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A Hole in the Heart: A Novel
A Hole in the Heart: A Novel
A Hole in the Heart: A Novel
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A Hole in the Heart: A Novel

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"Midafternoon on a Tuesday, it occurred to Bean Jessup that she was forgetting her husband's face."

So begins this smart and charmingly written debut novel about a young woman trying to start over amid the grandeur of the Alaskan landscape and the creaky confines of an isolated fishing village and its relentless and pungent salmon cannery.

A Hole in the Heart is the story of what happens when Bean arrives after accepting a last-minute elementary-school-teaching job in a town of 2500 people on Alaska's southern coast. Love and marriage follow in short order, surprising Bean, who feels that her husband is not only the best thing to happen to her, but the only good thing.

Then Mick vanishes leading amateur hikers--or "tuna" as the guides call them--up Mt. McKinley. Suddenly, Bean is thrown back upon herself and into the company of Mick's mother Hanna, an arthritic woman in her seventies who believes that "a little larceny is good for the circulation."

The pair chafe at first, but eventually become partners in a road trip back to California. Mike's disappearance feels like a hole in the heart, they decide, and Hanna tells Bean to prize that hole; it's something no one can take away from her. With gentle humor, pathos, and boundless stores of hope, Marquis writes of Bean's struggle with early widowhood, loss, and moving on.

An avid bird-watcher, Bean takes much of her wisdom from the Pemberton Guide to Alaska Birds. Like the globe-crossing birds she so admires, she has struggled to get aloft, but for a delicious, perhaps fleeting moment in this marvelous novel, we see her glide.

Book Magazine selected Christopher Marquis as one of "Ten To Watch In 2003" for this "Proulxian saga." With its first-rate evocation of landscape and its affectionately drawn characters, A Hole in the Heart marks the publication debut of a prodigiously talented writer.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 1, 2007
ISBN9781429977500
A Hole in the Heart: A Novel
Author

Christopher Marquis

Christopher Marquis is a general assignment reporter at The New York Times in the Washington Bureau. Previously, he was a longtime correspondent at The Miami Herald where he covered Latin America. Marquis began writing the novel while on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. The author earned his way through the University of California at Berkeley by working "the slime line" at a cannery in Alaska during his summers.

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    I thought the whole story was awesome. Lots of sad parts, but such is life. Alot of Bean's feelings I could relate to, that is why I gave it a 5 star

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A Hole in the Heart - Christopher Marquis

All five of the world’s loon species may be found in Alaska. The bird’s distinctive yodel evokes insane laughter for some, implacable mourning for others. As much as any other sound, the cry of the loon is identified with the call of the wild.

—The Pemberton Guide to Alaska’s Birds

Midafternoon on a Tuesday, it occurred to Bean Jessup that she was forgetting her husband’s face.

She was working the slime line, one of a dozen people at the trough, facing a spout that spewed cold water onto a chopping block. On a conveyor before her, slippery, metallic hunks of salmon rolled past, their heads and tails removed, bloody wads of pinks and chums en route to the canning machine. Her job was simple enough: pull a fish from the belt, slash away the bits of fin and innards missed by the gutting machine, rinse it, and return it to the belt. Repeat. She wore a yellow rain suit against the splashing water; with pimpled rubber gloves, she gripped a dagger-sized knife.

Every few hours, Fat Al, the supervisor of the Northern Pacific Fish Co., strolled by to inspect the carnage. He had a squirrel’s nest of a beard, Amish-style, and suspenders stretched drum-tight over a flanneled belly. His big slick pate reminded Bean of a chubby baby, but otherwise he was scary. His run-together eyebrows made him look permanently cross, and his left hand had only three fingers and a thumb. Bean had to remind herself not to stare at his hand.

The factory’s screeches and clatter made threats useless, so Fat Al tried to boost productivity with surprise appearances and a few hard looks. Time was everything. Fish rotted.

It was early in the salmon run, two days after the Fourth of July, and everybody was pulling double shifts. Wrapped in rubber, Bean felt her T-shirt cling like yesterday’s washcloth. The smell hung on her, too. But smell was too kind. It was the stench of blood and salt and fish heads, and not the fresh ones. By the end of the season she would have to throw away her shirts and jeans and probably her socks and underwear, too. She used skunk remedies on her hair.

