That is when I got my other two sources.
“Alex Malden,” I called to him politely. “Can you tell me the full name of the new student in your class please?”
Alex Malden looked at me like I am weird but said, “River Templeton?” His voice went up at the end like a question, but his question was not whether the new student’s name was River Templeton. He knew the new student’s name was River Templeton. His question was why I was asking, why I was asking him, and why I am so weird.
No one knows the answers to these questions, so I turned to Petra.
She started nodding before I could even ask the question. “For real, sister,” she said, and she meant me, even though we are not sisters, because my sister is like her sister which makes us like sisters too. That is the transitive property which I learned in geometry.
“Maybe it is a different Templeton,” I said.
“Wait’ll you see him,” Mab breathed all in a rush.
But I could not wait. I watched the back of the student weave off down the hall and then into the bathroom, and then I could not go in the bathroom because it was the men’s room and I am not a man, so I stood right outside the door. When the door opened and the front of the new student was behind it, what he looked was surprised, probably because I was a girl and not a boy and also probably because I was standing so close he could not get out.
“Excuse me,” he said which was polite.
I did not want his eyes to look in my eyes, but I did want to see his face, so I looked and did not move.
“I … have to get past,” he tried, and I saw what he meant, but I still did not move.
“Can you … um … scoot over a little?” he said, and that is when I saw what Mab meant about him. He had the same eye shape and the same lip shape. His nose spread out the same way from his cheekbones. The same lines, but less deep, came down from his nostrils to his mouth which raised at the corner in the same way. It was confusing. It is true I have only ever seen that face before in newspaper clippings and on the computer, but I recognized the sameness anyway.
So he would not see me or see me seeing him, I looked back at the ground and asked him my questions.
“Did you just move into the library?”
“Yes.” What he sounded was surprised. He is new so he did not yet know what a small town Bourne is or how fast word travels around it. “Why?”
I did not want to tell him why. “Is your name River Templeton?”
“Yeah.” Again, surprised with a little bit of something else. “Why?”
“Is your dad Duke Templeton?”
“No,” he said, and then he added, “My dad is Nathan. Why?”
“Do you know Duke Templeton?”
“Yeah, he’s my grandfather,” he said. And he did not ask why.
That is when I knew all I needed to know, so I let him out of the bathroom, turned, and went back to my class.
“I don’t get it,” Nellie says, which she does not need to because it is obvious. “River is a weird name for a boy.”
“Not River.” Kyle R. looks and sounds scrunched-up which means exasperated. “Templeton. Like Duke Templeton.”
Nellie’s face stills shows confused.
Nellie is usually confused—that would be rude for me to say out loud, but it is okay for me to think because it is just a true fact—so she might not be smart enough to know who Duke Templeton is, but she might also never have been told. Lots of Bourne parents do not tell their children what happened because it is hard to say to your baby girl, “Baby girl, you are real dumb. It is not your fault, but it also cannot be changed,” and it is also hard to say to your baby girl, “We needed the jobs so we did not mind for a while that we were all being poisoned.” A lot of parents never told their children what happened. They did not want them to know, or maybe they just did not want to talk about it.
As a contrast, my mother has talked about it every day for the sixteen years I have known her which is my whole life. She has shown me and my sisters her notes for the lawsuit so many times that when the grandson of Duke Templeton walks out of the boys’ bathroom at Bourne Memorial High School seventeen years after what happened happened, I recognize him in the blink of an eye without even meeting his.
My mother calls Duke Templeton the AIC of Belsum Chemical which stands for Asshole in Chief, and this is probably accurate but technically wrong because really Duke Templeton is the president and CEO.
“You know that abandoned plant on the other side of Bluebell Park?” I say to Nellie.
She shakes her head no even though it is the biggest building in all of Bourne, and she has driven by it at least 11,680 times which is twice a day for sixteen years, and since her birthday was in May, that is an underestimate.
“There is an abandoned plant on the other side of Bluebell Park,” I begin again. “It belongs to Belsum Chemical. They turned the water smelly and brown and said it was still okay to drink, and then they turned the water very bright green and said it was not okay to drink after all or even use or even be near, but by then it was too late.”
“Wow,” Nellie says, “I don’t remember that.”
“Because you were not born yet.”
“Oh.” She frowns. “Did they say sorry?”
“They said sorry like when you punch your sister, and she yelps, and you are glad it hurt her because she is annoying, but your mom says say sorry, so you say sorry, but you do not really care, and she knows it.”
“I don’t have a sister,” Nellie says.
“They said sorry, but they did not mean sorry,” I clarify.
“How do you know?”
“I know they did not mean sorry because they did not do anything to make it better.”
“What did they do?” Nellie asks.
“They left,” I say. “They did not do anything.”
She thinks about it. “Except send you their grandson.”
Nellie probably does not understand what she means, but this is a good point. Mab said who he was, but Mab did not say the most important things which are what is River Templeton doing at Bourne Memorial High School and why is he living in my library. It does not seem possible that Belsum Chemical sent their grandson to live with us. But I cannot think of a thing which does seem possible instead.
* * *
After-school tutoring is canceled because, Mrs. Radcliffe says, “What with everything.” I do not know what her words mean, but what her actions mean is Mab can leave school with me. On the way home, we stop at her friend Pooh Lewis’s apartment because even though Pooh Lewis’s eyes work, her legs do not, which means it is not accurate to say she cannot read without a reader (Mab), but it is accurate to say she cannot read without a librarian (me) because Pooh can read but only if there is a book already in her home.
I have chosen for her a book about King Philip II of Spain because King Philip II of Spain had a wheelchair, even though it was the 1590s and even though really he could walk if he wanted to, and that makes him a good subject for Pooh who also uses a wheelchair and also was born a long time ago and also can read without help but pretends she cannot.
But before I can give the good news about the book, Mab opens Pooh’s front door and calls in, very loud and happy about it, “You were wrong.”