by Julie Kenner
“Probably not,” Micki admitted. “But I’m trying to.”
The girl abruptly spun back to Micki, her eyes huge, her words intense. “It’s different for you. You’re rich. You don’t know how hard it is for a girl like me.” She swallowed, and tears shimmered in her eyes. “I’m scared all the time. I’m not like you!” Lucy gripped Micki hard. “I saw you. You knocked the knives out of their hands. You kicked Damian in the face! You hide it, but you got skills. I don’t have anything!”
Micki almost laughed out loud. The girl thought she was some great kung fu fighter or something. “Oh, Lucy, if you only knew. I’m just as terrified as you. Probably more. I’m nothing special. Honest. All I can do is try—every day—to help.”
“Bullshit!” Lucy snapped. “I’ve seen ’em.” Her voice dropped a little lower. “And Damian’s seen ’em too. He’s pretty pissed.”
Great. She’d ticked off a teenage gang lord. “I’ll deal with Damian. I have a plan for him,” she lied. “I’m just concerned about keeping you out of the crossfire. Lucy, you have to break up with the boy.”
Lucy angled her head. “Is it you and Mr. DeLuce? You two got a plan?”
No way was Micki going into what was happening between her and Joe, regarding Damian or anything else. “We’re talking about you.”
“You gonna bust Damian? You got something on him?”
“Lucy—”
“I hafta know!”
Micki stared at the girl. Lucy was nearing panic. Her eyes were wide, her voice shrill, and her hands were tightening into claws.
“You need to calm down, sweetie. You have to let things happen on their own.”
“You don’t understand, Miss Becker!” the girl wailed. “He’s dangerous! You could be hurt!”
Micki frowned, trying to follow Lucy’s thoughts. “You’re afraid for me? That I’m going to get hurt?”
“You ain’t from here, Miss Becker. You don’t know.”
Wow. Now she had kids like Lucy trying to protect her. Did everyone think she was a complete incompetent? “I thought you said I was protected. That I had amazing skills and all. And now you’re worried for me?” She dropped backward against the chair. “Lucy, what’s going on?”
But Lucy wasn’t talking. She just kept shaking her head. After a minute of that, she finally murmured, “The world is all fucked up.”
Micki sighed. “No argument there, kiddo, but there’s good stuff, too. There’s magic and . . .” And really sweet cops. “And people who care about you.”
“There ain’t no magic, Miss Becker. No justice neither. If there were, then my brother wouldn’t be in jail. It’d be the asshole what shot that crap into his arms.”
Someone had made her brother shoot up? Obviously Lucy was in denial, but now wasn’t the time to work that angle. “There is wonder in this world,” Micki repeated. “You have to know that.” She put her whole heart into her words because she believed them. And because she’d come to this school to deliver exactly that message. “There are people who care and who will help you. I’m here. Joe—Mr. DeLuce is here. There are lots of teachers who will help.”
“Like Mr. Gorzinsky?” It didn’t sound like a compliment.
“Yeah, like Mr. Gorzinsky. He gave you the college chem text, didn’t he?”
But Lucy wasn’t buying it. “He’s just like all the rest.”
This conversation was going nowhere. Like so many of her discussions with the kids, it just went around in circles, with Micki offering hope and the kids set in the belief that there was nothing. Micki needed something different, something shocking enough to break Lucy out of the cycle of bitterness; something magical.
“Life can be different, Lucy,” she began. “It can have surprises that you’d never expect. I got a very special surprise just yesterday.”
Lucy screwed up her nose. “You pregnant or something?”
“No!” The word came out more forceful than Micki intended, mostly because she was trying to cover the unexpected pang of longing. Wouldn’t a little baby Joe be adorable? “Um . . . no, Lucy, I’m not pregnant. And I wouldn’t do that without getting married anyway. It’s just too hard to raise a baby alone.”
“Hollar that,” Lucy murmured.
“My surprise was much more . . . different.” She was about to say magical, but honestly, a baby would be pretty magical all on its own. Especially if it was a boy with dark Italian eyes. Rather than dwell on that thought, Micki abruptly popped off her shoes. “Here,” she said offering the velvet Mary Janes to Lucy. “Put them on.”
