EVE

I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE how much my head was throbbing until I take my first sip of coffee.

I’ve got about ten minutes before I have to get to my classroom, and I take that time in the teachers’ lounge to sit with my closest friend, Shelby, and decompress. Nate has already gone to his classroom. He took his coffee to go, then he gave me the first of my three pecks on the cheek.

“So how was your summer?” Shelby asks me, as if we haven’t been texting nonstop since the Fourth of July.

“Not bad.” I spent most of it teaching summer school. I imagined that when I became a teacher, it would be great to have the summers off, but it hasn’t worked out that way. “How about you?”

“Amazing.” Shelby sighs as she crosses her legs. She’s wearing the same Nine West gray pumps that she wore on the last day of school. I already know that she spent most of the summer on Cape Cod with her tech genius husband and three-year-old son. Her perfectly bronzed skin is a dead giveaway. “I’m so sad to be back. Connor wouldn’t stop crying when I dropped him off at preschool this morning.”

“It’s good for him,” I say, except what do I know?

Shelby takes a long sip from her Styrofoam cup of coffee, leaving behind an imprint of her red lipstick. “Nate looks good. Has he been working out all summer or something?”

“Probably.” This summer, Nate was teaching a drama program for kids at the high school. He doesn’t have a degree in drama, but he’s taken classes in college, and moreover, he’s a natural. In another life, Nate could have been the next Brad Pitt. But on the days he wasn’t working, he went down to the basement to lift weights. I suppose he doesn’t want anything to jeopardize his chance to be the hottest teacher at Caseham High for the second year running. “He’s very into fitness.”

“I wish Justin felt the same,” she laughs. “He’s only thirty-six, and he’s getting a gut already!”

I wonder how many times a day Justin kisses Shelby. If they have sex more than once a month. I wonder if she lies awake next to him in bed at

night and wishes she could be married to anyone else or even nobody at all. I wish I could ask her. I’ve only ever been married to Nate—maybe these feelings are part of every marriage. Maybe it’s normal.

“Have you seen Art?” I ask instead.

The smile drops off Shelby’s face. “No. He resigned, obviously. And I’ve heard he hasn’t been able to find another teaching job.”

Up until the spring, Arthur Tuttle was a math teacher at Caseham High and also one of the most beloved teachers in the school. When I first started working here fresh out of my master’s program, he took me under his wing. But that was the sort of thing Art would do. He was genuinely the nicest person I had ever met, always ready with a comforting word or one of his wife’s famous brownies. And every year at the staff Christmas party, Art would dress up as Santa Claus, because even without the red suit, he was a dead ringer.

And now he’s ruined.

“I wonder how he and Marsha are doing,” I murmur. “And the kids,” she adds. “Two in college now, right?”

I wince, thinking of Art’s boys. Part of me wants to try to help him with some money, but he’ll never accept it, and anyway, we don’t have much to give after our hefty mortgage payments are done. Plus Nate wants to save for the baby we’ll never have.

“It’s so unfair,” I murmur. “He didn’t do anything wrong and she…” Shelby’s thin eyebrows shoot up. “We don’t entirely know that.”

I try to mask my irritation by taking another sip of my coffee. It’s not going to help to rant at Shelby, especially this early in the morning. Anyway, this is why Art had to resign. It doesn’t matter what happened or didn’t happen. It only matters that parents were calling the principal and telling her that they didn’t trust that man around their children. Art—the nicest person who ever was, who didn’t have an evil bone in his body— could no longer be trusted.

“She’s in my class, you know,” I tell Shelby. “Oh?”

“Sixth period.”

I’ve only seen her photo in the roster of students, and it was one taken about a year ago for the yearbook. I’ve never seen her in real life, but she looked painfully ordinary in her photo. Nondescript. Not so different from the way I looked at the same age.

“Be careful.” There’s a smile playing on Shelby’s lips, but at the same time, a look of warning is in her eyes. “That girl is clearly extremely troubled.”

She doesn’t have to tell me. From the moment I saw the name Adeline Severson on my roster, I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. In my nearly ten years of teaching, I never once asked to have a student removed from my class, but I almost did it this time.

I have a terrible feeling about this girl.