I clutch my binder to my chest. My heart thumps frantically against the front cover.Not Miss Diaz. Please, please, not Miss Diaz.“Can I come in early Monday morning instead?” Only ten stragglers left, chatting or texting by their desks.
Please let some of them wait to ask Miss Diaz a question. Please don’t leave me alone with her.
“You said that last time,” Miss Diaz says. She hops onto the desk next to me and crosses her ankle boots, the metal buckles clicking with themovement. “Have I done something to offend you, Mina? You can tell me. I promise I won’t be upset.”
The forlorn note in her voice makes me want to weep. This is the woman I’ve pestered for four years about everything from the merits of a peplum top to whether a classmate asking if my parents had ridden to school on a camel qualified as a microaggression. Things I couldn’t ask Baba, because he would just tell me to mind my business and focus on my studies.
People like that are weeds, habibti,he’d say.They want to tangle you up, make you as small as them. Otherwise, they know you will grow higher than they ever could.
Good advice. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I followed it.
For the other one percent, I went to Miss Diaz.
“You haven’t done anything wrong.” My first bit of honesty today. I trace the outer edge of the binder with my pinkie. “I’ve just been busy.”
The room empties. I shoot out of my chair. Dread drips in my belly, forming a pool of fear somewhere deep and dark. Miss Diaz watches me retreat with a puzzled frown. “What’s keeping you so busy? Is it anything I can help with?”
We’re alone, and she hasn’t changed. It hasn’t taken her.
Silence hangs like a guillotine in the empty room. “Just some personal stuff. But … if you want to meet in the quad during lunch on Monday, I can be there.”
Still nothing but warm brown eyes, flooding with joy at my weak invitation.
Hope blooms inside me. What if it’s over?
Miss Diaz leaps to her feet. “You’ve got yourself a deal. Let me write a quick Post-it so I don’t forget. Ugh, Mina. I’m getting sixteen emails a day about the Spirit Week schedule. My hair turns a shade grayer every time I check my inbox.”
I watch her closely, looking for any signs. Nothing. Just a long stream of complaints about block scheduling and class-separated assemblies.
The hope grows into a wildfire. A hope that’s been brutalized over the course of three awful weeks. Lunch with Miss Diaz. Monday!
She bends her head to write at her desk, pen moving rapidly over the bright pink Post-it. “Done!” Miss Diaz circles the board, searching for an empty spot to stick the reminder. “Why do they need to extend study hall by fourteen minutes and shorten lunch by twenty? Just to confuse the kids?” she mutters, scanning her flurry of pastel stickers.
“There’s free space next to the science fair flyer,” I offer.
Lunch should be safe, right? Out in the open, with plenty of people around us? To be extra safe, we won’t sit under my tree, since it’s set apart from the crowd. I’ll find a table smack-dab in the middle of the quad. The ants won’t be happy.
I will be, though. I’ll be so freaking happy I might expire on the spot, and wouldn’t that be ironic?
Miss Diaz still hasn’t put up the sticker. I walk to the board, tapping my finger against the rectangle of free space. “Do you want me to put it up?”
The Post-it flutters to the ground between us.
The seconds pass in centuries. The hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. I stare at the Post-it. At the marker stains in the creases of Miss Diaz’s fingers and the dirty brown carpet beneath it.
Wetness gathers under my lashes as I look up and meet cold orange eyes.
No. Not her. Not her.
“Get out of here,” I whisper. I’ve never addressed the thing directly before. I rarely have the chance. All I ever see is the orange of a bloody dawn rising in the faces of those unfortunate enough to be left alone with me. The foul smell leaking like an open sore. Rot and ash, the odor of unbearable heat beneath a desiccating body.
Miss Diaz slaps me across the face. I stumble back, slamming my hip against the corner of her desk. Her pencil holder goes flying, sending pens and highlighters rolling on the floor.
I don’t get a chance to recover before she shoves me to the ground. My elbow bangs against a desk leg as I try to rise, but the thing is moving too fast, taking a fistful of my hair and slamming my head against the carpet. Miss Diaz’s hands reach for my throat.
If this had happened three weeks ago, I probably would have blacked out. I might have even tried to wrestle her politely, the way you would a friend with a habit of starting the fight but then tattling to their mom if you won.
I have the scars to speak for what I’ve learned since the first time I saw orange eyes.
