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.
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.