“Um,” Fiona agreed, looking after the petite girl.
She and John followed her, Fiona keeping her voice low.
“What I can’t figure out is whether she’s really that
together. The sad part is, I’ll probably never know. One
of the frustrations of teaching. You see what they might
become, then most of the time, you never find out if they
did. If that makes sense.”
“Surely in a private school you’ll hear.”
“Maybe. Yeah, you’re right. In Portland it was different.”
The kitchen door swung shut behind Erin, leaving
the two of them alone.
John gripped Fiona and turned her to face him, his
easy manner gone. “We didn’t get a chance to talk.”
“No. It’s okay.” What “it” was, she couldn’t have said.
Her heart? If so, she was once again lying. It wasn’t okay.
His hand tightened. “Later?”
The door swung open again, releasing a burst of
voices. Hopper started to say, “Where’s the…” then
stopped. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Fiona said. “We were just
talking about how we’d get the van back on the road.”
She was a little bit appalled at how readily she’d
taken to telling lies, one after another.
“Muscle,” John said, putting a hand on the door and
gesturing for her to precede him. “Good thing you have
the boys with you.”
“We can do anything boys can do,” Kelli insisted.
“Um…what are we going to do?”
Fiona laughed, the pressure in her chest easing.
“Hoist the van back onto the road.”
“Oh. We can do that. Right?” She looked around the
table. “Girl power? And I guess guy power, too?”
Fiona cast John a grateful glance and sat down as he
went into the pantry and brought out a container of
cookies he must have whipped up during the day. The
kids excitedly talked about getting the van on the lane,
how they’d turn it around, how weird it would be to go
home.
“It’s like, anything could have happened in the world
while we were up here,” Dieter said. “I mean, the school
could have burned down, and we wouldn’t know.”
They were all briefly silent, contemplating the possibility with awe.
“I’ll try to call Mr. Schneider again,” Fiona said.
“If I get him, I’ll be sure to ask whether the school is
still standing.”
“Maybe it snowed so much, the gym roof collapsed.”
Kelli sounded hopeful. “No more P.E.”
“The gym roof is kind of flat,” Troy said. “Hey, you
never know.”
They launched into an entertaining litany of other
possibilities: the principal had quit, parents had moved
and left no forwarding address, colleges had gotten
together and announced that henceforth SAT results
would no longer be required for admission decisions
and the quarterback of the football team had heard that
Kelli was missing, perhaps dead, and realized he was
forever, tragically in love with her.
“Of course, he’d have to know who I am for that to
work,” she admitted practically.
“He does know, he’s just suppressed the knowledge,”
Tabitha contributed.
“Who is the quarterback?” Dieter the nerd asked.
Even John was smiling as they razzed Dieter.
When only crumbs remained in the cookie container,
the kids wandered back to the living room and their
various games and books. Erin had found a book of
Sudoku puzzles on the shelf, many unattempted, and
she and Troy huddled over it. While eating cookies,
he’d grumbled about the battery on his iPod being gone.
History. No charger. No music. Evidently he was consoling himself with number puzzles.
Fiona pretended to read. It seemed an eternity before,
in twos and threes, the teenagers headed upstairs. Fiona
had quit worrying about what configurations of gender
disappeared into rooms together. Now that the budding
romance between Hopper and Amy had cooled, Dieter
and Willow were the only potential pair, and they were
far too inexperienced with the opposite sex and too
awkward with each other to do more than sneak a first,