Free River Angel by A. Manette Ansay Page B

couldn’t come in before her crossing guard shift started at three. “Call my husband at Jeep’s,”she said, but Fred was unloading stock and couldn’t leave. “Handle it however you see fit,” he said. “I’ll talk to Robert John again when I get home.” So Maya brought Gabriel back to Anna Grey’s classroom, interrupting her half-hour planning period, the only break she would get all day. Gabriel’s face was raw and wet, streaked black around the mouth. He didn’t look at Anna Grey, but he didn’t not look at her, either. Gabriel just looked . That was what always got to Anna Grey. “Maybe you should keep him here,” Maya said. “I mean, instead of sending him outside with the others. They’re worse than wolves.”
    Anna Grey imagined spending the rest of the term’s planning periods under Gabriel’s absent stare. “He has to learn to stick up for himself,” she said, perhaps a little more crossly than she meant to. “He won’t always have teachers to look out for him.”
    â€œWell, OK,” Maya said. “But if I can help, Anna, let me know.”
    After Maya was gone, Anna Grey wiped Gabriel’s mouth with a Kleenex from her desk drawer, careful not to let her fingers touch his sore. “You’re bigger than those boys,” she said. “It’s silly to let them do this to you.” She poked the Kleenex into his hand. “Here. You can wipe your own mouth, don’t you think?” Suddenly he leaned over and spat into the wastebasket, a dark stream that made Anna Grey’s stomach turn.
    â€œGabriel!” she said.
    â€œIt tasted bad,” he whined. “It still tastes bad.”
    â€œThen don’t let them bully you next time.”
    He stared at the floor, unresponsive. It was as if she were talking to the air.
    â€œDo you hear me?” she said. “Do you?” Then abruptly, cruelly, she knocked on his head with her knuckles. “Hello? Anybody home?”
    He lifted his head to look at her, eyes brimming, an innocent child. Appalled by what she’d just done, Anna Grey turned andwalked away, down the hall and out the school’s back entrance, where she inhaled deep, burning gulps of cold air. On the asphalt, a group of boys chased a red rubber kickball, slipping and sliding over the ice. Younger girls jumped rope, while the older ones floated in groups. Maya was right. She wasn’t herself lately. The truth was that she wanted to go home—not home to Ambient, but to Skylark, where her sister still lived. She wanted to hear people speak her full name—Anna Grey —instead of shortening it to just plain Anna, the way Northerners automatically did. She wanted true heat that lasted more than a week or two in August, and she wanted humidity that left a person not knowing where her own skin ended and the air began. She wanted country music on the radio instead of rock ’n’ roll, and she wanted to order a glass of tea in a restaurant without having to say iced tea. She wanted to open her mouth without somebody telling her, “You’re not from here, are you?” And she wanted to walk down a street where people looked you in the face; but the thing was, Anna Grey’s sister said that Skylark had changed. People who worked in Atlanta lived there now; it was more like a suburb than a town. It had been seven years since Anna Grey had gone back, though her sister had come twice to Ambient. “You don’t want to see it, really,” her sister said. “It’s one big parking lot.”
    But the same sort of thing was happening to Ambient. Once, Solomon Public had stood alone on Country O, the only building north of the D road. To the south was the school bus parking lot and repair shed; farther down the road, well out of sight, was an International Harvester dealership. Now the IH stood empty, but new homes were sprouting up