Somewhere Between Black and White by Rosa Sophia, Shelly Hickman Page B

were doing all right.”
    “C’mon,” he whispered. He gave her a
squeeze, before pushing her hair behind her ear. “It’s always been you. Since
high school. How can you not know that?”
    She remembered. He had such a huge crush
on her back then, so awkward and adorable. She fondly envisioned the rail-thin
boy with braces, carrying around that sketchbook everywhere he went.
    One day after class, he had handed her a
folded piece of spiral notebook paper. Assuming it was a note, she opened it to
find a masterful sketch he had done of her while sitting at his desk. He’d
already slipped away before she could say anything. 
    But he had succeeded in leaving his imprint
on her heart.
    Evelyn released a breath and turned her face
toward him. “I’m sorry.” She suddenly felt as if she had blown this whole thing
out of proportion.
    “For what?” He kissed her ear. “Now, let’s
get rid of this,” he said, taking her wine to the kitchen.

 
    Ten
    Sophie arrived in the private courtyard
of the school a few minutes early to start setting up drinks for the pizza
lunch, which rewarded a handful of students each month. Students could earn
citizenship stamps, and a certain number of stamps would buy them various
rewards, the lunch being one of them. She lined up the plastic red cups, each
row having a different flavored soda.
    Her head was all over the place. She’d
purposely refrained from calling Evie, allowing her to initiate any
conversation regarding Christian, and it was killing her. Killing her! Then
there was Sam, and that blissful but indescribable first kiss she couldn’t
discard. Though nothing out of the ordinary had happened since, her thoughts
often returned to that night. There was no making sense of it. And guessing his
middle name? What was that about?
    Giving herself a headache, she decided
to shift her attention to the daily grind, and tried to come up with an
effective way to get her loud-mouthed eighth graders to come in after lunch at
a reasonable volume, without having to bellow at them. Over the years, she had
discovered that the louder she was, the louder they got. After a while they were
immune to the yelling. Besides, all that carrying on made Sophie feel worse.
These days, she kept her shouting to a minimum. When she did have to resort to
it, her students were usually stunned into silence because it was such a rare
occurrence.
    What happened to kids anyway? Or was it
the adults who had changed? At the end of each year, some of her students would
tease her about how relieved she would be once they were gone. Her response was
always that she would miss them as individuals. But as a group? Not so much.
That didn’t apply to all her classes, of course. The truth of the matter was
that the majority of the kids were positively delightful when relating with
them on a one-to-one basis.
    On the other hand, the manner in which
many of them interacted with each other was often obnoxious. Rude,
gossipy, and mean, no matter how much Sophie preached to them. These were the
times in which Sophie wondered if she took them too seriously, because they
always argued it was just their way of playing with each other. Sophie didn’t
care, or buy it, for that matter. Why did playing around have to involve
cutting to the bone?
    Sophie was just thankful she was at a
school whose students were relatively well-behaved, for she’d heard horror
stories from those who had come from truly awful places. Like their principal
once said, at worst, the students here were rambunctious.
    One by one, students began filtering
into the courtyard, where they took seats at one of the tables and waited to be
called to get their pizza. It was always a small group, about thirty kids. 
    Sophie responded to the occasional
“thank you” as the students picked up their food, and she proceeded to stack
the empty pizza boxes underneath the table. After the students were all seated
and eating, Sophie leaned on the outer window sill and sat