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.