The endless workdays threw everyone’s clock off-kilter. You worked the line for seventeen hours and had the remainder to eat, clean, love, drink, laugh, and consider your life. It didn’t help that the sun never set. After a while, you just believed whatever the clock in the break room said, though more than once Bean caught herself wondering whether it was morning or night. She stumbled home in the midnight dusk and was back by 7 A.M., trudging up the cannery’s plank stairs in knee-high boots. All day, she and her coworkers toiled in unblinking fluorescence, wired on cookies and coffee, which Fat Al shrewdly furnished for free.

When she first worked the cannery a few years back, Bean had been appalled by how much slime got past her sleep-starved colleagues—prickly fins, chunks of gill, speckled bits of skin—and rolled right into the canning machine. Her instinct was to lunge after an errant piece of gristle, hoping to spare some Safeway shopper a rude surprise. But her reward would be to get water in her gloves. Or a dirty look from the guy who had already slimed the fish. After a week or so, she just let it roll by: the sinews and cartilage and entrails clinging to the precious salmon flesh. All that ever came out the other side were perfect cans with tidy green labels. It was someone else’s problem.

With her hands leased out to Northern Pacific, Bean had lots of time to ponder. She wasn’t a heavy thinker or a particularly organized one. Much of the time, thoughts fluttered through her head like clothes in the dryer. She suspected that most people thought that way—in loopy circles—even bosses like Fat Al. Sometimes she thought about her second-graders; she imagined them visiting her when she was old. Sometimes she dreamed up a new diet for herself; she would live on chicken and carrots, or drink so much water that nothing else would fit in her stomach.

Frequently she wondered what in the world she was doing in Eyak—so far from home—where it always rained and there were bears and there was no road in or out.

She forced herself to think ahead; no sense looking back now. But after lunch on Tuesday Bean had one persistent thought. It tumbled through her mind, pushed her eyes from side to side, and made her feel whimpery.

I don’t remember what he looks like.

She glanced across the trough at Lois. Lois’s face was tucked into a red bandanna; she hated getting splattered. Lois was tall, had eyes that said either don’t mess with me or fuck me, depending. She looked like an outlaw, which was pretty much how Bean saw her. Lois spoke her mind and drank whiskey and had blond highlights in her frizzy hair, even in winter. Bean felt lucky to have her as a friend.

Lois was sexy, too. Even now. Bean watched her work on a sockeye, slicing away at the gills, gore running up her forearms. She wore the same shapeless rain suit that Bean did, except Lois’s was somehow cinched smartly at the waist. Her hips swayed slightly back and forth to whatever music was pumping from the Walkman into her ears. Her ears. Bright red fire hydrants dangled from each lobe. Only Lois would wear jewelry on the slime line. At twenty-eight, Lois was two years older than Bean, but next to her, Bean felt like a crone. Which was odd, because she had better breasts than Lois, and she didn’t have all those moles. But Lois’s face and body had an unimaginable asset: they had Lois as a press agent.

Lois looked up from her fish. She must have noticed Bean’s idle hands. She gave Bean a slight nod and a good hard look, which was entirely illegible because of the bandanna covering her face. Bean shrugged and looked away. Lois couldn’t help her with this.

Bean stared into the trough, at the blood swirling down the drain. It was horrible, yet oddly pretty, bright and thick, like finger paint. Her feet ached and she shifted her weight in her boots. Horrible pretty. As she rocked back, she bumped into a towering hulk behind her. It moved. She screamed and spun around, the knife in her fist poking at the intruder.

For a big man, Fat Al could jump. He hopped backward, clamped a meaty hand on Bean’s wrist, and twisted the knife toward the ceiling. They stood there for a moment, looking at each other—Fat Al, a foot taller than Bean, clutching her upheld glove—like a pair of miserable dancers. She felt his breath full force on her face. Chewing tobacco. It was hard to believe a man could smell worse than a fish cannery.

Jeez Christ, he said.

Bean’s heart was still pounding. Sorry, she whispered. She didn’t want to look into his menacing face, and she especially didn’t want to look at his abbreviated hand, so she dropped her chin like a bad dog. Sorry.

Her apology didn’t register. They were both wearing earplugs. It was like a conversation with her mother.

Lois was taking in the scene from across the trough, her eyes like Ping-Pong balls. Fat Al extracted the jagged knife from Bean’s hand and placed it on the chopping block. For a moment, she thought he might smack her. But he just put his bush-beard next to her ear and shouted, Fish ain’t goin’ to clean itself, then walked off.

