One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  Omar’s outstretched hands rise up like he’s under arrest. “Sorry, sorry. A beer when you get a chance.”

  He chooses the farthest stool at the end. Her eyeballs look mere degrees away from being able to set it aflame. She returns behind the bar and pours unrequested refills for Zach, Tom, and Hobart. “On the house,” she says. Then she starts polishing glasses.

  Frank sighs and pulls Omar a beer, takes it over to him.

  “Sorry, Frank,” says Omar.

  Frank nods. “Not your fault, man.”

  Everyone in the bar closes their eyes and takes this in. Everyone winces. Everyone thinks the exact same thing. There is an unspeakable amount for which Omar is at fault.

  “So, um … I have some news.” Omar doesn’t look up from the beer Frank has just handed him. He sounds sorry—for opening his mouth at all—but also a little bit excited, proud even, to have something to report. There’s not much he can give us—his wards, his citizens—but this is one thing. Some news. An offering. “Donna Anvers saw a moving truck.”

  “I heard it was a delivery truck,” Nora says, also without looking up. “Kitchen supplies or something.”

  “That too,” Omar says. “But that’s not what Donna says she saw. A moving truck, she said, for sure.”

  Nora’s incredulity is such that it overwhelms her abhorrence for Bourne’s mayor. She looks to see if he’s kidding or lying, teasing her, mocking her, tormenting her, manipulating her. He is not. Finally she asks, “Where?”

  “She saw it go by the nursery.”

  The plants never really came back here, so neither did Donna’s Nursery. It’s still open, but mostly she sits in the front window all day and watches Bourne go by.

  “Must have been on the way somewhere else,” Nora says, sure.

  “Where?” Omar asks.

  It’s a good point. Bourne is on the way to nowhere. No one, nothing, goes through Bourne.

  “No shit.” Frank gets away with penetrating commentary like that because he owns a bar.

  “Can’t be,” Nora says but adds, despite herself, “Can it?”

  Omar smiles at her. Omar shrugs. Omar looks like hope. So does Nora. It makes them both unrecognizable. His shoulders rise up toward his ears. “Maybe?”

  Nora considers this a moment. “I doubt it’s true.” Then her face shuts down. “And even if it is, we don’t want them here.”

  “You don’t even know who they are.”

  She goes to anger faster than an exhale. “Who would move here, Omar? I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. We’re broken.”

  “Nora, that’s not—”

  “And anyone who came willingly, who actually chose this, would be brokener still.”

  “This is a nice town—”

  “Used to be.”

  “We have some challenges but—”

  I don’t get to hear what comes after Omar’s very mayoral “but” because Nora interrupts again.

  “And whose fault is that?”

  Omar nods, resigned, closes his mouth and every other part of him, sips his beer. He and Nora have had countless versions of this conversation countless times, but this is where they all end. Speaking of going nowhere.

  One

  In the morning, I wake up like usual, groan out of bed, pee, pad back to the bedroom still half asleep to get Mirabel up, take her to the bathroom. (Monday helps lift and carry, but she won’t do the toilet part because: germs.) While Monday gets dressed, I find clothes for Mirabel (Monday can, but Mirabel sometimes likes to wear clothes that aren’t yellow), and then I get dressed while Monday helps Mirabel into the outfit I’ve picked out (no germs). When Mama’s appointments start early, sometimes she’s gone before we’re even up, but she always leaves coffee in the pot and breakfast on the table for us. Monday helps Mirabel (without touching her mouth) while I eat. If Mirabel’s head is steady, she can brush her own teeth, but this isn’t one of those mornings, so I brush mine, then hers (so many germs) while Monday eats. An ordinary morning.

  But that is the last thing in my day—my life—that’s ordinary.

  Mrs. Shriver is standing in front of the blackboard as we file in, twisting a piece of chalk in her hands. She looks nervous. It’s weird. “Good morning, everyone. Take your seats quickly this morning, please. I have some news.”

