Till the End of Tom Read Online Free

streets, my briefcase flapping across my side, knowing with each step, with each startled and annoyed pedestrian who moved aside for me, that I was in pursuit of a quarter-filled Styrofoam cup of cold tea.
    At least the weather was with me, the air almost warm, but managing as well to have an edgy whisper of winter lurking around the corner. It felt the way crisp new-crop apples taste, sharp and winey-delicious, and each breeze suggested that I enjoy it while I could, because its days were numbered.
    Enjoyment did not mean galloping clumsily the way I was. It did not mean sweating and gasping for breath at the back door of the school, the door for which I, along with the rest of the faculty, had a key, and it did not include racing to the front staircase and up it, gasping.
    I nearly crashed into Ms. Liddy Moffat, custodian. Ms. Moffat takes her role of caretaker—of the school and of the earth— seriously, and seriously takes care, with a proprietary concern for both. Ms. Moffat also has core convictions about waste, meaning what is allowed to be discarded and what is not. She is fond of reclaiming objects she declares “misplaced.” The fourth morning of my first year at Philly Prep I’d found a note on my desk. It said:
Rejected. Too nice to be trash. Somebody else could read it. Sincerely, Ms. Liddy Moffat.
The note sat atop a Xeroxed copy of a poem by Wordsworth. “Waste not, want not,” she wrote another time. Those words sat underneath a mostly-used-up lipstick tube someone had chucked. “Anybody in this school ever hear about recycling?” read a series of messages accompanying empty cola cans.
    I have nothing but admiration and respect for Ms. Liddy Moffat, a woman who loves her work and excels at it. At the moment, however, I dreaded her efficiency and eagle eye. Even she didn’t save Styrofoam cups.
    “Whoa!” she shouted, “Nobody allowed in this school after—” she squinted, stepped back, and said, “Miss Pepper! Sorry. I thought you—”
    “Ms. Moffat,” I said, catching my breath. “Have you cleaned there yet?” I gestured to the right, to my room.
    She sucked in her bottom lip and looked down at her feet, shod in red high-top sneakers. “Meant to, but I’m behind schedule. That chemistry lab, whew! No offense, but some kids are pigs. Not to mention the mess from this afternoon.”
    “The man’s fall?”
    She nodded. “Scuff marks and blood! Look at that! Just look at that!”
    To my relief, she was pointing not at blood, but at scuff marks, souvenirs of Tom Severin’s finely polished shoes, on the landing, just in front of her red sneakers. “How does a man make marks in a place like that?” she asked, rhetorically. She seemed equally appalled by the mess and its unrecyclable nature.
    “So you haven’t gotten to my room yet—that’s great! I left something.”
    “You shouldn’t have worried. You know I never throw things out by accident. I’m a careful—”
    “Anybody would throw this out. Even you.”
    “Real trash and you want it back?”
    Explaining why I coveted a Styrofoam cup with the remnants of somebody’s tea would take too much time and ultimately not sound that much saner, so I smiled my gratitude and knew I’d given her “this-place-is-crazy” material to discuss with the rest of the maintenance crew.
    The cup was still on the windowsill. I contemplated it, wondering what I should do next and how stupid I was going to feel when it turned out to contain nothing more than cold tea made of flowers.
    But I have felt stupid enough times to not worry that much about feeling that way again, so I carefully covered the cup with a piece of paper, put a rubber band around it, and then just in case forensics could retrieve fingerprints from Styrofoam—and in case the prints were relevant to anything—I wrapped yet another piece of paper around it, and carried it to my car where it fit, with a little jiggling, in the cup holder.
    I drove to headquarters filled with a