Lois thought the whole thing was pretty funny. In the break room an hour later, she tossed lemon pretzel cookies into her mouth and shook her head. I tried to warn you, honey, she said. I really did. I can’t believe you didn’t feel him behind you. I mean, any closer and he’d have to buy you dinner.

Bean nibbled a cookie. I’m distracted, she said. You know that.

You should’ve seen his face. His eyes popped out. He thought you were going to slime him, I swear to God.

Maybe that’s how he lost his finger, sneaking up on people, Bean said.

Back on the line that evening, Bean realized she could remember some things about Mick. Enough, for instance, to satisfy a police artist. His hair was brown and thick and he almost never combed it. He let Bean cut it now and then, and she shaved his thin white neck, taking care not to nick him. His eyes were brown, too. Gentle. He rubbed them when he was tired after he’d been out fishing. His body ran hot, even in winter. He sweated half-moons into his T-shirts before the morning was done.

Was that it, then? Bean wondered. Had she remembered him? Had she caught him before he slipped away? Everyone else seemed to think he was dead. There had been a service. But he had been missing for only a month. Some kids went to summer camp for that long.

How had his breath felt on her neck? Bean wasn’t sure.

She reached for a fish and noticed the guy beside her, a college student with a ball cap that said OREGON STATE. He was talking to himself again. Just staring straight at nothing and chatting away. Maybe he was in some sort of religious trance. She wondered if she could piggyback on his prayer, so it would count for her and Mick. It would be like when an operator busts into a phone call for you in an emergency.

It occurred to Bean that she might launch a prayer on her own. But she couldn’t remember the words. She knew one that started Hail Mary, full of grace. And it ended with Now and at the hour of our death. But she was damned if she could remember what came in between. It was a prayer with the middle cut out, and the middle was what mattered. Like with this fish.

She spotted a slip of paper dangling from the water pipe in front of the college kid’s nose. It was affixed with a blotch of salmon gut. He was reading something—memorizing it. By the shape of the words on the page, it was a poem. Bean wondered what it was about. She knew some poems. Well, rhymes really, stuff she’d learned as a little girl. Winnie-the-Pooh, Mother Goose. Her brother had read them to her, over and over. She remembered sitting beside him in the easy chair, cozily mashed together, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, as he turned the big pages in the book on their laps, she, safe and sleepy, sometimes dropping her eyes to stare at the blond down on his forearms. But she could never drift too far, because if he thought she was asleep, he would try to end the story in the middle.

And they lived happily ever after, Chip would say, slamming the book shut.

No, Bean would squeal, delighted that she had caught him in this trick. No happy after. She would stab an imperious finger at the unread pages beneath his arm and command: Read.

Bean hoped to read to her own child someday. She imagined only one: a curly-haired girl in sagging pants who played amid the daisies. You just had to smile to look at that little girl. Bean would bring her to her own best friend’s house—a friend who baked her own bread, wore loose skirts, and finished Bean’s sentences. On a lazy afternoon they would sit together on the porch, sip lemonade, and watch their children play.

So far, all she had was the porch. It was really just a deck that Mick built off the back door. Lois couldn’t make bread and she said baby-making would ruin her hips. As for the curly-haired girl, Bean had stayed on the pill. Mick had wanted children, though. Critters, he called them. As in: I wouldn’t mind a few of those critters runnin’ around on a Saturday morning. But she hadn’t been ready. Too many things could go wrong. And now—now it might be too late.

As she yanked on a string of gut, Bean pictured the various snapshots of Mick scattered around their house. Sleepy Mick in a thick brown robe cradling Fred as a pup. Skinny Mick in yellow trunks tugging a sailboat into the water in Cancún. Mick and Bean on the mountain, with surprised looks because the camera’s self-timer had worked. She loved that picture. It was on the nightstand. Mick’s soft eyes; her own pretty face, dark blond hair, her body luckily cut out of the frame so she didn’t have to worry if she looked fat.

But she couldn’t conjure Mick himself, make him stand before her, see him in the round as she had every day—jokey and excited, or bone-tired, or just there, with mussed hair and breakfast cereal. She couldn’t recall the secrets of the lean body she’d hugged at night. What freckle where? Fingernails, flat or rounded? Second toe longer than the first? Bean wasn’t sure. She recalled a scar across his eyelid where he’d hit a glass table as a little boy, and it made her feel a little better. But which eye?

