Free Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal

tumbling on the road.
    The bus driver stopped the bus and turned around, looking right at Chadd. “You. After I drop you off today, you are suspended from this bus.”
    “You can’t do that.” Chad smiled. “How am I gonna get to school?”
    “Come up here,” the driver said, pointing to a seat right behind her.
    Chadd’s friends made hubba-hubba noises as Chadd took his timegetting to the front of the bus. He paused only to flick his tongue at Eva, who had her head in her hands and saw hardly any of it.
     • • • 
    After a minute, a block before the bus arrived at school, Eva removed the little bottle of concentrated chile oil from her backpack. She first smeared some on her fingertips and then poured the rest in her mouth, holding it there like mouthwash. Even with her heat-ravaged mouth and hands, this stuff was special; it felt like the skin on her fingers and the inside walls of her mouth were searing off. She even glanced down once to see whether the skin on her fingers was actually peeling. She held a placid expression as she stepped out of the bus and made a right when every other student was making a left. She walked to the end of the block and turned at the fence, hearing Dylan, Chadd, and Brant laughing behind her, closing the gap. Then, by the fence at the official edge of school property, she waited.
     • • • 
    As the boys surrounded her, she stood as still as a pot of dry soil, holding the fire in her cheeks. Maybe things would’ve gone according to plan if Chadd hadn’t come up to her from behind and whipped her around, the shock of which made her spit the entire mouthful of searing pepper oil onto his face before he even kissed her.
    As Chadd fell on the grass screaming, Eva stared at him for a second. It was really working. She reached over and grabbed Dylan’s head and wiped her chile-oil-dripping fingers across his eyes, actually feeling his eyeballs under her fingertips. Screaming, he shoved her off and fell against the pole on the edge of the chain-link fence, shouting, crying, and grasping Oedipally at his face.
    Brant got one look at Eva, her mouth and fingers red and swollen from the oil. Between that and hearing the cries of his friends, his flight instinct kicked in, and he ran toward the school as fast as Eva had ever seen a boy run.
    Chadd was kneeling in the open lawn, fists uprooting handfuls of grass and dirt to wipe against the fire consuming his face, and was screaming—as was Dylan, who was still clawing at his eyes and weeping, long since having dropped his twenty-dollar bill, which Eva picked up, folded, and shoved in Chadd’s fat back pocket. She then collected herself and walked toward the school.
     • • • 
    Eva didn’t even make it more than two feet into her classroom before she was once again approached from behind, this time by stern adults, and whisked to the principal’s office. The look on sweet old Mr. Ramazzotti’s face seemed to say,
Why her? She’s one of my good ones
.
     • • • 
    As she was escorted past the secretarial pool area of the front-desk administrators, she heard an ambulance being called. The principal opened a heavy wooden door to what Eva judged to be the second-fanciest office she’d ever seen after her dad’s boss’s office that one time, and followed the principal’s stern orders to sit down in a chair facing the desk.
    Just when the principal asked,
What did you do to those boys,
Eva could hear Dylan Sternwall, crying—wailing, really (she’d never heard a boy her age cry so loud)—as he was brought to the nurse’s office. What a fantastic noise. She curled her hot, swollen lips over her teeth to fight back the smile and look contrite. There was no going back from this—she had just pushed her life forward in a particular direction—and as the principal lifted her cordless desk phone to call Eva’s mother, Eva saw that not all of it was going to be as pleasant as this moment. So while the phone rang