PAPERS PASSED ALONG IN A PILE. That’s what high school was. They went down one aisle between desks, came back around the next, looped slowly to the back of the classroom. The gifted and talented kids—transformed now into the Latin Club, the Forensics Team—licked their fingers to extract their portion. They always set to work like the swim team doing laps, breathing from the sides of their mouths, biting down on their pencils. The hockey players had to be prodded awake when the stack came down their aisle, had to be treated with great deference—or else we would lose the District Championship. Again. They woke from their naps long enough to take one paper and pass the rest on, long enough to dump open bags of chips into their mouths, wipe the salt from their lips, and return to their dreams of Empire. What else would hockey players dream about? It was their world we lived in. When I was fifteen, I figured this out. They dreamed it into fact. They got teachers to forgive their blank worksheets, they got cheerleaders to scream out their names at pep rallies, they got Zambonis to stripe the world as far as you could see—ceaselessly—in perfect swaths of freezing water. We were in a new building that year, a bigger classroom with pale brick walls, but outside it was the same thing it had been since we were children. Winter boomeranged back.
Outside: four feet of snow sealed in a shiny crust.
Inside: European History, American Civics, Trigonometry, English.
Life Science came last. It was taught by our old eighth-grade gym teacher, Liz Lundgren, who trudged over from the middle school at the end of the day in her Polartec parka and camouflage snow bib. Ms. Lundgren had a tic. Whenever she got irritated or inspired, she switched instantly to whispering. She thought that would make us listen better; she thought it would make us pay attention to protists and fungi; she thought we would try harder to understand meiosis if we couldn’t quite catch all the words in her sentences. “The spores … in absence of water or heat … maneuver in great quantities,” she would murmur, and it was like hearing some obscure rumor that, due to over-telling, no longer held any relevance we could make out.
In that class you could always hear the clock tick. From every window, you could see snow blow away in gusts, then drift back the next day in piles as high as houses. One day near the end of Evolution, a late-season storm brought a huge poplar branch down in a wumff of ice. Through the window, I watched it cascade to the ground and narrowly miss a small blue car pulling out from the grocery store across from school. At the board, Ms. Lundgren was chalking out the pros and cons of natural selection in squeaky cursive. The window fogged as I leaned toward it. I leaned back. Someone in a huge hooded parka got out of the blue car, dragged the branch from the road, got back in. Then the Honda drove a wide arc around the perimeter, crunching a few twigs beneath its tires.
Minutes after that the sun came out: brilliant, stunning us all. Still, it was no surprise when we were let out of school a half hour early due to the windchill. I made my way home from the bus stop at a rigid trot. I crunched along the snow-packed trail, felt the wind come off the lake in blasts, heard the pines groan and creak overhead. Halfway up the hill, my lungs started to feel raggedy. My face changed into something other than face, got rubbed out. When I finally got to the top of the hill, when I slowed down to brush ice from my nose, I turned and saw a puff of exhaust across our lake. I had to squint against all that white to make it out.
It was the blue Honda hatchback from town. A couple was unloading the car.
The lake at this point was extremely narrow, not much more than eight hundred feet straight across. I watched them for a few minutes, nursing my fingers, scrunching them into inflexible balls.