Page 9 of Never Alone
"Really?" He stood up and pulled on his backpack.
"Then you can tell me about your girlfriend, Penny."
"She's not my girlfriend."
"You punched a kid for her."
"She'snotmy girlfriend," he insisted.
"Alright. Alright." I ruffled his hair on the way out the door.
The next day, the bakery did the thing it did between rushes. It fell quiet. Benjie had gone out for his lunch break, walking down to the water the way he liked to. Mrs. Thompson was in her office with a stack of invoices.
I was taking inventory. I needed something to keep my hands busy. The voices from yesterday kept circling, and I couldn't get them to stop.
Noah hit another student.
I'm sorry, Mom.
Sometimes these incidents are isolated, and sometimes they're a sign of something we want to keep an eye on.
So was I just supposed to watch Aiden make Penny cry like that?
I'm sorry, Natalie.
"Tessa?"
I looked up.
She came over from the office, slowly, stopping at the prep table where I had the inventory list spread out.
"You okay, honey?"
"I'm fine."
She didn't push. She didn't have to. She knew I wasn't, and I knew she knew, and that was the way she handled most things.
"How's Noah? Benjie told me he had to be picked up from school yesterday."
With anyone else, that question would have sounded like a manager asking why one of her people had cut a shift short. With Mrs. Thompson, it sounded like what it was. She wanted to know how my son was doing.
"He punched another kid at school. I had to go in and meet with the principal."
"He got into a fight?"
"He was defending his friend from a bully."
"He's a brave young man."
"He is."
She nodded, slowly.
"So what's bothering you, sweetheart?"
I sighed and set the pen down on the inventory sheet.
"The school is going to be paying closer attention to Noah now. They want a follow-up meeting with me in a couple of weeks. To check in on how things are going at home."
