As the vehicle pulled up to the house and parked, with another one close behind it, Kat stood to stretch out the kinks. She walked around to the side of the beams of light. The first vehicle was hers. Despite how stiff and cold she’d gotten, sleeping like a forgotten toy on her front steps, the sight of her car—with the promise of her house key and therefore a hot bath—sent a wave of warmth washing over her.
Then she got to the driver’s-side door and noticed the entire side of the car was smashed in. The side mirror dangled from its cable, and deep gouges scarred the paint from the front bumper to the back one. She wobbled and pressed her hands to her mouth.
The driver, one of her students, pulled ineffectually at the door handle. After a few seconds he gave up and crawled across to the passenger seat and exited through that door. He shuffled around the car and held out her keys.
“I’m uh… sorry.” His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he looked younger than he was, and terribly guilty. He scuffed his worn-out sneakers. “I—I—I’ll pay for it.”
“Are you hurt?” She scanned him from head to toe, scrutinizing his face and peering at his pupils. She held up three fingers. “How many fingers do you see? What’s your middle name? Tell me the date. Are you dizzy? Can you walk in a straight—”
“Ms. Cherish, I’m good. See?” He closed his eyes and touched his nose, then patted the top of his head and rubbed his stomach. He opened his eyes. “Three fingers, Christopher, September twentieth, no,” he said, walking backward in a straight line.
The driver of the second vehicle honked. Christopher gulped. “I really will pay to get it fixed.”
Her shiny new car. She’d saved for so long to buy it, picked out the one with the best safety features available. She couldn’t look at it anymore, so she fixed her gaze on the teenaged boy, whose family of eight drove a beat-up old cargo van, who seldom wore new clothes because his parents just couldn’t afford them, who couldn’t possibly have a clue how expensive the repairs to a new car would be.
Kat swallowed the urge to fall to her knees in the mud and beat her fists on the ground. “Don’t worry about it. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
His forehead wrinkled. “But—”
“I have insurance. It’s all right.” She gave a pointed glance at the other vehicle. “Your ride is waiting. Thank you for bringing my car home. Really. I appreciate it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. Go on and get some sleep before school. And I’ll bet you have some homework to catch up on after missing school today.”
His cheekbones flushed pink. “Yeah.”
“Shoo.” She flapped her hands at him and watched him lope away. Then she retrieved her purse and climbed the steps to her front door.
She’d never tell Christopher, but her insurance didn’t cover damage caused by someone else driving her car.
As soon as she was sure she was alone, she let out a shriek that echoed back from the forest and set a flock of crows flapping and squawking from the trees.
She fumbled the key into the lock and let herself in. When she rented this house, she picked it because the decor was beige and calm and soothing, and she thought that’s what she needed. If Lacey were here, there would be a neon-pink sock dangling from the lamp and a take-out container lodged between the couch cushions.
What she wouldn’t give to come home to a month worth of dirty, colorful socks strewn about the house.
She shrugged out of her raincoat and tossed her purse onto the counter. The clock on the stove said it was 9:00 p.m. Before she did anything, even get warmed up in the shower, she’d better call the school superintendent and smooth things over with him. She pulled up his cell number and hit the call button. As she waited for him to pick up, the muscles in her shoulders wound themselves tight as springs.
The call connected.
“You have some nerve,” he said in an acid tone. Apparently he had Caller ID. And had been expecting her call. “Using your position of authority, encouraging your students—my son—to vandalize logging equipment.”
As he ranted, she clamped her lips between her front teeth, got a towel from the bathroom, and rubbed her dripping hair. Finally, he took a breath.
Kat dredged up her school board meeting voice. “I have a signed permission slip from each of the parents, including you,” she reminded him pleasantly. “They agreed that the students’ role would be observational only and that they wouldn’t physically take part in the protest.”
“I never got one of those forms.”
“Are you sure? I checked them all against the class lists, and all the signatures were there.” She’d copied the forms and taken the copies home, and she paged through them now and found the one she was looking for. “I have it right here in front of me. It looks like your signature to me.”
“Then it’s forged.”
She tilted her head and studied the bold pen strokes. “If it is, it’s a good forgery.”
“Are you accusing my son of something, Ms. Cherish?” His tone lowered, and she had a mental image of him clenching his fists.
Who did he think he was? “No.” School board meeting voice, Kat. “I’m saying I was thorough in checking the signatures.”
The superintendent cleared his throat. “The board made it abundantly clear to you… if you chose to go through with this stupid political stunt, you would take steps to prevent the students’ involvement. Now my own son has been arrested. Arrested! How do you think that makes me look?”
Kat slapped the signed form down on her counter. It makes you look like the parent of a vandal and a forger. Why hadn’t she waited till after she had a shower and a hot meal, given herself time to think through possible responses to his reaction? She pulled the phone from her ear and stared hard at it, willing the superintendent to see reason.
“You’re being transferred. Immediately.” His voice blared through the sound of her pulse.