“Your shoes? Whatever for?”
“So you can see how magical the world can be sometimes. That sometimes life has the most unexpected turns.”
The girl picked up the shoes by the tiny black straps. “No offense, Miss Becker, but these ain’t really my style.”
“I’m sure they aren’t. But these shoes aren’t about style.” She abruptly leaned down and tugged at the ties of Lucy’s grubby sneakers. “Come on, Lucy. It’ll just take a second.” Fortunately, Lucy’s feet were about the right size.
It took a little more coaxing, but the girl finally gave in. She pushed off her sneakers and buckled the Mary Janes on. Then she turned and plopped her hands on her hips and said, “So?”
Micki smiled, anticipating the moment when Lucy’s teen attitude was wiped away by amazement. “So sweetie, jump. Kick. Or punch something.”
“You been drinking, Miss Becker?”
Micki let her head sag. “Just do it, Lucy.”
The girl shrugged, then threw her hand forward in a punch. She was aiming at Micki’s shoulder, but what Micki got instead was a rapid pummel of rabbit hits that knocked her out of her chair.
“Oh my God!” Lucy cried.
Micki would have smiled at the look of astonishment on the girl’s face, but she was too busy dealing with her own soon-to-be black-and-blue arm.
“Oh my God, Miss Becker!” Lucy cried again.
“I’m all right. I’m all right,” Micki said, slowly rolling to her feet.
“But . . . oh my God!”
Finally, Micki got to face the girl and grin. “Pretty amazing, huh? I don’t have any secret ninja powers, Lucy. It’s all the shoes. They’re magic or something. Go ahead. Try and kick something.”
Lucy spun and extended her right leg at her own chair. The thing shot across the tiny stretch of grass to bang hard against the brick wall.
Micki narrowed her eyes at the crumpled metal. “I think you broke it.”
“Oh my God!”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I said yesterday. Over and over while I was running through the trees.”
Lucy stared at her. “You ran through the trees? Wait a minute—you did! I saw you! Not through the trees, but like the wind.” Her eyes widened even farther. “And all those things you did—the kicks, the punches . . .”
“All the shoes. I haven’t ever even taken a class. They just did it for me.”
“You think I could do that? Run through trees and kick stuff?”
“In those shoes, I think Annette Sticklan could do it.” She’d named the most unathletic girl in school. “Come to think of it, I am Annette Sticklan, athletics-wise. I never played a sport, never really did anything physical, and you saw what I could do.”
Micki kept talking, but Lucy wasn’t listening. She was too busy performing chops and kicks and round houses on the elm.
“Hey, go easy on that tree!” Bark was flying, and the poor thing was shuddering under the impact of Lucy’s blows. If the trunk weren’t larger than two kids around, Micki doubted it could have held up.
Lucy fell back a bit, not even breathing hard. “This is . . . This is . . .” Apparently there wasn’t an adjective cool enough to describe the experience.
“I know,” Micki said with a grin. “It’s amazing.”
Lucy grinned back, and her eyes sparkled with a delight that Micki hadn’t ever seen in them before. Her entire soul seemed to shine
through her eyes, bright and beautiful and so happy. “I don’t feel afraid in these shoes. They’re . . . like . . . like God!”
“They’re just shoes, Lucy. Magic shoes, yes, but they won’t change your life.” At least Micki hoped not. “And they won’t stop a bullet or an arrest warrant. They’re . . .”
Micki’s voice trailed away. Lucy’s thoughts were obviously far away. She was squatting down and then, with a look of intense concentration, she leapt upward. The first jump took her up into the elm branches at least a story up. She landed with a light plop, then dropped into a squat, perching just like Micki had done last night.
“I stayed like that for an hour, I think,” Micki said. “It was so easy, but so . . .” She shook her head. “It was too much.” Adults just didn’t accept the magical as well as kids.
“Wow.” Lucy looked out over the parking lot, the school, maybe as far as the freeway. “Wow.”
“Yeah.” Cool as it was seeing Lucy’s face shine like that, it was time to get back to message. “So, you believe me now? You believe that cool things can happen? That there’s magic and hope and . . .”
