He turns to us and smiles again, then swallows that smile like it embarrassed him. “Hi. Um. Hi. My name is River Templeton.” As if it’s nothing. “We. Um. My family and I. We just moved here. From Boston. Um.” He falters, then goes with “Thank you for having me.” Winces. Sits with polite relief at the desk Mrs. Shriver waves him toward.
It is hard to be objective now that I know his name, but mostly what he looks is new. It is strange, his newness, and hard to describe because here is a weird and horrible thing about me: I never, ever see anyone I haven’t already seen before. When Monday and Mirabel and I stop by the Do Not Shop on Saturday afternoons, we know everyone there. On the way there, on the way home, no matter how long we dawdle, we know everyone we pass. At the pizza place, at the laundromat, at the grocery store, at any of the shops still in business, we know all the patrons. At the bar where Mama works, there are no regulars because everyone’s a regular.
So some of why I’ve forgotten how to breathe is this kid’s newness. But that is not the problem. Because he is new, it is true. He is new. But his name is not.
“Yesterday we finished up the Treaty of Versailles.” Mrs. Shriver takes a deep breath and dives in. “So now we turn our attention to the Italian Renaissance.”
We’re used to history as backgammon, all shakers and dice throws. But River looks around like maybe it’s a trick or some kind of weird performance art we’re all in on. Of course he’s not familiar with Mrs. Shriver’s out-of-order approach to history, and of course he doesn’t know her own—how she and her husband and her brand-new teaching certificate moved to Bourne when the plant did to start a new life as a young married couple in a safe town where property was still affordable but on the rise and good new jobs were plentiful. Now her history includes all those miscarriages, a husband with migraines bad enough he can’t work, and a house into which they poured all their savings that today is worth nothing. So you can see why she would want to take history by the throat and shake it, what happens and what happens next, how one thing leads to another thing without any choices ever being made. Petra would say unassailably. She might even say incontrovertibly.
When River determines it’s not a joke and we are, in fact, advancing our study of history by going five hundred years in the wrong direction, I watch his eyes cloud with the possibility that what he must already be thinking of us—provincial, backwater, small-town hicks—isn’t the half of it. He has no idea.
But he rolls with it. He shrugs then leans over and pulls a leather-bound book out of an expensive-looking bag that is not remotely a backpack and starts taking diligent notes.
Right in the middle of Mrs. Shriver’s lecture, he raises his hand to make a point about the way fair trade and international commerce were sparks for democracy and religious equality. He raises it again with a question about the role Catholic Rome played in the rise of Venetian capitalism. He cites a book he’s read. He makes a joke about a gondola which is almost dirty and actually funny.
We are paying attention, if not to Renaissance history, at least to the history being made in this room right now. We are slack-jawed—with incredulity, with implication, with the audacity of this kid—or maybe just because we are exactly the unbright yokels River must imagine us to be.
We’re not actually dumb though. Which means some things are clear to us at once.
River is normal. This is what normal looks like. Not normal for here, normal for out there, normal for everywhere else—bright, educated, untroubled, unworried. Whole. And us? We’re not normal, not for anywhere.
And some things come clear more slowly, to us and to bright, clean, sparkling River himself. He knows much about the world out there and, apparently, the world which built it and the worlds which came before, but about our world here, the one in which he finds himself now, he knows nothing. Not even who he is.
Two
“Templeton?” says Nellie.
“Templeton,” I affirm. I have heard it from three different people now, and that is how many sources Mrs. Lasserstein says you need before you can put a fact in your research paper.
“The rat in Charlotte’s Web?”
The Kyles laugh at Nellie because we are sixteen, and she is not remembering Charlotte’s Web from her childhood or reading it aloud to a younger sibling but is actually studying it with her supplemental reading group. But the Kyles should not laugh at her. One, because it is mean. Two, because we all read at different levels, and different does not mean smart or stupid, and everyone has their own strengths as well as their own challenges. Three, because Charlotte’s Web is a good book regardless of how old you are. But mostly, four, because she is right.
“Yes,” I tell her and the Kyles. “A rat. Exactly.”
Because I have also confirmed that River Templeton is that Templeton. His father is Nathan, not Duke, but only because Duke is his grandfather. I have only one source on this rather than three, but since the source is River himself, that makes it a primary source rather than a secondary source, and sometimes you only get one of those. You could also interview his father, but of course he did not come to school. You could also interview his father’s father, but he would not grant you an interview. I know because Mama tried. A lot.
What happened was that I saw Mab in the hallway looking weird.
“One,” I said, and she did not even look up.
“One!” I said louder, and many other people looked up, but Mab did not.
“One,” I came up and said in her ear, and her head snapped over to me, and her eyes met my eyes and told them something was terrible. “Something is wrong?” I guessed.
She nodded.
“You feel sick?”
“No.”
“You thought of something sad?”
“No.”
“You got a bad grade on something?” This was a stupid guess because Mab never gets a bad grade on anything.
“That’s him.” She pointed with her chin at the walking-away back of someone. I could not see his front, but I still knew who she meant because there was only one him we had discussed recently: the new person living in my library.
“He is a kid?”
“He came with his family.”
“He is Track A?” I asked even though I was pretty sure because otherwise how would Mab know?
“Sure. He’s not from here.”
“Some people who are not from here also are not Track A,” I said.
She did not say anything because that was true, but that was not her point.
“Was he mean?” I guessed. She looked at me for the first time in the conversation. I looked away.
“No. He was fine.”
“What is his name?” I asked.
Mab’s expression was hard to identify. Closest was proud. She looked proud of me. Like I had finally asked the right question.
“River,” she said.
“River?” I wrinkled my nose. It was a weird name.
“River Templeton.”
She made big eyes at me, so big I had to meet them, and then I had to look away.
“Are you making a joke?” I asked because Mab is often making a joke, and it is hard to tell.
“It is a sick joke,” she said. And first I felt relieved and then I felt strange because one, it was not funny, and two, she did not look like she thought it was either.