Later, when she thought it likely that interest in her had faded, she stood up as quickly as she could, tucked her now-hateful briefcase once more under one arm, her textbooks under the other, and asked the only adult she could find where the bathroom was. Then she walked down the hallway, opened the bathroom door, and, upon finding it empty, tucked herself into a stall. She set down her stack of textbooks and her briefcase on the floor. A wave of relief washed over her, to be unseen, hidden inside something small. To be totally alone.
She stayed there for twenty minutes, checking the digital wristwatch that David had given her, waiting for the bell. She looked at her schedule. She would not be late again. Girls came into and out of the bathroom, holding forth on various subjects in rushed, enthusiastic bursts of language that Ada sometimes didn’t understand. She noted their diction with interest, sentence structures she had never heard before, expressions she had only heard in restaurants or on the T. The 1980s marked the dawn of like as a sort of linguistic master key, a shapeless bendable word that fit into the crevices of sentences as perfectly as honey. The girls at Queen of Angels poured it over their speech greedily, and Ada mouthed it herself, in her bathroom stall, practicing along with them as she often did with other members of the lab.
At 11:54, when the bathroom was empty, Ada opened her briefcase on her lap. From it she took the pen, the pad of paper, one textbook, and added them to the pile of textbooks she’d made on the floor. Then she tucked the empty briefcase into the nook between the toilet and the wall. She’d leave it there for the rest of the day. Her books didn’t fit into it anyway. She let herself out of the stall and into the hallway once more, carrying her textbooks on her meager hip, and she walked to her next class.
At the end of the day, when she returned to the bathroom nearest the cafeteria, she found that the briefcase was gone. She opened every stall door to make sure. She stood for a while, pondering what to do, wondering how she would explain it to David. In the mirror, she looked unlike herself.
The foyer of the Lower School was crowded with children, all jostling against one another to exit. Outside, she saw in her path a group of older boys from the Upper School—some of them so much older that they seemed to her like men, the whole broad-shouldered bunch. They were standing in a group, some of them leaning against the wall of the school, others standing splay-ankled in the middle of the sidewalk. Groups of boys terrified her beyond all measure; typically, if she saw them ahead of her on any walk, she crossed the street to avoid intersecting with them. But she had turned left out of the school doors, and the street was too busy to cross, and to turn around completely would have made her too visible.
She continued, head down, hoping to pass them unnoticed, when she heard her name.
“Ada,” said one of them—she still had her eyes on the ground, and her instinct, really, was to keep going. But then he said it louder.
She was past them already. She clutched her books more tightly to her chest and pivoted slowly on a heel. She could feel a deep, defeating warmth spreading downward from her scalp. She looked up at William Liston.
“Hi,” she said—so quietly that she might as well have mouthed it.
“How was your first day?” The other boys looked at her or away. Two of them continued whatever conversation they were having, uninterested.
“Okay,” she said, trying to produce more volume this time, wondering what anyone else would do or say at this moment. Make a joke, perhaps: some tossed-off line, some little act of self-deprecation or school-deprecation that showed him she belonged.
William Liston paused, as if waiting for more.
“Cool,” he said finally, and then turned back to his group. She understood that she was dismissed. She also understood that something further had been expected of her, a few more conversational twists and turns, and she racked her brain for anything, another word, another phrase, but she was not a native speaker of William’s language, of the language of children.
Suddenly, from behind her, she heard her name again.
“Ada! There you are!” called a voice she recognized instantly as her father’s. She froze.
“And William Liston!” he added. Ada turned around slowly, nervously, and saw David on the opposite sidewalk, wearing the large glasses that had gone out of fashion half a decade before, one half of the collar of his shirt tucked in on itself messily. He did not look to the right before bounding out into the street, and the driver of the car that screeched to a halt in front of him rolled down the car’s window to object.
“All right, all right,” said David, holding up a firm hand in the driver’s direction. “Let’s not overreact.”
Ada had told him she would meet him at the lab after school. It had not been the plan for him to come here. All around her, she could hear a ceasing of conversation as her classmates stopped to watch the spectacle of David, his clothing flapping in ways she had never before noticed, his thin frame jangling along, elbows sticking out at odd angles.
He reached the sidewalk and waved brightly to William, calling out his name once more, telling him hello.
“Hey,” said William. One of his friends turned his back to all of them, presumably to hide his amusement.
“You’re getting very grown, William!” David called brightly, which caused a physical shudder to make its way from the top of Ada’s head to her shins. Then he put one hand on her shoulder.
“Was it terrible?” he asked her, too loudly.
Ada shook her head no. Her voice was still lost.
“Well, how was it? And where’s your briefcase, my dear?” David said.
A giggle from someplace to her right. She looked down at the giant stack of books she was carrying in her arms and back up at her father.
“I lost it,” she said slowly.
He regarded her. In his gaze she saw that he knew what she had done, the intentionality with which she had misplaced the thing, and it shamed her: he would not have cared what anyone said, she thought. And she told herself that perhaps she was not so like him after all—that perhaps she lacked the best parts, the noblest parts, of David.
“How on earth does one lose a briefcase?” David said at last, and then at last he turned and walked toward home, and Ada followed. Her ears burned at the rumble, behind her, of a dozen conversations that resumed, in hushed tones, with more urgency, and the low sounds of laughter that followed.