Page 86 of The Teacher
“Hello, Addie,” the detective says as I slowly walk the rest of the way down the stairs. She is small, but the features of her face look like they’re carved from stone, and her hair is pulled back into a super tight bun behind her head. Even though she’s tiny, she’s frightening. “I need to talk to you for a few minutes, if that’s okay with you.”
“And I’ll be here the whole time,” my mother adds.
I look between the two of them. I don’t see any possible way to say no, so I nod.
“So, Addie…” Detective Sprague’s dark eyes study my face. She is the type of woman who looks like she could see through my lies even better than my fourth grade teacher used to be able to. “The reason I’m here is that your math teacher, Eve Bennett, disappeared sometime between last night and this morning.”
My throat feels like the Sahara desert, which we incidentally learned about last month. “Oh. What happened to her?”
“Well, we don’t know,” the detective says patiently. “But while doing some research into her disappearance, we discovered that you have had a few run-ins with Mrs. Bennett.”
I can feel my mother staring at me, unaware of this turn of events. I’m not entirely sure what to say, especially in front of my mother.
Deny everything.
“Um,” I say, “like, I was having some trouble in the class, so it wasn’t great, but we weren’t enemies or anything.”
Sprague’s lips twitch ever so slightly. “No, I wasn’t suggesting that you’re enemies. But she did tell the principal that she caught you snooping around outside her house two nights ago.”
Deny everything.“That’s not true. I wasn’t snooping on her. I was home the whole night.”
“That’s right, Detective,” my mom says. “I was with her on Thursday night. She didn’t go out.”
“So she wasn’t out of your sight the entire night?”
My mother hesitates. “Well, she’s sixteen. I don’t feel that I need to babysit her all the time. At some point, she was up in her room…”
“So it’s possible she could have gone out?”
My mother glances at me, then back at the detective. “I suppose it’spossible, yes.”
“Also…” Sprague reaches into her trench coat pocket and pulls out a folded piece of notebook paper. She hands it over to me. “Did you write this to Mrs. Bennett?”
Mom leans over my shoulder to read the paper she gave me. My knees wobble as I read the angry scribbles. No. Oh no.
It can’t be.
I’d like to gouge out your eyes, then fill the sockets with hot coals. I’d like to stab you right in the throat with my pen…
My mother claps a hand over her mouth. “Addie!”
“Did you write this?” the detective presses me.
There’s no point in lying. My mother knows my handwriting, so she knows that I wrote this. “Yes,” I admit. “But it wasn’t… I mean, I wrote it, but I didn’t write it to Mrs. Bennett.”
Sprague’s eyebrows shoot up. “Who did you write it to?”
“I didn’t write it toanyone,” I say. “It was…it was an assignment for English class.”
I think back to writing this letter, when I was so mad at Kenzie for stealing my clothes from my gym locker. And then Nathaniel gave me the assignment to write a letter to her, expressing my anger. I didn’t mean any of it. I was just being…dramatic. I was trying to impress him.
“Anassignment?” Mom says in disbelief. Detective Sprague does not say the same, but I can see on her face that she’s thinking it.
“Yeah, like…” I scratch at the back of my elbow. “I was supposed to write a letter to somebody I was angry at. But I never gave it to anyone. It wasn’t a real letter.”
“An assignment.” Sprague frowns. “So then…other kids got the same assignment? If I ask them, will they remember it?”
“No, it was just me.”
