This felt reckless. Absurd. But at the same time, he was so tired of having to hide himself from the world. Mrs. Caroline was not Ms. Heath. Even if he wasn’t going to snitch on Mike, he could say something to her, because . . . well, she’d listen to him.

“What do you do if someone’s being cruel to you?”

She raised an eyebrow, then glanced at the door. She turned back and smiled. “Is someone being mean to you, Mr. Muñoz?”

He frowned. “Cruel.”

“What?” she said.

“Not mean. Cruel. It’s different.”

She nodded. “Okay, I hear you. That is very different.”

“It is.” He ran a hand through his curls, uncertain if he should press on, but he swallowed down his fear. “What do I do?”

“I assume this is someone you can’t just get away from.”

He nodded back at her. “Yeah.”

“And you feel trapped.”

His eyes went wide. “Kind of, actually. Like . . . I can’t escape them but I also can’t ignore them because they’re everywhere.”

Mrs. Caroline moved closer to Héctor and sat on the desk in front of him. “Do other people like this cruel person?”

“Yes,” he said quietly, his heart thumping. He had to be careful; he didn’t want to make this worse than it already was.

“That’s really hard, Héctor,” she said. “You shouldn’t feel bad about how difficult it is. Even grown-ups deal with that, and we don’t always deal with it well.”

“Really?” he said.

She nodded. “There used to be another art teacher here,” she said. “When I came to Orangevale, we worked together to teach different grades. He had sixth grade, and I had seventh and eighth.”

“What happened?”

“The previous teacher got fired.”

“Whoa. You serious?”

She sighed, and it was the first time that she didn’t seem like a teacher to him. It was like she was wearing a different outfit and he was seeing a new side of her.

“Very serious. He didn’t like me, Héctor. And I have my suspicions why, but he was cruel to me. He stole supplies, he sabotaged my classes, he said terrible things about me behind my back to other teachers.”

“What?” Héctor’s blood boiled. How could anyone have anything bad to say about Mrs. Caroline?

“It was shocking. No matter how many times I tried being nice, his behavior didn’t change. He just kept getting worse.”

This sounded too familiar to Héctor. He had also tried to be kind to Mike and the Minions. He’d even told Ms. Heath!

“So what did you do?” he asked. “Did you, like . . . rumble with him in the parking lot? Because I kinda wanna do that right now.”

She chuckled. “If only it had been that easy,” she said. “No, I had to report him after he started destroying my students’ art.”