To Catch a Traitor by Shuster D. B.;

Author:Shuster, D. B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crime Bytes Media
Published: 2018-07-11T23:24:29+00:00

Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

VERA

VERA MET KOLYA by his cubby when school let out for the day. He sat on the floor, his arms wrapped around his knees, curled up in a little ball. Her heart beat fast. She hurried toward him.

“What’s wrong?” She had a sinking feeling she knew. Lively and charismatic, Kolya usually had a small ring of friends gathered around him, but now the children from his class gave him a wide berth, as if he had the plague.

And he did. The same one she did. The same one that made her a pariah day after day, year after year.

He didn’t answer, and she crouched beside him. “Were the kids mean to you?”

“The teacher,” he said.

She hugged her schoolbooks to her chest with one arm and put her other hand on his shoulder. “Don’t let it get inside you,” she whispered, even though she had never succeeded in putting that advice to use.

“I didn’t,” he said, and Vera wondered if she were the only one in her family who didn’t have a tough shell.

“I’m just thinking,” Kolya said. Elementary school children buzzed around them, pulling on coats and woolen hands and stuffing their hands into mittens. Kolya made no move to gather his own things. Yesterday Vera had cajoled him and rushed him out the door, but she didn’t have the heart to hurry him along today. Petya could wait.

“Thinking what?” she asked.

“How it’s not fair,” he said. “My teacher can be as mean as she wants, and I’m not supposed to talk back.”

“Did you?”

He held up the back of his hand for her to see. His knuckles were red. “She hit my hand with the ruler,” Kolya said. “To teach me a lesson.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” he said, but he winced when he flexed his fingers. In him, she could see the model of what her family wanted her to be, the mark from which she would forever fall short. Resilience came so naturally to him, and she was so, so deficient.

“But I’m so mad,” Kolya said.

“I know,” Vera said. Having Kolya with her at school this past year had eased some of her loneliness. She appreciated not having to sit or stand all alone and having someone to talk to, even if he was only seven. But she hated that he was now suffering, too. She had only a few months of school left, but he faced several more years of the same torture she had endured.

“Is my father really a criminal?” Kolya asked.

“Well, that depends,” Vera said. She put down her books and sat beside him on the cold, hard floor. She tucked her skirt around her legs and leaned toward him.

She spoke softly, even though the hall quickly emptied of any stragglers as everyone left to catch the buses and return home. “He was arrested for a crime. He didn’t do it, but the court decided that he did. And he went to prison.”

“For five years,” Kolya supplied. He pressed his lips together, but she couldn’t tell whether he was angry his father had been sent away or that he had returned.

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