Towering

stopped, the screaming kids, and the bus driver, shouting at us to be quiet. “It was sort of loud. Every once in a while, the bus driver would flip out at us for being so loud.”
    “Flip out?”
    “It’s an expression. Get mad, upset.”
    She nodded, like she was still picturing someone flipping over. “I don’t even know what loud would be like. My world is quiet, so quiet. Sometimes, I sing just to keep myself company.”
    “I know. I’ve heard you.”
    She looked at me, surprised. “You have?”
    “When I was at my friend’s cabin one night, it was quiet outside. The sound carries here, I guess. I heard you sing. That’s how I knew you were here. I’d heard you before, but this was closer. But no one else heard you. They said it must be a bird, a loon. But I knew it wasn’t.”
    “You were meant to hear me, and they were not. I had heard you too, for days before, or rather, sensed you. I knew you were coming.”
    It was so weird when she said things like that. Yet, I believed her. I reached over and took her hand in mine. It was small, so small, and cold. I squeezed it.
    “Tell me more about your school, when you arrive. What does it look like?”
    I tried to picture the school, how it would look to someone who had never been there, who’d never been to a school at all. I closed my eyes, remembering me and Tyler walking up to it, any given day.
    “The building is brick. The bus parks in the back by the basketball courts.” She wouldn’t know what that meant. “Basketball is a game we play. There are no trees or anything back there, but there are trees in the front, not as big as these trees. When we get there, there are already lots of people. Everyone finds their friends, their little group. At seven thirty, we go inside.”
    “And inside?”
    “There are hallways, white tile. Well, it used to be white, but now, it’s gray from all the people stepping on it for so many years. The walls are white too, but they’re covered with posters and signs, so you can’t really see the walls.”
    She leaned forward. “What do the posters and signs say?”
    “Um, different things. If there’s a student government election—where they choose the people who run things—they put up signs saying things like Vote for Lisa Amore or whatever. Or sometimes, they think of slogans. Like, once, this girl named Sara Mitts ran for president. Her signs had a picture of a shoe on them, and they said If the shoe fits, vote Sara Mitts . Or, sometimes, there was a pep rally.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Um, football, it’s a game, a contest. People get pretty excited about it.”
    “Like the jousting contests in The Once and Future King ?”
    “Sort of like that. People at school sometimes acted like it was like that. Yeah, we’d challenge other schools to see who was the fastest and strongest, so yeah, just like that. Anyway, before the team competed, they’d have a pep rally, to sort of get people excited about it.” I pictured the school gym as one of those long jousting arenas like they had in movies, the cheerleaders like ladies of court, waving ribbons instead of pompoms. “The band would be there, playing the school fight song, and people cheer—they scream stuff like, ‘Let’s go, Spartans!’”
    “And you were on the team.”
    She seemed impressed. I nodded.
    “That must have made you feel like a hero.”
    “It did.” It almost was like being a knight, the deafening applause as I ran into the school gym, Tyler behind me. I remembered smiling so much my face hurt. Where had it gone? What had it come to, if you could just be there one day and gone the next. It all seemed like a wasted effort.
    I changed the subject. “Sometimes, they have a school play or a dance. They put up posters for those too.”
    “A dance! At your school? How fun that must be!”
    “It wasn’t that big a deal. They were mostly . . .” I stopped. I’d been about to say the dances were lame. I’d never gone. I didn’t even know anyone who went, except to prom. But I realized that would sound ungrateful to say that to someone like her, like complaining about the food in front of a starving man. “I mean, they were fun. They’d usually have some kind of theme, like . . .” I reached back into my mind, trying to visualize the posters. “Under the Sea, or Western, or Winter Wonderland.”
    “Winter Wonderland?”
    “I think . . .” I pictured the posters. “They decorated everything blue and white,