Lucy leapt up to a higher branch, then another. Then from there, she easily cleared the distance to the school roof. Moments later, she ran like the wind across the school and well out of sight. Micki stood frozen, her hands on her hips.
“Lucy?” she called. “Lucy, come back. I don’t know the limits of what they can do.” She waited even longer, a bad feeling growing in her gut. “Lucy? Lucy, come back!”
Micki stepped over to the parking lot to get a better angle on the roof. Nothing. Then she went farther back. Then into the street. Still nothing. Eventually, Micki walked entirely around the building, hoping that what she feared wasn’t true. Except, it was.
Lucy had just stolen her magical shoes.
CHAPTER SIX
Most of the building had emptied by the time Micki gave up waiting for Lucy’s return. She trudged wearily through the quiet halls, barefoot, her mind a relative blank. Sure, she had thoughts, but most of them involved too much of an emotional charge for her to even attempt to sort them out. So she walked mindlessly toward her classroom and prayed that sometime soon a brain cell would fire and she would suddenly have a plan.
“Bloody hell! Stupid, bloody moron!” Mr. Gorzinsky’s voice echoed loudly down the hallway. In truth, this wasn’t unusual. He was extremely volatile for a man in his sixties, and given to pretentious curse words. What struck Micki as unusual were the added sounds of Joe’s voice.
Again, Micki moved without thought. At the moment, Joe’s voice was more real to her than anything else. Maybe he would have a plan.
But what she saw from the door of the chemistry lab stopped her cold. Mr. Gorzinsky, white hair flying every which way, leaned heavily against the front lab table as he clearly tried to contain his emotions. Joe stood just inside the door, his arms folded across his solid body. He had his back to Micki, but she could tell that he was calm, relaxed, and not in the least bit sympathetic to Mr. Gorzinsky’s aging heart. Didn’t Joe see that the poor man was risking a heart attack?
Micki rushed into the room, neatly sidestepping Joe. “Mr. Gorzinsky! What happened?”
The chemistry teacher’s head snapped up. His hair continued to fly wildly around his face, but his eyes were clear and direct as they pinned her with laser-point intensity. “Sam. Sam Wheaton died this morning. Drug overdose.”
“Oh no!” she gasped, her mind slipping through the faces of the children. Sam was a junior and not one of her kids, an underprivileged boy who abruptly started doing better in school when he hit chemistry last year. “He was doing better! Wasn’t he one of your Advanced Chem students?”
“Drugs don’t care what your grades are,” Joe commented from behind her. “And this drug kills extra easy.”
Mr. Gorzinsky grunted, then dropped down onto a stool. “Stupid, stupid boy.”
Micki couldn’t agree more, but it wasn’t helpful to say. Instead, she turned to Joe. “Which one? Which drug was it?”
“They call it ‘Chem,’ ” answered Mr. Gorzinsky with a snort. “Nothing flashy like ‘ecstasy’ or anything like that. Just Chem.”
“And it’s killing them,” continued Joe.
Mr. Gorzinsky shook his head. “Just the stupid ones.” He abruptly straightened. “Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe this is evolution in action. The dumb kids die. The smart ones survive.”
Micki grabbed the older man’s hands. “You don’t really mean that!”
He turned, looking at her with eyes that seemed to reflect decades of teaching the underprivileged. “Bleeding hearts don’t last long here,” he said. “Toughen up or leave. These children don’t understand your brand of kindness.”
She straightened. “Kindness is never lost on anyone.”
He snorted. “It’s the carrot or the stick with them. And the carrot has to be immediate and obvious.”
She sighed, the sound coming from her toes. This was familiar ground between the two of them. More than any teacher here, Mr. Gorzinsky got results. She respected that. But she hated his obnoxious, superior, evolution-in-action attitude. Especially as he rarely wasted an opportunity to sneer at her.
“Go back to the suburbs, Micki Mouse. You don’t belong here.” Then his gaze softened. “You just weren’t raised for this jungle.”
She shuddered, and Micki fought the tears. But then she felt Joe’s touch across her shoulders. His hand was large, his warmth seductive, and without even thinking about it, she leaned into him.
