Hector stiffened, turned to face the speaker. “Now, Henry,” Jed was saying, but he was useless with discipline, and his students knew it. Henry pushed his way forward, just a few inches from Hector. “Want to know where you’ll be in ten years? Eh, maricón?” Henry pointed to a detail in Hector’s deepest hell, where a demon probed a kneeling man with what appeared to be the barrel of a handgun.
The suddenness of Hector’s violence: it was as if Jed could hear the sound of a leash being ripped. Hector was on top of Henry now, pinning the boy with his knees. He had already landed two punches to the kid’s face before Jed could lunge to pull him away. And then Jed did try, but he wasn’t much use. In the bear hug he had on Hector’s back, Jed could feel the relentlessness of Hector’s swinging arms, a thrashing machine that would not stop running until its job was done. Thankfully, Henry’s friends came to Jed’s aid, jarring Hector away, pinning him to the blackboard. Ten minutes later, after the classroom had emptied, Jed was looking at Henry’s fat lip, the knot rising on the side of Hector’s head. And what did Jed do? A lifelong nonconfronter, he handled this fight as he always handled the little skirmishes that broke out in his classroom. No boy wanted a trip to Doyle Dixon’s office, with its inevitable call home to explain the specifics. He made the kids shake hands, and no one ever spoke of it again. Weeks passed, at last the semester tipped to its end, and then the problem of Hector was no longer Jed’s to worry over.
Hector was, in fact, only one of a great many disturbed kids who had filtered through Jed’s room over the years—if not for what happened years later, these memories would likely have vanished, not taken on their crushing tonnage. But Jed would remember too well the fury he had felt in Hector as he hooked his arms around the boy’s shoulders, a machine set into frantic motion, a violence that only the muscular effort of other bodies could put to a stop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
One day, in the midst of another quiet evening of homework at Mr. Avalon’s kitchen table, Rebekkah perked her head to a knock at the door. Rebekkah would not yet have admitted to any feelings of shame about their evenings together, but she panicked a little, not wanting to reveal her presence there to whoever had dropped by.
“Oh,” Mr. Avalon said to the dark figure at the door.
“Forget about me? You said I should drop by sometime,” the voice said, in an odd way that brought Rebekkah away from her books, made her creep up behind for a better glimpse. This visitor’s face was mostly shadowed in the porch light, but she identified his shaven head from that afternoon, outside the school.
“Her again?”
Something in this guy’s tone had an odd effect on Rebekkah. She could only name herself in a near-whisper. “Rebekkah,” she said. “I’m Rebekkah.”
“What can I do for you, Hector?” Mr. Avalon felt for his mustache.
“It’s been a while, aren’t you happy to see me?”
“It’s just not a good time. Right now. We’re in the middle of some work.” Mr. Avalon was already closing the door a few inches. “If you’d like to come visit some other time, I’d be happy to talk.”
“Right. Work.” This young man now craned his head past Mr. Avalon. “And so what did he tell you—Rebekkah, you said it was? That you’re gonna be some rock star? I should tell you,” he said. “He lies.”
“Hector.”
“He lies! You know, he never even let me sing in that stupid club of his? He wouldn’t even let me join his class! ‘First you have to hone your craft,’ he says. Hone my craft! Ha ha!”
Mr. Avalon jerked back his arm, as if he might shove the kid to the ground. Instead, he slammed the door shut into Hector’s grinning face.
“I’m sorry about that,” Mr. Avalon said after the sound of the car had grumbled away. He cleared his throat a couple of times, shook his shoulders like a wet dog. “Hector. Truth is the boy was very talented. Another kid from a broken home. I thought I could help him, but sometimes boys like Hector just go in the wrong direction.”
“Wrong direction?”
“Last I heard he’s got himself involved in some bad business. Selling drugs around town. It’s such a shame, really, all that wasted talent, what he could have been.”
Mr. Avalon made a boyish display of pouting, sticking out a shining lower lip. “But maybe, in a way, I’m just like him, aren’t I? What I might have been, too.”
Rebekkah could see that Mr. Avalon needed reassuring, but she couldn’t think of the right words.
“It’s different for a girl like you,” Mr. Avalon added, a little viciously. “You couldn’t understand.”
“What do you mean?”
“You probably can’t even see it, can you? The gifts you’ve been given in this world. Hate to think how far I myself might’ve gone if I’d been born to some rich white folks like yours.”
Rebekkah nodded awkwardly. “You’ve given your life to help kids like me. And that isn’t nothing,” Rebekkah said. She did not ask, How many of us have there been?
Rebekkah hated the thought of other super special students before her; she hated the threat of Mr. Avalon pulling his attention away. Someday, when he was through with her. But mostly Rebekkah was afraid, at all times, that she would do something wrong with Mr. Avalon, and she’d have to go back to the way things were before. Everything had gotten better, including her stomach. Even her father, who noticed nothing, had noticed the difference. “Look at you, finally brightening up a bit!” Rebekkah had kindness to spare. Despite Mr. Avalon’s admonishment, Rebekkah still showed up each day for a nice, warm hour of Oliver Loving’s attention.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Hector’s painting scenes of his father as a feast for insects, a mumbling kid who had suddenly become a machine, an instrument of punishment that day in Jed’s classroom: Why didn’t Jed ever say a thing about it?