Believing Cedric Read Online Free PDF Page A

got comfortable on the seat; and once he had made sufficient bodily adjustments, he turned to her, smirking.
    â€œAnd just what are you grinning at? Do you think this is funny? Is that it?” She hadn’t meant to challenge him either. In fact, the only thing she wanted to do was leave him be, contain him in a place where he couldn’t be heard, and walk away. But now, after having explicitly confronted him, those same eyes were fixed on her again, teasingly clever, knowing. His smirk grew into a half-hearted smile, as if, yes, there really was something that was funny, a private joke that belonged to him and him alone. Then he looked away, beginning to inventory the rest of the room with the same hungry attention that she’d noticed in him a few minutes prior.
    She didn’t dare say another word. Instead, she closed the door and made her way to the ladies’ room, where she leaned against the tiled wall and watched her reflection gawk back at her in the mirror. What exactly did this all mean? Was she going crazy, finally losing her grip, like everyone thought she was? Because, being honest with herself, as it stood, the only thing she could be absolutely certain of was that the child who was holed up in the room a few doors away from her was not a child at all. She shook her head. No, she knew children, understood them. She could recognize when a child was simply reciting adult words, repeating things he’d heard his parents say, trying out snippets that he’d picked out from restaurant conversations and bus-stop arguments, but this was different. There was a cognizance with the language, a natural ease with it that could only come from profound maturity, from worldliness. And this, this was the only thing she could be sure of.
    So what was she supposed to do now? There was no one to help her, no one to ask advice from. It wasn’t as if she could just stroll up to the principal’s office and let him know that there was a man in the skin of a boy locked in the book room downstairs. It would be a matter of minutes before she was injected with sedatives and wheeled away to some institution for the rest of her life. No. She had to deal with this alone. And quickly.
    She noticed that her reflection didn’t look healthy, her complexion pallid, sickly. She stepped forward to the sink and turned on the taps, splashing her face with lukewarm water. When she was finished, she put a hand on the cold porcelain of the basin and leaned closer to the mirror. Her other hand wormed between the third and fourth buttons of her blouse and found the skin above the empty space there, pressing down on it, her fingers cold as a stack of nickels.
    The thought crossed her mind to just leave, to walk out the front doors and never return; let someone else clean up the mess. But she also knew that, if she did, she would be admitting to herself that she was insane, or at least incredibly unstable. Besides, if she just walked out now, wouldn’t they try to take away some of her retirement fund? And if so, how many friends did she have on the school board who would stand up for her, speak in her defence? Few. Maybe none.
    No, what she needed to do was to look at this problem with rational eyes, as something real, as something that actually happened to people. Then she could deal with it.
    She considered how he’d addressed her, the way he’d held her gaze as if he were on the same ground, the same standing, and it came to her that the best thing to do was to confront him in that light, as an equal. She would have to walk into the book room and have a rational, grounded conversation with him, a conversation that was going to be every bit as squeamish and gawky as standing her ground with another adult; one of those cumbersome situations that everyone has been in at some point, a colleague who has overstepped his or her boundaries, a supervisor who has made a mistake. This was going to be about diplomacy,