HUGE, read the first note. The postscript made him laugh and earned them both a twenty-minute detention. AND SCARY. When Sean unfolded the paper tossed his way, he knew that Norah was describing her great-aunt Diane. Caught sniggering by Mrs. Patterson, he was invited to share what he found so amusing with the rest of the class. He demurred, blushed, stammered into trouble. The teacher unfolded the message and misinterpreted the words as directed toward her.
After the dismissal bells trilled, Sean and Norah remained behind, fixed at their desks, waiting out their punishment, while at the front of the room, Mrs. Patterson graded papers, glancing up every so often, a bemused stare tempering the gravity of the situation. The red second hand on the clock face—MADE IN THE USA, ALLEGHENY COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT—slowed, wavered, threatened to stop entirely. Norah could count almost to ten between the ticks, and bored into mischief, she tried to attract his attention by clearing her throat, tapping her fingers along the pencil well on the desktop, sighing. He dared look back once, panic in his eyes, and for the last five minutes simply bowed his head and tucked it into the cradle of his folded arms. Excuses for their tardiness in getting home played out in the recesses of his mind. Never before had he been punished by a teacher, never asked to stay one minute after school.
Sentences served, they were dismissed with the admonishment to go and sin no more. Dragging their coats and bags behind them, the pair left the classroom to empty corridors stretching out to the front door. The school seemed alien and foreboding, and he pushed ahead, anxious to disassociate himself from the troublemaker. He pretended to be interested in the displays along the walls: the first graders’ crudely fashioned poems to winter; lopsided snowmen built from cottonballs, spit, and glue; the second graders’ paeans to Groundhog Day, now forlorn after the actual date had passed. The third graders’ papier-maché masks of African animals, his own clumsy antelope and Norahs toothy leopard. She called for him to let her catch up, but that only served to spur him onward. When he heard her flying toward him, he started to sprint, but before he had broken the traces, she was upon him, spinning him around so quickly that his bag flew from his hand and his coat whipped to the wall and dropped to the floor.
“I told you to wait up,” she said.
“Get offa me.”
“Are you mad because I got you detention?”
He met her stare with malice in his eyes. His face bloomed red and he spat out the words: “Go away. You're nothing but trouble since you got here.”
“Sean, you're making a big deal—”
“Everything was fine till you showed up.” Angry lines crossed his forehead as he flushed a deeper red, and he pinched his hands into fists. She struck quick as a snake, sinking her teeth into his shoulder, biting hard enough to break the skin beneath his shirt. Even as he jerked away, she clamped on and would not let go until he screamed out in pain and surprise.
“There!” she yelled at him. “There, now you have a real reason to be mad at me.”
Fingers clamped on his shoulder, he stammered his reply. “What did you do that for? That hurts. You had no right—”
“I just wanted to talk with you and you ran away. I'm sorry, but you're not going to let Mrs. P ruin us being friends, are you?”
“You really bite hard.”
“Sorry—”
“I'm still mad at you. I have to come by your house every morning and take you to school, and then you're all weird, and you know all these tricks and you won't share and you cheat and you keep secrets.”
“I'm trying to apologize.”
“Sorry isn't enough.”
“You don't understand right now but you will. If you just help me.”
“Why should I help you? You bit me. Why would you bite me?”
“ ‘Cause you made me mad on account of a tiny problem, a bump in the road.”
“But I never get in trouble. My parents would kill—” He caught the words as they tumbled from his mouth, choking on the memory of his father.
“Don't tell on me, okay? You can win next time we play chess.”
With a grudging reluctance, he eased into his coat and shouldered his bookbag. A silent truce formed between them, and taking care to match strides, they walked to the front door. Outside a light snow fell dry and small. Norah pulled up her hood and tugged on her mittens.
Before they opened the door, he stopped to ask in earnest. “I won't tell anyone, but you have to tell me who is following you. You said that night that someone might want to take you away. Where to?”
“I don't know what he wants,” she said. “But I am afraid. I don't want to leave.”