Free This Is Not Your City by Caitlin Horrocks

whiskers twitched.
    â€œNow touch the tumor,” Eril said. That had been the Word of the Day two weeks ago, tumor, so the students could put a name to what was happening to their class rat, define his misfortune and use it in a sentence.
    â€œEwww www. . . , ” the class called out, and Eril shushed them. For once it worked, and the classroom was silent as Donald traced the bulge with the tip of his index finger. Eril saw him shaking and almost told him to stop, it was all right, he could stop. But only almost. The class was quieter than it had been all semester. She couldn’t fold now.
    Â 
    That night Eril’s mother called to gloat about the weather. “What’s the temperature there? Forty-something?” Eril’s parents had sold the house just after Christmas; her father had taken
early retirement, and they’d kept an eye on real estate prices, looked at condominiums in Florida or Arizona, places where they would never have to shovel snow again. The day they left for Scottsdale, Eril moved into a studio apartment filled with boxes of her old books, clothes, stuffed animals that her parents had announced they would no longer have room for. She had her bedroom furniture and whatever else her parents hadn’t wanted. She had two coffee tables and no couch. She’d sit on one table, put her feet up on the other, and watch her parents’ old television set. The boxes stayed piled along the walls, four of them wedged under the card table she ate at. She’d forget and bang her knees against them as she ate frozen pizza in the evening.
    â€œI guess it’s in the forties,” Eril told her mother.
    â€œYou know what it’s like here?”
    â€œNice?”
    â€œLike you wouldn’t believe. I’m sure you’ll have another freeze before spring, too.”
    â€œProbably.”
    â€œHow’s the boyfriend?”
    â€œThere’s no boyfriend. Not since August. You know that.”
    â€œThat was August. Plenty of time for someone new.”
    â€œThere isn’t anyone.” Eril curled her legs beneath her on the sturdier coffee table.
    â€œAre you looking?”
    â€œI’m trying not to get devoured by small children.”
    â€œThe job’s going that well?”
    I tortured a child today, Eril wanted to say. I made a boy touch a dying rat. “The bathroom’s right in my classroom, practically,” she said. “Just this flimsy door. You can hear the kids peeing. It’s too weird.”
    â€œI put the old amaryllis, you know, from the backyard, in the guest bathroom here but it hasn’t bloomed. I don’t think there’s enough light.”
    â€œThe kids are pretty crazy. I can’t make them shut up.”
    â€œHats off, Eril. I wouldn’t teach kids. You were enough, and there was only one of you.”
    â€œI really don’t know what I’m doing.”
    â€œI’m sure you’re doing just fine.”

    â€œI’m really not.” I should quit, she almost said. I should get out before I hit one of them. I don’t know what’s happening to me.
    â€œModesty gets you nowhere. Your father and I are both very proud of you, you know. Really showing your independence.”
    â€œThanks,” Eril said, swinging her legs out to rest them on a box behind the coffee table. Her feet sank through the top and she felt the plush fur of old stuffed animals squish beneath her toes. “That means a lot.”
    Â 
    The next week the ground refroze into ridges and canyons of mud and weeds, footprints and tire tracks caught rigid by the cold snap and dusted with snow flurries. The kids came to school in boots again, left them at the door and went to their desks in sock feet. Eril passed out a grammar worksheet and tried to get them to work in pairs, boy-girl: it was mutiny. They shouted in protest, they howled about cooties. The biggest boy poked a girl in the eye, and Eril