When was the last time she had laid eyes on Jonathan Hamish? Years and years ago, as he was being carted away by the police. No, she shouldn’t even think that, not even jokingly. But that was the look he had about him—slouching, defiant, richly amused—as Mr. Peele escorted him back inside the school building. He’d been causing trouble in the courtyard.
Eighth period, American history. Whap! Whap! The sharp sound of cracking, of something possibly being broken. Ms. Hempel wheeled around from the blackboard and glared. “Brad…,” she said ominously, and the boy held up his hands with the indignation of someone who for the first time in his life has been wrongly accused. The class was gazing at the window, the one next to the dusty air conditioner, and Lila put down her pencil and pointed. “It’s coming from out there.”
Ms. Hempel went to investigate. Whap! She flinched. The window shuddered. Down in the courtyard, the varsity track team were milling about as they waited to board the school bus, fuming at the curb, that would deliver them to some faraway campus for their meet. Draped in their glossy warm-up suits, the boys loped elegantly about the yard, their long bodies leaning to one side, weighted down by their voluminous gym bags. Some were pulling cans from the soda machine, others stretching themselves across the steps. Occupied and blameless, as far as she could tell. Then, whap! A face squinted up at her from below. A hand hung suspended in the air.
She slid the glass open. “Jonathan?”
He gave her a lopsided smile. “Hi.”
“Enough with the window-breaking,” she said. “We’re trying to do manifest destiny up here.”
He looked at her blankly.
“Cut it out, okay? It’s dangerous.” She was too far away to see what was happening in his eyes. “Okay?”
She drew back into the room and tugged down the sash.
No sooner had she closed it: Whap! The class, hunched forward in their desk-chairs, ecstatic with the distraction, let out a breathless little laugh. Whap!
“Jonathan,” she sighed, and reopened the window.
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 criminal: 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
