Hargrove was good-looking, but he knew it. His hair was cut short and clean above his collar and ears. His clothes were pricey and pressed. But that notebook he carried was old and dog-eared with bent corners and didn’t match the rest of him.
I sauntered by him back to my seat. “He’s still staring?” I asked Shelby without turning around.
She glanced back and nodded again. “Never seen him this weird before.”
I whirled around in my seat and glared, catching him off-guard. He lowered his eyes, but just for a second.
“Is there a problem, Zoë?” Ms. Avery asked.
“No, ma’am,” I said, and scowled at Hargrove before I turned back around. “No problem at all.”
But that didn’t stop him. He stared at me clear through spelling and silent reading. And the next day, and the day after that. I didn’t even have to ask Shelby anymore to know when he was doing it. I could feel his eyes boring into me, and by week’s end I’d had my fill.
On Friday I packed up early and was the first one out of class. He was the last one out, as usual. I waited for him just beyond the turn to the main hall and stepped right in front of him as he came around the corner. “What?” I snapped, not three inches from his stunned face.
He tried to go around me, but I blocked his path. His face flushed red, but it hardened, too. He tried to dodge me, but I was quick.
“Quit staring at me,” I snapped.
“You’re crazy,” he said, and then added something under his breath that I didn’t hear.
“What was that?” I said.
His eyes met mine. “Just like your mother who offed herself,” he said, this time loud and mean, and then pushed past me, bumping me sideways into the wall. He walked out the front door without looking back.
That shook me. I leaned against the wall for a minute. I didn’t think anybody knew about Mama but me and Henry, and maybe Fred and Bessie, who sure wouldn’t say anything to Hargrove Peters. Mama hadn’t been my favorite person, but I didn’t like some uppity loser kid, who didn’t know us from dirt, talking about her like that. I didn’t like it one bit.
The principal, Mr. Reardon, was coming down the hall. He stank of the cigarettes he sneaked in the janitor’s closet, and had a seen-it-all, heard-it-all, done-it-all attitude toward kid behavior. He ran the school with horse sense and humor dry as dust. I liked him, and I could tell he liked me back.
“What’s shaking, kiddo?” he said, smiling. “How’s the world treating you?”
“Fine,” I lied. “Fine as can be.” Which is what I said to Fred when he picked me up outside, and to Henry when he asked at dinner how school was going.
After that, only one thing made school bearable: Ms. Avery wasn’t as dull as I’d thought. When I got to my desk on Monday, I found a book and a note: I think you might like this, if you haven’t already read it. If you like it, I have others. E. Avery. It was called They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell. I’d never read it. I started it right then and lapped it up—about eight-year-old Peter, called Bunny, his thirteen-year-old brother, Robert, their daddy, James, and their mama, who died of the influenza. I read the whole book in one day.
I lived for Ms. Avery’s books and for the last bell, when Henry or Fred picked me up and drove me back to the house. Except for Hargrove, my classmates were nice enough but boring—they automatically did whatever the nearest grown-up expected. I was nice back, but that was all. When Henry or Fred asked about my day, I kept quiet. If fifth grade was crammed down my throat, I wasn’t going to waste time puking it back up.
Henry took my attitude in stride. “It’s how I’d feel,” I overheard him tell Fred, after which he added that between paying alimony, Mama’s debts, and his lawyer, he was pretty strapped for cash and needed to get into the studio and stay there if we all wanted to eat. For a few hours I felt bad for shutting him out, but my heart rehardened against him when I saw Hargrove at school the next day. Henry had till Christmas. Then we’d see.
When summer turned to autumn and trucks thundered night and day up and down the man’s drive, he changed his mind again about humans. The whole species was a restless, sleepless, earsplitting scourge upon the earth.
What had come over the place? Dog or no, the man had once seemed to know about solitude, the space a creature needed. Now, morning till night, men swarmed the place like ants, hauling off the metal things the man made. They wrenched them apart, lifted and lowered the separate pieces with roaring machines, shouted and cursed as they lashed and bound the pieces with ropes. Then the trucks rumbled off, raising clouds of dust. The cat sneezed and shook his head, fled under the house to ease the buzzing in his ears, the pounding in his head.
After that the boy came. The boy who used to mind his own business. Who’d gone and stayed gone for whole seasons, kept to his own turf. Even he traipsed right through the yard with his dimwitted deer, carried the sleeping girl straight up the front steps, through the front door and inside the house. Had they all gone mad?
The girl disappointed him most. Kindred at first, she’d lingered after she filled
