Mrs. Powell leans against her desk, holding The Truth About the Titanic in her hand. “When you read first-person accounts like this one, you realize how subjective they are and how much is left to interpretation. Gracie made a strong effort to interview people and cross-check stories. But we can also see how his voice, and his understanding of what happened, play a role in his account. We always think that history is fact and literature is fiction. But the truth is, they are all stories. And the people who tell them influence our understanding in various ways.”
She places the book on her desk and scans the room. “So tell me, what sort of influence do you notice in this story, good or bad? What did you take away from this one?”
The guy next to me raises his hand. “I think men like Gracie did a brave thing, letting the women and children get into the lifeboats first.”
“Yes, certainly,” Mrs. Powell says. “It also says something about how women were viewed.”
The boy looks confused.
A girl raises her hand, like she’s not sure if she wants to.
“Yes, Maya.”
“It showed who he thought mattered and who he thought didn’t.” Her voice is a little shaky, probably just like mine when I speak in class.
“Ah. That’s a very interesting point. Elaborate,” Mrs. Powell says.
“Ships like the Titanic were made for immigrants. They were funded from the money of good, honest workers. Yet there isn’t much in the book about minorities or people not in the first class, even in the research he did afterward. And the third-class passengers had the highest death count by far. Even third-class women and children,” Maya says.
My chest tightens. Ada.
Mrs. Powell smiles. “There is certainly something to be learned by what is omitted—who is omitted—from stories, especially historical ones. Very nice.”
She scans the room. I direct my eyes to my notebook. I’m not here and you can’t see me.
“Sam?”
I sit there for a second, trying to think past my exhaustion to what I’ve learned during my research. “The way Gracie talks about the before moments made an impression on me. Before the ship sank, I mean.”
Mrs. Powell waits for me to go on.
“Everything was so luxurious and happy, like everything was okay but not quite. And there were a thousand tiny things that decided the fate of the ship. The completely still water that prevented the lookouts from seeing the iceberg. The nearest ship’s Marconi operator going to bed and turning off the radio system. The lack of lifeboats. The arrogance that stopped the ship’s operators from worrying about the iceberg warnings in the first place.” Ada, Nora, Mollie…all those people who didn’t make it off. “Why is it that when you’re headed for a disaster, some part of you almost always knows?”
“It’s a good question,” Mrs. Powell says. “There are accounts of passengers who were said to know with certainty that something was going to happen, even if they didn’t know what and couldn’t stop it. Esther Hart is said to have stayed up all night every night in her clothes waiting for the unknown disaster, the ship’s cat carried all her kittens off board before it left Europe, and people canceled their journeys at the last moment because of a feeling. I suppose it’s important to trust yourself. Even Gracie says that if he hadn’t gone to bed early that night and hadn’t been exercising with some frequency, he would never have had the energy to survive the freezing water.”
The bell rings.
“Have a good lunch,” Mrs. Powell says over the noise of the chairs moving against the floor. “Only three more days left of Titanic curriculum before the much-anticipated Spring Fling. Give it your all.”
Her words remind me of Ada’s yesterday. This one last time. I exit into the hallway and almost collide with Mr. Wardwell.
“Sorry,” I say.
Mr. Wardwell straightens his blazer. “Sam. Well, this is a lucky coincidence. I had wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh?”
“I tried to get your attention after class, but you were out the door too fast.”
I try to hold back my yawn, but fail.
He takes a better look at me. “You seem awfully tired and distracted recently. Is everything okay?”
I eye him suspiciously. He’s never asked me if I was okay. In fact, I’m not sure he’s ever really liked me at all. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
“Also, it’s time to decide what to do about those missed exams from last semester. A paper should do it. I’m around for office hours today.”
Alice doesn’t believe in coincidences. Maybe I don’t, either. “I can’t today.”
Mr. Wardwell frowns. “Tomorrow, then,” he says with finality, and walks away.
I rub my eye with the heel of my hand and push through the lunchroom doors. I head straight for the Descendants. Blair and her friends whisper behind their hands as I pass. She looks like she wants to say something to me, but instead she glances at Matt and then goes back to her conversation. I’m sure Niki didn’t waste any time telling people about me insisting on seeing Jaxon’s bracelet. I take my seat facing the window, my back to the lunchroom.
“I feel terrible for Mrs. M. It took me an hour to convince her this morning that keeping Jaxon home would only agitate him more,” Alice says.
Mary scowls at the cafeteria. “And it’s not helping that this school is a breeding ground for gossip.”
“Yeah, it’d be nice if they all just shut up already,” Alice says loudly enough for the tables next to us to hear. The few people looking in our direction immediately busy themselves with their lunches.
I pull a piece of paper out of my pocket. “So I had some time in history today, and I went through my third-class passenger cards looking for Mollie Mullin again. I couldn’t find a single passenger with that last name or anything similar. So I looked for anyone named Mollie. No such luck. There were, however, a lot of passengers named Mary.”
Susannah’s eyes light up. “That’s an old nickname. I had a great-aunt Mollie whose proper name was Mary. I hadn’t thought of that.”
They all lean toward me.
“This is the thing: I found Denis and Mary Lennon, who boarded in Queenstown,” I say. “Originally I thought they were brother and sister because that’s how they were listed on the passenger ledger. But when I started looking up each of the Mary passengers, I found a news article that said Mary’s last name was really Mullin and that she and Denis were actually eloping to the United States.”
“Whoa. The brother-sister act was a cover?” Mary asks.
“Yeah. They were being chased by Mollie’s brother, who had a gun. Her family didn’t want her to marry Denis because he was the barman in their general store. Her family thought he wasn’t a good match. But her brother didn’t show up until right after the Titanic left port, and the two got away.”
“Did they survive?” Susannah asks.
An image of Mollie laughing and telling me stories about her family pops into my thoughts. I sigh and shake my head.
“How did we not learn about that story?” Mary asks. “It’s so tragic and romantic.”
“So many people were forgotten,” I say. “They didn’t make the cut for the lifeboats, and they didn’t make the cut for historians.”
“Change of plans. I’m going to the Spring Fling as Mollie Mullin,” Mary announces, and I smile at her.
Alice chews on her thumbnail. “What does it mean that a third-class passenger is now a first-class maid?”
“And why do Henry and Myra believe I was with them in Europe and Asia when I never was?” I ask.
“Someone or multiple someones are intentionally rewriting history,” Alice says.
“And keeping the Titanic stuck in time before its sinking,” Susannah says.
“April thirteenth,” I say, remembering Ada’s and Mollie’s answers.
“And today is the twelfth,” Mary says, and we all look at her. “You don’t think something is going to happen tomorrow when our time catches up to theirs, do you?”
No one answers, but I can tell by their faces that they are thinking about Redd’s warning.
“Wardwell just asked me to come in for office hours,” I say.
“Did Elijah find anything in his house?” Susannah asks.
“Lots of Titanic info, so much that he hasn’t even made it through everything. But nothing magical,” I say. “So basically, we have no solid leads on how or if he’s involved.”