EXCERPT

1

Gloria

Gloria Fryrear dropped her red marking pen on the desk and waited for adrenalin to pump in and replace the panic that froze her to the seat. She pled with the forces that held her captive; let it be Kelly Downs returning with an excuse for not finishing today’s test, or the custodian coming for the trash. Anyone. Just let a person come through that door and claim the knock.

Her plea went unanswered.

After the blood drained from her throbbing head and freed her mobility, she ran down the aisle that divided the desks into facing sections, pulled the door closed and turned the lock. A brave look through the glass-enclosed chicken wire in the door revealed nothing. There was not so much as a shadow in the hall.

She stepped aside to lean her back against the wall while she waited for her breathing to return to normal and her knees to stop trembling. It was time to move her desk back to the front of the room, near the door and phone, although she preferred it in the back where she could face her students and smile at them as they entered the room.

Someone wants to scare me, and he wins when I react this way; she repeated that message as she pushed her desk down the aisle, drawing energy from the anger she was building. Why hadn’t she listened when Susan Carton urged her to leave with the rest of the teachers? Stupid question - twenty minutes earlier she still believed she would rather stay an hour than risk losing a paper en route. If forced to ask a student to retake a test, she would be as disappointed in herself as the student would be upset with her.

She sat in her chair and looked over the room from the new position. She hated it, except for one thing. The Mexico poster was behind her now, so she wouldn’t have to stare at it every time she looked up. But that wasn’t such a big consolation since she didn’t spend much time in her seat anyway. Gloria moved around the room while she taught, employing animation that bordered on theatrics, because most of her students hated Spanish and wouldn’t learn anything unless she made the class fun.

The students seemed to like her, and she didn’t know many adults in Lovetown, so who wanted to scare her? Twice the night before, someone had knocked on her apartment door and took off before she answered. The first time, she thought a neighbor might have accidentally bumped the door in passing. She had no doubt that the second one was intentional.

She mentioned this to her coworkers before school started and Susan said the same thing had happened at her house, on the other side of town. Granted it was a small town, but Gloria still thought someone had gone to a lot of trouble to knock on both doors, and it seemed too weird to be coincidence. Now that she had heard the same distinctive knock on her classroom door thirty minutes after the final bell, she was positive someone was deliberately doing this.

Since Gloria routinely stayed late, she was familiar with the normal sounds in the empty building. Even in the athletic shoes that most students wore, there were clicks and squeaks and echoes when they walked through the empty halls. She hadn’t heard a sound before the knock. Someone obviously snuck up to her door and left either very cautiously, or in sock feet. Why?

Her pulse quickened again and she cursed the faulty logic that had convinced her to move to this unwelcoming place. Weren’t small towns supposed to be friendly? Lovetown had certainly sounded like a comforting place to start over after a divorce. It was proving to be anything but.

In the two months she had been there, she questioned more than why she had let the name of the town allure her. She wondered why she had thought she needed to move at all. Bobby stayed away as much as possible while they were married, so it made no sense to think she needed distance between them to avoid him after the divorce. She understood now. She needed to distance her heart, not her body. But it was too late.

She was stuck in Lovetown, at least for the school year, surrounded by strangers who mostly wanted to remain that way, teaching at William’s Middle School. One of the cafeteria workers warned her early on that it was possibly the most depressing place on earth so she should find plenty of outside activities to keep her spirits up.

Susan and Bran Carton were the closest friends Gloria had in Lovetown, proving that perceptions and definitions change as much as scenery and temperatures in a couple hundred miles. In her old life, the Cartons would have been acquaintances at most. She talked to Susan every day at work, and to Brad when he occasionally brought in lunch to save them from cafeteria food. But they never invited her to their home or to do anything with them socially.

Brad stayed to eat with them that morning when he delivered chef salads from Katlyn’s deli. Susan told him that Gloria lived alone and had been scared by someone knocking on her door the night before, the same as had happened at their house.

“I’ve never lived alone,” Susan had admitted. “I’d be afraid to spend one night alone, and can imagine how frightening it must have been for you. I had Brad to protect me.”

Brad told Gloria she could always call them if she was afraid. Susan said by all means, call them any time, and wrote their home and mobile phone numbers on a napkin for her.

Gloria dug the napkin out of her purse and pushed their home number into her cell phone, preferring outside contact to using the in-house school phone. When Brad answered she felt foolish.

She told him about the knock on the classroom door. “I’m a little spooked,” she confessed. “If you don’t mind talking to me until I get to my car, I promise to leave with everyone else from now on so I won’t have to bother you again.”

He offered to drive to school and walk her to the car, but she insisted that wasn’t necessary. Having him on the phone was enough to ease her mind. She was sure the mystery knocker was long gone, maybe even on the way to the Cartons’ house to knock on their door.

Gloria put the phone on her shoulder and gathered the Spanish tests, her purse, and her coat, and unlocked the door while Brad killed time with small talk. Susan hadn’t come home yet so she must have stopped at the grocery, he told her.

