As they grew up, Amie and Nina even founded a tradition of passing along the books they were reading, as soon as they were finished. It was originally Amie’s suggestion, a balm for her fears that as the two of them aged, and their lives started to diverge—Nina came out as gay, then they both headed off to separate colleges—their newfound differences might threaten their closeness. For the five years they spent living apart, both sisters sent each other dozens of paperbacks through the mail, complete with sticky notes on favorite passages and inside jokes scribbled in the margins. Nina made fun of Amie’s blubbering when she received her copy of Never Let Me Go, the last pages wrinkled with tears, and Amie griped at Nina for sending Outliers with a distracting amount of highlighted sections.
In the bookstore, Amie paused at the section for dystopian fiction, where she had come across The Giver back in January and, flooded by fond memories of her own fifth-grade book club, decided to assign it in class—before everything changed that spring. One spot over, The Handmaid’s Tale sat snugly beside The Hunger Games, two books she remembered reading rapturously as a teenager. On more than one occasion, she had lain in her bed past midnight, unable to sleep, envisioning herself as a tribute in the Games, fending her way through a dark, dense forest grown inside her mind.
At least the future they had been doled seemed more promising than those on the shelves in front of Amie, in which women’s bodies were stripped solely to their reproductive capacities and children murdered each other on television at the government’s behest. Each novel seemed to imagine a world bleaker than the last. If those were the alternatives, Amie thought, perhaps they should feel lucky that the strings were all they got.
But Amie wondered, as she did almost every day, if she was making the wrong decision by refusing to open her box and rejecting the knowledge that had given so many of her friends and colleagues—nearly all of whom had long strings—an unprecedented peace of mind, the greatest gift they could ask for. Even Nina, whose thoughts were so often consumed with worry about Maura, had admitted to Amie that she couldn’t help but feel relieved when she saw her own long string.
But Amie’s mind was constantly in motion, depicting herself in different scenarios. She had vividly imagined every possible outcome—a long string, a short string, a length in the middle, she once even conjured an empty box—and she reasoned that the safest choice was simply shoving the chest to the back of her closet, behind a salt-stained pair of winter boots that she only wore during snowstorms.
On Monday morning, Amie arrived at school, armed with two dozen copies of Tuck Everlasting.
“Excuse me, Miss Wilson?”
Amie turned around to see one of the school’s custodians pulling a folded piece of yellow loose-leaf from his pocket. “I found this on the floor of your classroom as I was cleaning up last night, and I didn’t know if I should throw it away or put it somewhere. I’m guessing one of your students wrote it?”
“Oh, thank you.” Amie took the sheet of paper, a miniature rendering of the Manhattan skyline drawn on the back. She glanced at the names mentioned in the note inside. None were her students.
“Where did you say you found this?”
“Just lying under one of the chairs, near the bookshelf.”
“I guess it might belong to someone,” she said. “Thank you for saving it.”
He nodded. “Anytime.”
Amie smiled and stepped into Room 204, taking her seat behind a cluttered desk crowned with two notebooks, one tiny cactus （a gift from Nina that was “more practical than flowers”）， two empty coffee mugs, a near-empty stapler, and a tabletop calendar with the theme of “banned books” that the history department had given her. May was The Catcher in the Rye, although Amie’s calendar had been open to May ever since April 3, when she decided that too many of her students were asking what Lolita was about.
She placed the sheet of paper atop a small stack of essays, unsure if she should read it.
Amie turned her attention to the day’s grammar lesson on commas and semicolons, but her eyes continued to drift toward the paper until she finally slid it off of the pile and onto the desk in front of her.
Sean told us that we needed to write a letter, so here goes.
A few faint marks after the period betrayed an impatient tapping of the author’s pen.
Carl still thinks this is a stupid exercise and looks like he’s poking holes in his paper with the tip of his pen, to Sean’s dismay. And Chelsea might be drawing something, it’s hard to tell.