“Where are you living next year?” asked Ms. Radley.
“I don’t know. I know where I’d like to be, but so far I haven’t had much luck with the housing lottery.”
“That can happen.”
The dog scooted closer and heaved herself upside down. I rubbed the pink skin of her belly.
“Raspberry is very happy,” said Ms. Radley.
I was beginning to cry. I fought it, swallowing and blinking. I thought about Cliff Gillespie and his elements. I thought about the bike in the water. Nothing was enough to stop the tears.
“Are you looking forward to sixth form?” she asked me.
“I’m looking forward to my ISP. I mean, if it’s approved, if you’re comfortable with it, of course. And I’d like to start Italian, if they can find a teacher. And it’ll be good, I guess, to be at the top of things.” By which I meant that Rick and Taz and Budge and all of them would be gone. I was almost there. So close. “And college, of course…”
“Yes, yes.”
The dog was snoring. Ms. Radley said, “You’ve got free afternoons with that hand, do you?”
“I do. I run.”
“Where?”
“Around campus. Blinking Light. Boat Docks. The woods.”
“Hm. I wonder if you might take this one with you sometime.” Ms. Radley aimed a tethered needle toward the dog. “She loves the woods.”
“Really? I could do that?”
“Her leash is right over there.”
“That’s great. That would be amazing. The woods can be kind of creepy. I’d feel so much safer with a dog with me. I’d feel so much better.”
“Good.” Ms. Radley raised up her knitting and examined something close under her lamp. “Sweater for my daughter.”
“I wish I had a dog in my room,” I said suddenly. “At night.”
I heard the needles clicking again.
“I wish you did too.”
She hadn’t asked me any of the questions I’d been sure of. Tell me about your plans for the project. Tell me how you will balance this with your course load as a senior. How many pages? With what supporting evidence? What outside sources? Initial bibliography? Tell me about yourself. About your mother, who’s a priest, like me. Prove yourself.
“Lacy,” she said. “You know that I have to be a chaplain to everyone.”
I didn’t understand. “Of course…”
“So you will see me being friendly with people who have been horrible to you. That is my job and I cannot change that.”
“I would never ask you to—”
“But,” she continued, still without looking over at me, “if you ever feel unsafe, at any hour, you just come right in through that door.” She gestured with her needles. “It’s unlocked. The guest room is just there. There is a bed made up. No need to wake me, and you know Raspberry. Just come up and you may sleep there. I will vouch for you.”
I couldn’t talk. My tears fell onto the dog’s fur. Ms. Radley knew this, and did not look my way. It was generosity on top of generosity, delivered without fanfare and without any expectation of reply. I hardly knew what to do with myself. I was silent, terrified of the flood.
She went on knitting for a while, until I found the courage to thump the dog twice in valediction, stand up, say thank you, and get out of there. Any longer and I’d have dissolved. She had me bring her a pen from a table so she could sign my ISP form, and I held that page in my good hand all the way back down to my dorm.
I was at the Tuck Shop, buying myself a blueberry muffin. The shop sold highly processed baked goods wrapped in cellophane. They were wet to the touch when you unwrapped them, and I liked to microwave them for half a minute to make them even softer, so they wouldn’t hurt too much when I swallowed.
Because I still didn’t know what was wrong with my throat, I considered each new outbreak of sores to be a punishment. This time I wasn’t so sure what I’d done—I hadn’t had much to do with any boys lately—so I figured it must be that I’d thrown in the towel on the Ferguson exams, especially after The Rock went to so much trouble to help me. But the weather was finally warming. The air was humid, raising steam over the meadow when the sun broke through. Afternoons were properly hot. So close, the end of the year. So close.
“Hey, Lacy,” said a voice behind me. The tone was sly, on the tilt, and I braced for an insult.
But when I turned it was just Scotty, Elise’s Scotty, the boy she’d left behind when she’d withdrawn from school. He gave me his impish smile and made a little wave.
“What’s up?” I said. I marveled that his hair was still shaggy, a giant pouf all around. It hadn’t gotten any bigger all year, which meant either that it grew that long on its own but no longer, or that he carefully trimmed it to exactly this mess. Either way it was interesting, nonthreatening.
“Have you talked to Elise?” he asked.
I hadn’t. It hadn’t occurred to me. Do soldiers still in foxholes write to the ones who got to go home?
“No. Have you?”
He shook his head.
He wore low-slung cords that were covered in what looked like plaster. Hand-swipes were visible across his thighs. But his shirt was an Oxford button-down that still bore the sheer planes of an iron, and seeing him in it I imagined his mother, how her loving him kept all of this together.
“What’s that you’re eating?” he said.
I held up my paper plate.
“Oh,” he said, and scratched at the back of his head. He did this absentmindedly, when he was anxious or without a thought, not because something itched.
“Want some?”
“Oh, naw. I’m good.”
His accent was almost Southern. “Scotty, where are you from again?” I asked.
“Philadelphia.”
I knew nothing about Philadelphia. I wasn’t even sure where it was.
“Cool.”
“You’re from Chicago.”
“Yep.”
“Cool.”
“Yep.”
I balanced