“No monsters so far,” Gloria reported, as her long legs carried her quickly down the hall to the front of the building. “I see Ralph mopping the floor in the lobby. I’m sure he’ll relieve you and watch me to my car.”

Brad stayed on the phone until she was in the car with the door locked, then told her to call back if she needed him again.

Gloria drove away, pleased with her decision use what little money she had saved to buy a new car instead of springing for the two-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t anything special – a white, Ford Taurus that she got for a steal because Metro Auto Sales had used it as a loaner and it already had five hundred miles on it. Actually, she hated giving up her Camry, but since Bobby had leased it in his name she left it with him. The Taurus had automatic locks and windows and came with a warranty, so it served her purpose. Safety deserved top priority over comfort when she was so far away from everyone she knew.

An abbreviated panic washed over her again when she stepped inside the empty apartment and turned to lock the door. She flipped the switch that controlled the lamp beside the couch and spent a few seconds scanning the room. The navy blue couch sat flush against the wall by the door, and through some mixture of hand-me-down luck looked pretty good on the tan carpet. A low-backed chair in front of the window and the computer desk practically covered the second wall, and the third wall was completely hidden behind bookshelves and an entertainment center that looked misunderstood with an eighteen-inch television in a compartment designed to house a screen twice that size. Bobby watched more TV than she, so she left the big screen with him and took the smaller one from the kitchen. She hoped to replace it soon, hence the ill-fitting entertainment center.

Gloria wondered if the apartment would ever feel like home. In the beginning she concentrated on decorating and organizing her new classroom and lived out of boxes at home. Two months later, the boxes were gone but the walls in the apartment remained bare, and she had yet to buy a throw rug or picture or anything to personalize her place of residence.

The emptiness, that she was sure her mother would say reflected what she felt inside, made her job this afternoon that much easier. Without moving an inch, she saw that there were no intruders waiting to grab her in the living room or kitchen. The bedroom required little more. She looked under the bed and in the closet, and turned the light switch on in the bathroom off the corner of the bedroom to finish the search by looking through the clear shower curtain, at the last place anyone could possibly be hiding.

Verification that she was alone invoked mixed feelings of safety and desolation. Was this her fate? Did she have to be alone to feel safe?

Enough with the negative emotions. She turned the radio on for company and put a Lean Cuisine lasagna dinner in the microwave, not because she needed to watch her weight. She was underweight according to the charts. She didn’t enjoy cooking for one, and microwave dinners were easy.

While dinner cooked, Gloria booted up the computer and signed on to the Internet. She clicked her favorite places icon and opened the message board dedicated to the discussion of middle school violence, where she had spent most of her free time the last few weeks, partly because she learned something from reading what others thought about the topic, and partly to fill the lonely hours between school and bed.

Over three hundred new messages had collected in less than twenty-four hours. How sad. Or was it? She wasn’t sure; it was like the question is the glass half empty or half full. The fact that the topic existed disheartened her, but it was encouraging to see so many people interested enough to discuss it. If more parents took the time to investigate and discuss the problems their children experienced in school, they might work toward solutions.

She wanted to tell the parents to wake up; that she saw abuse every day in the schools and more often than not, teachers and administrators turned their back. Often, administrative and legal decisions like the disability protection act and zero tolerance, tied their hands. And few of them wanted to deal with the parents of bullies.

Unlike many other teachers, Gloria believed verbal and emotional abuse were every bit as dangerous as physical confrontations, and probably led to most of the physical violence that occurred in schools. She was sure verbal abuse, both at home and at school, accounted for much of the depression suffered by children in that age group. But she didn’t even know where to begin to make changes.

Because she didn’t have children of her own, and most of the people posting on the message board were parents, she offered no comments. But she read as many of the messages as possible.

In case there wasn’t time to make it through three hundred messages, she scrolled down to read HotBabe’s entries first. Gloria worried about that girl. HotBabe was the only kid posting and from the number of posts she left, Gloria figured this must be where the girl spent all of her free time too.

HotBabe posted responses to most entries, but obviously focused on SaveURSoul. She clung to him like a pit bull with her teeth permanently implanted in his leg, challenging nearly every word he wrote. Gloria wished the girl had kept her age secret. Some of the others reprimanded her for being disrespectful to SaveURSoul, yet Gloria believed they would agree with what the girl said if they gave her the same credibility they offered other adults.

She read the new exchanges between HotBabe and SaveURSoul, imagining how they might differ if HotBabe were an older woman. Or a male. The second consideration really opened her eyes. She was sure SaveURSoul would never speak to a male the way he spoke to this young girl.

The message board made her forget about the door knocking for the evening. While she showered, and long after she went to bed, Gloria tried to pinpoint what it was about SaveURSoul that bothered her most. She doubted he was who he claimed to be, and feared many of the women in the group trusted him more than they should. Sometimes, chills ran up her spine when she thought about him.

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