Free Inland by Kat Rosenfield Page A

humor and easygoing grin make him the kind of teacher that everyone likes. A favorite.
    “Don’t worry, you haven’t missed much,” he assures me, with one eye on the entering, settling crowd, noisily filtering its way to seats at the high, Formica-topped lab tables. “And let’s see . . .” He scans the room, then shouts, “Hey! Ben!”
    At the back, by the glass case filled with formaldehyde-preserved floating things and a handful of sun-bleached skulls, a boy with red hair and glasses snaps to attention. He even salutes.
    “Mister S!” he shouts back.
    “This is—” He pauses, looking at me for input. And though I’ve met no others yet, I make it official: Mr. Strong is my favorite teacher, too. Not just here, not just now, but of all time and forever.
    “Callie,” I say. “Please. Thank you.”
    “Right!” He turns back: “This is Callie. She’s an accomplished horsewoman from the wild Northwestern plains, and she needs some help settling in.”
    I prepare for the miserable minutes to follow. I know what comes next. The boy will take me in—eyes down, eyes up—and sigh, and irritatedly make only the tiniest bit of room, and studiously ignore me for forty minutes except for the grunted information about which page we’re on. All while the rest of the class looks on with half pity, half relief that it wasn’t them.
    Only he doesn’t.
He doesn’t.
    Instead, there’s a smile. A beckoning hand. Mr. Strong’s send-off pat on the shoulder, and only a handful of curious stares as I cross the room.
    “Hey, Callie,” says Ben. He pulls out the high-legged chair and waits, patiently, as I heave myself up. And when I do, he holds out a hand for me to shake—small but strong, and pleasantly warm—and then gestures at my ponytail, pulled back against the humidity and hanging in crazed, curly coils down my back. “Nice hair.”
    “Yours, too,” I manage to whisper.
    As promised, I call home at lunch. She picks up on the first ring.
    “Callie!” she yells, and even as I cringe away from her ear-piercing squeal, I can’t help smiling. It has been weeks—weeks!—and for all my father’s glowering and pointed remarks, he can’t make Nessa leave. He’d have to put his foot down, evict her, kick her out with a flourish and threats of arrest if she ever came back. But he won’t. He can’t. The confrontation, with its inevitable madness and sobbing good-byes, a perfect repeat of the last one, is a door he won’t open again. And for once, his dry and undramatic disapproval has met its match.
    “Aren’t they missing you at your job?” he’d said, irritation creeping into his voice, when he came home late from work two weeks ago to find my aunt and me substituting a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch for dinner.
    “Oh, and aren’t you sweet to be concerned!” Nessa sang, all innocence and wide eyes, then smiled at him—the way that a cat might smile at a dog as it scampered up a tree and sat, smugly, just out of reach. “But surfers, you know, they’re such a laid-back crowd, it didn’t matter a bit for me to take a leave of absence. In fact, I can stay as long as I like.”
    The last sentence was less a statement of fact than a challenge, aimed right between my father’s eyes.
I can stay as long as I like
. But he didn’t meet it. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t say,
No, you can’t
. Instead, he sighed, and shrugged, and wandered away, closing the door to his study, and eventually planting a dry, distracted peck on my cheek when I knocked to say good night. I’m starting to think that he can’t bring himself to take her away from me. Not again. Not this time. And not when, and even he has to admit it, Nessa has made herself useful. For all her flightiness and swearing and refusal to wear shoes, for all the nights she vanishes into the darkness by the water and then comes back with the telltale, slightly sweet scent of marijuana clinging to her hair, she’s someone who can be there—to keep me