“I heard it was a delivery truck,” Nora says, also without looking up. “Kitchen supplies or something.”
“That too,” Omar says. “But that’s not what Donna says she saw. A moving truck, she said, for sure.”
Nora’s incredulity is such that it overwhelms her abhorrence for Bourne’s mayor. She looks to see if he’s kidding or lying, teasing her, mocking her, tormenting her, manipulating her. He is not. Finally she asks, “Where?”
“She saw it go by the nursery.”
The plants never really came back here, so neither did Donna’s Nursery. It’s still open, but mostly she sits in the front window all day and watches Bourne go by.
“Must have been on the way somewhere else,” Nora says, sure.
“Where?” Omar asks.
It’s a good point. Bourne is on the way to nowhere. No one, nothing, goes through Bourne.
“No shit.” Frank gets away with penetrating commentary like that because he owns a bar.
“Can’t be,” Nora says but adds, despite herself, “Can it?”
Omar smiles at her. Omar shrugs. Omar looks like hope. So does Nora. It makes them both unrecognizable. His shoulders rise up toward his ears. “Maybe?”
Nora considers this a moment. “I doubt it’s true.” Then her face shuts down. “And even if it is, we don’t want them here.”
“You don’t even know who they are.”
She goes to anger faster than an exhale. “Who would move here, Omar? I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. We’re broken.”
“Nora, that’s not—”
“And anyone who came willingly, who actually chose this, would be brokener still.”
“This is a nice town—”
“Used to be.”
“We have some challenges but—”
I don’t get to hear what comes after Omar’s very mayoral “but” because Nora interrupts again.
“And whose fault is that?”
Omar nods, resigned, closes his mouth and every other part of him, sips his beer. He and Nora have had countless versions of this conversation countless times, but this is where they all end. Speaking of going nowhere.
One
In the morning, I wake up like usual, groan out of bed, pee, pad back to the bedroom still half asleep to get Mirabel up, take her to the bathroom. (Monday helps lift and carry, but she won’t do the toilet part because: germs.) While Monday gets dressed, I find clothes for Mirabel (Monday can, but Mirabel sometimes likes to wear clothes that aren’t yellow), and then I get dressed while Monday helps Mirabel into the outfit I’ve picked out (no germs). When Mama’s appointments start early, sometimes she’s gone before we’re even up, but she always leaves coffee in the pot and breakfast on the table for us. Monday helps Mirabel (without touching her mouth) while I eat. If Mirabel’s head is steady, she can brush her own teeth, but this isn’t one of those mornings, so I brush mine, then hers (so many germs) while Monday eats. An ordinary morning.
But that is the last thing in my day—my life—that’s ordinary.
Mrs. Shriver is standing in front of the blackboard as we file in, twisting a piece of chalk in her hands. She looks nervous. It’s weird. “Good morning, everyone. Take your seats quickly this morning, please. I have some news.”
History teachers can’t be used to reporting news.
“Class, we have a new student.”
I can barely breathe. Mrs. Shriver either. She sounds like she’s repeating something she got from a book. She’s been teaching for almost two decades, but those words have never come out of her mouth before.
And it’s not just me and Mrs. Shriver. We’re all wiggly like when we were second graders. We’re all paying attention. Chloe Daniels is not falling asleep on her notebook. Evie Anders has pulled back the hood of the sweatshirt she wears so ubiquitously I’d forgotten what color her hair is. Rock Ramundi’s phone is nowhere in sight. Mrs. Shriver walks over to the door and opens it with a little bit of a flourish.
“Allow me to introduce—” The kid standing there looks embarrassed then alarmed as Mrs. Shriver suddenly stops talking and starts looking panicked. It’s her big moment, and she’s forgotten the kid’s name. I try to imagine day one in a new school where everyone already knows everyone but you. I try to imagine day one in this school, without having grown up here, and cannot. I consider what he sees. Bodily—like, as a body but also physically—we’re varied as a garden, one of those weedy ones where anything that grows goes. For a small nowhere town, we’re pretty diverse, I guess because not that long ago Bourne was on the rise, a good place for fresh starts and young families, open to anyone because not that many people were here yet. Mrs. Shriver, who is a Black woman married to a white man, says that’s why they chose it, so her family would belong, so her kids would fit in no matter what they looked like. But it turned out not to matter because Mrs. Shriver and her husband couldn’t have children. Maybe after six miscarriages, they gave up. Or maybe they realized having kids in Bourne wasn’t safe after all, no matter how diverse we are.
So we look different. But we’re all poor. We’re all poisoned. We’re all tired—of this place, each other, our options. Our sisters. We’re all here, and we’re all stuck, and we’re all stuck here. Not that you can tell any of that from looking.
The kid leans in from the hallway and stage-whispers his name to Mrs. Shriver.
“River Templeton.”
And at once, we all understand the look of panic on her face.
Petra’s eyes have doubled in size.
“No. Way.” I grab her hand under the desk.
“Phantasmagorical,” she whispers back.
Alex Malden stops sharpening his pencil mid-point. Peter Fabbelman’s squeaky felt tip falls silent mid-doodle.
Apparently, insanely, in all the flurry of the morning, it had not occurred to Mrs. Shriver when she saw it written down on the paperwork. Not until her lips were on the cusp of mouthing his name did she figure out exactly who River Templeton must be.
There is a jolt through the whole of me, like some kind of acid has been pumped out from the middle of my chest, down my arms, around the horn of my fingertips to pool into my stomach. I look down and expect to see smoke. I look around and notice that River Templeton is the only one in the room with his mouth closed. He uses it to smile.
He looks like a movie star. It’s not the perfect skin or the bright teeth or the hair so labored over I can see neat furrows like he plans to plant seeds. It’s not that he’s so overdressed in brand-new khakis with a sharp crease down the middle of each leg, black dress shoes shiny as silverware, a light-blue shirt, clearly ironed within the hour, buttoned all the way down around his wrists and within one of his neck, never mind it’s supposed to hit ninety-three degrees today and is not much cooler than that now in our classroom. I suppose no one thought to tell him we don’t wear uniforms. Or have air-conditioning. But I can see that under his outfit he’s just a kid playing dress-up, trying too hard, itchy in his clothes. So it’s not that. It’s something else.
“Do you want to introduce yourself?” Mrs. Shriver finally stammers.