Free An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer Page A

else, kept kissing this other lady and my mom got so mad she spat and said something awful, I don’t know what, but I could tell it was horrible.” He looked hastily over his shoulder. “She was muttering and so worked up she had me worried.” He glanced over his shoulder once more. “But I heard her— ‘Ayin hora,’ she says, like it’s a done deal, like she knows something.” I looked blank. “The evil eye,” he explained, his teeth clenched. “Next week, the guy dies, and my mom’s just sitting there in front of the screen, smiling.”
    I thought the wind might be filling my head, making the skin on my forehead stretch out and thin. I shivered again. “She killed him?” I croaked.
    Teddy didn’t answer me right away, but his eyes were watching me closely. “I’m worried,” he whispered back.
    My hand flew up to my chest. “What should we do?” I asked.
    He leaned forward and whispered into my ear, his cheek on mine, “We need a plan.” Then he squeezed my hand, turned around, and ran back inside. “Tomorrow,” he mouthed at the door.
    I hid myself in my room, staring at the walls in a desperate attempt at inspiration. I would need to do something definitive, something that would indebt his mother to me for life. Somehow it had become about her as much as it had become about Teddy; somehow I knew they were, on some level, one and the same, that I couldn’t love one without having the love of the other. She would not let me take him away from her. I understood this, already, about his mother.
    I thought about my own mother and her clean beauty, wondered if a child could be readopted, if we could steal Teddy and keep him. I thought about what she’d said about Grandmother Carol, wondering if, on her rare visits, she brought me candy as a way to try to quickly fix something that was broken. Adults assumed it was kids who loved candy, but they were the ones always presenting it to us like a cure-all.
    I dug the plastic, jellybean-filled Easter bunny she’d brought with her that spring out from the bottom of my closet where I had buried it after my father had pitched a fit. I stared at it after retrieving it, everything about it perfectly intact, the pastel colors looking back at me opaquely. There was something both unsettling and miraculous about the fact that even though it had been buried for three months, it still looked as untouched as the day my grandmother gave it to me. Perhaps this was not just a miracle of plastic and corn syrup; perhaps there was more to this mythical creature than met the eye. The fact that some of the candies were the exact same color as my father’s antacids gave me further courage. I clutched the rabbit in my hand and snuck down the hall to my parents’ bathroom.
    His father’s heart. That was where the miracle needed to happen. What does a heart need? I tried to think. I thought of that night in the hospital, of the ugly mold of the heart and the meticulously drawn one with all its lettering. I thought of the orange bottles they’d sent my father home with, how he took them so carefully, each pill its own distinctive and mysterious color.
    My parents’ medicine cabinet was full of its usual mysteries. Cough syrup I recognized. My mother’s hairbrush. Shaving cream. Many other bottles, the titles of which I could read but did not understand. There were three of the type I was searching for: the orange with the white safety cap, a device my father had already shown me how to unlock. I was hoping for one that didn’t have many pills left. The second one I tried had only two, and my heart leapt when I opened it. I dumped them into the toilet, worrying that it was too loud, that the sound would wake my mother, praying as I flushed that the two pills wouldn’t be missed. Then I replaced the contents with half the jellybeans, saving the other half just in case Mr. Rosenthal needed more.
    Back in my room I tried to scrape the paper off the front but it wouldn’t