Rodent by Lisa J. Lawrence

Dent even called us out once for talking when we weren’t supposed to, and that doesn’t happen to me.
    Damien flipped through his dictionary until he found the right words. “ Lo siento, Señor Dent .” He lowered his head.
    Mr. Dent seemed to accept his apology and didn’t separate us.
    Damien looked back at me, eyebrows raised, like, Phew .
    * * *
    Mom tells me on Wednesday that she’ll pick up Evan from day care, not to worry about it. I swing by with Maisie anyway on our way home, just in case. He’s gone.
    “Mrs. Bennett already came,” Mrs. Carrigan says. She always calls Mom that, even though there has never been a Mr.
    I speed-walk to the apartment, dragging Maisie and her backpack. What if she’s been drinking and has taken him somewhere? They could be on some random bus on the other side of the city, Mom passed out in her seat while Evan takes candy from strangers.
    I find them curled up on the sofa, reading one of Maisie’s take-home reading books. Relief—and a mental note to get a public library card.
    * * *
    My after-school routine doesn’t give me any warm fuzzies, but it seems to be working. I hang out for ten minutes after the bell—in the Spanish classroom, the library, the bathroom—until that first bus leaves. There was one day when they must have missed it, and Ainsley and Pole Dancer were still standing on the front lawn when I tried to leave.
    I had to sneak out a side door and walk the long way around to Maisie’s school. When I stood on the front step of the elementary school, they were too busy wrestling with some guys, getting leaves stuffed down their shirts, to notice me. Pole Dancer’s friend, that blond guy from Social Studies, follows her around like a magpie after a leaky garbage bag.
    They’re the ones who make me feel like the fly swatter is looming. They’re too quiet. Too still. I caught a full-on mean smile from one of them as I passed through the cafeteria the other day. It hit me like a kick in the ribs. They’ve stopped following me though. Celeste looks away any time our eyes meet, an odd expression on her face. Like a bad memory.
    I bumble along through the week, waiting for the ax to fall. I wonder if it’s fallen when Mr. Drummond stands by my desk during English on Friday and says, as softly as a gravel truck, that he’d like to see me after class. Haven’t I been keeping up okay? Is he going to ask me about Mom?
    The girl who picks at her split ends meets my eye and cringes sympathetically. I’m starting to wonder if she’s mute. She hasn’t spoken once this term.
    There’s a nervous hum in my chest for the rest of the class and afterward, as I stand in front of his desk, arms crossed.
    He wears a ratty gray sweater that matches his wiry hair and mustache. “Isabelle,” he says, clearing away a stack of books on his desk, “pull up a chair.”
    I wish people wouldn’t say that. As though difficult things are made easier while sitting down. I prefer to stand, myself. Easier to run. Still, I grab a chair from a nearby desk and arrange it across from him, like a job interview.
    Once I’m sitting, he says, “Isabelle, I’ve been thinking about Words on the Wall.”
    I blink. What?
    “Do you know what that is?” he asks.
    I shake my head. Sounds like a trendy coffee shop.
    “It’s an event we have near the beginning of every school year, one of our welcome-back activities.” I nod for him to continue. What does this have to do with me? “We cover an entire wall of the cafeteria with paper. Then we supply pens, pencils, crayons, you name it. A theme is chosen, and students come and write whatever they like on it—barring obscenities and hate speech—and it stays up for the week. Kind of a legal graffiti.”
    Okay. So he doesn’t want me writing my disturbing troubled-home stuff on it?
    “Ms. Furbank and I—she’s the other English teacher—we’re putting together a committee of grade-eleven students to organize and run it,” he says.