to her chest as she rolled helplessly on the worn wooden planks.
The boy rose from his seat and dashed to the front of the room, kneeling down beside her. But as he reached out to touch her, she screamed yet again and scrabbled away, only to collapse a second later, sobbing uncontrollably.
When the ambulance took her away, she was still sobbing, still screaming.
The boy watched the ambulance leave, but even after it had disappeared into the distance, the sobs and screams lingered on, echoing in his memory.
Perhaps the other students who were in the classroom might forget the agony they’d heard and seen that day.
The boy never would.
Chapter 1
Judith Sheffield felt the familiar tightening in her stomach as the final bell rang. All that was left of her day was the walk to the parking lot, accompanied, as always, by the prayer that today the tires on her car would still be inflated and none of its windows would be smashed. The day itself hadn’t been too bad. Both her classes had gone well, which, she ruefully reminded herself, meant only that the disruptions had been minor.
At least today no fights had broken out in the classroom. After two years of teaching in East Los Angeles, Judith regarded that as a victory. But still, teaching during the summer session had been a mistake. She should have taken the summer off to relax, to rejuvenate herself and prepare for the far worse chaos of the regular school year. But she’d let herself be tempted by the extra pay, and conned herself into believing that the summer students would be more motivated than the regular term crowd.
The truth—which she knew perfectly well—was that the summer session students were there because they thought summer school would be a snap. Eventually they’d turned out to be right, for as Judith’s energies had slowly drained through July and into August, she’d begun to slip, ignoring assignments not turned in, and skipping her regular morning quizzes. As the heat and smog of the Los Angeles summer closed in, she’d even begun dismissing her second class early, eager to return to her tiny apartment in Redondo Beach, strip off her clothes, then spend the afternoon lying in the sun on the beach, listening to the surf and trying to pretend that teaching in Los Angeles would get easier as she gained more experience.
It was getting harder to pretend.
The bell rang, and the kids poured out of the classroom into the halls like an overflowing toilet. Judith chided herself for the cruelty of the simile, then decided she didn’t care—she tried to be a good teacher, tried to take an interest in the students, but if they didn’t care, why should she? And what, really, could she do about it?
She could try harder.
And she would.
For the next six weeks she would relax, and by mid-September she would be ready, searching for new ways to capture the kids’ interest, combing through the school’s budget for the money she would need for new books. Perhaps this fall she would even organize a painting party to make her classroom a little less drab. She could hustle some plaster from Bobby Lansky’s father—after all, it was Bobby who had hurled the desk that had made the hole in the wall—and she herself would spring for the pizzas she’d use to bribe some of the better students into participating.
She waited until the last of the kids’ babble had died away, finished straightening the papers on her desk, then left her room, locking the door behind her. Warily, she glanced up and down the corridor, but it seemed deserted, and she told herself that today there would be no problems—it was the last day of summer session, and even the worst troublemakers would have been eager to get out of the building.
But as she moved toward the back staircase, she thought she heard a faint shuffling sound. She froze, listening.
A snicker, echoing maliciously, drifted through the hall.
She turned and started toward the main staircase at the other end of the hall.
Her step quickened and she instinctively clutched her heavy leather bag tighter, one hand gripping its shoulder strap while the other hovered protectively over the purse’s flap.
A low whistle sounded behind her, and she steeled herself against the urge to break into a run.
Another whistle, slow and seductive, echoed in the hallway, and Judith felt her face turning scarlet.
She should be used to the wolf whistles by now—she heard them every day. Most of