Her Name in the Sky by Kelly Quindlen

things in her throat. “Can I go?”
    Ms. Carpenter nods quickly and repeatedly, as if remembering herself. “Go ahead,” she says. “I’ll see you later.”
    Hannah hurries out of the room and into the empty hallway. She pushes into the bathroom and checks the floor beneath the stalls to make sure there are no pairs of saddle-shoed feet in the room. Then she shuts herself into the handicap stall, leans her head against the cold tile, and breathes.
     
    “I heard you got in trouble in Ms. Carpenter’s class today,” Joanie says after school. She stands across from Hannah in their mother’s yellow kitchen, snapping pretzels in her mouth. “What’d you do?”
    “Nothing.” 
    “I heard you said some shit about Father Simon.”
    “Everyone’s been saying shit about Father Simon.”
    “So did Ms. Carpenter give you detention?”
    “No.”
    Joanie snaps hard on a pretzel. “What’d she do?”
    Hannah turns her back on Joanie to heat a bowl of leftover rice in the microwave. “She just talked to me.”
    “Talked to you? What, like, lectured you?”
    “Yeah. Kind of.”
    “Ms. Carpenter’s so cool,” Joanie says. “I can’t wait to have her next year.”
    “She’s alright.”
    “She’s awesome. You’ve been saying that for years.”
    Hannah shrugs.
    “Jeeze, what’d she do, shout in your face?” Joanie says. “I thought you loved her.”
    Hannah pushes the microwave to stop it from beeping. “She just spewed a lot of bullshit.”
    “Bullshit,” Joanie repeats. “What kind of bullshit?”
    “Jesus, stop being so nosy. She just irritated me, okay?”
    Joanie bites a large pretzel in half and stares Hannah down. “You’re probably just pissed because she was right about whatever she said.”
    “Shut up, Joanie.”
    Hannah takes the rice up to her bedroom and shuts the door with her foot. She sits on the end of her bed and stares across the room at her bookshelf. A Separate Peace . To Kill a Mockingbird . The Catcher in the Rye . All the books she read as a freshman in Ms. Carpenter’s English 1 Honors class—back when Ms. Carpenter still taught freshmen, before she switched wholly to seniors—stand side-by-side on the top shelf. They are small and unassuming, their spines crinkled in a way that makes Hannah nostalgic for the 14 year-old girl who had not yet opened them. The other books that Ms. Carpenter gave Hannah to read outside of class— The Perks of Being a Wallflower , The Book Thief , The House on Mango Street —books that Hannah then passed on to Baker—stand next to them. Hannah sets her rice bowl down on the bed and walks over to the bookshelf, running her fingers across the tops of the books, touching the dust that has settled over them to prove to Hannah just how long ago she read them, just how long ago she was that bright-eyed freshman girl. She trails her finger down the spine of A Separate Peace and remembers, with the soft coloring of memory, the first moment Baker existed in her world.
    Hannah can still see the configuration of the classroom—the plastic-topped desks separated into two rectangular formations, each one facing the center of the room. She can still see Ms. Carpenter, the first teacher who showed them that high school would not be scary, sitting on her wooden stool in the middle of the tiled floor. And she can still see the back of the head of the girl sitting in the desk in front of her—the girl wearing a yellow headband over her long dark hair—who, on the third day of class, when they were supposed to be taking notes on Ms. Carpenter’s discussion of A Separate Peace , turned around and looked at Hannah with big, anxious eyes.
    “Can I borrow a piece of paper?” she had asked, her voice nervous but earnest. “I gave my last piece of loose-leaf to someone in first block. I can just use, like, a torn-off piece of your paper—” she had pointed at Hannah’s sheet—“if you want.”
    “Sure,” Hannah had said, sliding her paper forward,