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I looked back when the car pulled away. I don’t know why. Something made me do that.

I saw Mother darling standing on the walkway, clutching the boots I had taken.

She held them as close to her as I had held them to me.

It was all we shared at the moment.

But it was enough to free the tears locked in my heart.

PART TWO

TEAL

1

Suspended

As soon as our English teacher, Mr. Croft, took off his sports jacket and draped it over his desk chair in front of the classroom, I knew I was going to laugh. The laughter rose in my chest in waves, rolling freely upward. Mr. Croft turned to write the first grammar exercise sentence on the board, and I saw his shirt partially out of his pants. It really wasn’t anything all that unusual. He was not a very neat dresser. However, everything had struck me as humorous this morning, from the security guard at the front entrance looking at me with grouchy, suspicious eyes, to the snob birds in the bathroom who nearly exploded with shock when I plucked my silver flask out of my purse and took a sip.

“What’s that?” Evette Heckman asked.

“Orange juice and vodka,” I replied, smiled, and drank some more. When I offered it to them, they fled as if I was offering them a drink of poison.

In class my laugh came out with a sound that resembled someone spitting up a drink first, and then I went into the giggles. Mr. Croft turned with confusion on his face and raked the room with his eyes, finally settling on me. His grimace of bewilderment changed to a smirk of annoyance, and that made me laugh even harder.

I knew the vodka I had taken from my parents’ bar to mix with the orange juice had most to do with my inability to contain myself. This wasn’t the first time, and something told me it wasn’t going to be the last, no matter what happened this particular morning.

“What do you find so funny, Miss Sommers?” Mr. Croft asked. “Surely not restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, although the results of your quiz yesterday might suggest you’re not taking this very seriously.”

Everyone’s eyes were on me. Some of the snob birds looked angrier than Mr. Croft, probably to win favor or maybe because they really did think I was interrupting their precious private-school educations. The idea was, if you paid more for it, you would take it more seriously. At least, that was the theory my parents believed or, should I say, hoped was true, especially for me. I had all but failed tenth grade the year before in public school. I had been suspended three times there and put in detention so often, there was a joke that I would get a degree in it. After I was caught vandalizing the girls’ room, which cost my father nearly a thousand dollars, my parents thought a strategic retreat to a private school would be the solution. I would be less apt to be influenced by bad seeds. The truth was, I was the one doing the influencing.

Mr. Croft brought his hands to his wide waist and glared at me. His nostrils were as big as a cow’s when they flared. He turned his lips inward, outlining his mouth in two thin white lines of rage, and clenched his teeth.

“Well?” he demanded, speaking through the wall of cigarette-stained enamel.

I laughed harder. I couldn’t help it, even though my stomach was hurting and I was gasping for breath.

He sighed.

“I think it’s best you get up and go to the principal’s office, Miss Sommers,” he said in a tighter voice.

I continued to laugh.

“Teal Sommers!” he screamed, stepping toward me. “Get up and get out this minute.”

He pointed at the door so vigorously and sharply, the button on his cuff undid and his sleeve sagged like a torn curtain. Someone gasped, but that just widened my idiotic grin. He saw what happened and lowered his arm, pointing more gracefully with the other arm and hand toward the door.

“Go. I will intercom the office to let Mr. Bloomberg know you are coming,” he assured me.

I caught my breath and let my head fall back a moment. I was looking up at the ceiling, watching the lines of the tiles wiggling. Mr. Croft walked all the way down the aisle to my desk. By this time his rage was building like milk boiling in a pot. Any moment he might seize my arm and pull me out of my seat, I thought.

“What is wrong with you, young lady?”

“Smell her breath,” one of the snob birds cried out. I wasn’t positive, but I thought it was most likely Ainsley Winslow. Always full of herself, she’d hated me from the moment I told her that her nose job was poorly done, was too pointed, and made her resemble a chicken.

Mr. Croft looked in her direction and then down at me with more intense scrutiny.

“Is that true, Teal? Have you drunk something you shouldn’t?”