Ms. Green had been absent from class the first two days of the week, and a substitute teacher had taken her place. The substitute had been young and pleasant and inclined to giggle. The contrast when Ms. Green came back again was shattering.

Wednesday afternoon when Nancy walked into social studies class to find that withered, pinched-up face waiting for her, she shuddered all over.

I can’t stand it, she thought. I just cannot sit through her class one more day.

The week had been insane for Nancy even without Ms. Green’s coming back. First of all, there had been an e-mail from her father. It was addressed to their mother, but it was to all of them, and it told about skydiving. He was going to take his camera and jump from a plane to get pictures behind enemy lines. Another correspondent, a woman named Maggie Courtney, was going with him.

A sick feeling gripped Nancy’s stomach when she read the e-mail.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t like him doing that. Something’s going to happen.”

“It can’t be too dangerous,” Brendon said. “Not if some lady’s doing it with him. Dad wouldn’t let her do something too risky.”

“Maggie Courtney does what she wants,” Elizabeth said. “She’s a rather special kind of woman. I met her once when she was just back from doing a piece on mountain climbing. She made the whole climb herself, carrying her own photographic equipment. Her camera fell into a crevasse, and she almost lost her life trying to climb down after it. It was a terrifying story, but she laughed about it when she told it. I’d say she’s a good person for your father to have with him on any assignment.”

The feeling of apprehension stirred in Nancy more strongly.

“Even so,” she said, “I wish he weren’t going. I feel—wrong—about it. I don’t know why exactly. It’s just that there’s something.”

Elizabeth turned to give her daughter a hug, and there was sympathy in her voice.

“You shouldn’t worry about your father, Nance,” she said. “That’s the thing that was so hard for me to learn throughout the years of our marriage. You just love him and enjoy him and trust in God to take care of him. If you’re going to worry every time he does something dangerous, you’ll be a wreck.”

But Nancy did worry; she couldn’t help herself. And then Kirby had added her own contribution to the week that was already ruined. She had come home from the dance studio Monday evening with the idea that she was going off to live at some ballet school in Atlanta.

“The Ballet South representative will be here in the spring to interview students,” she explained. “Madame Vilar thinks I could win a scholarship.”

“But Kirby!” Elizabeth gestured helplessly. “You’re so young!”

“Not for dancing,” Kirby said. “I’m old for dancing. You have to start young, Mom, to become a professional. And I have to—I have to—become one! It’s the only thing I want in the world!”

Kirby’s face was radiant and her voice was leaping with excitement.

Don’t let her, Nancy felt like screaming. Mom, don’t let her!

Couldn’t her mother see what would happen if they let Kirby get away from them? She would go twirling off into the clouds someplace, and they would never, ever have her for themselves again!

Why can’t she be normal? Nancy thought. Why can’t she giggle on the phone and get a crush on Jessie’s brother and go to parties?! She could—she would—if it weren’t for this dancing! I wish there were some way we could tie her down and never let her put on her toe shoes!

But she could tell from the look on her mother’s face that Elizabeth did not feel that way. When the time came and Kirby was offered a scholarship, her mother would let her go because that was the way Elizabeth was. She would never bring herself to withhold anything from her children that she thought would make them happy.

So it was a miserable Nancy who walked into class on Wednesday to find the substitute gone and Ms. Green glaring out from behind her desk.

Oh, no, Nancy thought. I can’t take it. I just can’t.

She took her seat with a sigh, and the boy in the seat behind her leaned forward and gave her hair a tug.

“I see the old Green Bag is back with us,” he whispered. “I wonder what was wrong with her Monday and Tuesday.”

“She couldn’t have been sick,” muttered Emily from across the aisle. “She’s too mean to be sick.”

“She was, though,” Nancy said. It was at that moment that the idea began to come to her. She had told Kirby that she would “teach Ms. Green a thing or two,” but the statement had been made impulsively. She hadn’t known at the time how she would carry out her threat.

Now she did know, and suddenly she was filled with a dawning sense of excitement.

“She has a disease,” she said in a low voice to the classmates within hearing range. “She has something called dropsy.”

“Dropsy?” Jessie glanced up from her own seat, where she was belatedly trying to finish her homework. “Is it contagious?”

“I’ve heard of it somewhere,” Emily said. “Don’t you swell up or something?”

“Silence!” Ms. Green’s voice broke through the whispered conversation.

“The bell hasn’t even rung yet,” grumbled the boy behind Nancy. “We can talk until the bell rings!”

“Bitch,” Emily mouthed silently, and Nancy nodded in agreement.

The bell rang.

Ms. Green spoke sharply. “Nancy Garrett, I will have no whispering in this classroom!”

“I wasn’t whispering,” Nancy said. “I was just nodding my head. And anyway, class hadn’t started.”

“You will not speak unless asked!” Ms. Green’s voice was icy. “I have not been well, and I am not in any state to put up with insolence. If I hear one more word, I will ask you to leave the classroom. If your desire is to bring up your grade this next semester, I would not advise this as a way to begin.”

Nancy dropped her head and stared down at her hands gripped into a knot in her lap. She was so angry that she felt herself shaking. Her jaw ached with the effort she was making to keep from shouting in outrage.

All right, she thought, you asked for it! For the first time in her life she focused her mind hard on a person who was not a member of her family.

She would never have attempted it a month ago, or even contemplated the fact that it might be possible. A mind was a thing to look with, not something with which you did things. Yet during the past weeks of working with Kirby, a strange realization had begun to come to her. Sometimes it seemed to her that she had a picture in her mind even before Kirby started drawing.

