Free In the Dead of Summer by Gillian Roberts Page B

was more a shaping of his lips than sound.
    As soon as my shock ebbed, I understood just how grateful he must have been that I hadn’t persisted with questions. But why?
    Meanwhile, he’d turned with almost military briskness and, surrounded by back-slapping allies, the smile, the friends, and Woody were gone.
    But, of course, so was April Truong.
    *
    Philly Prep was originally built as a turn-of-the-century beer baron’s statement of his net worth, which made for quirky, not always logical school architecture. This included anachronistic, politically incorrect conceits like a narrow back staircase that was off-limits to students, for reasons of liability. However, nobody worried about the odds of servants or teachers—if anyone distinguished between the two—tripping on its dark and narrow treads and breaking their necks, so I used the back stairs regularly.
    En route, I passed Five’s room. At least half a dozen students—including, to my surprise, Woody and his pals—milled around inside, some holding soda cans, others settling in with sandwiches. At the moment I passed, Five was sitting on the edge of his desk saying something I couldn’t hear. The robber baron’s house had solid-core doors.
    I could see the boy nearest him laugh in response, however, and I was suffused with envy. Summer in the city, and the hardcore mob suspended its contempt for school and all things related and hung out with their teacher. How did Five inspire such devotion, and why couldn’t I manage even a shadow of its intensity? Was it a guy thing? Or a gender-free failing on my part?
    Farther down the hallway, I passed Flora Jones’s room. She was reading at her desk again, oversized tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose.
    I walked on, then doubled back. Her reading matter had looked unbusinesslike. Aura of mass-market paperback.
    I knocked on her door. She looked up, smiled—a little tensely, I thought—waved me in with one hand and opened a desk drawer with the other and dropped the paperback into it. My suspicions had been correct, and I wasn’t interrupting a serious study session.
    “I hope I’m not—” I began.
    “Not at all.”
    “Just that I miss you. Can I tempt you outside?”
    “Sorry. Not today. So busy. Besides, it’s cooler in my room than anywhere else.”
    “How come you get special treatment?” An enormous unit blocked one entire window.
    “Don’t get jealous,” she said dryly. “The climate control’s for their computers, not me.”
    “Listen,” I asked. “Are you… I mean last time we talked… Is everything okay? You aren’t staying up here because you’re angry, are you?”
    “About what?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe something I said? Or didn’t say?”
    Flora shook her head. “Don’t take it personally just because I prefer a quiet lunch hour. Besides, I never thought it was you.”
    “You can’t think that anybody here, that somebody at Philly Prep, a teacher, made those calls. That’s the only thing that happened, right?”
    It’s interesting how a whole passel of needs can shape a sentence. Instead of asking Flora whether anything else had happened, which was my real question, I virtually answered myself with what I wanted to hear. Nothing more had happened. Flora had suffered a one-shot of ugliness. Over and done. A fluke.
    “No,” she said softly.
    Unfortunately, juggling syntax does not alter reality.
    “It’s still going on. I just didn’t want to talk about it.”
    “With me?”
    “With anybody except the police. And they said not to. But two days ago, there was a letter, like a ransom note—words and letters cut out of newspapers and magazines. It said: ‘Stay where you belong or else, Nigger.’” She took a deep breath and was silent, then she spoke again with her normal, brisk delivery. “Or else what? And where is it I belong? What makes me not there now?”
    “Flora, I don’t know what to say.”
    She stood up and stretched. “And then,