The college boy recited his poem.

It felt terribly wrong. Mick knew her secrets; the least she could do was remember his topography. It had taken months of hurt feelings, stuttered starts and misfights over chores and money before Bean had managed to unfold herself to Mick.

When I was one, I had just begun.

He figured out her moods. He knew when to cajole. And he knew when to stand aside and wait for Bean to emerge, heavy-headed, from her lair of twisted sheets, children’s books, and Ho Ho wrappers. Mick knew all this, but now he was gone.

And if she let him go, it would be as if the best thing that had ever happened to her—the only good thing, it seemed—had never been.

The Bald Eagle does not migrate. . . . During the harsh winter, when fish are not available, it remains attuned to the difficulties of larger birds, striking to kill at the slightest indication of weakness.

—The Pemberton Guide

T hey met four years ago, the year Bean finally decided what to do with her life. Finding a job had kept her and Betty Chin, the career counselor at San Francisco State, on edge for quite a while. Six months after Bean had received her diploma, Betty dug up Eyak’s desperate plea for a substitute teacher. No certification required, hardship pay, and a chance to make it permanent. Take it, Betty said.

Bean got a long-distance call a week after they’d sent off the paperwork. A friendly voiced man from the school district wanted her on the next plane. Only then did she go to the library and pull an atlas off the shelf.

In fifth grade, when her class was making relief maps of the states, Bean had drawn Alaska from the hat. One afternoon she hurried home to mix a salt and flour plaster, arranged it on a cardboard tracing of the state and slipped it into the oven, hoping for the best. But her mother came home when she was pulling it from the rack, and it was all cracked up, like there had been a major earthquake. One by one, the Aleutian Islands slipped onto the floor, like turds.

Her mother was wearing a tennis dress. Which was lucky, in a way, because the kitchen counters were covered in white dust. Lately she was always wearing tennis clothes—wristbands, little white socks with tiny puffs over the heel—that seemed ridiculous. When the tennis club had slashed its dues in a desperate bid to shore up its finances, Bean’s mother had pounced. Tennis was her new passion, and she was determined to spread it through the family. But Bean’s dad refused to go. He said the club was full of fakers. He sat in his armchair and imitated them. It was a scream.

What is the meaning of this? Her mother had been shouting at her a lot recently. Maybe she’d gotten tired of shouting at her dad.

It’s Alaska, Bean said. Her voice shrank into a swallow. Why was her mother always around when she messed up? It’s due tomorrow.

Never mind that her teacher had assigned the maps two weeks earlier. Bean’s interest in school had dropped off considerably. All she wanted to do was read books, but not the ones the teacher assigned. Her conference reports said Bean was neglecting her potential.

Just then, the Alaskan panhandle, which had turned out pretty well given its odd shape, broke away from the main part and slid down the sloping cardboard, which Bean clasped with fat oven mitts.

They watched it hit the floor and break into crumbs.

Her mother arced her fingers around her temples and made a last-straw look. She stepped to the oven and peered in, as if it might contain a family of raccoons.

I want this kitchen clean, she commanded. This is all I need right now.

Bean made an imploring gesture, which the hand mitts made all the more dramatic.

But I need a map, she begged. I’ll get an F.

It took forever to get everything down the drain.

________

After so many years, Bean was surprised at how familiar the shape was when she opened the atlas. The shelfy Arctic forehead, Kodiak Island, the Aleutian tusk. She stared at the map until the longitude and latitude lines ran together.

Maybe in Alaska it would be all right. A person could get lost there. Start over.

They lived better up north, she was certain. Nobody slept in the streets. They’d flat-out die if they did. In Alaska everybody had a home and a thick coat and drank lots of hot chocolate. Families worked; people stuck together. They had to. It took at least six people to kill and butcher a walrus. You had to respect that kind of cooperation, even if you hated hunting as much as Bean. Alaskans were like their sled dogs, pulling together.

Eventually, she found Eyak on the southern coast. It was so tiny that she locked her index finger on the spot. It was nestled amid speckles of islands, a thick blue river, blue stripes that meant glaciers, a splotch of green for forest, and lots of tight gray lines behind it, meaning mountains. It seemed like a lot of geography for a town of 2,500.