Instead of opening her mind to receive, she would be pressing it outward at her sister. Without even realizing it, Kirby’s fingers would begin sketching the very image that was in Nancy’s mind.

She hadn’t said anything to Kirby. Her twin wouldn’t like it, and might even have insisted on stopping the exercise sessions completely.

Now Nancy sat quiet, focusing her gaze and thoughts on Ms. Green. The teacher had finished her attendance check and had picked up a textbook.

“I left lesson plans,” she was saying, “for Monday and Tuesday. If your substitute followed them you should be ready for a quiz today. If you will get out your notebooks—”

Suddenly, as if of its own volition, the book slid from her hand and fell to the floor.

Ms. Green retrieved it and continued.

“—your notebooks and pencils—”

Her hand seemed to shake, and the book fell again.

This time she bent stiffly and set it carefully upon her desk. Then she picked up a piece of chalk and turned to the blackboard. Her strokes were swift and angry, and the chalk made a squeaky sound.

What are the principal products, she wrote, of the country of—

The chalk fell out of her hand and struck the floor.

From somewhere at the back of the room there came a giggle. It was a nervous, high-pitched sound that was infectious.

Placing one hand on the edge of the desk to steady herself, Ms. Green bent once more and picked up the chalk. As she started to straighten, it flipped from her fingers. When it landed this time, it broke into pieces that went rolling off in several directions.

Suddenly Emily made a choking sound.

“It’s dropsy!” she whispered. “She really does have it, just like Nancy said!”

Jessie gave a strangled giggle.

“Dropsy!” hissed the boy behind Nancy to a friend of his who sat two rows over.

“Silence!” Ms. Green said sharply. Her face was pale and she let the chalk lie where it had fallen. “You will all open your notebooks if you have not done so already. Now, write these words one hundred times: ‘I will not laugh at the misfortunes of others.’ ”

Thirty-one notebooks flipped open and thirty-one pencils were raised to writing position. People on the far side of the room were giggling now as the words spread back to them.

“Dropsy! She has dropsy!”

In the row by the window, there was a burst of uncontrolled laughter. Emily giggled again and pressed her hand over her mouth. Everybody in the room seemed to be strangling.

“Not one hundred times—five hundred times!” Ms. Green amended angrily.

Nancy picked up her pencil and began to move it across the page. As always after a blaze of temper, she felt drained and empty. She also felt shaken and oddly ashamed of herself.

I did it, she thought. I did it! The thought was frightening.

Her hand was trembling as she traced the words on the paper. I WILL NOT LAUGH…

I made it happen, she thought. I made something happen! I thought about it and wanted it and pushed with my mind when I was angry, and it happened. It happened exactly the way I planned it to.

She had pictured Ms. Green’s fingers sliding from the book, fumbling with the chalk, dropping first one thing and then another. She remembered the woman’s face, white and strained, watching in bewilderment as the chalk fell from her hand.

I did it, Nancy thought, but the realization brought no pleasure. The feeling that came instead was closer to panic.

If I did that—if I can do things like that—then, Grandma, what else am I able to do?

Kirby, she thought, I’ve got to talk to Kirby! Kirby is the only one I can tell, the only one who knows enough to understand.

She raised her eyes to the clock on the wall. The minute hand was moving so slowly! The period had barely started.

She looked down at the desk where her hand kept writing I WILL NOT LAUGH—

Row after row of letters kept appearing on the paper. The words were meaningless now. Why on earth should she be laughing? To laugh was the last thing she wanted to do!

The minute hand moved, tick by tick, around the edge of the clock. The lines of “I will nots” covered one sheet of paper and another and another. The amusement of the class had died down now and the only sound was the scratching of pencils.

Nancy glanced up once to see Ms. Green sitting silently behind her desk. She looked tired and old and pathetic. The chalk still lay on the floor where it had fallen.

She must think she’s sick, Nancy realized miserably, or that she’s crazy. And she wouldn’t believe it if I told her what really happened.

When the bell rang, Nancy was the first one out of the classroom. She dropped her papers on Ms. Green’s desk, feeling too guilty to look at her. Behind her she heard Jessie’s voice calling, “Nancy! Wait for me!” and someone else saying, “Dropsy!”

Ignoring her classmates, she hurried down the hall. There was no one in the world she wanted to see and talk to now except Kirby.

Kirby’s locker was at the foot of the steps in the north end of the building. By the time Nancy reached it, the hall was alive with students. They surged out of some doorways and into others, bumping, shoving, calling to one another, laughing, chattering.

Kirby wasn’t at her locker yet, which wasn’t unusual. Her fourth-period class was on the second floor.

Backing against the wall to stay out of the main stream of traffic, Nancy trained her eyes on the stairway. Several minutes went past with still no sign of Kirby. What was taking her so long? Nancy asked herself impatiently.

Then, as if in answer to the question, her sister appeared around the bend in the stairs. Her arms were loaded with books, and she was moving very slowly. She stopped on the landing and stood there uncertainly for a moment.

Nancy was so relieved to see her that she raised her arm and began to wave wildly. What if she wasn’t here? she asked herself frantically. What if she was away at ballet school? There would be nobody for me to talk to, nobody to share things.

She can’t go away, Nancy thought. She just can’t go. I won’t let her!

At that moment, Kirby pitched forward and fell straight down the stairs.