Holly Banks Full of Angst (Village of Primm, #1)(29)

“LET ME GOOOOOO!” Ella thundered. “I HATE CRAYONS.” But it sounded more like I ATE CRAYONS. Which Holly would be fine with right about now because she could at least blame Ella’s behavior on an upset stomach.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Holly was supposed to prepare her child for school, both socially and emotionally. She felt—she didn’t know what she felt. Guilt? Worry? Embarrassment? Anger? Why wasn’t Ella walking through the gates of the school like all the other Primm children? Seriously, Ella? Could you at least try to be prim? Because I’m pretty sure demon possession is not allowed at the academy.

The poor woman’s headband had been knocked silly and now sat askew; a hank of her hair hung across her left eye. Either thanks to nerves of steel, great training, or both, she remained calm, a consummate professional. She told Holly, “Call the school in thirty minutes. We’ll send a teacher’s aide from the guidance office to her classroom to check on her.”

“I WANT MY TOOTH BACKKKK. I ONLY GOT A DOLLAR.”

The woman was cool as a cucumber. Holly wished she could be like that, cucumber-like, but she wasn’t. She was egg-like. Cracked easily, usually served scrambled, and could make you sick if you weren’t careful.

“I. AM. PINKIE PIIIIIIIIIIE!”

And then—the woman quickly released Ella, placing her firmly on the ground.

“Did she just bite you?” Holly’s jaw dropped. Please say no. Please say no. “Did she?” Ella hadn’t bitten anyone since she sank her teeth into a kid at a park in Boulder City when she was three. And then there was that one time when she was almost four and bit a kid at the library during story time. Okay, so maybe she bit him twice, but the bites were a week apart, and he deserved it both times—sort of. And Holly was sorry if that mom dropped out of Mommy & Me Story Time because Ella couldn’t control herself. But Ella—Ella had never bitten a grown-up.

“I’m so sorry. Did she bite you? She bit you. Please tell me she didn’t bite you. She did—didn’t she? She bit you?”

“Yes.” The woman inspected the top of her arm for broken skin.

“Anything?” asked Holly. Thank goodness, no. Just teeth marks the size of a tiny shark’s. “Ella. Apologize right now. Biting is not okay.” Holly pleaded with the woman. “I’m so sorry. I’m as surprised as you are. Ella’s never bitten anyone. Ever.”

“It’ll be okay in a few minutes,” the woman said.

How is she still pleasant to us? How? My rabid kid just bit her bicep.

“Ella will be fine once she gets inside. Trust me,” the woman told Holly. “Kids always do better once the mother leaves.”

Wait. What? “Is that true?” That’s a horrible thing to say.

“Usually. Yes. I’m afraid it is.” The woman closed the car door with a reluctant smile, separating Holly from the child she’d brought into this world—a demon spawn, true, but she was Holly’s demon spawn.

Holly could barely see the top of Ella’s head. Barely see the little blue barrette she had fastened above her ear while urging her to finish her waffle. The barrier between them was just a car door, but apparently the barrier worked because through the closed window, Holly watched the woman say a few words to Ella, and then, miraculously, as if the skies opened up and a ray of sunshine beamed down from the heavens to light upon Ella’s head, Ella was cured. No more demon possession. No more Linda Blair.

Ella took the woman’s hand and walked up the cobblestone sidewalk as if nothing had happened. At least Holly was right about one thing: people who wore headbands tended to be nice people—despite telling mothers their children did better after they left.

Holly watched the two of them walk hand in hand up the cobblestone sidewalk and toward the grand front entrance that welcomed the children of Primm to the first day of school. The headband woman pulled a tissue from her pocket to wipe Ella’s cheeks. Stopping beside a pair of matching topiaries to wait at the back of a line, Ella turned to give Holly a tiny frightened wave. Holly pinched her arm. So this was it: kindergarten. Holly’s baby girl—all grown up.





10


Moments later



With Ella in line on the sidewalk, there was nothing for Holly to do at the moment except wait for the buses in front of her to pull out. Then she’d go home and take a shower, try to figure out what she was supposed to do with herself now that Ella would be gone all day every day. Holly reached for her phone to call Jack but didn’t have it because she’d left the house in such a hurry.

Holed up in her red Chevy Suburban, she passed the time watching Mary-Margaret St. James place an apple and a pencil into the hand of every child who disembarked from a bright-yellow school bus. The kids walked in single file beside the stately brick-and-iron gate, down the cobblestone sidewalk, and in through the same heavy wooden doors that Ella was in line to enter.

At least a dozen moms, fanned out behind Mary-Margaret, worked countless bushels of apples, handing off what must have amounted to over one thousand pencils and pieces of fruit, if Holly’s student head count was correct. Kindergarten through twelfth grade, about four classrooms per grade, twenty-five kids in each classroom. The apple passing resembled a bucket brigade, the kind used by firefighters before the invention of hand-pump fire engines. But they weren’t firefighters passing buckets of water to extinguish a fire. They were chipper, hardworking school moms dressed in the school colors of gold, black, and white, passing shiny red apples and pale-yellow pencils to eager schoolchildren. Intercepting each and every child to bestow a greeting, an apple, and a pencil certainly slowed the unload, but what could be more perfect? The moms’ flawless execution, the way they bent and reached in choreographed, synchronized assembly, astounded Holly. This dance of the mothers of Primm should be set to music, she thought. A ballet. No! A lilting instrumental jingle you’d expect to hear in a sappy nuclear family television show: Gee, Wally, I sure do like apples.