"Exactly! Every parent at this school is somebody. Our kids are the best of the best. Just thinking about that little bastard going to the same school as my child makes me sick to my stomach!"
The woman at the center of it all spoke up, her contempt completely undisguised:
"Oh, I invited her sincerely. But if she actually has the nerve to show up, I'd love to get a good look at the kind of trash that seduced my husband and had the audacity to bear his child!"
By the last word, Maria Henson's eyes were brimming with raw hatred.
Something in me stirred, an involuntary flicker of pity for her. But beneath that pity lay something far stronger: the sheer absurdity of it all.
Walter Perez, a man who'd married into my family with nothing to his name, had her wrapped around his finger without her even knowing it. She sat there like a hen puffing up its feathers in a dying frenzy, pitiful and small, yet impossibly shrill.
I was about to step inside when I heard my daughter's homeroom teacher, her voice oozing with that sickeningly eager, groveling sweetness: