Free A Terrible Beauty: What Teachers Know but Seldom Tell outside the Staff Room by Dave St.John

fine.”
    “Mrs. Noble called, said you were there. Next I get a
call from Parnell. He tells me O’Connel blew his top over this kid,
Wagner, I guess his name is, bumping into you in the hall. Demanded
he miss this week’s game. Said if he were allowed to play, you’d
press charges.
    Of course I knew he couldn’t be right about
that.”
    “Of course not,” she said, wincing as she reached to
massage the small of her back.
    She smiled to her reflection in the dark window. So,
he’d told off Parnell. It embarrassed her, but pleased her as well.
Just thinking it she felt traitorous.
    “Parnell says this kid is one of his starters, and
they’ve got a tough game coming up this week. of course he’ll
apologize. Parnell says it was just an accident.” She said she was
sure it had been.
    The boy’s sneer had been a vile thing, his eyes
anything but sorry. Solange’s stomach burned, and she pushed the
tray away, no longer hungry.
    “The main reason I’m calling is to touch bases with
you on how it’s going. Are you making any headway?” She frowned.
How ridiculous. Why the ring around the rosy? Why didn’t he just
say it? What dirt had she gotten on him? “I’m rewriting my notes,
now.”
    “And?”
    “And I’ve documented several instances of
misconduct.”
    “Ah, that’s exactly what I hoped you’d say. Why do I
get the feeling there’s going to be a but coming up here
somewhere?”
    “I don’t know, Hugh,” she said, dredging up
enthusiasm she didn’t feel. “I’ve got them here.”
    “Okay, you get some rest, now, and fax them over
tomorrow, will you?” She said she would. As she set the phone down
she tried a smile at her reflection in the darkened window. It was
no good. No good at all.
    She set her dinner on the floor for the cat. Felix
sniffed at the low-fat chicken entree, and stalked off, tail
swishing. Chucking the meal in the garbage, she dug a pint of Dutch
chocolate burnt almond ice cream out of the freezer. This she
polished off at her desk as she composed her notes into something
she could read at a hearing.
    A death sentence for a dedicated man’s career. Maybe
they weren’t so far off after all; maybe she was the angel of
death.
    It was past midnight when she finished. She went to
bed and lay awake, mind refusing to be silent. The comforter
gathered under her chin, she watched as the streetlight sent
strange shapes flitting across her ceiling. A car’s horn from
somewhere down Fourth blared three short blasts.
    She and O’Connel hadn’t spoken much in five years at
Elk River.
    They’d run into each other at the copy machine,
passed in the lounge, seen each other at meetings... But he’d been
married at the time, and she’d been with someone.
    There was something there, though. It wasn’t going
anywhere, but it was there, just the same. Two years hadn’t changed
a thing—at least not for her.
    She was pushing thirty, and as any good Brazilian
girl knew, and her mother had of ten reminded her, a man was caught
in your twenties, or forever lost.
    She smiled at the memory of her mother in the kitchen
of their tenth story apartment near the Capemi building in Sao
Paulo. On swollen feet at the stove, she waved a long-handled
wooden spoon in the air as she recited her cautionary tales. She
was so round, so wonderfully plump, her voice so comforting, even
when chiding.
    “Que isso? What is this? Always your nose in a book!
A girl should be learning to cook so she can be a good wife, not
always hiding in a book! Come here, now, little one. Corta uma
cebola para sue Mae, querida. ‘Cut Mama an onion, sweetheart.
    Every minute she wasn’t in school Solange spent at
the battered table in Mama’s kitchen. In a frightening world, it
was a place of warmth, of safety. She read, steam from a simmering
pot of black beans billowing about her. Neighbors yelled, fought,
laughed, sang, made love—all on the other side of cracker thin
walls. When the bedstead began its rhythmic thumping,