Chapter 4: One for Every Desk

“What’s that thing on his eyes—”

“It’s a scarf.”

“That’s not a scarf. That’s like a—”

“It’s tied like a scarf. Look at the knot.”

“What’s he holding?”

“A cane, dude. It’s a cane.”

“I know what a cane is.”

“He’s got the schedule printed out. Who prints out the schedule?”

“Somebody who needs it,” somebody said, and then, “Oh,” in a different voice—the voice of a person who had just worked out what needing it meant.

Then a horn went off down in the drop-off line, long and flat, and the whole conversation slid under it and didn’t come back up.

Nobody came over. That was the part he kept turning. All that talk, six feet away, and not one of them actually came over.

He stood at the top of the walkway and let the morning get on with it. First day, first week of September, and the heat was already sitting on the pavement the way it did in the last week of summer, with no wind in it anywhere. Somebody had mowed the grass strip along the front, and the cut of it smelled dry and going stale. Wet mulch. The flagpole halyard knocking. A boy went past him at a run with his backpack open and flapping and one shoe half on, slapping loose, and from the drop-off line a woman’s voice going, “Have a good day! Have a good day! I love you!”—the way mothers did while the window was still down.

New Kettering High was older than the last good year at the glass plant. Dana said so every time they drove past it, the way she said most things twice. There was a ramp up to the front doors, worn smooth down the middle where everybody walked, and the doors were heavy and stayed heavy. Behind him somebody read the marquee out loud to somebody else in the car—Welcome back, Glassmen. Seniors to the auditorium, eight o’clock—and then, “That’s not us, that’s not us, go.”

Inside it smelled like floor wax and somebody’s body spray and, under both, the cafeteria getting a running start on something with tomato in it.

The front office had a counter with a bell on it and a woman behind the bell. “New?” she said. “Name?”

“Adrian Voss.”

“Mm-hm.” Keys. “Honey, if you need anything, you come right here. Don’t stand out in the hall hoping.” She wrote something and tore it and pressed it into his hand, a sticky note with the paper already curling at one end. “Four-twelve. Three, eleven, twenty-two,” she said, reading it back to him off her own writing. “Don’t lose that. They’ll charge you five—” and then, thinking about it, “—you want somebody to walk you up?”

“I’m good.”

She put a lanyard in his hand, plastic and a card in plastic, and told him it was his, and he said thank you and folded the sticky note and put both in his pocket, and the lanyard stayed there.

The schedule was folded into his other hand, and he carried it out where it could be seen, because that was the point of a printed schedule.

He was a junior. The rest of them had had two years to work out where everybody stood, who was whose, which tables, which jokes. He’d had a weekend.

The hallway opened. That was all it did. A boy came off the wall without a word and was gone before they reached each other. A girl turned early so she wouldn’t have to turn later, and the case she was carrying knocked a locker going past. A woman with a walkie-talkie said, “Walk, please,” to people who were already walking. Two different kids asked if he needed a hand, and one of them asked twice, and when he said, “I’m good,” she said, “Okay, but it’s a hundred stairs,” and he said, “I’m good,” and she said, “Okay”—and then her shoes went up ahead of him the whole way, ten feet out, stopping when he stopped and going when he went, checking.

He had braced for the other thing. He’d heard the other thing a thousand times, in a thousand rooms with a TV going in them. New kid walks in, somebody puts a shoulder into him, the hall laughs, and the joke is on him until the third act. He’d braced so hard on the way in that his jaw ached.

What happened was nothing.

By the second floor he had the reason worked out, and the reason was not kindness. Nobody in this building wanted to be the kid who shoved the blind kid. That story followed you to graduation. It got told at Thanksgiving, and your mother heard it, and it was the only thing anybody in your family knew about you for the rest of your life. So the hall opened and stayed open, and he went up the middle of it with his hand on the cane, and it didn’t matter why.

A girl fell into step next to him and said, “Can I ask you something weird?”

