Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Years earlier . . .
When Amara realized her favorite teacher was going to be dead by dinner, she kicked over the recycling can in the front of the room and set the papers on fire.
This provoked several reactions from the audience: the bully she’d stolen the lighter from, the track nitwit who’d never liked her, and the teacher who did.
“Damn. That’s hard-core.”
“Oh Em Gee, why are you so weird and crazy all the time?”
“Amara Morrigan!” Mrs. Mickel had tossed her cardigan on the small blaze and was now stamping wool into the embers. “Hallway, now. And Karen, use the latte I know you smuggled to class to put out this mess.”
“It’s not a latte. It’s a flat white.”
“Empty it all and I won’t ding you for detention. As for you, young lady . . .”
“I know. Detention.” Even better, detention on Mickel’s watch.
“My own fault,” Mickel grumbled, scribbling the dreaded blue slip while Karen dumped out her overpriced coffee du jour. “Saw there weren’t any students in detention today and foolishly made plans.”
“That was foolish,” Amara observed.
“Just for that, two hours.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
* * *
“That was as unlike you as anything I could imagine,” Mrs. Mickel said hours later.
There was a run in her pantyhose, her updo was well on the way to being an updon’t, and her glasses magnified her pretty brown eyes so they looked comically huge.
She was, as always, an adorable wreck with a fine brain.
“What got into you? Is there tension at home?”
“I’m a teenager. Of course there’s tension at home.”
Mickel chuckled. She was young, about a decade older than Amara; she’d gotten her degree just two years ago. “Right. Silly question. And I understand if you don’t want to discuss it, but I’d hate to see ‘firebug’ go into your permanent record.”
“My permanent record is the least of my problems.” And yours. “I just needed to make a fiery statement denouncing tyranny in all forms that would result in Karen having to dump out her drink and then whine about it for an hour afterward.”
“Is this about the cafeteria running out of tater tots again?”
“It only happens to me. Three weeks in a row I had to make do with a lack of tots!”
“Oh, Amara. You’ve got to let Totgate go.”
“Never!” Amara realized she’d jumped to her feet and sat down. “Everybody else is drowning in tots but they run out when it’s my turn? Three times in a row? How does Principal Hecker not see what’s happening?”
“I have some chips, would you like some?”
“I’m not a child to be placated with—oh, cheddar sour cream? Yes, please.”
So they argued for two hours and detention was jolly, which Amara hadn’t expected but should have, since Mrs. Mickel had a rep for relaxing the rules.
Amara loved Mrs. Mickel for her kindness, knowledge of Greek mythology—Mickel could give Hilly some competition in that area!
—and sense of humor. But mostly because on the second day of school, Amara had her first period, and Mrs. Mickel helped with the humiliating and painful cleanup, lent her clean shorts from Lost and Found, slipped her some Advil, and never told a soul. And made it all seem like NBD.
And it was NBD; biological functions were nothing to be ashamed of, certainly not in the twenty-first century.
But still. People could be stupid and cruel; thanks to Mrs. Mickel, no one found out, so no harm done, except to her shark underpants.
But Amara hadn’t been able to see any of that until Mickel calmed her down and pointed it out.
Mrs. Mickel didn’t deserve any kind of death, but especially not being broiled alive due to an ancient oven’s gas leak. Amara wouldn’t have it; simple as that. So when she heard the sirens, her entire body relaxed; she nearly oozed out of her desk chair into a puddle on the floor.
“I live just a couple of blocks from here,” Mickel murmured, opening the shades and peering out the window to see where the fire trucks were headed. “Amara, we only have ten minutes left for detention, why don’t you head home?”
“Sure, Mrs. Mickel. See you tomorrow.”
But she didn’t, since Mickel was killed in a car crash on her way to the fire Amara had saved her from.