  History teachers can’t be used to reporting news.

  “Class, we have a new student.”

  I can barely breathe. Mrs. Shriver either. She sounds like she’s repeating something she got from a book. She’s been teaching for almost two decades, but those words have never come out of her mouth before.

  And it’s not just me and Mrs. Shriver. We’re all wiggly like when we were second graders. We’re all paying attention. Chloe Daniels is not falling asleep on her notebook. Evie Anders has pulled back the hood of the sweatshirt she wears so ubiquitously I’d forgotten what color her hair is. Rock Ramundi’s phone is nowhere in sight. Mrs. Shriver walks over to the door and opens it with a little bit of a flourish.

  “Allow me to introduce—” The kid standing there looks embarrassed then alarmed as Mrs. Shriver suddenly stops talking and starts looking panicked. It’s her big moment, and she’s forgotten the kid’s name. I try to imagine day one in a new school where everyone already knows everyone but you. I try to imagine day one in this school, without having grown up here, and cannot. I consider what he sees. Bodily—like, as a body but also physically—we’re varied as a garden, one of those weedy ones where anything that grows goes. For a small nowhere town, we’re pretty diverse, I guess because not that long ago Bourne was on the rise, a good place for fresh starts and young families, open to anyone because not that many people were here yet. Mrs. Shriver, who is a Black woman married to a white man, says that’s why they chose it, so her family would belong, so her kids would fit in no matter what they looked like. But it turned out not to matter because Mrs. Shriver and her husband couldn’t have children. Maybe after six miscarriages, they gave up. Or maybe they realized having kids in Bourne wasn’t safe after all, no matter how diverse we are.

  So we look different. But we’re all poor. We’re all poisoned. We’re all tired—of this place, each other, our options. Our sisters. We’re all here, and we’re all stuck, and we’re all stuck here. Not that you can tell any of that from looking.

  The kid leans in from the hallway and stage-whispers his name to Mrs. Shriver.

  “River Templeton.”

  And at once, we all understand the look of panic on her face.

  Petra’s eyes have doubled in size.

  “No. Way.” I grab her hand under the desk.

  “Phantasmagorical,” she whispers back.

  Alex Malden stops sharpening his pencil mid-point. Peter Fabbelman’s squeaky felt tip falls silent mid-doodle.

  Apparently, insanely, in all the flurry of the morning, it had not occurred to Mrs. Shriver when she saw it written down on the paperwork. Not until her lips were on the cusp of mouthing his name did she figure out exactly who River Templeton must be.

  There is a jolt through the whole of me, like some kind of acid has been pumped out from the middle of my chest, down my arms, around the horn of my fingertips to pool into my stomach. I look down and expect to see smoke. I look around and notice that River Templeton is the only one in the room with his mouth closed. He uses it to smile.

  He looks like a movie star. It’s not the perfect skin or the bright teeth or the hair so labored over I can see neat furrows like he plans to plant seeds. It’s not that he’s so overdressed in brand-new khakis with a sharp crease down the middle of each leg, black dress shoes shiny as silverware, a light-blue shirt, clearly ironed within the hour, buttoned all the way down around his wrists and within one of his neck, never mind it’s supposed to hit ninety-three degrees today and is not much cooler than that now in our classroom. I suppose no one thought to tell him we don’t wear uniforms. Or have air-conditioning. But I can see that under his outfit he’s just a kid playing dress
-up, trying too hard, itchy in his clothes. So it’s not that. It’s something else.

  “Do you want to introduce yourself?” Mrs. Shriver finally stammers.

  He turns to us and smiles again, then swallows that smile like it embarrassed him. “Hi. Um. Hi. My name is River Templeton.” As if it’s nothing. “We. Um. My family and I. We just moved here. From Boston. Um.” He falters, then goes with “Thank you for having me.” Winces. Sits with polite relief at the desk Mrs. Shriver waves him toward.

