The Kingdom of Childhood

hallway.

The enormous room was dark when I stepped inside, except for a single fluorescent fixture in the far corner where the playhouse had been. Zach crouched on the balls of his feet beneath the yellow light, brushing sawdust out of a power sander. He did not look up when I came in.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated.

His shoulders twitched with a laugh that held no humor. “You’re sorry. I’ve been waiting all week to get called down to Beckett’s office. I knew I was in deep shit.”

I frowned and came closer, stopping at the edge of the square of light. “Why would you be in deep shit?”

He looked up and grinned—at my bad language, I assumed. “Over what happened. You looked pissed. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“I wasn’t pissed. I was terrified. All week I’ve been waiting to get called down to Beckett’s office. So I could get fired.”

He dismissed days of mortal fear with a shake of his head. “I’m not telling anybody.”

“Well, I didn’t know that.”

He stood up and laid the sander on the shelf, then jammed his hands into his back pockets. “Trust me, getting Scott’s mom fired wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good here. All my friends are his friends.”

“I appreciate that,” I told him. “But it was my fault, and I promise you it won’t ever happen again. If you don’t want to work with me on the bazaar anymore, I completely understand. I’ll tell your mom there’s a senior who needs hours. It won’t be a problem.”

“Nah, I’m not worried about it. I’ll just keep away from confined spaces.”

My laugh held an edge of mortification. “I don’t know what I was thinking, Zach. I’m so sorry. I swear to you I’ve never done anything like that before. My husband has been a jerk lately, and I’ve been lonely, and—” I stopped, realizing Zach had never asked for an explanation. “I must have been in a mood. There’s no way to justify it.”

“It’s all right. I thought you were cool with it at first. But then the look on your face after—I figured you thought I took it too far.”

Right away I shook my head. “Oh, no. I didn’t think that at all.”

At first his eyes registered confusion. Then he looked to the side and grinned.

I winced at his interpretation. “Okay, let’s wrap up this conversation,” I suggested, to his laughter. “Crazy mistake. It’ll never happen again. Done.”

“Done,” he agreed, and in my earnest need to wish it away, I chose, with a bold enthusiasm, to believe it was true. I had, after all, made a career out of fairy tales.

“So, anyway,” he said in a louder, lighter voice, “the playhouse is done. Great, huh?”

I replied with a quick nod. “Beautiful. I’ll sign off on all thirty of your service hours. Wonderful job.”

“Jeez, Teach,” he said, and the sarcasm in his smile was infectious. “You’re paying me off? I don’t think that’s legal.”

My laughter bubbled over, but even as I laughed I felt a shadow at its edge, the giddy feeling brought on by a sense of hopelessness. The danger loomed much larger than I had feared.

Not because he might report me.

But because he would not.

When my students ran out our classroom door to the playground, they did not spread out like bees, as they usually did, but gravitated toward a single point. It didn’t take long for me to realize why. Zach’s playhouse had been moved to the sidewalk between the playground and workshop, left behind, evidently, on its way to storage. Around the side of the workshop I spotted two teenagers wrestling a metal trolley past the concrete parking barriers.

“Let’s move to the play area, boys and girls,” I said. “This is for the Christmas auction. It needs to be tucked away safe and sound.”

Max popped his head out of one of the shuttered windows and grinned at me. “Out, Max,” I urged. I pointed toward the little wooden bridge in the sand pit. “Look, your friends are playing Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

“They’re playing Grenade Bandits,” he corrected.

“Well, why don’t you go play with them.”

As he scurried out, I shut the Dutch doors in relief. I felt thankful the playhouse was not destined for my classroom. Watching the children run around in it was unnerving. In the days since my encounter with Zach, even —perhaps especially—after I knew my job and life would be safe, I found myself mired in uneasy guilt and gloomy self-reflection. What could have possessed me to do such a thing? I wondered. I had spent my entire adult life in the service of a single master: pure childhood. Not God. Not a messiah or a prophet. Only childhood at its most undefiled, a walled garden as big as a child’s imagination could stretch, into which no evil thing could enter. I had obsessed over the minutiae of the color of a silk square, the finish of a toy horse. With a religious devotion, I worked to ensure that the unformed mind would experience only what was natural, what was pure. Now, in my failure to control a most natural impulse, I had revealed the wildly impure.

A lapse of reason, I thought. It wasn’t his youth that intoxicated me, but the way he had of bringing my own youth to the surface; with each passing hour with him another year seemed to fall away, until the woman in the mirror would have appeared to me a stranger. When he kissed me, he recognized the girl radiating out from within me. But I was not that girl anymore. Any jury of my peers would be happy to remind me of that fact. And because of that, I had to find a way to stay oriented in time, not to succumb to the pull of his camaraderie. If I needed affection so badly, then I needed to find a lover my own age.

I clutched at the knot beneath my head scarf and turned my thoughts toward the choir trip coming up at the end of the week. Sylvania’s madrigal choir had won a spot in a regional competition in Ohio, and so for four days I would be away from home, supervising teenagers but also free, off and on, to do as I wanted. In a year or so that might mean the chance to find a replacement for Russ, but at the moment I lacked enough nerve. Instead I would try to think like a free woman rather than a confined one. In my mind I would be nineteen