Grace by T. Greenwood

his camera, take some pictures of the river, the new green tops of the trees. He thought about the church that looked like a castle. A cathedral in the light. He pulled his camera from his backpack and peered down the long hallway through his viewfinder.
    “Hey, it’s the Abdominal Snowman,” Ethan Sweeney said, stepping in front of Trevor, his face filling the frame. He’d gotten his hair cut, and it stuck up from his scalp in sharp red spikes. His freckles looked like spaghetti sauce splatters on a white stove top.
    “It’s Abominable, ” Trevor said, quickly shoving his camera back in his bag. What an idiot.
    “That’s what I said, asshole .” Ethan’s already squinty eyes closed into slits like a snake. Then Ethan put his face close enough to his that Trevor could smell what he’d had for lunch. “Stupid faggot asshole.”
    And Trevor could feel it happening. Taste the metal filling his mouth, practically hear the clink clink clink of the bones in his hands as they also curled into fists. But just as he pulled his arm back, Mr. Douglas was standing between them, shoving both of their chests with his meaty hands, acting as a wall between them, looking back and forth from him to Ethan like the referee in a boxing match. “Do we have a problem here, fellas?”
    He wasn’t sure why Ethan and Mike were always pushing his buttons. If he tried, he could level them both. Old habits die like a sonuvabitch, Pop would say; they’d both been giving him a hard time since second grade. They probably figured he was still too afraid to really fight back. He used to just cry when they started in on him. Run away.
    After the final bell rang, Mrs. Cross called Trevor over in the hallway. “How are we doing, Trevor?” she asked. He hated how she spoke in the plural, as if saying “we” made them on the same team. “I hear we had another run-in with Mr. Sweeney this afternoon?”
    Her perfume was making him light-headed. He stared at the floor, at her toes poking out of her high-heeled shoes. At a wad of green gum stuck to the floor.
    “Do you think it might be a good idea to have a little sit-down to talk about whatever it is that’s going on between you two? Maybe if we can get some communication going between you boys, we can get to the root of this.” Mrs. Cross looked awfully proud of herself, as though she’d just figured out a way to bring peace to the Middle East, though Trevor thought that might be more likely than getting Ethan Sweeney to stop bothering him.
    Mrs. Cross put her hand across his shoulder as if to steer him down the hall, but at her touch his shoulder jumped, jerking her hand away. He caught his breath as her eyes widened; she looked at him in disbelief.
    “I didn’t even do anything!” Trevor said, feeling bile rising in his throat, and then he was running; he could hear his sneakers squeaking across the linoleum, feel his hair blowing away from his face, see the tiles moving beneath his feet. He knew if he were to look back now, Mrs. Cross would be standing there, shaking her head. He ran all the way down the hall to the exit, his backpack slamming against his spine.
    “Tomorrow afternoon, Trevor. Three o’clock. Sharp. In my office.” Her voice chased after him.
    K urt sat down at the kitchen table after supper and reached for the stack of bills on the counter. He’d just sent off the tax bill to the IRS; there would be no refund this year, and the numbers in the checkbook were far lower than he was comfortable with. He knew that one unexpected expense, one emergency visit to the pediatrician, one trip to the shop for Elsbeth’s piece-of-shit car, could mean another major ding in their already beaten-up credit. He divided the bills by delinquency: thirty days past due, sixty days, ninety plus, the ones threatening collections. He paid the utilities first (those things they could not live without: electricity, water, gas). He opened something from their mortgage company next, tearing