Read Online The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott - Free Book Online Page A

take her lunch in the teachers’ lounge or even in the cafeteria.
    Rather, she sat at her desk, working away alone, stealing glances at the mountains holding up the sky outside her open windows. Afterthe gray pall earlier in the week, that sky had turned hard blue, extending endlessly.
    She guessed word had spread quickly among the teachers, probably leaked by Principal Tanner, that Hart wasn’t always her name—that once she’d been another person, in another time and place. It didn’t matter. Not the other teachers or whatever they might think about her. She just needed to get through the year, do her job well.
Teach.
Being in the classroom felt good, even with the two years she’d been away.
    Away
—like it had all been a sabbatical, a vacation. She’d probably never convince them anyway that the
other
woman they were hearing about was as dead as the former English teacher. So she watched her students take a quiz.
    Even in Murfee, like teaching itself, school kids didn’t change much. There were all the same types; the same cliques, forming and re-forming. Big guys in letter jackets; popular girls, and those who weren’t. Kids who hung in the parking lot until right before the first bell, smoking or laughing by their trucks (in Austin, more than a few might have been leaning on BMWs), and those who were already in their seats fifteen minutes early. She’d taught at three different schools: in Virginia, Austin, and now Murfee, and although they were all very different places, the schools—with their peculiar rhythms and closed ecosystems—were not so different at all. They even smelled alike, whether it was the brand-new building in Austin where everything had been cream and silver and the floor had been polished tiles and the walls modular linen, or this one in Murfee, which was ancient as the mountains around it, carved out of wood and iron and old glass. All schools were haunted the same.
    •   •   •
    Caleb Ross was done with his exam, had been for several minutes, and she wondered if he’d dropped off the note on behalf of his father. Hands folded, he stared out her windows. He’d lived here his whole life and she wondered what he saw out there—if his view or perspective was somehow different from hers. He was a good-looking kid (
don’t think that,
don’t ever think that
), although far too thin. She’d met his father once before in Austin, a tall, imposing man with high cliffs for cheekbones and iron-gray hair and eyes, and had seen him a few times here too, just in passing. Yesterday, driving away from school, she’d caught sight of him standing on a street corner in his uniform, every bit the cowboy, laughing with two men in a dirty truck. He smiled at her as she passed, gave her a slight wave as if they’d known each other their whole lives, and that had been weird, unsettling, because in that moment, he looked exactly as she always imagined Marc would at that age. She returned the wave without thinking as he retreated in her rearview.
    There was very little resemblance between Caleb Ross and his father. The few times she’d seen Caleb outside of class, he’d been with America Reynosa—a pretty name, she thought, for an even prettier girl with a mass of dark hair, which reminded Anne of a flock of birds forever circling her. Anne couldn’t decide whether they were a couple-couple or just friends. They were always smoking together on the benches in the breezeway—an avenue, really—stretching between the school and the giant football stadium; sitting close, but not too close, so it was impossible to read what passed between them. Amé was done with her quiz as well, or had decided not to do it at all. Her grades were a hit-or-miss affair, suggesting the girl was smartenough but didn’t care all that much. Now she was staring down at her phone, her expression unreadable.
    Anne could take the phone, probably should, but in another minute or so the bell would ring and this