Ms. Hempel Chronicles

now is a quarter. A regular, normal, twenty-five-cent quarter.” Ms. Hempel smiled; Harriet Reznik—exuberant soul, mischief maker, jumper up and down—did not like speaking in front of crowds. She kept her eyes fastened on the quarter; she spoke in the breathless, uninflected rush of small children reciting poetry. “Before your very eyes, I will make this quarter disappear.” She waved the coin mechanically above her head, as if spraying a room with insect repellent. “Disappear into thin air,” she repeated, and gulped. Her wrist flicked; her hand curled into itself; the cape shivered. Then, miraculously, the coin was gone. Blinking rapidly, Harriet held her palm out for the audience to examine: “Behold! No more quarter.” She checked her hand as if she did not quite believe it herself, and for the first time she smiled. “No quarter!” She patted the air with her outstretched palm, and the audience clapped. A claque of girls in the front row shrilled. “Now, watch closely.” And Harriet Reznik tightened her fingers into a tube, pressing them against her eye like a telescope. “Empty?” She presented the spy hole for the audience to peer through. “Nothing in there?” She righted her fist, so that the telescope transformed back into her hand, gripping a fat bouquet of invisible flowers. With the unemployed hand she dipped into the fist, from which she extracted, in a single fluid gesture, a length of red silk. It floated in her fingers. “Magic,” Harriet Reznik said.

“I bet she’s going to be gay when she grows up,” Mimi Swartz, the head of the art department, had once predicted. Mimi was gay, too. And Harriet certainly was different from all the other girls in the seventh grade; she was without fear, utterly uninterested in the opposite sex, never betraying even the smallest flicker of self-consciousness. She fancied herself an incorrigible troublemaker. Ms. Hempel went to great lengths to encourage her in this role: “Harriet Reznik, why do you plague me so?” she would exclaim, rolling her eyes up toward the heavens. Harriet liked to dart into Ms. Hempel’s office during recess and distract her from her grading. “Harriet Reznik, you are the bane of my existence!” Ms. Hempel would say, and Harriet would cackle delightedly. She had a battery of pranks—finger traps, squirt rings, fake rattlesnake eggs—all of which she practiced upon Ms. Hempel. “Want some gum, Ms. Hempel?” she’d coo, offering a piece encased in a suspiciously generic wrapper. Her teacher would reach out her hand, allow it to hover over the stick of gum, and then, after a moment had passed, plant both fists on her hips: “Are you crazy? I know the way that mind of yours works!” Ms. Hempel would exhale, as if she had just had a close call. “Harriet Reznik,” she would say, eyes narrowing. “I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you.”

But she didn’t like to think of Harriet Reznik being gay. Not because she had any misgivings about gayness; she just didn’t like to think of Harriet becoming a grown-up. A selfish, terrible part of her didn’t want to see any of her kids get bigger. Yes, she wanted to see Adelaide emerge from the wings, as luminous as a moonbeam. Yes, she wanted Jonathan to sleep well; she wanted Edward Ashe to travel the world, blowing on his didgeridoo, adopting rare reptiles and spiders wherever he went. She wanted to see Harriet Reznik make whole elephants disappear. But Ms. Hempel couldn’t bear to think of them not being exactly as they were now, as she knew them. She wanted them to stay in middle school forever.

Ms. Hempel had once believed, foolishly, that teachers liked to watch their students grow up. She had written letters to the teachers she loved most, to tell them of her progress, her becoming. Upon graduating from college, she had even telephoned Mr. Mellis, who had taught her creative-writing class in the eleventh grade. “I’m going to be a teacher, too!” she announced breathlessly over the phone. She waited for his ecstatic reply. The silence hissed over the long-distance connection. “Well,” he said, finally. “If you ever had a novel in you, Beatrice, it’s certainly not going to come out now.” And now she sat here, in her brown lipstick, on a folding chair, and wondered: would she ever write a novel, or sing in a band, or foment a revolution?

A volunteer hoisted himself up onto the stage. He was a father, but one whom Ms. Hempel didn’t recognize. Tall and homely, he stooped down, as if longing to be the same compact size as Harriet Reznik, but she shot him a forbidding look and fanned the cards brusquely in his face. “Pick a card, any card,” she commanded. The father danced his hand over the splayed cards Harriet held before him. “Do not, at any cost, show me the card you have chosen,” she said. He extracted a card from the fan and held it to his chest. “Study your card. Memorize it.” He did as she told him. “Once you are absolutely sure you have memorized the card, you may show it to the audience.” The father shielded his eyes and slowly rotated his outstretched arm from one side of the auditorium to the other, displaying his selection. Parents, kids, teachers, all leaned forward at once. A six of spades. Ms. Hempel heard a little boy somewhere behind her whisper it to himself. “You may replace the card,” Harriet Reznik said. Frowning deeply, she shuffled the deck, cut it, stirred the cards around on her little card table. Then, abruptly, she swept them into a pile and rapped them against the heel of her palm. After placing the deck in the center of her table, she waited, face straining; she seemed to count silently to ten. The magic book’s instructions must have included, Ms. Hempel realized, this moment of suspense. Now Harriet Reznik was ready to continue. “Is this,” she asked, delicately tweezing a card