“I’m glad you’re retiring, Mr. Gorzinsky,” he said with an angry rumble. “It’s definitely time.”
The chemistry teacher shot him a dour look, then apparently thought better of saying whatever was on his mind. Instead, he reached down to gather his things, muttering to himself the whole time. Micki couldn’t hear exactly what he said, but it sounded like his retirement plans in the Bahamas.
Joe guided her to the door, gently urging her back toward her own classroom. “Don’t let him get to you,” he murmured in her ear. “He’s old and bitter and—”
“Wrong?” She stopped and looked Joe in the eye. “Do you think Mr. Gorzinsky is wrong in what he said?”
Joe fidgeted. His shoulders tightened, and he fixed his gaze over her shoulder at a bulletin board. “It doesn’t really matter what I think,” he finally said. “What do you think?”
“That you’re both full of shit.” She abruptly spun on her heel and walked away. But in the privacy of her own head, she cursed herself for a fool. She believed in kindness. She believed in giving of herself until some child somewhere responded. Unless, of course, they were right. That the children she should be teaching were in the wealthy suburbs. In which case . . .
“He bribes the kids, you know.” Joe’s voice stopped her cold in her tracks.
“What?”
“Mr. Gorzinsky. He pays them in cash. To finish their homework or do well on a test.”
She turned to look him in the eye. “How can he afford that? I mean, doesn’t he have an ex-wife or something? He bitches enough about paying alimony.”
Joe closed the distance between them. “I talked to her. He hasn’t paid alimony in years. She says he uses that money to bribe the kids. And since they need the money more than she does, she’s cool with it.”
Micki frowned. “I thought she hated him.”
Joe shrugged. “That’s Gorzinsky’s story. She seemed rather sweet to me, and very forgiving. Said they split up because he spent all his time at school or in their basement lab preparing the next week’s experiments.”
Micki frowned, trying to process that information. “That’s his secret? That’s how he gets these kids to work so hard for him? He pays them?”
“Yup.”
“That’s some carrot.”
“Yup.”
“Wonder what his stick is.”
“Chores and stuff at his home or here. The chem lab gets pretty disgusting.”
She glanced back down the hallway to where Mr. Gorzinsky was locking up his classroom, then striding away. “But how does he get the kids to do that? I mean, who would go do chem clean-up just for failing a test?”
Joe turned with her, watching Mr. Gorzinsky round the corner into the stairwell. “If you want the cash later—”
“And what teen doesn’t?”
“—then you do the chore. And do better on each test.”
She frowned, already thinking of her trust fund, of how much she could afford to give. But then she grimaced. That wasn’t the way. She could empty her bank account and still not get anywhere. And, there was something else that Mr. G had over her, something else that made the kids respect him.
She grimaced. “The kids are afraid of him. Flat-out afraid, and so they respond better to his bribes.” She wasn’t built that way. She just didn’t inspire fear.
“What happened to your shoes?” Joe asked.
Micki blinked. She’d almost forgotten that she was standing in her now destroyed panty hose. “I took them off. They were pinching my feet.”
“You’re a terrible liar, you know.”
She looked up at him, shame heating her face. “They’re gone. Lucy took them.”
He blinked at her. He blinked again, and his chin shot forward. Then his eyes widened into horror. “She’ll give them to Damian! Geez, Micki, do you know what he could do with those shoes? Oh my God . . .” He shuddered—actually shuddered—as he thought about it.
She felt her belly sink even deeper than her toes. “Maybe she won’t. Lucy’s a smart kid.”
“She’s dating Damian! She’s a teenage girl dating a drug dealer. Oh geez, how the hell did she find out about those shoes?”
Micki hunched her shoulders. “I . . . uh . . . I told her.”
Joe’s gaze felt piercing, even though she wasn’t looking at his face. His silence was even worse.
“I let her try them on. And then she . . . well . . .”
“She took off with them.” His voice was excruciatingly dry.
“Yes.”
“God.”
Micki dared to peek up at his face. He looked angry and frustrated, but within moments his expression shifted to resigned. Then he shifted his gaze to meet hers. “I’m starved. You up for Italian food?”
