A Soft Place to Land by Susan Rebecca White

Jake started driving toward Allen Hall, the junior high building.
    He glanced at Ruthie in his rearview mirror, and she realized he had just asked her a question.
    “What?” she said. “I can’t hear you.”
    He turned down the music, just a little. “You’re Ruthie, right?”
    “Uh-huh,” said Ruthie.
    He whispered something to Julia, something about Julia being the sexy one.
    “Shut up,” said Julia. But in the rearview mirror Ruthie saw her sister’s private smile.
    Sometimes Ruthie hated her sister.
    They were almost to Allen Hall. Ruthie did not want Jake to pull up in front of it. Usually there was a teacher stationed by the front entrance, making sure drop-off ran smoothly. Ruthie did not want to be caught in the car of a smoking student.
    “This is fine,” said Ruthie, pointing to a curb a good three hundred feet from the entrance. “Just drop me off here.”
    Jake pulled over to the curb Ruthie had indicated. Once the car was stopped Julia got out of the passenger seat so she could tilt it forward and let Ruthie squeeze through. As Ruthie was walking away from Jake’s car, her L.L. Bean backpack swung over one shoulder, she heard Jake ask her sister, “Want to get out of here?”
    “Fuck yeah,” said Julia, and before Ruthie could say anything Jake was swinging a U-turn, then peeling down the main drive, headed toward the back gate of campus.
    They were going to get caught. Ruthie knew it. Dean Hashermade a point of hiding out in the woods by the back gate, on the lookout for students trying to get away.
    Ruthie was so occupied thinking about Julia and the hell she would catch—if not from Mimi, then from the school—for leaving campus to cut class with a smoking, speeding boy that at first she did not notice the commotion taking place in the turnaround in front of Allen Hall.
    And then suddenly Ruthie was upon it, looking down at Laney Daley along with twelve or so other students. Laney was scrambling around on the sidewalk on her hands and knees, wearing jeans so tight they squished her rear flat as an ironing board. She was picking up what looked like little white cigars rolling about. But of course they weren’t cigars; they were tampons. Somehow they had fallen out of her purse, which lay open and abandoned a few feet away.
    There must have been twenty tampons on the loose. Ruthie could not fathom why Laney would choose to bring twenty tampons with her to school. Then again, most everything Laney did was unfathomable. Laney, who was also new to Coventry that year, was so awkward, so earnest, and so nakedly desperate that sometimes Ruthie wanted to pull her aside and just give her a few tips for survival. Like that tampons were a private thing, a shameful thing, something to be zipped away in an inner pocket of a backpack or a purse. And you only brought two to school—at the very most!—on days when you had your period.
    Ruthie registered the looks on the faces of those observing Laney. Their expressions were short on sympathy, long on scorn. Within the half hour, everyone would know about this.
    But now the second bell was ringing and so the gawkers rushed inside.
    Ruthie was on her way in when she saw a familiar burgundy diesel Mercedes wagon pull up to the curb. It was Mrs. Love’s car, the same one she drove when Alex and Ruthie started pre-school together at St. Catherine’s.
    Ruthie hadn’t seen Mrs. Love since the funeral.
    Alex stepped out of the front seat of the wagon, wearing a button-down pink-and-white-striped shirt over a short khaki skirt, Keds, tiny ankle socks. Ruthie smiled at Alex, and waved at Mrs. Love through the closed passenger window. Mrs. Love rolled the window down. She was wearing tennis whites. Atop her blond hair was a visor with the words “The Cloister” spelled across it.
    “Hi, Max!” said Mrs. Love, her face taking on an expression of delight, affection, and perhaps a little pity.
    Max was what she had called Ruthie ever since Ruthie had changed her