END OF the next week the teacher stood one side of the desk and leered down on him. Terry stayed on the open math book and the teacher kept beside. He tapped the pencil at the spine, looked up, nodded quickly and put his face back down.

Teacher, he said.

A kid a few seats up spit a laugh he could not hold, put his head down at his arms on the desk. Terry turned his eyes down again. The teacher kicked her shoe at his knapsack. He turned the pencil over and erased a mark on the page, brushed the shavings. She went on the bag again. He looked up.

I didn’t read last night if you’re wondering that, he said.

Open your bag.

What?

I said open your bag.

I’d rather not.

Do it now.

It’s personal please.

He looked at the faces turned on him. The one at his left, Richard Jenkins, looked at him and huffed. Terry studied his face and he knew.

You son of a bitch, he said.

Stand up now, the teacher said. You get sick and us too carrying that around.

Terry looked up at her.

It’s not there anymore, he said.

He nodded at the bag beside the desk.

I took it out. Yesterday I did.

She raised the knapsack chest level and did the zipper. She winced and turned her head and stretched her arms long into the bag, and then she dropped it, feathers sprung from the top. She went up toward the front.

Bring it up here, she said. Now.

He got the bag at a strap and took it up front.

Take it out, she said.

He put his hand inside and got the dead bird out. He unwrapped the newspaper. It did stink.

Put it in the trash, she said.

He looked at the bird, some of its feathers gone, eyes open old black, and he felt strange, and weak. A cry bloomed in his face. He put his eyes at hers, a plead.

In the trash, she said.

The bird crunched paper falling. He looked at it there a moment, head buried, splayed on balled white.

The teacher pointed him back to his desk. He walked drop eyed, and sat down, and the cry a hard knot in his jaw. He pinched fists at the desk, looked over at Richard Jenkins, worked on some word problems like the other ones.

The bell ran loud and didn’t stop. Some of the kids around him put hands on their ears. The teacher stood up front and yelled. She held a textbook above her head and squatted in front of her desk. Behind, there was a map of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was cold there. She told them the week before the Russians had a lake bigger than all the great ones up north combined and more nuclear missiles than anyone, ever, and if some important one over there just decided to, the world could end, all of them burned to cinder. They reached under the desks, to their knapsacks and got out their math books, and then they put them flat over their heads and necks and kneeled beneath the desk wood. The bell rang and kept. The teacher got from beneath her desk and stood up in front and then she pointed them to the door.

They cleared double doors, and he got Richard Jenkins near the others huddled at the back of the yard. He jammed him on a tree, pushed him up by the neck and tried to break his jaw. Then he took him down and punched on the back of his head. Richard Jenkins covered his face and his legs jerked straight at the grass. Terry hit him at the forearms, then stopped and stood over him. He felt the cry come up in his chest again and it twisted his face up. He put a hand long at his brow and over his eyes.

A trashcan, he said.
He kicked him hard. Richard Jenkins whimpered.
I was going to give it a burial, he said. A damn funeral.

He saw her stood a ways off, watching, chewing the end of a finger; he forgot Richard Jenkins huffing on the ground, felt some quick and sudden calm. He smiled a way to hide his sick front tooth and waved.

The principal got him around the chest, and another teacher came up and yanked his shirt at the front and they started to drag him. He yelled at them, hauled off, felt sad and talented, knew, from then on, he’d look for her, and that was all.