Amos—I only teach up to a dozen students in each grade.
I return the smattering of ‘hellos’ and ‘good afternoons’ before facing the chalkboard. “Today we’ll be discussing epigenetics. Can anyone tell me—?”
My classroom door rattles. I glance back at my class.
All my students are present. It’s highly unusual for a staff member to interrupt me once my lesson has begun. Word has long since gotten around how much that annoys me.
“Who is it?”
The door immediately stops rattling. Then a hesitant, high-pitched voice says, “Trinity.”
She cuts off when I open the door and snatches away her hands. Looks like she’d been pulling at the handle instead of pushing.
I tilt my head. “May I help you?”
The girl steps back, and huffs a dark curl away from her face. She’s wearing street clothes and a thoroughly confused expression. “Yeah…uh…is this Psychology?”
T. Malone.
My new student.
I’d barely glanced at the memo slipped under my door this morning. My mind had been on other things. More important things. So much so, I’d even forgotten to assign her a seat.
I step back and wave her inside, my mind moving a mile a minute.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m set in my ways. Which is saying something for someone who’s turning twenty-one in a few months. A strange girl showing up at my door shouldn’t have rattled me, but it did.
She stands at the front of the class, notepad clutched to her chest like a shield. A moment later, her amber eyes come back to mine, now even more confused than before.
I snap my fingers at a student in the front row and point to the chair behind my desk.
He hurries over, picks it up, and sets it by the wall.
“You’re late,” I say, when the girl keeps staring at me like she’s had a stroke. “Don’t let it happen again.”
Still, she doesn’t move.
“You’re my teacher?”
I straighten as my hand drops to my side. “Were you expecting someone different, Miss Malone?”
As if she realized what she said, she shakes her head and hurries to her seat. There’s a soft hiss as she plops down on my chair and the air leaves its pillow. Her fair skin looks even paler as her cheeks turn rosy with embarrassment.
It takes me a moment to gather my thoughts. As I turn back to the board, the text message on my phones comes back to me.
Could this be the ‘problem’ Cassius mentioned?
She’s not wearing a uniform which indicates her presence took others—such as Sister Ruth, who runs the laundry—by surprise. Else she’d have been decked out in Saint Amos colors.
Her slim body, her poorly fitted clothes, the nervous energy vibrating through her—I put her at sixteen. But her eyes tell a different story. They’re underlined with shadows, as if she hasn’t had much sleep, and don’t hold my eyes longer than a moment before she looks away.
Could be she’s shy, but I suspect it’s more a matter of her not wanting to give away more than she already has.
“Have you submitted your transcript to the administration office?” I ask, turning my back on her as I scratch out a note on the chalkboard.
“I…I don’t have one.”
I turn back to her, subtly aware the other students in my class are following our exchange like a particularly slow—if fascinating—tennis match. “Which school did you attend? I’ll have it sent over.”
“I was…homeschooled.”
“Ah.” I click my fingers at the student closest to her and turn back to the board. “Sit with Alex. He can share his textbook with you.”
She drags her chair over to the closest table, and the boy reluctantly slides his textbook to the side so she can lean across and read with him.
Homeschooled? That’s a first for Saint Amos. At least, since I became a teacher here. Most of our students are children from across the state who couldn’t afford private tuition and whose parents—for whatever reason—had decided they didn’t want them in a public school.
Those who still had their parents, of course.
Many students at Saint Amos are orphans.
Is that the case with Trinity Malone? If so, why isn’t she at the all-girls school up in Devon? Sisters of Mercy never turns anyone away.
I glance over my shoulder. Trinity immediately drops her gaze back to the textbook, and her cheeks turn rosy again. I take in the rest of the class. Most of the boys are surreptitiously peeking over at her, some hiding the fact behind hands or raised up textbooks.
I’m fully aware of her presence through the rest of my lesson, and