Free River Angel by A. Manette Ansay

children’s. “Chapter Four-teen ,” she said, but Gabriel wasn’t listening. His hand was in his desk cubby, and Anna Grey thought she heard the irritable crackle of his lunch bag. Bethany packed him plenty of food, but the child was always hungry. All morning, he’d sneak bits of crushed Ding-Dong, a corn chip, a peanut butter cracker—that slow hand moving from his cubby to his mouth. By lunchtime, most of it would be gone; still, he prayed before he ate, seemingly oblivious to the mimicking gestures of the kids all around him. Looking for attention, Anna Grey knew, like the second-grade boy who always fell down or the girl—thank heavens she’d moved away—who kept taking off her underwear. Poor child , the other teachers said, and inevitably they’d ask, Why isn’t he in Living and Learning? Living and Learning was Marty’s pet project, a special class for special kids that met three mornings a week. But Anna Grey couldn’t admit she was failing with Gabriel, especially not to Marty, especially not now. She wasn’t the same green teacher who’d encountered Sandy Shore. She planned to surprise everyone, discover a special talent in Gabriel—art or, perhaps, music—and encourage him until he grew to trust her, blossomed like a flower. She imagined how he’d start making friends, play kickball and softball at recess, look boldly out at the world—but the fact was that, nearly a month into the term, Gabriel still was staring at the ground.
    What made it worse was that Marty himself had approached Anna Grey about Gabriel just last week, surprising her as she sneaked a cigarette in the teachers’ lounge after the first bell hadalready rung. “I think he needs more than you can give him,” he said matter-of-factly.
    â€œMy recommendation is to keep him mainstreamed,” Anna Grey said firmly. “You know how the Living and Learning kids get ostracized.”
    â€œGabriel is already ostracized,” Marty said. “Tortured might be a better word. Let me help the kid, Anna.”
    â€œI’m late,” Anna Grey said, crushing out her half-smoked cigarette.
    â€œCan we schedule a meeting to discuss this?” Marty said. “It would be, I mean, strictly professional.”
    He blushed with the sincerity of those words, and Anna Grey blushed too, but angrily, because even as he spoke she was imagining the scrape of his beard against her cheeks, the edge of his teeth against her tongue. Strictly professional—of course, that December afternoon had been a mistake, a weak moment after his separation, her only infidelity, ever. Until that day, affairs had been something that happened only to other people, and even now, after the fact, it was unthinkable that she had fallen into such a thing herself. She almost wished she were a Catholic so that she could confess, receive her punishment, leave her sin in the care of someone bound by God’s law not to repeat it. Maya assured her that the Circle of Faith meetings worked the same way—members took a vow of silence so that whatever was said between Faith walls was sure to stay there. “I know something’s on your mind, Anna,” she’d said more than once. “You just don’t seem yourself lately.” But Anna Grey could not imagine admitting something like this to anyone, though the fact was that she longed to tell Bill, to make a clean breast of everything. Her fear wasn’t that he’d be angry, or hurt, or even that he’d leave her. Her fear was that he wouldn’t care one way or the other.
    She’d first met Bill on the IU campus during the terrible fall of Sandy Shore, when it seemed to Anna Grey that her life hadchanged, that nothing was satisfying anymore. She and another teacher were there to see a football game. Bill was sitting next to them, and they all got talking during the halftime show. As the cheerleaders kicked