classrooms.
“Hey, Liza, you didn’t have to go with me to Mr. F.’s office. Now you’re in all this stupid trouble, and I wouldn’t’ve said jack about the Deton—”
“Don’t matter.” Liza turned and put her hand on 7A’s doorknob. “Timmy’s away working down in Mount Vernon till next week. And Ma won’t even remember to tell him, by Monday.” She opened the door. “So I’m home free. Scout’s honor.”
Relief lapped the edges of Rock’s stomach. If Liza was home free, then it was no big deal.
He watched Liza in, and then turned to look at the door of his own classroom, Mrs. Lewin, 7B. He should be in eighth grade; he was more than a year older than Liza, but he’d done second grade over, since he’d spent most of that year getting in fights instead of learning how to spell and subtract and whatever else it was that second-graders did; it was hard to recall, even after two times through.
A better idea than going into Mrs. Lewin’s room turned Rock away at the door just as he was about to enter. He ducked his head and slinked quickly away from 7B and down the hall, then up the stairs to the library.
“Rock, what are you doing out of class?” Ms. Manzuli, the librarian, looked up from her desk. She was sort of beautiful and awful-looking, Rock had decided long ago, with skin so pale it looked as if the sun had never once basted it, and hair the soaking-red color of cafeteria spaghetti sauce. She always wore shapeless clothes that seemed like she shopped for them at retirement homes, but her body underneath was strong and young.
Rock never got along too well with teachers, but he was always impressed by Ms. Manzuli; how she could tell him anything he needed to know, like stuff about baseball or Saturn or different types of poison oak, and how she could zip to the exact location of any book in the entire library without cheating by looking at the Dewey decimal chart.
“Mrs. Lewin said it was okay for me to come,” Rock lied. He looked her straight in the eye. But Ms. Manzuli didn’t seem to weigh the truth of Rock’s story. She just smiled, white teeth shining in white skin.
“Okay, then, what brings you to these parts, Mr. Kindle?” she asked, leaning over her desk and propping her chin in her hands.
“I was thinking, um. I have a paper, that midterm Revolution paper. It’s due at the end of this month.”
“Aha, so maybe you need some extra reading?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
But she was already bounding away from her desk, toward one of the blond-wood bookshelves.
“You’re my best history buff, Rock. The other day I was telling my husband about you. He’s ravenous for any book about the big wars, too, although I confess to being more of a queens-and-kingdoms type of history reader myself …” She chatted lightly as she bent and peered at spine titles, occasionally pulling a book off the shelf and placing it into Rock’s hands.
Rock felt squeamish, thinking about Ms. Manzuli telling her husband how Rock liked history books. Mr. Manzuli probably thought Rock was some big library nerd. He better not have said any jokes about him. Rock clenched his hands.
“That ought to keep you, for a while anyway,” Ms. Manzuli finally pronounced, after half a dozen titles were stacked in his arms. “Let me know how it goes, okay? I’m interested to see what you do with this paper. I could really see you becoming a wise old history professor one of these days. Then I could say, ah yes, I knew Professor Kindle when he was brilliant young scholar at Sheffield Junior High.”
“Ha,” said Rock, half smiling. Ms. Manzuli was sort of freaky sometimes, the way she’d just let her imagination go on talking. Now she looked up at the wall clock. “But I guess you should probably get back to class now. Come back soon.” She waved. “And give me updates.”
“So you hurt Brian Briggs’s kid. What you do that for?” His father’s eyes shone as they stared at Rock from over his