  It is hard to be objective now that I know his name, but mostly what he looks is new. It is strange, his newness, and hard to describe because here is a weird and horrible thing about me: I never, ever see anyone I haven’t already seen before. When Monday and Mirabel and I stop by the Do Not Shop on Saturday afternoons, we know everyone there. On the way there, on the way home, no matter how long we dawdle, we know everyone we pass. At the pizza place, at the laundromat, at the grocery store, at any of the shops still in business, we know all the patrons. At the bar where Mama works, there are no regulars because everyone’s a regular.

  So some of why I’ve forgotten how to breathe is this kid’s newness. But that is not the problem. Because he is new, it is true. He is new. But his name is not.

  “Yesterday we finished up the Treaty of Versailles.” Mrs. Shriver takes a deep breath and dives in. “So now we turn our attention to the Italian Renaissance.”

  We’re used to history as backgammon, all shakers and dice throws. But River looks around like maybe it’s a trick or some kind of weird performance art we’re all in on. Of course he’s not familiar with Mrs. Shriver’s out-of-order approach to history, and of course he doesn’t know her own—how she and her husband and her brand-new teaching certificate moved to Bourne when the plant did to start a new life as a young married couple in a safe town where property was still affordable but on the rise and good new jobs were plentiful. Now her history includes all those miscarriages, a husband with migraines bad enough he can’t work, and a house into which they poured all their savings that today is worth nothing. So you can see why she would want to take history by the throat and shake it, what happens and what happens next, how one thing leads to another thing without any choices ever being made. Petra would say unassailably. She might even say incontrovertibly.

  When River determines it’s not a joke and we are, in fact, advancing our study of history by going five hundred years in the wrong direction, I watch his eyes cloud with the possibility that what he must already be thinking of us—provincial, backwater, small-town hicks—isn’t the half of it. He has no idea.

  But he rolls with it. He shrugs then leans over and pulls a leather-bound book out of an expensive-looking bag that is not remotely a backpack and starts taking diligent notes.

  Right in the middle of Mrs. Shriver’s lecture, he raises his hand to make a point about the way fair trade and international commerce were sparks for democracy and religious equality. He raises it again with a question about the role Catholic Rome played in the rise of Venetian capitalism. He cites a book he’s read. He makes a joke about a gondola which is almost dirty and actually funny.

  We are paying attention, if not to Renaissance history, at least to the history being made in this room right now. We are slack-jawed—with incredulity, with implication, with the audacity of this kid—or maybe just because we are exactly the unbright yokels River must imagine us to be.

  We’re not actually dumb though. Which means some things are clear to us at once.

  River is normal. This is what normal looks like. Not normal for here, normal for out there, normal for everywhere else—bright, educated, untroubled, unworried. Whole. And us? We’re not normal, not for anywhere.

  And some things come clear more slowly, to us and to bright, clean, sparkling River himself. He knows much about the world out there and, apparently, the world which built it and the worlds which came before, but about our world here, the one in which he finds himself now, he knows nothing. Not even who he is.

  Two

  “Templeton?” says Nellie.

  “Templeton,” I affirm. I have heard it from three different people now, and that is how many sources Mrs. Lasserstein says you need before you can put a fact in your research paper.

  “The rat in Charlotte’s Web?”

  The Kyles laugh at Nellie because we are sixteen, and she is not remembering Charlotte’s Web from her childhood or reading it aloud to a younger sibling but is actually studying it with her supplemental reading group. But the Kyles should not laugh at her. One, because it is mean. Two, because we all read at different levels, and different does not mean smart or stupid, and everyone has their own strengths as well as their own challenges. Three, because Charlotte’s Web is a good book regardless of how old you are. But mostly, four, because she is right.

  “Yes,” I tell her and the Kyles. “A rat. Exactly.”

