“Where’d you get that T-shirt, zitface? Hey, Tank, you ever heard of this brand?”

Stuff like this.

“You know they got stuff out today that can help you with acne?” Vic said about the pimples on Thomas’s chin.

Every single thing Vic could think of belittling him for, he did. Mrs. Hayne told him numerous times to stop talking in the back of the room, but she obviously had no idea what he was talking about.

Thomas would have told anybody who asked that the taunts and the names meant nothing. But they stung. They peeled away layers of self-confidence, and word after word and encounter after encounter left him feeling thin and shredded.

In the last class before the end of the day, as kids spoke about upcoming Christmas vacations and what they wanted for the holiday, Thomas could only think of one thing.

It wasn’t the list that he’d given to his mom for the Angel Tree. He seriously doubted he was going to get any of those gifts.

No, Thomas only wanted one gift. To be left alone by Vic, the same way everybody else left him alone.

Opportunities

When the truck pulled up, a part of her seized up while another part of her already starting planning the escape route. All in less than a second as she glanced outside at the white truck.

Then Lynn saw a stranger approaching and realized it wasn’t him.

Daryl hadn’t finally decided to show up at her front door and try to bring them all back home.

Yet.

It had almost been a year, and the only interaction with her husband had been the few times she’d called and then hung up on him from a phone at the restaurant before saying anything. Daryl didn’t have caller ID, but he probably knew it was her. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d called.

Maybe to check and see if he was still alive.

He probably assumed she’d come back to the Greer area since some of her family still lived out there. She wondered if Daryl had called her sister and brother, but neither of them knew she had moved back. Not that they would have been overjoyed anyway. Daryl had been the one who promised her years ago when they first married that he was rescuing Lynn from her drug-taking white-trash family.

As the door on the trailer rattled from the knocks, Lynn held a hand over her heart and breathed in for a moment. It would probably take a half hour to slow down.

“Can I help you?” she asked the man at her door.

“You called about your stove.”

She had been so scared she had forgotten that Mr. Sinclair had gotten someone to come in to see about the stove. “Oh, yes, please come in.”

A part of her wanted to double-check and see if her husband was anywhere around, but she forced herself to let it go.