Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

winding down of the school year. Grades due. Contracts signed. Rooms cleaned. The school was to be repainted this year. Tiles replaced in the cafeteria. New chairs for the band room. Lockers needed to be rekeyed.
    “All right,” she had said, alone in her office, staring at the full days marked on the calendar. “All right.”
    Maybe she could fit it all in. If she could last four months, maybe she could get it all done.
    So June had not taken her dream vacation to Europe. She had not gone skydiving or climbed a mountain. She continued to work at a job she had grown to despise as if what she did made a difference. Suspending students. Lecturing teachers. Firing a slovenly gym coach she’d been collecting a file on for the last three years.
    Clumps of hair fell onto her desk. Her teeth loosened. Her nose bled. One day, for no obvious reason, her arm broke. She had been holding a cup of coffee, and the heat from the liquid pooling on the carpet in front of her open-toed sandal was the first indication that something was wrong.
    “I’ve burned my foot,” she had said, wondering at the dropped jaws of the secretaries in the front office.
    What had forced her on? What had made her capable of putting on panty hose and pantsuits every morning, driving to school, parking in her spot, doing that hated job for four more months when no one on earth would have questioned her early retirement?
    Willpower, she supposed. Sheer determination to finish her final year and collect her full pension, her benefits, after giving thirty years of her life to a system that barely tolerated her presence.
    And pride. After all this time, she embraced the opportunity to show her suffering on the outside. She wanted them to see her face every day, to watch the slow decline, to note the subtle changes that marked her impending death. Her last pound of flesh. Her last attempt to show them that they were not the only ones who’d sustained damage. Jesus on the Cross had made a less determined departure.
    There was no best friend to tell. No family members left to whom she could confide her fears. June announced it in a schoolwide e-mail. Her hand had been steady as she moused over to the icon showing a pencil hovering over a piece of yellow paper. Compose. Send to all. No salutation. No tears. No quibbling. She was fifty-eight years old and would not live to see fifty-nine, but a sentence of death did not give her license to lose her dignity.
    You should all know that I have inoperable stage-four lung cancer.
    The first thing people asked was, Are you a smoker? Leave it to June to get the sort of disease that had a qualifier, that made strangers judge you for bringing on your own illness. And even when June told them no, she had never smoked, never tried a cigarette or even thought about it, there was a glassy look in their eyes. Disbelief. Pity. Of course she’d brought this on herself. Of course she was lying. Delusional. Stubborn. Crazy.
    It was all so eerily similar to what had come before that by the end of the day, June found herself laughing so long and so hard that she coughed blood onto her blouse. And then the horrified looks had replaced the pity, and she was back in those dark days when her only comfort was the thought that the sun would rise and set, the years would go by, and, eventually, she would die, her shame taken with her to the grave.
    Irony
, June thought now. An incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.
    The lung cancer had quickly metastasized. First to her liver, which gave her an alarming yellowish pallor, then to her bones, so brittle that she was reminded of angel hair pasta before you put it into a pot of boiling water. And now her brain, the last thing that she could truly call her own. All cancerous. All riddled with tumors, cells multiplying faster than the palliative radiation and chemotherapy could keep up with.
    The doctor, an impossibly young man with a smattering of acne on his chin, had said, “The metastasis are quite pronounced.”
    “Metasta
ses,
” June had corrected, thinking she could not even have the luxury of dying without having to correct the English of someone who should clearly know better. “Five months.” He’d scribbled something in her chart before he closed it. “Six if you’re lucky.”
    Oh, how lucky June was to have this extra time.
    The tumors in her brain weren’t impinging on anything useful. Not yet, at least, so it would seem not ever. This