The Lesson of Her Death

staring at her. Her breath escaped in a soft snap then stopped completely. Sarah looked at their eyes and felt her heart shudder then start to beat at a fast gallop.
    “I called on you. Come up here.”
    Sarah sat still and felt the pure heat from her face flood into her arms and chest.
    Mrs. Beiderson smiled, her face as sweet as Sarah’s grandmother’s. Mrs. Beiderson smiled a lot. She never raised her voice at Sarah, never shouted at her, never took her hand and walked her to the principal’s office like she did the boys that drew pictures on their desks or fought. Mrs. Beiderson always spoke to Sarah in a voice like a pussy willow.
    Sarah hated her more than anyone in the world.
    “Sarah, now come along. This is just practice. You’re not being graded.”
    The girl looked at her desk. Inside was the pill her mother had given her. But it wasn’t time to take it yet.
    “Now, Sarah.”
    Sarah stood, her hands at her sides, too heavy to lift. She walked to the front of the dungeon and turned to face the class. She felt Mrs. Beiderson’s smile pelt the back of her neck like a whip of snakes. She glanced at the trees outside the window. Oh, the freedom of the trees! She could smell the bark, she could feel the fuzz on the bottom of an elf cap growing up through ivy, she could see the doorway to the secret tunnel in her house.
    Looking out over her classmates’ faces, she saw Priscilla Witlock laughing, Dennis Morgan twisting up his fat lips into a mean grin, Brad Mibbock rolling his eyes. Laughter roaring so loud it struck her face and stung. She saw boys holding fists above their you-knows and moving them up and down, she saw girls with long red fingernails and dangling bracelets, girls her age but with round perfect breasts and sleek makeup and high heels, girls taunting her.…
    And Mrs. Beiderson, who saw only the bored facesof her class and heard nothing but Sarah’s whimpering, said, “Sarah, your word is ‘clarify.’”
    The sound hit Sarah with the jolt of a schoolyard punch. Her daddy had helped her with this word. But she knew it had several up-down letters, which were very hard for her. She began to cry.
    “You’ve done it before,” smiling Mrs. Beiderson said in her soft lying, cheating, snaky voice. “You’re not trying, Sarah. We all have to try.” Mrs. Beiderson touched the rose cameo at her throat. “‘Clarify’ is on the list. Didn’t you study the list?”
    Sarah nodded.
    “If you studied the list then there’s nothing to cry about.”
    Now
everyone
would know she was crying, even the students in the back.
    “I can’t.”
    “You don’t want us to think you’re being difficult, do you? ‘Clarify.’”
    Between sobs, Sarah said, “C.”
    “Very good.” The snake smiled.
    Her knees quivered. “I don’t know. I don’t.” More tears.
    “What’s the next letter?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Try.”
    “C-A …”
    Mrs. Beiderson exhaled a sigh. “All right, Sarah. Sit—”
    “I could do it at home—”
    “—down. Anyone else?”
    And Priscilla Witlock didn’t even rise from her seat but was staring right at Sarah, slinging out the letters, C, then L, then A, then R, spelling the word in the time it took Sarah to take a huge gulp of air to try to quench her fear.
    And then she felt it. First a trickle. Then a flood, as her panties grew wet and she put her hand down-there to stop herself but knowing it was too late, the flowingwarm moisture running around her leg and Mrs. Beiderson saying, “Oh dear oh dear,” and some of the class looking away, which was as bad as the rest of the class staring, as bad as knowing the story would be all over town and everybody would know even her grandfather up in heaven would know.…
    Sarah threw her arms around herself and ran to the door, pushing it open with her shoulder. The glass burst into a spiderweb of cracks. She leapt down the stairs two at a time and ran blindly down the corridor to the front door of the school, leaving on the linoleum the swirls and drips of her shame, like fragments of the letters that had beaten her once again.
    The woman said, “Whatever has to be done and I mean it.”
    Dean Catherine Larraby was fifty-five and, if you squinted, looked like Margaret Thatcher. Gray hair, round face, stocky. Reassuring jowls. Eyes tired but severe. A coolness around the edges that Bill Corde thought was permanent and had not arisen with the killing. She had not applied her makeup well and the powder had