The Shadow of the Bear: A Fairy Tale Retold Read Free

said.
     Rose saw that Blanche glanced at Bear when he said that, but lowered her eyes again quickly.
    “I’m sorry,” said Mother. “It’s hard, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah, it is.” Bear was silent for a few minutes. Then he winced.
    “Does that hurt?” Mother looked up at him. “Good! Good!” She continued rubbing. “How sharp is the pain? Faint or does it really hurt?”
    “Um—it really hurts.”
    “Good! Well, I’m sorry to tell you it will probably get worse before it gets better.”

    As if to distract himself, Bear looked at Blanche and met her eyes. “So, what’s your name?”
    Those black eyes seemed to see too much of her. She almost flinched, but stopped herself. “Blanche,” she said stiffly. The storm continued to roar in the darkness outside, and this person still seemed part of that darkness—and her mother had brought it right inside their house.
    “We go to St. Catherine’s high school,” Rose informed their guest. “Blanche is a senior and I’m a junior.”
    Blanche chewed her lip. There was Rose, spilling out information. The last thing Blanche wanted him to know was that they attended St. Catherine’s.  Mother should stop Rose from talking, but Mother didn’t know that Blanche knew that Bear was probably a drug dealer.  And Blanche couldn’t think of any way to tell her. 
    Wretched but defiant, Blanche got up and walked over to the rocking chair. She picked up her quilt and sat down, folding and smoothing it over her knees.
    “How do you like school?” Bear asked, leaning over to gently touch his feet. His jaw line was taut and he shut his eyes just a bit. Blanche noticed that he was really in pain, as much as he was trying hard not to show it.
    She felt odd, seeing his chance vulnerability. Here, on their living room couch, surrounded by their quaint little tables and books and lamps, his hugeness seemed to make him more clumsy and out of place than threatening.  It was hard to remember now how he usually looked, hanging out with the drug pushers in the high school parking lot.
    St. Catherine’s was an ugly rectangular block building, four unremarkable stories high. The hallways were long and narrow, and the three stairwells were always crowded between classes. But in the morning, the top of the south stairwell was usually empty, and that was where Blanche went for refuge when she felt besieged by her classmates. It had a window, and it was from there she had seen the guy who called himself Bear.
    Sometimes on those mornings, she looked out on the grey cracked square of the parking lot and the surrounding dirty streets and felt trapped and lost. Before homeroom started, different groups of students hung out in the parking lot by the chain-link fence and smoked. Every once in a while, Blanche saw some money change hands, and she would get a hard, cold feeling inside.
    Usually standing among the crowd or hanging about on the edges was a tall, burly figure, a kerchief over his lengthy dreadlocks.  Blanche had noticed him at the beginning of the school year, mostly because he was someone she wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.  He looked like the sort of thug who was hired by kingpins to break arms.  But since he didn’t seem to be taking orders from anyone, Blanche had decided he had to be working alone. He would pace up and down the periphery with cool indifference, sometimes pausing to talk to a student or another suspicious-looking character. Once she had seen a police car crawl slowly through the traffic near the school, and the guy with the dreadlocks had sauntered casually off.
    And this was the same guy who was now sitting in their living room, having his feet washed by her mother. At the moment, he looked more shabby and bewildered than ferocious, but Blanche could not forget his usual appearance of disguised danger. She felt wooden inside, and cornered.
    But her blithe younger sister was apparently quite taken with this character of conflicting faces and sat