The Death of Us by Lori Rader-Day EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:Lori Rader-Day
- Language: English
- Genre: Women’s Crime Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 7.22 MB
- Price: Free
Lissette Kehoe’s phone gave a loud space-ray zap of a noise, the sound
she’d assigned to texts from her son. Her hand shot out to quiet it.
Through the open door of the office at her shoulder, her boss’s chair
squeaked. Liss quickly closed the window on her computer screen.
“Is that the kid already?” Vera Chan called out from her desk.
Already? When it was nearly six anyway, and almost everyone else in the
building—certainly all the support staff in the school’s main office—had
gone home at the final bell?
Vera was her friend by now, but someone Liss had to read to forecast the
kind of day she might have. The weather, as she had come to think of it.
And just as with storm clouds, she couldn’t take what came personally.
They’d been slammed with student crisis after student crisis since the
semester began. Liss only had to schedule them. Vera and Spence, the
counselors, did the delicate work of defusing.
But now that the actual weather was turning, days shortening, moods
turning sour, they’d hit the skids. Homecoming this week, with all its forced
hoopla and dashed expectations, and then midterm exams would claim their
victims. The juniors, or their parents, would soon realize the future needed
to be planned for, and the seniors applying early decision to their top
colleges would haunt the office for reassurances. The next school break
hovered out on the horizon like a mirage.
It all made for good reading in the notes Vera and Spence kept in the
student database. Of course, Liss wasn’t supposed to be reading those notes.
But how could she prioritize the students appropriately if she didn’t know
what they were dealing with?
Instead of snooping in the databases, she should have been getting ahead
on her own work. Catching up, really. But she couldn’t very well make
career fair calls after business hours.
Even as busy as things were, though, she still wouldn’t be at her desk this
late if not for Callan’s football practice. She wasn’t Vera. She had a life.
“Last whistle from Coach ten minutes early?” Liss said. “Unheard of.”
She reached for her phone. Mom, the text said, don’t freak out
When had that ever worked, on any mom, ever? Practice would run late
or he’d forgotten something at his dad’s apartment or he needed to build a
model of a DNA double helix for biology class, due tomorrow. When
Callan was younger, she’d had a total lock on his schedule and assignments.
Now he was fifteen. At this age, there was far less need for emergency
poster board, but her son was a different kind of challenge. She had to read
the weather forecast at home, too.
Mom, Callan had taken the time to type.
Her son’s messages to her were usually bare minimum, a handful of
characters and shapes she had to parse like messages from behind enemy
lines, with the detail she needed buried below code and evasion.
Are you OK? she typed. The phone made a little whoosh as the message
went on its way.
Where are you? she typed.
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