Ms. Suarez dismissed her class of third graders for recess. Debbie and Beans were the last to leave the classroom. Even Ms. Suarez had left before them. They took their time walking down the hall. Ms. Suarez waited at the corner, waving them forward.
“Come on, Beans,” Debby said.
“Bernie,” he said.
“Whatever,” she said.
She wrapped her hand around his wrist and pulled him forward. She expected him to complain about his asthma. He didn’t. He jogged along beside her. She heard his ever-present wheezing increase a notch. Recess was their time to get outside and away from the rest of the kids, most of whom tortured poor Bernard Holland. Debby knew that one day her friend would show them all. He’d grow up to program computers to run faster and bigger than they ever had. He’d build planes that would cross the globe in an hour while riding amid the stratosphere. Or maybe he’d invent a stove that could cook dinner in a minute or two instead of thirty to forty. That’s what he’d told her one time, at least. A snap of the fingers, he’d said. Mac and cheese as you please.
“You two,” Ms. Suarez said. “Always lagging behind.”
“He has asthma,” Debby pointed out to the teacher.
Ms. Suarez smiled and offered a knowing nod. She ushered them past the tinted glass door. They stepped outside, his wrist still in her hand, and walked toward the outer edge of the recess area. While the other kids turned into four-foot tall savages, Debby and Beans found a shady spot under an old oak. He went to sit down in the grass.
“Stop,” Debby said.
“Why?” he asked. “Did you see a spider?” Beans was terrified of spiders. One time Debby had stuck a fake but realistic looking spider in his cereal. He screamed so loud and so long that he nearly passed out. She wished she had it on video. Not that she’d ever share it with anyone.
“No,” she said. “The ground is wet from that storm this weekend.”
Beans bent over and placed his hand on the ground to verify this. When he straightened back up, he nodded. “Let’s go over to the bench.”
They walked along the back fence toward the other side of the recess yard. There was no shade to protect them from the bright sun. The air felt heavy, like they were walking through a cloud. Debby’s gaze traveled from one kid to the next. Most of them played on the large play set in the middle. Swings and slides and ladders and some kind of half-circle geometric plaything. Fun, she thought. But not for Beans.
“Come on,” she said, taking his hand. “Hurry up.”
“I’m already hurrying, Debby,” he argued.
They reached the corner and turned right. The bench was close to the school building, just off to the side a few feet in front of the gate. Debby once again turned her head and watched the kids having fun. She felt a slight urge to join them. She never did, though. Not even on the days when Beans had been absent from school.
She felt Beans’s grip on her hand tighten, and she looked back at him.
He stared at her with a serious look on his face. “You should go have fun, Debby.”
“I am having fun. Nothing is better than hanging out with you Beans. Besides, those kids don’t like me.”
“No, they don’t like me. If you ditched me, they’d like you just fine.”
“Nonsense and gibberish, my good man.”
“What?” He smiled and let out a single laugh.
She smiled back and tugged on him in an effort to get him to pick up his pace. When they’d almost reached the bench, she cast one last gaze toward the kids. Sometimes she wished that Beans wasn’t there to occupy all her time. Those thoughts were fleeting and she chastised herself for thinking such things. There was no kid she’d ever met who spoke to her or understood her the way he did. She’d be lost in the third grade jungle without him by her side.
By the time they reached the bench, Beans looked like he wanted to collapse. He sat down in a huff. His hand reached into his pocket. She imagined that he wrapped his thin fingers around his inhaler. But he didn’t pull it out. No, Beans sat on that bench and took a deep rattled breath or two. He looked like a fish who’d escaped from a hook after dangling over the water for a minute. He glanced up at her and smiled.
She felt relieved.
So she reached behind her back and stuck her fingers through the chain linked fence. The metal felt damp, like it had been sweating. Everything else had been. Why not the fence? She didn’t watch the kids playing and having a good time. Instead, she looked up and stared at the clouds for a long moment. A cool breeze passed. It had the same smell her yard used to have when her dad was around and he mowed the grass on a Saturday morning. She remembered lying on her belly, watching cartoons and hearing the sound of the mower buzzing by the window. Those stinky gas fumes would always follow, but they’d soon be replaced by smell of freshly cut grass.
