Free Just Another Kid by Torey Hayden Page A

her head and looked down the hallway.
    “What is it?” I stuck my head out of the closet and glanced in the direction she was looking.
    Back and forth between me and the stairwell Leslie glanced. Her body was taut with excitement.
    “You shouldn’t be up here, you know,” I said. “You’re supposed to be down on the playground with Miss Berry and Joyce. Do they know you’ve come up here?”
    She raised one hand and pointed down the hall, then she grunted. It was the first intentional sound I’d ever heard Leslie make.
    Again, I looked around the corner of the closet door. “What is it?”
    “Crying,” she said hoarsely.
    “Crying? Who’s crying? Can you show me?”
    Leslie took off. I followed her down the hallway, down the stairs, through the fire doors. As we came out of the stairwell, I was accosted by noise. A general hubbub filtered up from the area around the main office.
    Carolyn was just inside the office door when I reached it. She had hold of Dirkie by the collar of his shirt and Shemona by her coat. Dirkie was crying angrily. Shemona was hysterical. She twisted and turned, all the while screeching at the top of her lungs.
    “Oh, thank God,” Carolyn said when she saw me. “I thought you’d gotten lost.”
    “What’s happened?”
    “She tried to kill me!” Dirkie shouted. “That girl, that girl with the long yellow hair, she tried to kill me!”
    “Dirkie was just being Dirkie,” Carolyn said. Letting go of him, she reached over the top of the barrier to grab a handful of tissues. She held them out to Dirkie. “You were being a bit annoying, weren’t you, Dirkie? You kept wanting to touch Shemona’s hair. I asked you several times to leave her alone.”
    “She tried to kill me!” He displayed a scratched cheek.
    “I was about to kill you myself,” Carolyn replied. “How many times did I ask you to leave her alone? Five? Ten? It’s not surprising she got fed up.”
    Shemona persisted with ear-splitting screams, making it nearly impossible to continue the conversation. Moreover, the other children were milling around inquisitively.
    I looked over at Carolyn. “Do you suppose you could spare Joyce to watch my gang for a moment? There’s an art project all laid out up there. Maybe to be on the safe side, you could take Dirkie down with you. But I’d like a private moment to deal with Short Stuff, here.”
    Carolyn nodded. Getting a good grip on Shemona’s jacket, I dragged her, still kicking and screaming, off in the direction of the teachers’ lounge. Once there, I shut the door firmly behind us, then pulled her across the room to the sofa and sat down.
    “Do you want to sit here beside me?” I asked.
    She simply continued to scream.
    “Would you like to sit in my lap?”
    “No!”
    “Oh, all right. Very well. The thing is, however, I can’t let go of you. I need to hold on so that you don’t hurt yourself in here. Or hurt anything else. When you look like you’re more in control, I’ll let go of your wrist.”
    This brought a new spurt of anger, and she struggled savagely, clawing at my arm with the fierceness of a tiger cub. Grabbing her free hand with mine, I hung on and said no more.
    Shemona screamed. And screamed. Tiredness eventually crept into her voice, but she still managed to carry on shrieking in monotonous, syncopated bursts. Then exhaustion finally overtook her, and her screams faded to squawks and then grunts. At last she was hoarse. Genuine tears filled her eyes at that point, and when she looked at me briefly, I saw the anguish. Sinking down first to her knees and then all the way down, she sat on the rug at my feet. I let go of her wrists.
    I smiled. “That was hard work, wasn’t it?”
    She gave no response.
    “I’m tired now. Are you?”
    She fingered the red marks left on her wrists by my grip, then she snuffled and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her blouse.
    “This must have been a hard day for you. It must be scary, having to come to school