. Want a Coke?”
    She nodded.
    “Don’t move,” I said, and fetched one from the little refrigerator I stashed under my bookcase. Then I locked the door so that nobody would interrupt us. The way Michelle was sitting, with her bony knees jammed together and her feet splayed out, she could have been ten years old, never mind the three-hundred-dollar shoes. She gulped at the soda and choked.
    I patted her on the back until she stopped. “What provoked all this?”
    “I can’t believe you don’t know, Ms. Bolles. Everybody knows. The whole school’s staring at me.”
    In my peculiar state perched halfway between guilt and ecstasy, I hadn’t stopped by the teachers’ lounge or even spoken to anyone on my way to homeroom. “You’d better fill me in,” I said.
    “My father married that person last night, that Dakota Blue. It was on TV this morning.”
    “Dakota Blue, the singer?”
    She nodded.
    “And that’s how you found out, on the news?” I was incredulous.
    She wiped her nose. “Mom saw it. She went ballistic and beeped my dad on his emergency cell phone and he said it was true.” The tears started up again but it was hard to blame her. Dakota Blue was barely twenty, “barely” being the operative word in that the clothing she wore in any photograph I’d ever seen was comprised of two Post-Its and a cocktail napkin. Well, perhaps a slight exaggeration. So this was Michelle’s new step-mom, a pseudo-Native American by way of Bayonne, New Jersey, pop singer.
    “What did I do?” Michelle asked in a whisper.
    “What?”
    She looked at me as if I were functioning with half a brain. “Well, I must have done something. To make him want to leave.”
    I felt as though a slab of granite had just fallen on my heart. “Michelle, don’t start thinking that way.”
    “You can say that. You don’t know.” And she was off again. “I thought him and Mom were going to get back together. I so feel like killing myself.”
    I wasn’t one of those teachers who’s pals with their students. But Michelle’s anguish struck a resounding chord. I took a deep breath with shudders of its own, getting ready.
    “I do know, Michelle. My father left, too.”
    Her head snapped up and her mouth fell open. There’s misery and there’s a scoop, and this was a tough contest for her. As I had hoped, the investigative reporter won out.
    “Really? He left? When?” This was worth several days’ rumination over frappaccinos at Starbucks.
    “I was only six, but I remember how it felt. I blamed myself, too.”
    “Oh, Ms. Bolles, you poor thing! Was he having an affair?” No good deed goes unpunished, of course. I was going to have to pay with all the nitty gritty.
    “Yes. With a woman much younger than my mother.”
    “Did he marry her?”
    I nodded. “And divorced her, and married again.”
    “Oh my God. How did you ever get through it?”
    I didn’t want to tell her what a pillar Ma had been, given Filona Cross’s dubious maternal skills. “Sometimes I think it bothered me more when I got to be your age. I felt as if I were different from everybody else. It didn’t matter that half the kids I knew also had divorced parents.”
    She was listening