Beans said something that she didn’t quite hear. She started to look down at him when she noticed the strange man from earlier. He was on the other side of the gate, maybe fifty feet or so away. He leaned against the side of the school and watched her. That shiver went down her spine again. Three times in one day. That, as her mother might say, was a sign.
The guy narrowed his eyes and then lowered his head. He reached inside his pocket and pulled out a set of keys.
Debby watched on in horror. Beans said something again. Maybe he repeated himself. She wasn’t sure. His words sounded like they came from a hundred miles away. Or a few feet through the water. It was all the same to her.
The guy turned and stuck the keys into the side of the building. He leaned forward into what she supposed was a closet of some kind.
Along the outside of the building?
It made no sense to her, but she had to trust what her eyes were seeing. Besides, she’d never walked along the outside of the entire school. He returned a moment later, holding a brown bag. Not like a trash bag, but something else. He began walking in their direction, his gaze fixed solely on her.
Debby said, “Come on, Beans.” She didn’t wait to see if he followed along. The tone of her voice should have told him that she meant business.
One of the boys from her class ran up to her and blocked her path. His name was Peter. His red hair and freckles always made her think of a pepperoni pizza. Strange? Yes, she admitted that. What was stranger was she couldn’t look at him for long, otherwise she’d get hungry. When she tried to go around him, he held out his arms and stopped her.
“Let me alone, Peter,” she yelled.
He stepped to the side so that he was in front of her again. “Go back to your little black boyfriend, dweeb.”
She threw her arms forward and pushed him back. Peter’s cheeks turned as red as the hair on his head.
“I ought to kick your little freak butt.” Peter also rode the same bus as her. Everybody copied the red-haired boy.
She shrieked and bulldozed her way past him. By this point, Ms. Suarez had started toward her to see what in God’s name was going on.
“What in God’s name is going on?” Ms. Suarez said.
“She hit me,” Peter said. A few other kids added their two cents to confirm this.
“Go away,” Debby said to him. Then she grabbed Ms. Suarez’s hand and started to pull. “There’s a—”
“What are you doing, Debby?” Ms. Suarez freed herself from the child’s grasp and placed her hands on her hips. Her thin eyebrows angled downward in the middle. She tilted her head to the side and leaned over a bit. “Are you okay?”
“There’s a strange man on the side of the building, and he—”
Ms. Suarez straightened up. Her tone went from caring to fast and serious. “What does he look like?”
“Old.”
“What’s he wearing?”
“A blue suit.”
“Like Principal Bennett wears?”
“No, like a trash man.”
“What color is his hair?”
“He has none.”
Her expression eased up and her voice relaxed. “That sounds like our new janitor.”
“What happened to the old janitor?”
Ms. Suarez shrugged. “He stopped showing up.”
Debby pulled away from Ms. Suarez and looked toward Beans, the bench and the gate. The gate swung open. She screamed. The man was coming for her.
Ms. Suarez said, “Wait here,” and she started walking toward the open gate.
At that moment the bald headed man who had seemingly been stalking Lil’ Debby Walker throughout the day burst into the recess yard with a brown burlap sack. He pulled a rifle from the bag and aimed it in the direction of Ms. Suarez.
“Don’t move, bitch,” he said.
It caught the teacher off guard. She had picked her pace up to a run when the guy appeared, and now in the presence of the rifle she tried to turn around. Her feet didn’t cooperate with the rest of her body. At one point Ms. Suarez’s body was parallel to the ground and three feet in the air. She hit the ground with a thud and made a painful gasping sound.
Debby looked from Ms. Suarez on the ground to where the man had been standing. He wasn’t there. She shifted her gaze to the left. The man reached for Beans and yanked him off of the bench. Debby tried to scream. She couldn’t. Neither could Beans. So she did the next best thing. She started running after the man who had Beans hanging over his shoulder.