The Man in the Woods Read Free Page A

She did not understand how hard it was. What right did Helen have to hope these two old friends would want her tagging along anyway? Luckily she hadn’t embarrassed herself by asking to be included. Besides, Helen told herself, she should have known better. One look had convinced her that these two girls would one day be cheerleaders or baton twirlers. They would have boyfriends soon, if they didn’t already.
    In the old days, a hundred years ago, she’d learned over and over in school, poor people waited hand and foot on rich people. They tipped their hats and licked the boots of the wealthy. Rich people with servants and mansions hardly gave the poor their table scraps, much less held conversations with them. That may have gone down the drain years ago, Helen thought, but it was certainly still true in high school. Cheerleader types simply didn’t associate with frizzy-haired new girls who looked two years too young, locked themselves out of their lockers, and drew political cartoons.
    Mercifully Miss Podell forgot about her sixty seconds of silence almost the moment she announced it. The bell rang, and the class surged out toward the early buses.
    Helen was sure, as she wended her way up to the history room, that the last catastrophe of the day lay waiting for her with Mr. Brzostoski. He was probably Polish, she decided. Most likely the Russians had tortured his family to death and he had escaped to America, where everything was beautiful and wonderful. He probably didn’t like criticism of anything modern or American and would hate her for her drawing. He would probably think she was a Communist.
    Helen stood in the history room doorway, patiently watching him eat another banana while he marked his attendance sheets. Suddenly he noticed her and smiled.
    “Your six pages were excellent!” he said. “Where did you learn so much history?”
    “From my father,” Helen answered, smiling too and looking at his banana hungrily.
    “Hungry?”
    “Oh, am I! I locked all my stuff in my locker this morning by mistake. My lunch too.”
    Mr. Bro handed her a banana. “Eat!” he said, and to it he added a Hershey bar. Helen was pleased to see that despite all the bananas he was not a health-food freak. He held her cartoon up. “This,” he said, “is the best drawing to pass my desk in years.”
    The pleasure that burst like a tiny firework inside Helen must have shown in her face, and Mr. Bro was evidently waiting for it. He smiled even more broadly. “Now we have work to do,” he announced.
    Helen had been sure that pleasure itself had ceased to exist the moment she’d left St. Theresa’s and come to New Bedford Regional. “Work?” she asked.
    “You know the Whaler downstairs? The school paper?”
    “I think so. Down in the basement of the other building?”
    “That’s it. Now listen. The editor of the Whaler , Jerry Rosen, is a big shot. He wants only one thing in his life.”
    “What’s that?” asked Helen.
    “He wants to go to Yale. But he needs a scholarship. He wants to win the ten thousand dollar grant that the City of New Bedford gives out every June. He knows he’ll win it hands down if he gets the prize for journalism that the state awards every year to the best high school newspaper. Jerry is a very good editor, don’t get me wrong, but he has a soft spot.”
    Mr. Bro coughed, twisted his ring, and looked Helen square in the eyes. “I usually don’t talk to students this way,” he said, “especially brand-new ones, but ... somehow it’s hard to think of you as brand new.” He grinned. Then he began writing a note on a yellow legal pad.
    Helen felt also that Mr. Bro wasn’t brand new like her other teachers. She listened.
    “I want to help Jerry,” Mr. Bro went on. “He isn’t a wealthy boy. He’s a good editor and a fine student, and he deserves to go to Yale. His soft spot, unfortunately, is his girl friend, Beverly Boone.” He kept writing, seeming to choose his words carefully.