“Look, you’re stressed out right now.” A transfer because of a conflict between a principal and a board member? Oh, please—if district policy covered that, principals would transfer to a different school every few months. Now, if the parents had complained, it would be a different story. But they hadn’t. Well, except this one. “Let’s talk about it when we’ve all had a chance to cool down.”
“You’ll submit your request for a transfer”—his voice cracked—“by the end of the day.”
This was more than her job. She wasn’t a success in any other area of her life, but she was a damn good principal. She couldn’t lose this, not because of a petty disagreement with a man who didn’t have a clue what his child was up to half the time.
“We’ll talk about it. Later.” Right now she needed to sleep for a few hours. Things would look better in the morning. They had to.
He gave a derisive snort. “I have a stack of signed parent complaints demanding your transfer.”
Silence pressed down on her. How had he managed that? Her shoulders sagged. It didn’t matter how he’d done it. If he had managed to convince enough parents to request her transfer, she was finished here.
* * *
The parents’ signatures were real, and Kat really had to transfer to a different school.
Why the board had decided to send her back to Craigmont hadn’t been explained.
The whole point of her taking this job in Mills Creek was to provide a secure future for Lacey, even if that meant simply setting an example of how to grow up and take responsibility for herself. Not that Kat’d had much chance to do that—but in the last while, she was feeling her way through making her own decisions. Too many choices had been stolen from her, ever since Lacey came along and turned their family’s world upside down.
She’d given up everything for Lacey. She’d even given up Evan.
Now her choice to be a voice in her community had ended up with her losing her place here. All she wanted to do was go home and lick her wounds, but other than this little house, far away from everyone she
loved, she didn’t have a home anymore. And now she had to go back to Craigmont, opening up wounds that had barely begun to scab over.
She picked up her phone to call Lacey, and all she got was voice mail. As usual. She sighed and left her usual message. “Love you, kiddo. Call me.”
She looked around her at the utilitarian cabin. Just one picture on the wall—an enlargement of Lacey’s baby portrait, with sixteen-year-old Kat looking defiant as she held her infant sister. Her mom had argued against it, but that had been one of the few battles Kat had won back then. She was part of Lacey’s family, too, and somehow that picture had felt like proof it was true.
It hadn’t done much to keep them from growing further and further apart over the years.
Sinking into her one chair and propping her feet on a box she still hadn’t unpacked, as though she’d instinctively known she wouldn’t be staying here long enough to put down roots, she called Peg Kelly, who knew everything about her and liked her anyway.
Defeat welled in her throat. “Can I stay with you for a few days?”
“Hmmph. It’s about time.”
Peg’s dramatically fake tone of insult was what it took to finally make Kat thaw on the inside. She explained about the forged signature and the board’s backlash. “It’ll be good, right? To make a fresh start. I just can’t understand why they picked Craigmont out of all the communities in the province.”
“About that,” Peg said.
The more she thought about it, the madder she got.
“And can you believe the kid who wrecked that machine forged his father’s signature, and I’m the one who has to leave? I’m so sick of people making arbitrary decisions about what’s right and what’s wrong, and my life going into a tailspin every time it happens.”
“Oh boy.”
Kat sat up straight, with her feet flat on the floor. She knew that tone too well. “Oh boy, what?”
She had the unsettling image of the week before Lacey was born, when Kat and her mother and Peg were in Peg’s house, deciding about Lacey’s future, and the other two women had decided what was best without considering Kat’s opinion. “Peg, oh boy, what?”
“Um… about your job situation. I may have said something to someone…”
Her stomach dropped. Not again, please, not again. “Who, Peg? Who is meddling with my life this time?”
“Climb down from the ceiling, would you?” An edge to Peg’s voice said Kat had crossed a line. “I heard there was a job posting for vice-principal at Craigmont High School a while back, so I mentioned it to the superintendent when he called—in case you’re ready to come home. And then later I called the principal of Craigmont High and set up a tentative meeting so you wouldn’t have to arrange everything at the last minute. You don’t have to go, but I wanted you to have the choice.”
Kat slumped back in the chair and buried her face in her hands. Vice-principal. Not principal. “Thank you, Peg,” she said quietly.
Could going home to Craigmont be a fresh start for her? After she said good-bye to Peg, Kat made calls to the local utility companies. And wondered whether there ever could be a fresh start for her and Evan. Or whether even that, like everything else to do with her and Evan Jerry, would be a monumental disaster.
Meet the author of OVER THE EDGE
SUSAN LORHER
Susan Lohrer grew up in more towns in western Canada than she has fingers to count them on. She currently lives in southern BC with her husband of more than two decades, their two teenagers who are still at home, three dogs, and far more aquariums than a reasonable household should contain. She believes life is always better with a healthy dose of humor.
Website: http://www.susanlohrer.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Author.Susan.Lohrer
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Thirty
Chapter One ~ The Merger
Meet the Author
CHAPTER 1 ~ OVER THE EDGE
Acceptance, The Page 22