Why was the principal talking about tapestries? “A school is a tapestry of threads.” Oh, yeah?
He’d seen tapestries, on that England trip with his mother years and years ago. She’d been like a kid for two whole weeks, all excited over dumb stuff like stone walls and old villages and scones with cream and church bells and rooms crowded with furniture and paintings—and tapestries. With just her and Brendan, she’d actually been having fun.
Until they came home, and the fights started up, and then one day she was gone.
He’d been pretty young, so mostly what he remembered about the trip was stuff like her happiness, and the taste of scones, and the giant Ferris wheel next to the river that you saw in any movie about London. The tapestries he remembered as a kind of dingy wallpaper, not something you’d want to find yourself woven into—old-fashioned, dark, and covered with dust.
Well, yeah, come to think of it. Kind of like school, after all.