Luckily, Maura didn’t see any abandoned boxes that evening as she approached the entrance to the school. The quiet, brownstone-lined streets of the Upper East Side were either too genteel or too uptight for such a public display of emotion, she thought.
Fitting for its locale, the building looked old and fancy, the architectural equivalent of an elderly philanthropist dressed up for a benefit. It had one of those elaborate prewar exteriors that realtors love to point out, adorned with tiny gargoyles shaped like gryphons.
As she walked up the wide interior staircase, past marble plaques quoting Plato and Einstein, Maura’s fingers crept up to her face, touching the small turquoise nose ring she had worn since college that would surely violate the dress code of a place like this. Nina’s younger sister, Amie, had taught at this school for several years now, but Maura had never stepped foot inside before tonight.
She heard murmurs when she reached the second-floor landing and followed them to Room 204. Thankfully, she was the last to arrive.
Amie
Apparently she had never finished Atonement.
Amie’s arm was stretched painfully under her bed, fingers splayed, feeling for a pen that had seemingly rolled into oblivion, when her thumb brushed unexpectedly against the spine of a book. She pulled out the paperback, covered in a light layer of dust, and saw that her bookmark—gold-plated and monogrammed, a gift from an ex-boyfriend that had long stopped reminding her of their brief intertwinement—still rested in the furrow between pages, two-thirds of the way through.
Amie had been reading the novel back in March, and she couldn’t believe she had forgotten about it, she had been so engrossed in the story. But she had nodded off that night, the night the boxes arrived, with the book sleeping next to her in bed, and in the commotion of the following morning the novel must have slipped off the duvet and into the past, a sudden relic of the days before.
Before.
Amie held the book in her hands, remembering that morning. She had slept in late, as usual—a habit that her sister, Nina, never understood—unwilling to extricate herself from that night’s reverie, no doubt inspired by her reading. In the dream, she was a student at Cambridge in the 1930s, courted by a young man who spoke like Hugh Grant, and Amie remembered feeling faintly disappointed to have woken up alone in bed.
By the time Amie rolled off her mattress that morning, Nina had already left two panicked voice mails. （She was only a year older than Amie but had long deemed herself the voice of authority.）
“Call me as soon as you get this!” Nina shouted into the phone. “Don’t go outside yet, don’t do anything. Just call me first! Please!”
Nina hadn’t believed in the boxes’ inscription and wanted to wait until she had met with her news team at work. But the truth was Amie wouldn’t have looked anyway. These boxes had shown up everywhere, clearly powerful beyond belief. The world had somehow tripped and tumbled through the looking glass, and Amie had read enough novels to recognize that this was the part of the story where nobody knew what the hell was going on, where the characters made rash decisions whose consequences would only be revealed chapters later.
Fortunately, the strings had arrived in the middle of spring break, so nobody at the Connelly Academy had to make the last-minute decision to cancel classes. （Very few schools had actually canceled that day, though Amie heard that most classrooms were only half-full, with both students and teachers failing to turn up.）
“Your students will, of course, have questions,” the principal had addressed the staff the following Monday. “And I’m sure that you all have formed your own opinions by now. But we cannot go telling our students anything we don’t know for certain.”
The teacher next to Amie had leaned in and whispered, “So . . . basically that means we can’t say anything at all?”
More than a month had passed since then, the gravity settled over the world. But the situation at school felt largely unchanged, the administration still trying to shelter its students as much as possible. Access to YouTube had even been blocked on school property, after a teacher realized that half of the pupils in the cafeteria were watching videos of a teenage boy attempting various means of destroying his parents’ strings. The teachers later watched some of the clips in their lounge, and Amie looked on anxiously as the boy tried cutting the strings with pruning shears, dipping them in a fizzy homemade acid concoction, pulling strenuously on one end while his bulldog chomped down on the other.
“Look, I certainly don’t want the kids getting inspired by these stunts, or watching them in my class,” Amie recalled her colleague saying. “But we can’t just act like it’s not happening. I can’t keep teaching them history and pretending like we’re not living through it right now.”