Free The Tell by Hester Kaplan

He leaned in closer and whispered. “What’s wrong with her, by the way?”
    â€œI have no idea.” Owen knelt to pick up the Starburst and gum wrappers blooming under the chairs. The kids were like birds, leaving their bright droppings behind.
    When Wilton squatted next to him, his joints popped. “Look, sometimes I overstep,” he said. “So I apologize. I just wanted the kids to see what they have in you, that’s all. People like you never get enough recognition.”
    â€œPeople like me?”
    â€œTeachers, I mean.” He paused and gave Owen a narrowed look. “Mira warned me that you’re impossible to give a compliment to, that you’d fight me about it. She wasn’t kidding.”
    It was startling to hear, not because it was untrue but because Wilton had quoted Mira and that meant that Mira had been talking about him with Wilton. The man’s eyes, a glacial blue, were too earnest and invasive to meet, and Owen began to straighten the desks. He told Wilton he’d see him in front of the school in fifteen minutes.
    When he stepped outside, one bus was still waiting to ferry kids back to less verdant parts of the city. Affluence, and the lack of it, Owen had once been told by the man who flew the traffic helicopter for Channel 10, could be measured by the densities of springtime green (and in these few weeks, pinks and purples and buttery yellows)—not in black or brown or white or any other color that existed at street level. A few kids trudged up the steep hill that crested at Hope Street, petals falling on their shoulders like confetti for heroes. To his left, just beyond the corner of the school, a lens of kids had contracted. He pushed through them—in moments like this, he was the imposing giant with giant strides and a deep voice—and pried George and Oscar apart. Skinny boys, full of shaking rage, throwing punches and kicks. Their sweatshirt zippers were bared teeth. He gripped their wrists, measured the brutality in their pulse, and felt the sap of it rise in him. He suspected that just under his own cool restraint was a capacity for violence, something he wasn’t ever going to tap. Dark hair was beginning to whisk the boys’ upper lips, and their bones were thickening as they waited for him to do something. They didn’t know what pride was, or what to do with it, but it obscured them like their hoods. They groped at their slipping pants, checked their shirts for smudges and injuries. Oscar blinked furiously and tried not to cry.
    â€œSo, you guys had enough?” Owen asked. He waved away their attempts to blame the other.
    Tears and fury was a particularly poignant middle school brew that left the spectators, many of them girls pressing cheap necklaces to lips, unsure where to look except at the hard-packed, grassless dirt. He hoped Oscar wouldn’t blubber. George called him a bitch and a baby. The pugilists made a half-hearted attempt to shake Owen off because it was expected of them, just as it was expected of him to take them back into the building and write them up. But he didn’t see the point on most days—and on this day particularly. He looked past the boys’ heads and the identical knobby structure of their closely shorn skulls, now that he’d whipped their hoods down to make them nakedly accountable, and he saw Wilton standing under a flowering tree. Owen made the boys shake hands and told them to go home. They walked in opposite directions, backpacks entirely empty of books and homework, shoulders hunched like men and pants dragging in the dirt like children.
    He and Wilton walked in the direction of the leafy boulevard. The afternoon had lost some of its electric edge. In front of the Oasis Market, Wilton read out loud the signs for a million urgent needs plastered on the glass. Milk! ATM! Fax machine! Cigarettes! Charcoal! He wanted to go in. It was a squeezed convenience store that smelled of