“Sure.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Does what hurt?”

“The—” He heard her hand come up and stop. “Never mind. That was—never mind.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, cool.” She walked with him another half a hallway, which he hadn’t asked her to do, and then peeled off at the science wing and yelled back, “Room 214 is up the stairs and left!”

There was a plastic sleeve taped to the door of 214 with the day’s schedule inside it, and the paper cracked under his knuckles when he brushed it. He stopped in the doorway.

One one-thousand.

Two one-thousand.

“There he is—!”

The room came apart at once. Six people got to him at the same time and got in each other’s way, and somebody’s hand closed around his—not grabbed, took, the way you’d take a plate out of a kid’s hands—and a voice said, “Four steps and then it’s right there, watch the chair, watch the chair, somebody move the chair.”

“Your seat’s up front, I put a card on it—”

“Do you want me to take that, I can take that—”

“Watch the bag. Watch the bag. Somebody get the bag—”

“Hi. Hi. You’re Adrian.”

“Okay,” said a new voice, and this one had a clipboard in it. “Okay, everybody, give him room. Back up. Back up.”

The press of people eased off about a foot. A badge clip ticked somewhere close, at chest height.

“Hi. Kayla Brandt. I’m class president.” She said the name and the title both, on the first day, which was more than the first day required. “Your desk is the one up front by the window. There’s a card on it with your name on it—”

She stopped mid-motion, and he heard her decide to say the rest.

“—from me. That’s not a thing. I had the markers out anyway.”

“I’m Bryce.” The voice came from a foot above the rest of them, and the kid didn’t ask. He got a hand under the backpack strap and lifted. The weight came off Adrian’s shoulder all at once and the bag went up and stayed up, riding higher than it had any right to.

Adrian’s hand closed on the strap before he had decided to do it. For about half a second he stood there with his fingers wrapped around it and a stranger’s knuckles a half inch away, and then he made his hand open, one finger at a time, and let the bag go.

“Bryce Donnelly. You want this on the back of your chair or on the hook?”

“Chair’s fine.”

“Chair’s fine. Nobody ever says hook.” He said it over his shoulder, already walking.

“Sean Dooley,” said somebody else, closer. “I’m supposed to give you the tour. The tour is: this is the room, that’s the door, and the water fountain on the second floor runs warm and nobody’s ever explained why. That’s the school. You’re caught up.”

“Do you—” The girl behind him stopped. Then, quieter, to Kayla, and not quietly enough: “Do I just, like, ask him?”

“You can ask me,” Adrian said. “I’m right here.”

“Do you need somebody to walk you between classes?”

“I’m okay.”

“I’ll do it,” Kayla said. “I said I would.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I said I would,” Kayla said again.

Somebody at the back laughed at something on a phone, not at him, and nobody turned around to see whether he’d heard it, and the room went back to being a room. Chairs. A fan in the corner with a bad bearing. Sneakers on tile. Somebody counting out homework answers to somebody who hadn’t done it.

He got to the desk. The card was taped flat to the corner, printed off a computer and then gone over by hand, the marker pressed hard enough to raise the paper in ridges. He put two fingers on it and found the ridges, and then took his fingers off, because there were twenty-three other people in the room.

“Hey,” Kayla said. She was still standing there. “They emailed us. Before you came. About you coming.”

“What’d it say?”

“Just that you were coming. And could we help.”

“Okay.”

“That was it,” she said. “That was the whole email.”

She was still standing there, and he understood that she wanted him to say something about how that was fine, so he said, “That’s more than some schools do,” and she laughed.

Then she said, “Your aunt’s really nice, by the way.”

“Yeah.”

“She came in last Tuesday. For schedule pickup.”

“Yeah,” Adrian said. “She said she had errands.”

“She had a laundry basket.”

The room was still going on around them, but two or three chairs had gone quiet. Kayla said, “A laundry basket with a towel in it,” and stopped, and started again. “Like for a baby. That kind of basket.”

