“My mom says—”
“Let’s have a meeting. You,your mom, and me. I’ll call her today and see what we can set up.” He looked back into the classroom. “I have to get back in there before someone sets fire to the curtains. But this isn’t over. This conversation? It’s going to keep going. I promise. In the meantime, though, stay cool. It isnotokay for you to get physical, no matter what words someone uses. Clear?”
“My mom says—”
“I’ll hearfrom your mom when we have our meeting. But this isn’t her classroom, it’s mine. No violence.”
He’d let his student repeat hateful slurs, interrupted her multiple times, and essentially issued a challenge to her mother. Great work. His Teacher of the Year award was probably waiting in his mailbox at home.
Still, the kids calmed down and made it through the rest of the day without anything serioushappening. He made his phone calls, got mortification and promises of retribution from Ty’s mom and vitriol from Peyton’s, and packed up his regular banker’s box of journals, workbooks, and miscellaneous projects. He had an exciting weekend of marking and lesson planning ahead of him.
Behind the wheel of his battered Toyota, he headed out toward Main Street. He walked to work whenever he could,but he always seemed to be lugging too much stuff. Maybe he could get some sort of—not a baby stroller, not a wagon, not a damn shopping cart, but some sort of contraption that would let him carry more stuff. That would be good. A good example to the kids too—
He stopped at the Main Street stop sign, looked both ways, then pulled out into the intersection, turning right as the car from the otherside of the intersection waited to turn left. The car—the Mercedes sports car—with Liam Marshall behind the wheel.
Liam Marshall.
Liam Marshall.
A horn blared and Ben jerked the wheel, but he was too late. A jolt he felt in his whole body, the screech of metal against metal, and he wasn’t sure if his car stopped because he’d slammed on the brakes or because it was hopelessly entangled withthe front panel of the—
Oh shit. Entangled with the front panel of the police car he’d just sideswiped.
Everything stood still for a moment, and then Liam—Liam Marshall!—appeared at the hood of Ben’s car, peering in through the front windshield, eyes wide. “Are you okay?” he yelled.
Ben tried to figure out an answer to the question. He must be fine—he hadn’t been going more than ten or fifteenmiles an hour, and he was pretty sure the police car had been stationary.
On the other hand, he’d just run into a stationary police car, so “okay” didn’t really seem like the right word to describe his state.
“I’m uninjured,” he said, but not very loudly.
“What?” Liam yelled back at him.
Liam. Liam Marshall was standing outside Ben’s car, yelling at him.
“I may have bumped my head,” he said,louder this time. Because it made more sense for all of this to be some sort of hallucination than for Liam to be back in town. Didn’t it?
The police officer was out of the car, now. She must have slid across the front seat and exited from the passenger side, since the driver door was still jammed up against Ben’s.
Laura Doncaster. Damn. There weren’t that many North Falls police officers tochoose from, but any of the others would have been better than Laura Doncaster.
“Sir,” she said now, as loud and officious as if she were teaching a “how to intimidate civilians” course at the police academy. “Please get out of the car. Now.”
Well, that was a reasonable request. But his driver side door was jammed and the passenger seat was piled high with the box of schoolwork, his lunch containers,the snow pants he’d worn on yard duty all winter and was planning to take to the cleaners’ when he got around to it, a variety of fabric shopping bags, some of which might have stuff in them—
He hit the button to lower his windows, and miraculously, they worked. “It’ll take me a minute,” he called through the new opening. And then, because the officer was scowling as if she was about to pullout her gun and fill him with lead, he added, “Sorry, Laura. I’m sure this isn’t exactly—”
“Sir. Get out of the car immediately.”
“Laura?” Liam said from outside the car. He sounded pleasantly surprised, even charmed. “Laura Doncaster? Wow, it’s you!”
“Liam?” she replied. And it became clear that his reaction hadn’t been because he was charmed, it had been because he was charming. Laura dimpledlike a little girl staring at her first crush. “Holy smokes, Liam, it’s really good to see you!”
“You too,” he gushed. And behind his back so only Ben could see he made a frantic sort of hand gesture that clearly meanthurry up and get out of there before I run out of ways to be interested in Laura Doncaster. “You look great—and you’re a police officer! That’s fantastic! You always were a leader,so it’s a great career for you. Are you enjoying it?”
Ben was temporarily distracted by trying to figure out any way Laura had ever led anything but her little clique of mean girls, but he managed to call himself back to the job of maneuvering around the pile of crap in his front seat. Some of it he jammed into the back, but the banker’s box would probably be harder to move than to just slitherover—or so he believed until he found himself stuck partway across, his back arched as he braced against the headrest and tried to figure out what his jacket was caught on, how he could get his left foot up and over the gearshift, whether it was too late to reach down and slide the seat back to give himself more room….
Then the passenger door opened, and someone—no, not someone,Liam—eased thebanker’s box out from beneath him, and suddenly everything got five times easier. Still not exactly simple, because Ben was tall and the car was small and he really hadn’t planned things out too smoothly, but definitely a lot better than before.
