The Lesson of Her Death

don’t need profiles of the school in the press.” She did not look at the
Register
but her fingers absently tapped the grim headline.
    Sayles said coldly, “Her death was most inopportune.”
    The dean missed his irony. She asked, “Does anybody know about our arrangement?”
    Long dark hair. It often dipped down over one eye. Which? Her right eye. She would keen with passion. The Gebben girl. Student number 144691. She would cry at the scent of a forest filling with stiff fall leaves
.
    “Does anybody know?” he mused.
Nope, not anymore she doesn’t
. Sayles shook his head.
    The dean stood and walked to the window. Her back was to him. She had a solid figure, rubbery and strong; this was appealing—the severity and solemnity one wants in airline pilots and surgeons. A large, stern woman, hair going a little wiry, eyes puffy from wrestling with an injustice only partially of her own making.
    Jennie Gebben. Who would grip his cock with her prominent teeth and rasp up and down along his swollen skin
.
    Who could not without prompting analyze European motives behind Civil War foreign relations but who had the far more enduring gift of pressing her knees into Sayles’s midriff and with a stone-buffed heel square against his asshole force his pelvis against hers
.
    Student number 144691
.
    “Randy, we can expect an audit by mid-June. If you don’t raise three million six hundred thousand dollars in cash by then—”
    “How am I supposed to get that much money?” He heard his voice rise to a strident whine, which he detested but could not avoid.
    “You?” she asked. Dean Larraby polished the purple stone against the fabric of her skirt then looked up at Sayles. “I think it’s pretty clear, Randy. You, better than anybody, know what’s at stake if you don’t find that money.”

    She got the idea from a made-for-TV movie.
    It had been a film about a thirteen-year-old girl, and her mother and stepfather
hated
her. Once, they locked her in the house while they went away to gamble and the girl ran away from home by jumping out a window then grabbing onto a freight train that went to New York City.
    Sarah shut off the water running in the bathtub, which though it
was
filled with steamy water and fragrant violet bubble bath did not—as she had told her mother—contain her. She had run upstairs and taken a fast shower then dressed quickly. Now, wearing a T-shirt, overalls, Nikes and a nylon windbreaker—her traveling clothes—she listened to her mother fixing dinner downstairs.
    In the film, when the girl ended up in New York she lived in the alley and had to eat bread somebody had thrown out and she smoked a cigarette and just before this big guy was going to take her up into his apartment and do something to her Sarah didn’t know what, the girl’s mom showed up and hugged her and brought her home and dumped the stepfather. And they showed an 800 number you could call if you knew any runaways.
    What a stupid movie—about as real and interesting as a cereal commercial. But it solved a big problem for Sarah because it showed her how to save all of the wizard’s money and still get to Chicago.
    She was thinking of the railroad train.
    There were no railroads in New Lebanon. But there
was
a truck. It was a big one that looked sort of like a train and it passed the house every afternoon. The truck had a platform on the back that she thought she could hold on to, and it went past the house real slow. She could catch the truck easily and then climb onto the back and sit there. When he stopped for the night she could ask the driver where to find another truck going to Chicago.
    Sarah packed her Barbie backpack. She took Mr. Jupiter her shooting star bank, pairs of Levi’s and sweatshirts and socks and underpants, her toothbrush and toothpaste, and a skirt and a blouse, her Walkman and a dozen books on tape. Of course Redford T. Redford the world’s smartest bear would be traveling with her. And she took some things from her mother’s dresser. Lipstick, mascara, fingernail polish and panty hose.
    It was now five-thirty. The truck usually went past the house about six. Sarah walked around her room. She suddenly realized she’d miss her father. She started to cry. She’d miss her brother some. She thought she’d miss her mother but she wasn’t sure. Then she thought of the wizard telling her, “I’ll look out for you,” and she thought about school.
    Sarah stopped crying.
    She lifted the window,