“Yes,” I said, “I will.”
For the first time since I’d met him, Benny smiled, revealing a missing front tooth. With a sudden inspiration I grabbed Silas’s stick and kneeled on the floor. I scratched the word quickly, without thinking, into the hard earth. Then, in one swift motion, I underlined it. “Do you know what that is?” I asked.
Silas stared at the letters and back at me, as though he was surprised that my hand had made those letters appear. He shook his head.
“That’s your name,” I said, pointing at the letters one by one. “S-I-L-A-S.” Then I scribbled another word below it. “And this spells Benny.”
Benny smiled, his one front tooth jutting out at an angle.
Silas stared at me, his mouth forming a small O. “Silas,” he repeated, pressing his fingers to the ground.
I set the stick down and stood, flushed with pleasure. “Wait here, for just a minute,” I said, thinking of all those books that sat, unread, on Paul’s old desk. “I’ll be right back.”
BENNY STOOD IN FRONT OF THE MUD WALL, SCRATCHING out the letters with a stick. “Yes, that’s right,” I said, as the room of boys watched in silence. He finished the Y and stood back, spelling out the word in block letters.
“Benny,” he read, his face exploding in a toothless grin.
“Very good,” I said, taking the stack of children’s books off the table. What started as the two little boys etching their letters in the ground had grown as a few of the older boys had poked their heads into the room and taken seats.
“Let’s read a book,” I said, pulling one off the top of the pile. When I had retrieved them, I was delighted to recognize a few from School. “Once there was a tree,” I read, showing the pages around so everyone could see. “And she loved a little boy. And every day the boy would come—” I paused. Silas’s hand was raised. It was the very first thing I’d taught them, after I began the lesson and they all tried to shout over one another.
“What do you mean she loved him? What is that?” he asked.
Kevin, the boy with the cracked glasses, let out an annoyed sigh. “It means he wants to kiss a girl. It’s what happened before the plague.” He smiled up at me, a pink-cheeked, bashful smile.
“Kiss a girl?” Silas asked incredulously.
Huxley perked up. “No, it’s not that. This is a tree. The tree isn’t kissing the boy.”
“What are you guys talking about,” Silas asked, twisting his face in confusion.
“You can love anyone,” I interrupted, looking around at the group. “Love is just”—I searched for the right words—“caring about someone very deeply. Feeling like that person matters to you, like your whole world would be sadder without them in it.” I thought about Pip’s staccato laugh, or jumping from bed to bed with Ruby, the way we always did Saturday mornings, when we were waiting for our showers.
After a long pause, Benny glanced up. “I loved my brother,” he said.
“I loved my mother,” a fifteen-year-old named Michael added.
“I loved my mother, too,” I said. “I still do. That’s the thing—it never goes away, even if the person does.” I waited a moment, then opened the book again. “So every day the boy would come and gather her leaves and make them into a crown—”
“Kevin! Michael! Aaron! Where are you?” Leif’s voice boomed down the hall. He turned the corner, his muscular body streaked with ash and mud. Those black, marble eyes stared at me again, not betraying any feeling. “Where are the buckets?”
A few of the older boys sprang up from the floor. “We were going to do it after . . . after we finish the book.”
“The book?” Leif asked, stalking toward them. He did not look at me, kept his head turned, as though I were the table, a chair, the floor beneath his feet. “You will do it now, because you were supposed to do it this morning. I want all the buckets of rainwater inside, around the fire.”
“Can’t it wait a few minutes? We’re almost done,” I said before I could stop myself.
The boys turned, surprised at the sound of my voice.
Leif stepped toward me, his musky smell filling the space between us. “Wait for what?” He snatched the book from my hand. “This? These boys don’t need to be reading children’s books. They need to learn to fend for themselves.”
“And they’ll be able to.” I straightened up. “But they also should be able to understand a basic road sign, or how to write their own name.”