  Because I have also confirmed that River Templeton is that Templeton. His father is Nathan, not Duke, but only because Duke is his grandfather. I have only one source on this rather than three, but since the source is River himself, that makes it a primary source rather than a secondary source, and sometimes you only get one of those. You could also interview his father, but of course he did not come to school. You could also interview his father’s father, but he would not grant you an interview. I know because Mama tried. A lot.

  What happened was that I saw Mab in the hallway looking weird.

  “One,” I said, and she did not even look up.

  “One!” I said louder, and many other people looked up, but Mab did not.

  “One,” I came up and said in her ear, and her head snapped over to me, and her eyes met my eyes and told them something was terrible. “Something is wrong?” I guessed.

  She nodded.

  “You feel sick?”

  “No.”

  “You thought of something sad?”

  “No.”

  “You got a bad grade on something?” This was a stupid guess because Mab never gets a bad grade on anything.

  “That’s him.” She pointed with her chin at the walking-away back of someone. I could not see his front, but I still knew who she meant because there was only one him we had discussed recently: the new person living in my library.

  “He is a kid?”

  “He came with his family.”

  “He is Track A?” I asked even though I was pretty sure because otherwise how would Mab know?

  “Sure. He’s not from here.”

  “Some people who are not from here also are not Track A,” I said.

  She did not say anything because that was true, but that was not her point.

  “Was he mean?” I guessed. She looked at me for the first time in the conversation. I looked away.

  “No. He was fine.”

  “What is his name?” I asked.

  Mab’s expression was hard to identify. Closest was proud. She looked proud of me. Like I had finally asked the right question.

  “River,” she said.

  “River?” I wrinkled my nose. It was a weird name.

  “River Templeton.”

  She made big eyes at me, so big I had to meet them, and then I had to look away.

  “Are you making a joke?” I asked because Mab is often making a joke, and it is hard to tell.

  “It is a sick joke,” she said. And first I felt relieved and then I felt strange because one, it was not funny, and two, she did not look like she thought it was either.

  That is when I got my other two sources.

  “Alex Malden,” I called to him politely. “Can you tell me the full name of the new student in your class please?”

  Alex Malden looked at me like I am weird but said, “River Templeton?” His voice went up at the end like a question, but his question was not whether the new student’s name was River Templeton. He knew the new student’s name was River Templeton. His question was why I was asking, why I was asking him, and why I am so weird.
r />   No one knows the answers to these questions, so I turned to Petra.

  She started nodding before I could even ask the question. “For real, sister,” she said, and she meant me, even though we are not sisters, because my sister is like her sister which makes us like sisters too. That is the transitive property which I learned in geometry.

  “Maybe it is a different Templeton,” I said.

  “Wait’ll you see him,” Mab breathed all in a rush.

  But I could not wait. I watched the back of the student weave off down the hall and then into the bathroom, and then I could not go in the bathroom because it was the men’s room and I am not a man, so I stood right outside the door. When the door opened and the front of the new student was behind it, what he looked was surprised, probably because I was a girl and not a boy and also probably because I was standing so close he could not get out.

  “Excuse me,” he said which was polite.

  I did not want his eyes to look in my eyes, but I did want to see his face, so I looked and did not move.

  “I … have to get past,” he tried, and I saw what he meant, but I still did not move.

  “Can you … um … scoot over a little?” he said, and that is when I saw what Mab meant about him. He had the same eye shape and the same lip shape. His nose spread out the same way from his cheekbones. The same lines, but less deep, came down from his nostrils to his mouth which raised at the corner in the same way. It was confusing. It is true I have only ever seen that face before in newspaper clippings and on the computer, but I recognized the sameness anyway.

  So he would not see me or see me seeing him, I looked back at the ground and asked him my questions.

  “Did you just move into the library?”

  “Yes.” What he sounded was surprised. He is new so he did not yet know what a small town Bourne is or how fast word travels around it. “Why?”

  I did not want to tell him why. “Is your name River Templeton?”

  “Yeah.” Again, surprised with a little bit of something else. “Why?”

  “Is your dad Duke Templeton?”