Free Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood Page A

Paulie in an electric-blue frame, my little chamber could not shirk its original identity as a stall for dyeing shoes.
    I gestured toward a seat. Andrea would sit eventually, but she liked to meet even the smallest requests on her own timetable. It drove her teachers crazy. She would someday become the kind of adult other adults admired, if one of them didn’t kill her first.
    “I got my schedule,” she said, fishing it out of the same handbag she’d toted all the previous year, a scabrous vinyl pouch that matched her jacket.
    “That’s not final,” I informed her. “The prelims got mailed out by mistake.”
    She slapped the printout on my desk. “I got the Rattlesnake for English.”
    “I can’t imagine who you mean.”
    Andrea tsked significantly. “Mrs. Ratclef.”
    “Oh, Mrs. Ratclef. That would be the same Mrs. Ratclef who, as a member of our faculty, is entitled to our respect whether she is standing in the room with us or not?”
    Andrea stared me down for a few moments, her eyes etched in thick swipes of black, deceptively ferocious-looking. “That’s the one,” she conceded at last.
    “Shall we start again?” I said, sitting down. “How was your summer?”
    She allowed me a small smile—I’d never seen her laugh. “Better than yours,” she said. Finally she sat, draping herself over the chair as if she were made of seaweed.
    My desk faced the wall. My chair was turned out to face whoever landed in the student chair, as a kind of invitation. Across the hall Rick used his desk like a barrier, which I could understand. As vice-principal he likened himself to a prison warden who couldn’t afford to start feeling sorry for the inmates.
    “How’s your mother?” I asked.
    Andrea thrust out her wrist and consulted her watch. “Drunk,” she said.
    I waited.
    “My dad finally bailed on us,” she said, stroking the eyebrow ring that had more than likely been applied to commemorate the event. “He moved in with Miss Teenage America on August twelfth. Which he totally and completely forgot was my birthday.”
    I nodded. The saga of her father and the girl from the hardware store had been a recurring theme the previous year.
    “You want to talk about it?”
    “Nope,” Andrea said, her vinyl jacket, spotted from the day’s rain, creaking around her as she sat up. “What I want is to switch to English 220. This class you put me in is for morons” Her eyes flickered over my face. “Or whoever put me in. Obviously it wasn’t you.”
    “No,” I said. “I was kind of busy.”
    Until that moment I had never seen that girl choke up. Not over her feckless father, her pickled mother, over the shackshe called home, an unpainted heap of planks with a dirt yard, fourteen miles from a cup of coffee or a tank of gas. She lifted her hands as if to touch me, her black nail polish looking like gangrenous wounds. Instead, she peered at my face, squinting closely at the scar along my eyebrow.
    “I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said. Her hands returned to her lap.
    “The pay’s irresistible.”
    Andrea didn’t smile. “I felt really bad,” she said.
    “Me too.” My eyes stung unexpectedly as I took her schedule. “Let’s see how we can fix this”
    My buzzer sounded. “Line one, Lizzy,” Jane said. “That bully-man.”
    Andrea sat up with the alacrity of a federal agent. I picked up the phone.
    “Did you get the flowers?” came a voice from the ether.
    “Who is this?”
    The moment hovered, and the voice said, “I’m the guy that saved you.”

NINE
    He’d been waiting for me, hands knuckled hard into the pockets of a used London Fog with shiny spots and a broken belt loop. His head lifted edgily as I parked the car. He was scrawny and raw-skinned, with the white, wet-combed hair of a man in deep middle age trying hard not to look like a former drunk. I checked his boots, recalling the tink-tink-tink they made on the wet night road.
    “Hello?” he said, heading toward me. I