“Yeah, that’s what she said,” I say, trying to conjure an image of what her home situation might be like. “Did you meet the parents?”
“Yes,” Pam says, tensing her lips into a straight line. “Only the mother is in the picture. She looks a little bit rough.”
It’s impossible to not make assumptions about people, even in our profession. Victory Hills High School is a public school, although our prominent location makes it feel private. Most of our parents are the wealthy, PTA type. They want to be involved and want everyone to notice their involvement. Few students have troubled home lives. Of course, I know more than most that looks can be deceiving. My parents had nice jobs and lived in an upscale neighborhood, but they still raised a psychopath.
“Well, Zoey is very smart,” I say. I don’t want to appear as though I’m bashing the girl already.
“Her test scores are high. She could have been in an Honors group, but she insisted on being in a standard English class.” She turns away from the computer and tilts her head. “Maybe she likes being the smartest kid in the room?”
“I definitely sense that,” I say, rolling my eyes. As a guidance counselor, Pam deals with all sorts of situations. She has a better understanding of the student body than I do. She knows the attitudes students can display, especially on their first day after an inconvenient move.
“It’s a shame she moves around so much,” she says. “Imagine what a mind like that could do with stability.”
“How old was she when the family left Florida?”
“Florida.” She turns back to her computer and strokes the mouse. “I’m seeing Kentucky and Virginia. Florida isn’t on the list.”
“Maybe I misunderstood,” I say. But I know I didn’t. When someone mentions Florida, it stings. Her comment seemed intentional, like she wanted to upset me. “I thought she said she was from there.”
Pam shrugs and shakes her head. “It’s sad, really, what some of these kids go through. No sense of a normal childhood.”
We chat a bit longer, but certain words from the conversation stick out in my mind. Normal and childhood and Florida. Pam, like everyone else I’ve met in my five years of working here, cannot possibly understand how normal means absolutely nothing. The most abnormal person could be living under their noses and they’d never know it.
Four
Now
I placed some stew in the slow cooker before I left for school this morning. It’s ready by the time I arrive home, so I toast bread in the oven and the meal is set.
“Everything all right with you?” Danny asks.
“Yeah. Why?” I’m sitting at the table, swirling my meal with a spoon.
“You’ve barely talked since I got home.”
“Sorry.” I straighten my posture, trying to literally shake off whatever icky feeling is bothering me.
“Have you started planning the trip?”
“Trip?”
“Europe,” he reminds me. “We talked about it last night.”
“Of course. Yeah. I’ve been looking around.” That’s a lie. I spent my planning period talking to Pam about Zoey. I didn’t even google potential destinations. “Where do you think we should go?” I ask. “You know I’ve been dying to return to Paris.”
“Let’s look into Spain, too,” Danny says. “This guy I knew in med school went last summer and he posted all these amazing pictures.”
“Spain.” I nod without looking at him. “Yep, sounds nice.”
“Dell, tell me what’s going on,” he says, standing. He walks toward me and kisses my cheek. “I can tell something is on your mind, and if it’s not Europe, it must be big.”
“It’s nothing big,” I say, taking the napkin from my lap and hitting him with it. “I got this new student. She got under my skin yesterday.” Although it’s more than that. I’ve been thinking about Zoey ever since I realized she lied about Florida. I can’t figure out why she’d say that, unless she knew it would bother me.
“What did she do?” he asks with a laugh, returning to his seat to finish his meal. I never let students get under my skin, and even when they dance on my nerves, I don’t tell Danny about it. My problems at Victory Hills never leave campus.
“Well, first she went off about this Faulkner story in front of the class.” I stop talking because I know Danny is already lost. He’s easily one of the smartest people I know, but our intellectual interests occupy opposite sectors of our brains. He cares about Southern Gothic literature about as much as I do about trending probiotics. “She used the word fuck in class.”
Danny laughs, and I reluctantly join in. Disrespectful behavior takes on a different context outside of the classroom.
“She’s a kid,” he says. “You don’t usually let that kind of thing bother you.”
“There was something about the way she acted, though.” I could tell Danny wasn’t convinced, so I continued. “She said she was from Florida.”
“Okay,” he says, shifting in his seat. He immediately recognizes my discomfort. “You can’t fault the kid for that.”
Victory Hills is a good nine hours away from our former hometown. I wish we could have settled somewhere outside of the south entirely; it would have put my past further behind me. But Danny was hired to work in Victory Hills, so that’s where we ended up.
“I rarely run into people from there, and when I do, they don’t creep me out the way she does.” I swallow a spoonful of stew. “So, during my planning period today, I talked to Pam. Turns out the girl isn’t from Florida at all.”
“So what’s the big deal?”
“She lied to me,” I say, more troubled by Zoey’s fib than if she’d actually been from there. “It’s like she said that to annoy me.”
“Okay, wait a minute.” He pinches the bridge of his nose while he thinks. “There’s no way she could know about your brother—”
“I know that,” I interrupt. I’m not trying to make my exchange with Zoey about Brian, and yet
