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“What did you do?”
    â€œI told her that Indians are not the Noble Savages she made them out to be. She was going off on how American Indians were somehow saints. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I did.”
    â€œBecause David was there?” Tabitha asked.
    â€œNo. Well, maybe a little,” said Eleanor. “But she was wrong. Just wrong. Indians were not noble shepherds or peaceful neighbors.”
    â€œNo, they weren’t,” agreed Tabitha, again stroking Eleanor’s hair. Eleanor leaned into her mother’s hand, relishing the contact. Her hands were cold, but her fingers felt like love itself caressed her head and neck.
    â€œPeople change. Attitudes change. Don’t be prejudiced,” Tabitha said.
    â€œOkay, but it’s flat out ignorant to say the Indians were all rain dances and peace-pipes.”
    â€œStill, they’re your people,” began Tabitha and then stopped herself when Eleanor tensed. Tabitha dropped her hand down Eleanor’s back and scratched it through her shirt.
    â€œSo did you get in trouble?”
    â€œNo. She just went on talking.”
    â€œShe probably won’t call on you again for a while, huh?” offered Tabitha.
    â€œI was thinking the same thing. So it’s not all bad.”
    â€œNone of it is bad, cupcake. I’m proud of you.”
    Tabitha leaned forward and kissed her daughter on her forehead. On her mother’s breath, Eleanor could smell green tea and lemon, strong and hot, mingling with the nausea pill dissolving in her stomach. The medley of odors nearly covered the wretched underlying stink of the murdering cancer eating her away.

CHAPTER FIVE
    R obby Guide, the half-blood Shoshone, was the first boy to extend David friendship. Robby was the first to join David at lunch, and they talked about old times in the woods. Eleanor listened and watched, ashamed that she hadn’t been the first to speak to him. She’d wanted to, but hadn’t.
    â€œMr. Blake is new this year,” Robby told David, “if you haven’t figured that out yet. We haven’t had a foreign language teacher since that German chick left a couple of years back.”
    Eleanor watched David with Robby. David was happy for the company. She knew he’d suffered under the silent-treatment. He’d reached out to several people, but in varied shades of rudeness from “quiet, here comes the teacher” to “bug off loser,” each had put him off; none had welcomed him.
    Once, in chemistry, when David was ruining an experiment, Eleanor had actually taken a step toward his table to help, but she held back. If she was the first to welcome David, she might well be the only one. Eleanor’s reputation for non-existence was not something David needed. He needed to belong as much as Eleanor needed to hide. His survival might depend on it.
    â€œThere’s no negotiating with Mr. Graham,” said Robby. “If you’re lucky and catch him on a full moon or something, he might let you do some extra credit, but once he enters a score in his book, that’s it. It’s over.”
    Robby was one of the “nice boys.” There were basically two groups of boys in Jamesford. One, the nice ones, was a loose affiliation of kids who were behaved and decent and minded their own business. Then there were the bad boys. Tabitha had called them that back in elementary school when Eleanor told her about them kicking a dog at recess and pulling her hair when she cried about it. That group was a tighter circle of six or seven kids who were responsible, Eleanor knew, for all the vandalism and juvenile crime in Jamesford. The leader was Russell Liddle. He wasn’t the biggest or the fastest or even the meanest, but he was cleverer than the others, and since every pack of wolves needed a leader, he’d stepped up to be it.
    On the girls’ side, there were ever-shifting circles of friends among the