“She’s describing a basket,” Sean said from the back. “In case you were—”

“I got it,” Adrian said.

“Individually wrapped,” Kayla said. “Every single one. She starts at the front row. She gets to a desk, she puts a cookie down, and she asks.”

“Asks what?”

“She had questions. She wanted to know who was in this homeroom. She wanted to know if I had a car.” Kayla paused. “She had a notebook.”

“A notebook.”

“Little one. Black. She wrote names in it. She asked me if I’d walk you to your classes, and then she wrote me down. She asked me what I do after school, and she wrote that down too. She asked—” Kayla stopped. “She said I had nice handwriting.”

Somebody at the back laughed.

“And then what,” Adrian said. His voice came out fine.

“And then she said I’d like you,” Kayla said. “Which is a lot to say to somebody you met nine minutes ago.”

She’d have said it the same way at every desk. He could hear her. He’d heard her say it at the pharmacy counter, at the bus stop, in the emergency room the night he was nine and bleeding through a dish towel, where she had still taken a second to tell the triage nurse that her nephew was very handsome.

He’s handsome. Look at him. He gets that from my side.

He’s not cold. He’s slow. He takes a minute with people. Give him a minute.

You get to know him and you won’t be sorry. I promise you won’t be sorry.

She’d have said all three, at every desk, and gotten the words a little wrong every time, and meant all of them completely.

The black cloth was wet where it crossed his cheekbone. He didn’t know when that had started. He turned his head a little, as though he were listening to something over by the window, and the wet part of the cloth slid sideways into a place where it could dry.

“Somebody said you were out near Pittsburgh last year,” Kayla said. “Like at a school out there.”

“Something like that.”

“Somebody said—” She moved closer, which was worse. “Somebody said the eyes might still—you know. That there’s a chance.”

Half a second is a long time. He could have said: they told my aunt that when I was seven. He could have said: she still says it. She says it to the woman at the pharmacy. She says it to the dog.

“Something like that,” he said.

“Hey.” Bryce came back around the front of the desk. “Where do you eat?”

“I go home.”

“Like, for lunch?”

“Sure.”

“Every day?”

“Yeah.”

Bryce thought about it. Adrian could hear him thinking about it.

“Lunch is twenty-five minutes,” Bryce said.

“I know.”

“Okay.” A pause. “You could sit with us. Table by the window, the one that wobbles. Put a napkin under it and it stops. That’s all it is. It’s just a table that wobbles.”

“I’ll see.”

“It’s the table by the window,” Bryce said, and went to move somebody’s bag.

After school he had to be on the 3:10 bus. Toby’s bus dropped him at the corner at 3:40. Dana’s shift started at three. None of that was going in a cafeteria, and none of it was going to get explained to a kid who had carried his bag up a flight of stairs and asked him one question about lunch.

“Oh—wait.” Kayla had her bag open on her forearm. “I saved you one. From your aunt. I put it in here so nobody’d take it.” She came up with a paper napkin folded into a pouch. “Okay, it’s a little crushed. It was in with my gym stuff.”

He took it. It was warm from her bag and soft through the napkin. “Thanks.”

“She put raisins in them,” Kayla said. “I feel like you should know that up front.”

Then the bell went, and the room emptied around him in a scrape of chairs and twenty-three people going out the same door, and the hall filled up and drained, and then it was quiet in there.

He sat down. The chair was the right height. Somebody had moved it in from the art room, or the office, and the seat had a crack in the vinyl that he could feel through his jeans. The card was on the corner of the desk, taped down flat.

He broke the cookie in half. Oatmeal and raisin, the way she made them, and it tasted like the kitchen at home at seven in the morning—the fan going in the window, the chair knocking once as it took her weight, the breath she let out before she sat down. He folded the napkin back over the other half and left it on the corner of the desk.

There were twenty-four desks in the room. He didn’t have to count them.

He counted them anyway.