Read Online The Tell by Hester Kaplan - Free Book Online

locker-lined hall, furious or confused. Teaching was never just about the kids. Behind them, over them, far away from them, there were always one or two parents, grandparents, an overburdened aunt, an ambivalent guardian. Some gave him their concerned hands, some turned their backs, others kept a tight grip on their children. Some wanted soothing, some came to argue. Sometimes he’d look into the eyes of a kid and detect generations of brutal history staring defiantly back at him: I dare you to change the course of my life.
    A chair scraped against the floor, and Jacqui, in the center cluster of desks, pink tank top and black bra straps, ponytail of hair pulled back into a glossy helmet, shot up. In the amazing variation of skin color in his classroom, she was somewhere in the middle, between pale sun and wet earth, now with a greenish tint. All heads shot up with her. Hand over mouth, she wove between the desks to the door which she yanked open in time to vomit in a trash can placed with odd prescience just outside. Owen left his own desk as the kids began their derisive hooting and twisted in their seats to get a view of Jacqui doing her fearsome business. Owen put his hand on Jacqui’s rounded back to absorb the jolt of the heaves. Sweat polished her neck and hid in the padding of baby fat. The smell of strawberry perfume mixed with puke. Where his finger met an inch of bare forearm, she was hot.
    â€œIt’s okay, sweetheart. Just relax. You’ll be okay,” he soothed. Efficient footsteps approached the turn in the hall, and Owen pulled his hand back. Touch was a loaded word, a lethal action here. The girl shuddered and shivered. “Breathe, Jacqui. Take your time.”
    Mrs. Tevas, the librarian, hadn’t been rushing to the scene, but had happened on it. Waylaid, she stopped, an ancient encyclopedia volume pressed to her chest. Her thin eyebrows dipped as she noted the posture, the trash can, the open classroom door, the stink of puke. Just last week Owen had been in the library and picked up a book about space exploration for one of his students. The first line read, “Someday man will walk on the moon.” He’d showed it to Mrs. Tevas, but she hadn’t found it nearly as funny as he had.
    She passed off the encyclopedia to him so she could hold the girl’s shoulders. He sensed that Mrs. Tevas didn’t think all that much of male teachers. Still, there was something assertive about her that he admired. She tended the library like it was a garden, a place you might someday enter and be surprised by. Like most of the teachers in the building, she was a native of the city and had a pragmatic surface, a Formica demeanor. Her accent sounded like a piece of bright melted plastic. She always eyed him circumspectly, as did his fellow teachers, as though he’d come to Spruance with an unfair advantage, as though his height and size alone could scare kids into compliance. Almost instantly they’d decided that his ability to control a classroom hadn’t been earned—though it had been, in harder, tougher schools than this one. That he might actually be able to teach was a secondary consideration. He was from out of state, always an outsider, and so suspect of other things, too: aloofness, his own ideas about how to teach, maybe even the sin of mystery. Moments of affinity with his colleagues were rare. He didn’t regret this very often.
    â€œWhat happened?” Mrs. Tevas asked. Her mustard yellow blouse and blue skirt had the toxic sheen of dry cleaning.
    Wasn’t it clear, the smell rising in yeasty waves? “Jacqui was reading, and …”
    â€œI got mad sick.” The girl spoke from the echoic depths of the trash can. A cell phone in her back pocket pulsed with light.
    â€œMaybe something from lunch,” Mrs. Tevas said, and looked at Owen. “You taste those fajitas?” She rolled her eyes.
    Over Jacqui’s back, they silently