“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?”
“No,” he said, and then he added, “My dad is Nathan. Why?”
“Do you know Duke Templeton?”
“Yeah, he’s my grandfather,” he said. And he did not ask why.
That is when I knew all I needed to know, so I let him out of the bathroom, turned, and went back to my class.
“I don’t get it,” Nellie says, which she does not need to because it is obvious. “River is a weird name for a boy.”
“Not River.” Kyle R. looks and sounds scrunched-up which means exasperated. “Templeton. Like Duke Templeton.”
Nellie’s face stills shows confused.
Nellie is usually confused—that would be rude for me to say out loud, but it is okay for me to think because it is just a true fact—so she might not be smart enough to know who Duke Templeton is, but she might also never have been told. Lots of Bourne parents do not tell their children what happened because it is hard to say to your baby girl, “Baby girl, you are real dumb. It is not your fault, but it also cannot be changed,” and it is also hard to say to your baby girl, “We needed the jobs so we did not mind for a while that we were all being poisoned.” A lot of parents never told their children what happened. They did not want them to know, or maybe they just did not want to talk about it.
As a contrast, my mother has talked about it every day for the sixteen years I have known her which is my whole life. She has shown me and my sisters her notes for the lawsuit so many times that when the grandson of Duke Templeton walks out of the boys’ bathroom at Bourne Memorial High School seventeen years after what happened happened, I recognize him in the blink of an eye without even meeting his.
My mother calls Duke Templeton the AIC of Belsum Chemical which stands for Asshole in Chief, and this is probably accurate but technically wrong because really Duke Templeton is the president and CEO.
“You know that abandoned plant on the other side of Bluebell Park?” I say to Nellie.
She shakes her head no even though it is the biggest building in all of Bourne, and she has driven by it at least 11,680 times which is twice a day for sixteen years, and since her birthday was in May, that is an underestimate.
“There is an abandoned plant on the other side of Bluebell Park,” I begin again. “It belongs to Belsum Chemical. They turned the water smelly and brown and said it was still okay to drink, and then they turned the water very bright green and said it was not okay to drink after all or even use or even be near, but by then it was too late.”
“Wow,” Nellie says, “I don’t remember that.”
“Because you were not born yet.”
“Oh.” She frowns. “Did they say sorry?”
“They said sorry like when you punch your sister, and she yelps, and you are glad it hurt her because she is annoying, but your mom says say sorry, so you say sorry, but you do not really care, and she knows it.”