Free The People Next Door by Christopher Ransom Page A

smoke-reeking boys had been acting
     up the entire three hours of the morning session. When she finally snapped at them, after fifteenor so polite reminders to
please pay attention
, they had scowled at her from the back of the classroom and whispered conspiratorially.
    People’s evidence number two: when she twirled, scanning the parking lot to see if anyone had noticed it yet – her first instinct
     was to avoid embarrassment, not ascertain the perpetrator – they were already laughing. Standing just six spaces away, leaning
     against Eric’s hopped-up Honda (with its giant gray louver fin), smoldering Marlboros in hand, feasting on her reaction. Identified,
     they covered their mouths and fell into each other, guffawing, ‘Aw, damn!’ and ‘Ouch!’ But they did not run away or deny what
     they had done.
    They hovered at a safe distance as she scrubbed the glass furiously, but the wad of purse Kleenex failed to do so much as
     smudge the letters. They had used permanent markers, and there lay the smoking gun. She’d seen them in the halls last week,
     tagging lockers with their artless signs and calling cards. By then it was unbearable. Going back inside to track down Dick
     Humphries, the custodian, was out of the question. She’d be here another hour, and Dick’d probably enjoy the dirty insult
     almost as much as Eric and Jason were enjoying it now.
    As their laughter reached its crescendo and began to fade into a morbid curiosity about what she was going to do next, Amy
     wanted to march over and remove the cigarettes from their mouths and plant the coals in their eyeballs. Instead she gasped
     like the schoolmarm she was becoming, chirped the power locks, and sped away.
    The saddest part was that she knew she wouldn’t do anything about it. She could sit them for detention, but she wasn’t getting
     paid enough to spend her summer afternoons making them read
Great Expectations
, and she doubted they could read. She had only the next four weeks to get through, eight more sessions, and then Eric Pritchard
     and Jason Wells would be free to make their disgusting jack-off faces at their teachers at Boulder High or September School,
     or at the guards at the Boulder County Jail – the eventual if not next stop on their descent.
    But it would only get worse as the weeks wore on. She had no experience with average high-school students, let alone the kind
     of metal shop ’n’ meth miscreants that were her charges this summer. She had taught grades three, four, and five, and taught
     them well, for eleven years. But it had been a bad (couple of) year(s) for the restaurant.
    To pick up some of the slack, Amy had used her background in human resources to wrangle her way into teaching Workplace Economics,
     the vocational technical program created to reward high-school kids who were also holding down jobs of at least twenty hours
     per week, and who were – due to their financial demands, sloppy grades, difficult home environment, or lack of discipline
     – at risk of not graduating. Successful completion of WorkEcon earned the kids fifteen credits, the equivalent of three regular
     semester classes; for Amy, an extra fifty-five hundred before taxes and health insurance. Her net take-home would be less
     than onemortgage payment. But it was something at a time when every little bit helped.
    WorkEcon was supposed to be a snooze, for her and the kids. And for the first week, it was. But that was before Ronny Haskovitz
     got expelled for smoking pot in the back row, before Lisa Klein punched Angela Valdez in the possibly pregnant belly, and
     before Amy herself became
    WARTHOG TITS
    She was a coward, she knew. She would pass Eric and Jason right on out of WorkEcon with a C-, just so she didn’t have to face
     the bureaucratic wrath of Jeff Wheatley, the program’s supervisor and most ardent champion, whose criteria for WE success
     was summed up in the motto, ‘Twelve summer days earns a triple A.’ So long as