Maybe that was where a person could become somebody. Out in the woods, where there was nobody to tell you you were strange. Maybe it was a place where a girl could unblock herself. Something was holding her back—she knew it, she felt it—but she couldn’t name it.

When Bean announced that she was moving to Alaska, her mother took a deep breath, as if a good argument needed lots of oxygen. She exhaled, then stared at Bean. I don’t know what you’re trying to run away from, she said finally. Bean just gave her a look.

On a bright morning in February, feeling strangely peaceful, except for a jumpy belly, Bean caught a jet to Anchorage and a puddle jumper to Eyak. She pressed her forehead against the Plexiglas window as the atlas symbols became real, the ripsawed mountains, the oozing glaciers, the meringue-topped islands. The natural light had dimmed. She sipped Florida orange juice served by a big-boned stewardess and realized none of them would ever survive a plane crash.

Maybe she’d never go home. Or she’d wait till everybody was dead. Or at least really old. She’d come back one day, herself all wrinkled and bleary-eyed, and walk stiffly over to the rope swing in the front yard. And she wouldn’t say anything. She’d ride back and forth and pull the pins out of her scraggly, long gray hair so it would swing in the breeze. And she would sing to herself as if all the years meant nothing, and that would just freak the hell out of her mother standing on the porch with her hand over her mouth.

For now, all that snow offered a convincing bulwark. Her plane landed on a strip of asphalt gouged from the snowy forest and she peeked through the oval window. The lights blazed in the airport, a low-slung shed no bigger than a 7-Eleven. It was nearly dark. She looked at her watch: 3:30 P.M.

The wind was strong. As soon as she stepped onto the rolling staircase, her clothes flapped against her and her hair went haywire. Cold mist moistened her skin and stung her eyes. In the distance, darkened trees bowed and bobbed frantically. She clutched the frigid metal railing and stepped with an old woman’s care down the steps.

The other passengers hurried across the slushy tarmac into the building. Bean took a deep breath and slung her new canvas carry-on over her shoulder. It felt ridiculously heavy, crammed as it was with the last-minute addition of a few beloved books, thermal underwear from the army surplus store, a box of Nilla wafers, and—embarrass-ingly—six jugs of Finesse for dry hair, because who knew what they’d have in Eyak? Somewhere in the bottom of the bag was a present from her college roommate: a potent repellent called Bear Scare. There didn’t appear to be any bears on the tarmac.

From outside, she noticed a fur-lined parka lumped up against the glass in the tiny airport. It waved. Bean cast a quick look behind her to see if the parka meant her. She squeezed through the narrow glass door and the parka hurried over. Encased within was a stout, jowly woman with curly orange hair and thick pink cheeks. She was all hood and boots; she didn’t appear to have any hands or thighs. Her voice was as high and excited as a gnome’s.

Oh, thank heavens, the woman said. Her obvious relief made Bean feel both proud—they needed her—and scared—they needed her. But then the woman yanked back a sleeve, magically produced a wrist with a watch, and explained. I’ve got the four o’clock ferry, you see. Jiminy, it’s going to be close.

Something about the woman reminded Bean of the White Rabbit; was it all that fur around her face? After hours of delicious inactivity—an airline passenger does so little, yet achieves so much—Bean felt herself sucked into this stranger’s rush.

Name’s Rosalie, the woman said. She snatched up Bean’s carry-on and crossed over to where they were piling up the baggage. Her coat was so long, you couldn’t see her legs move and she gave the impression of floating. Course, everyone calls me Feetie. Can’t remember why. Just the way it’s been.

She scowled at Bean’s bag. What you got in there, bricks?

Shampoo, Bean said softly.

By then, Feetie had enlisted a gristly man in a ball cap to lug Bean’s bags to the parking lot. Bean chased after her. She needed to finish the introduction. My name’s Celestine, she said. But I go by Bean.

Feetie had the minivan door open and Bean thought she might whip out a cattle prod to speed up the bag man. Bean? she said distractedly. That’s odd.

Feetie peeled off her parka, as if skinning herself, and slipped behind the wheel. Bean jumped into the car before it left without her. They sped down the two-lane road into town, hitting every pothole on the way. In the twilight all you could see was the stretch of road illuminated by the headlights.

