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emphasized getting us to be able to argue our positions about what we read. We could tell he really listened to us when we were talking. He looked us in the eye.
    Some people thought he was kind of cute, and I guess he was, in a hipster-nerd sort of way. Floppy James Franco hair and skinny 1950s ties. Glasses. He went to Harvard, so sometimes we’d even run into him in the Square on the weekend, and it was like spotting a celebrity. We’d laugh and wave and then run away giggling, wondering who he was with and what he was doing and if he had a girlfriend. Before the AP exam every year he had the whole class over to his apartment to cram, and he’d make weird early American food, like Indian pudding and corn pone and dandelion salad, and then after the exam he’d have everyone over again to show
The Last of the Mohicans
with sarcastic commentary about all the historical inaccuracies. I heard a rumor that he bought beer for last year’s post-exam party, but I don’t think it’s true.
    Emma and I were dissecting what had just happened to Clara when Jennifer Crawford leaned over. Up close her pink hair looked dry and fried, sticky, like cotton candy. I didn’t know why she’d want to do that to herself. She could’ve been almost pretty if she’d just tried to look halfway normal.
    “That was intense,” she said.
    “Yeah,” I replied. “We were just saying.”
    “It’s all over Facebook already,” Jennifer said, flashing us her phone.
    “What are people saying about it?” Emma asked, eyeing Jennifer’s phone.
    Jennifer slipped it into her purse with a quick glance at the classroom door.
    “Just that it was totally crazy, and nobody’s seen anything like that before.”
    “Do people know what’s happening?” I asked. “Is she going to the hospital or something?”
    “Oh, she doesn’t need a hospital. She was fine when we left advisory.” That was Emma.
    “A couple people were saying she’s going to the hospital, but the Other Jennifer said her dad’s coming to pick her up.”
    “Dang,” I said. “Poor Clara.”
    “It’s Elizabeth and the Other Jennifer you should feel sorry for,” Jennifer Crawford said with a curl of her lip. She leaned back, coiling a hank of pink hair around one finger. “What are they going to do with no one telling them where to sit at lunch?”
    “Come on, Jennifer,” I said. “Can you try to not be a total bitch for, like, five minutes?”
    But Emma was silently laughing behind the sleeve of her sweater.
    I was eyeing Emma when the door opened to reveal not Mr. Mitchell, but some random woman with huge eyeglasses and an armful of papers that slipped loose while all twelve of us watched. I could feel us all deflate when it wasn’t him.
    “Oh, dammit,” the woman said, pushing the door closed with a hip before bending to pick up each leaf one at a time. “Is this,” she spoke to the floor, waddling from paper to paper, “Room 811? AP US History?”
    Curious glances crackled around the perimeter of the room, followed by shrugs and more than one surreptitious peek at a cell phone. It took us a minute to realize no one had answered the random woman.
    “Well?” she said, standing, the last reclaimed page jutting out from under one arm. She planted her free hand on her hip and looked annoyed. “Is it or isn’t it?”
    “Ah,” someone stammered. “Yeah, this is 811.”
    The woman gave us the once-over and—upon seeing the North Shore shipwreck map that Mr. Mitchell had hung behind his desk and the poster of the Gilbert Stuart George Washington portrait that they issue to every high school American history teacher at the same time they hand out the Tasers and Valium—decided she must be in the right place.
    A hand tugged at my sleeve. Emma.
    Where is he?
she mouthed.
    I shrugged.
Dunno,
I mouthed back.
Maybe he’s sick?
    Lame,
she said, a line forming between her pale eyebrows.
    The random woman stumped up to the front of the room, slapped her papers onto Mr.