She saw that he had an endless supply: the pool of gray pebbles out of which a sad, spindly tree had been trying for ages to grow. Jonathan’s one hand was cupped, heavy with ammunition, while his other hand had found the deep pocket of his tracksuit.
She gazed down at him. “What.”
“Is it true that you’re leaving?”
“Are you serious?”
He shrugged. “I was wondering. I just wanted to know.”
“And it couldn’t wait.”
“So it’s true, then. You’re leaving.” With a softly spilling sound, he released his handful of pebbles back into their small enclosure. Then he glanced up, as if struck by a sudden thought. “You shouldn’t leave,” he said.
“I’m going back to school.”
“School?” he asked, incredulous. “What for?”
“I’m not going to yell it out the window!” She could hear the happiness in her own voice. “Couldn’t you have asked me in the hallway? Or some other place where people have conversations?”
But he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. His attention had already roamed elsewhere, and here she was leaning halfway out the window, hollering. She straightened at once, hands back on the sash, and as she declared, “I’m trying to teach right now,” she saw the mass of bodies in the courtyard part neatly along the middle, and Mr. Peele come bearing down on him.
He would be missing his meet that afternoon. And if he was still anything like he used to be in the eighth grade, she knew this was the one punishment that devastated him. Absurdly, she felt the fault was hers. And though she was certain there must have been other sightings before the year ended, this was the last time she could actually remember seeing him — his brave, shuffling walk up the steps in the shadow of tall Mr. Peele.
“So the man his mom married,” Sophie continued, “makes bank. He started a company and then he sold it. Technically I should call him Jonathan’s stepdad, but seeing that he came kind of late into the picture, it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of parenting left to be done. So we just call him Jeff. Or sometimes Jefe, but really only Bob calls him that.” Beatrice felt grateful as she half listened to Sophie’s sweet and inscrutable chatter, grateful that Sophie was the stranger she happened to be following from the station, and not another child, not Jonathan. “Jeff’s very interested in technology,” said Sophie, “and he subscribes to all of those magazines, and they’ve turned the whole garden level into — his word — a media center. It’s completely gorgeous. It’s like being inside a movie theater. But he won’t let you go down there holding even so much as a soda. Can you believe that? It’s criminaclass="underline" an entire media center gone to waste. So we’re stuck up in Jonathan’s room, everybody trying to fit on his bed, and there’s nothing to do except watch the guys play Grand Theft Auto on the little beat-up TV that used to be in his old house.”
“That is criminal,” Beatrice murmured.
“Julia will play sometimes, but I can’t stand it — those games make me sick. They give me headaches. So I have to entertain myself. And the other night, I’m poking around and looking at all these pictures he has taped up on the door of his closet — and I shriek, literally, because there is a photo of Bessie Blustein!” Oh, Bessie Blustein — Beatrice winced — that tortured soul whose name was as wrongly bovine and placid as her appearance. She had left the school after the eighth grade to reinvent herself as a gothic Elizabeth. “It was a picture from that day at the courthouse — she was wearing her choir robe, too. And whoever said that black is slimming — well, they never saw Bessie Blustein dressed up as a Supreme Court justice. I know, that’s really mean of me. I bet she’s lost a lot of weight by now. But in the picture she’s this big black smudge in the middle. To be fair, the photograph is pretty blurry. And I say to Jonathan, ‘What are you doing with a picture of Bessie Blustein on your wall?’ and he says, without even looking up from the game: fuck Bessie Blustein, it’s a picture of you. Meaning you, Ms. Hempel. And he says it with this voice like, you idiot. Meaning me. So I look more closely, and sure enough, there you are! Up in the corner, way in the background, trying to fix Ben Vrabel’s tie.”
A slow warmth suffused Beatrice’s face, her body — she felt as if she’d been set alight.
“And that’s when we started talking about the whole Constitution thing we did. Which is why it was still on my mind when I was talking to my friend. Don’t worry, you don’t know him, he didn’t go to our school. But here’s what I was trying to say: we still called you Ms. Hempel! We sounded like a bunch of little kids. Right in middle of a serious discussion about the war, presidential powers, civil liberties, all that stuff Completely incongruous. But that’s what I mean: you’re Ms. Hempel forever. At least to us.”
Beatrice was smiling uncontrollably.
“I know! Incongruous. You taught us that word,” Sophie said. “I still use it all the time. That, and precarious.”
Beatrice didn’t know what to do with herself, with this ridiculous feeling of joy, so she threw her arms around Sophie for another hug. “That’s about the nicest thing anyone has ever told me,” she said into a curtain of slippery hair. All she wanted to do now was float away, or at least travel the remaining two blocks to the park, where in the shade of its enormous plane tree she could unwrap the story and gaze at it quietly by herself. What a reversal — usually it was the young person itching to get away from the old — and here was puffy, aching Beatrice, making polite excuses to the most beautiful of girls.
“I need to pop into the store, anyhow,” said Sophie, untucking her orange purse. “I know, don’t give me that look; I know that it’s a disgusting habit. But it’s mine now!” she said cheerfully as she pulled an almost-empty pack of cigarettes from her bag.
“Kisses,” she cried, and stepped away, while Beatrice panicked, not knowing what she could give in return.
“You look breathtaking, Sophie!” she called. “Did I tell you that? You look glorious. All the way from the station I was walking behind you and thinking, what a beautiful, beautiful person…”
“Oh. Thanks,” Sophie said vaguely, as though she’d received this tribute so many times that it had ceased to mean anything at all. “That’s really sweet.”
Now it appeared as if she were the one who suddenly longed to get away.
“And I meant to ask,” persisted Beatrice, “whatever made you turn around? Because I’m so glad you did. Otherwise I never would have realized it was you, and we never would have had this chance to talk. But isn’t that an unusual thing? I almost wondered if you could hear what I was thinking. Because that’s odd, isn’t it — to just turn around as you’re walking down the street?”
A short, brittle laugh burst out of Sophie. “I’m not going to bore you with the long version, but needless to say, there’s a guy involved.” Famously, she rolled her eyes; but this time there was more than just contempt in the gesture, there was also weariness, and maybe something else. “Put it this way: it’s my new habit. Being aware of my surroundings. You know what I mean?”
Oh yes, fear. That’s what it was. Beatrice weakly held up her hand in a wave. “Well, be careful,” she said pointlessly. She pulled her sweater closer as she watched Sophie disappear inside the grubby store.
The two blocks that separated her from the park now struck her as an impossible distance. This happened more and more often, the abrupt onslaught of exhaustion. If she were to sink right down onto one of those worn stoops, would they let her stay? She realized she hadn’t even told Sophie — who probably just assumed she’d grown fat. And she didn’t remember to mention that she had a new name. No one, not even the solicitors who bothered her on the phone, called her Ms. Hempel anymore. And other new names were likely to come, among them Mama, most strangely. Or Mom. Something her students would on a rare occasion call her when they were deeply lost in concentration — an accident, of course, and they would blush.