Kit's Law by Donna Morrissey Read Free Book Online

straight as Mr. Haynes bent over, boring heavily squinted eyes into mine. I stiffened as he laid a heavy hand on my shoulder and gave me a little shake.
    “Apologize to Margaret,” he said quietly.
    “I’m sorry,” I half whispered.
    “Say it agin!”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Say—I’m—sorry—Margaret!” he stated slowly, lips peeling back over gritted teeth.
    “I’m s-sorry, Margaret.”
    He kept staring at me, his fingers digging into my shoulder, and my eyes wavered, not able to go far, as his face was a scant inch from mine, mostly to the bulb of his nose, and I saw that it wasn’t that his nose was purple, but that it looked purple from the dozens of tiny reddish veins meshing it.
    “Is that all right, Margaret?” he asked, his eyes still searching out mine.
    “Thank you, Mr. Haynes,” said Margaret, smiling sweetly. Then she ran off, leaving me struggling between the meshed, red veins and the boring, squinting eyes.
    “Do you remember what I told you about reform school, girl?” he asked, his voice dropping lower, still.
    I nodded.
    “That’s good,” he half whispered. “You keep remembering, you hear me?” He gripped his fingers deeper into my shoulder, giving me another little shake, then stood back up and walked across the yard into the school. I watched, surprised that he had left me standing by the fence with no further threat of punishment, and churning through the things he had told me about reform school. For sure, he’d told me enough times. From the very first day when I started school and cried to go back to the gully with Nan, he took time to tell me about the reform school. It was a place near the orphanage where bad orphan youngsters were sent, where awful things happened to them, like having their heads shaved and dunked in kerosene for getting head lice, and being stripped naked and thrown into tubs of ice-cold water for daydreaming when you was suppose to be listening, and being strapped for getting a sum wrong, even if you’d never seen that kind of sum before. Now, here I was in grade six and never cried for Nan no more, never got a sum wrong, never got head lice, never yawned or daydreamed or not listened, and here he was, still threatening to send me to reform school.
    I trailed back inside the school after recess and paid strict attention to working out long-division sums, careful not to come under Mr. Haynes’s attention. But, while I was readying to leave my seat after the bell rung for the end of the day, he ordered me to stay behind and write “I will not say bad words” one hundred times in my scribbler. I scribbled as fast as I could, knowing Nan was outside, waiting to walk me home from school. She always came to get me these days, what with Shine chewing up people and whittling out tombstones. By the time I got my one hundred lines wrote and met her at the school gate, she was after learning from some of the youngsters as to why I was kept in.
    “What in hell’s flames bad words was you usin’?” she bawled out the second she seen me coming through the school door.
    “None,” I mumbled.
    “None? He kept you in for sayin’ None? That’s a bejesus bad word to be sayin’—None! Out with it, my girl; what bad word was you sayin’?”
    “I never said one. Honest!”
    “Then what did he keep you in for?” Nan’s eyes flew open, and she tore off towards the school door. “Be the Lord Jesus, if he starts pickin’ on you, agin … ”
    “No, wait—it was an accident,” I cried out, running after her and grabbing hold of her hand.
    She stopped and swung around.
    “What do you mean—an accident?”
    “Me and Margaret and Melissa were callin’ out words and a bad one popped out.”
    “Outta whose mouth?”
    “Outta mine.”
    “How come it popped out outta yours and not one of theirs?”
    “It popped outta theirs, too.”
    “Then how come alcohie Haynes never kept them back?”
    “H-he never heard theirs.”
    “Uummph, but he heard yours? Be