The girl turned around.
“Ms. Hempel?”
It had been ages since anyone called her that.
“Sophie?” she asked, shocked that the person she’d been following was in fact a familiar one. Hard to imagine that this blithe creature was once stuck in the seventh grade. Sophie Lohmann. She would never forget their names, even years and years later; they were carved roughly and indelibly somewhere. “Oh, Sophie! Look at you.”
The young woman—she was not a girl anymore—smiled and retraced her steps. She held out her lovely arms for a hug.
“How are you? What’s going on? Tell me everything!” said Ms. Hempel, laughing joyfully and nervously, awash in Sophie’s lollipop perfume, surprised that even as grown-ups her girls still offered the same diffident, bony embraces as they did when they were children.
And how unexpected that Sophie Lohmann, of all those girls, should excite in her this rush of affection! Sophie with her unsettling doll-tiny features and huge kewpie eyes, now smoky with makeup. Not a soul that Ms. Hempel thought about much anymore, though at the time she had made enough of an impression. Sophie was new to the school, a new girl then. In the first few days she gave an elaborate performance of shyness and hesitancy that was later revealed to be purely perfunctory. She knew she’d be fine. How could she not be? She was cute and thin and blond and clever. Universal currency, accepted everywhere. But there was something in the pertness of her looks, or maybe it was her manner, that struck Ms. Hempel as uncanny, antiquated, as if Sophie were a resuscitated bobby-soxer with a little bit of freezer burn around the edges. On some days she would even take a curling iron to her ponytail. “Good morning, Ms. Hempel!” she’d say with a surplus of sweetness that made her blond ringlets bounce crazily about.
All that simpering—she never faltered. And she never once let her spine droop; she never slouched. Having abandoned her ballet career, she still kept a strict eye on her posture. During all-school assemblies, Ms. Hempel always knew where Sophie was sitting: the one child perfectly erect among the bodies hunched on the gymnasium floor. What else? What else came floating up out of the strange, drifting sediment? The sugary perfume made her dizzy. She couldn’t remember a lick of Sophie’s schoolwork—though maybe she did fancy covers for her book reports. There was a younger brother, in the fifth grade, who had starred in a peanut-butter commercial. A free trip to Hawaii, thanks to a magazine contest the mother had won with a photo essay about her kitchen renovation. Ms. Hempel couldn’t remember ever meeting this mother, or the father for that matter; she had no recollection of them at all. Which only heightened her sense of Sophie’s slightly concocted quality. What else. What else? Nothing more came to mind, except of course the fear: the embarrassing feeling of fear this girl had kindled in her.
“It’s so weird,” Sophie was saying. “I was just talking about that Constitution thing we did. Remember? When we went to that big courthouse downtown and everybody dressed up in jackets and ties? And we pretended to be lawyers in the Supreme Court? I was a justice; I wore a choir robe you got from Mrs. Willoughby. I think you gave me a B on the decision I wrote, which I didn’t quite understand, seeing that I worked really hard on it. But this is the important part: the whole case was about anthrax! Do remember that?”
“I do,” said Ms. Hempel, nodding rapidly, already marshaling silent arguments in defense of the ancient B. “I remember all of it.”
“So don’t you think that’s weird? Here we were, talking theoretically about anthrax. I didn’t even know what it was before then—”
To be honest, neither had Ms. Hempel. She thought Anthrax was a band who played their guitars demonically fast. But thankfully the Constitution unit came equipped with an instructor’s guide, which out of vanity she kept hidden inside a bland and unincriminating notebook.
“But we became experts on it! We spent a month talking about nothing but anthrax. That little island they infected during World War Two, and then in Russia when it got out by accident and killed so many people and they covered it up.”
“We also talked about the Pentagon Papers. We talked a lot about those,” Ms. Hempel pointed out, as if for the benefit of a parent standing nearby. “And other relevant cases. Precedents…” She couldn’t summon up any of them by name, the teacher’s guide long lost by now. But look what surfaced from the murky depths! The red plastic binding, the jaunty little logo with the flag. Sophie’s appearance had really set things astir. “National security versus freedom of speech,” Ms. Hempel said triumphantly, reading the heavy block letters on the title page. “That’s what we were talking about.”
“I guess so. But what I remember most was the anthrax,” Sophie said, and glanced down at her opalescent toenails, which wiggled back at her from the flawless white flip-flops. “And that’s why I completely freaked out. You know, when it really happened. The letters with the spores, and people dying. I knew everything already, everything they were talking about on the news.” She lifted her huge smoky eyes to Ms. Hempel. “And I know this sounds crazy, but the whole thing felt psychic. Or maybe prophetic. I had this feeling that we had made it happen somehow, by getting dressed up and taking it so seriously, going to