Feetie talked as fast as she drove, and Bean—straining to see her new home—registered only every second or third phrase. Feetie grew up in Montana. "No one’s really from here, she said. Spent my whole childhood on the back of a horse, free as a bird. . . . Darrell rolls around and says, ‘Hey, Feetie, you’re twenty-two, time to get married.’ And you know what? I did. Never thought I might say otherwise. Well, after two kids in two years, Montana is too crowded for Darrell. Imagine it. Montana, crowded. Suddenly, he can’t breathe. We moved to Valdez—what?—nearly twenty years ago. Saw the ocean for the first time, learned to cut a fish. Two more kids. I’m thinking, well, we can build something here. Sure, make a home. But then Valdez got too crowded for Darrell."

Bean made a mental note. Val-DEEZ. Not the way you would say it in Spanish.

Where’s your husband now?

Beats me, Feetie said. I mean, Jiminy, where do you go from here?

Feetie swerved into an unpaved driveway and slammed on the brakes in a clearing. Three tiny trailers—bulbous, ’50s models, with their rusted truck hitches sticking out—sat darkly before them.

Feetie stepped out of the van and tested a wood plank that stretched like a bridge over a mud puddle. She stuck her arms out, like a wire walker, and crossed slowly to the first Airstream trailer. Bean followed. The door was unlocked. Feetie squeezed aside, keeping her eyes on the plank, so Bean could enter. Bean sloughed her bags to the ground and stepped in. A mildew odor crept up her nostrils.

There now, Feetie said, singing it. She pushed past Bean and tugged at some checkered curtains around the porthole window. The school board pays for the trailer, but you’re on your own for utilities. When she had taken in the smell, she made a vinegar face.

Once you get settled, nothing you can’t fix with a little Lysol, some air freshener, she said. I think lilac is best, don’t you? Heavens, the wildflowers we got in Montana. Feetie inhaled the memory, startled herself, then looked at her watch. She scurried off with a jiminy hanging in the air.

Bean clicked on the space heater, then sat on her bunk and pulled her knees up to her chest. The heater made the smell worse. She thought about lilacs. She sat still, feeling the room. She felt edgy, not right. Was the room too small? No, it was the silence, she decided. It was deafening. She sat there like a terrier, waiting to hear her master’s keys in the door. Something. She had forgotten the sound of silence.

It was 4:30. She set her alarm for the next day, pushed aside the yellow comforter, and slid into bed.

Eyak Elementary was about the ugliest building Bean had ever seen. It sat on a denuded slope behind a field of river rocks instead of a lawn. The main building was a two-story box of corrugated white-gray metal that looked like it had been ferried over in prefab slabs and stapled together. Which it had been. But inside, the school was full of homey touches. A glass display case featured fishing flies the kids had made. Over that hung portraits of George and Abe. The auditorium was off to the right, with a huge mural map of the United States, and Eyak proudly marked by a star. The artist had sliced out Canada and pulled Alaska south, just like in the atlas. Eyak floated in the blue waters just west of Los Angeles, as if the Malibu wine sippers might view it from their decks. At the top of the staircase, there was another display case. It hosted a stuffed black bear, which was the size of a Great Pyrenees and had claws like the blades of a pocketknife.

Bean met all the teachers that first week. She tried to absorb their names and advice, but the introductions went right past her. They were big, solid people who spoke too loud, like when you used a cell phone. You could leave them out in any weather and they’d do all right. The women had big butts, which Bean secretly welcomed after all the anorexic types back home. There were only a few men. They seemed to go out of their way to look ridiculous to their students, sporting too-short pants, meticulous comb-overs, and furry ears and noses. They mostly kept clear of Bean, which suited her fine. But one math teacher, a beefy man who had lost the battle to tuck in his rumpled plaid shirt, shook Bean’s hand and didn’t let go. He held it up over her head, as if he expected her to pirouette. Where’s the rest of her? he said. Then he sat down at the lunch table, pulled out a sandwich, and locked Bean in a wet, brown-eyed stare that made her want to crawl under the table.

Bean tended quietly to her lunch, but she was the news of the day. A chicken-necked teacher, who smelled like she was smoking even when she wasn’t, sank into a chair across the table. She nudged the lady beside her, who just then was poking at something encased in Tupperware as if to make sure it was dead. Chicken Neck winked at Bean. Pretty scary, huh? she said. Her voice sounded like a toad burp. As if they were all pirates or snake handlers. Bean smiled

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