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Mitchell’s desk, and hunted around on the desktop, as if she hoped she might discover an instruction manual there. Mr. Mitchell kept his desk as I imagined an intellectual does—chaotic, some of the papers stuck together with rings of coffee. There was even a magnifying glass on it, mounted on a brass stand.
    “Okay,” she said, more to herself than to us. “Right. Let’s get started.”
    She turned to the board and wrote
Ms. Slater
in cursive handwriting that drooped and melted at such a sharp angle that she had to bend over to finish the
R
.
    “I’m Ms. Slater,” she said, resettling her glasses on her nose.
    We all peered at her, squinting for clues. Our squinting didn’t accomplish much—she was still just some random woman in a ponytail and a gray dress. Some non-age, like maybe thirty-five.
    “If you’ll all just pull out whatever you were supposed to have read for today, we’ll see where we are.”
    “Excuse me, Miss Slater?” a girl in the back said as she raised her hand. Leigh Carruthers. The inevitable Leigh Carruthers.
    “Ms.,” the random woman corrected her without looking up from the disorderly heap of papers where she was, I guessed, hunting for the roll sheet.
    “
Miss
Slater,” Leigh said again. “Um, I have to leave early today? For an appointment? So I’m going to have to be going in, like, five minutes?”
    The random woman looked up slowly, a wicked smile spreading across her face. When she smiled, she looked younger, and I felt myself smile, too. She had a tiny gap between her front teeth that made her look mischievous.
    “Don’t like the ‘Ms.,’ eh, Miss Carruthers?” Ms. Slater said. “We can go with Doctor Slater, if you’d rather. That works for me, too.”
    Leigh sat back.
    “And I’m sure you’re aware that student appointments during school hours have to be cleared with the office first. Then they do this thing where they give all the teachers a list of who’s going where when, with stuff like your cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses so we know what you guys are up to. Including substitutes like me. You know that, right?”
    Leigh. So busted.
    “Yes,” Leigh said.
    “Great,” said Ms. Slater. “Now, books out.”
    Out of the corner of my eye I saw Emma tapping on her phone. She caught me looking, and slid it away quickly.
    What are you doing?
I mouthed.
    Unlike Anjali, Emma wasn’t much of a texter. Emma was too laconic for that. She usually waited for the world to come to her.
    Nothing,
she mouthed back.
    I frowned at her, but by then we were all rummaging in our shoulder bags and pulling out the play that we were supposed to be discussing that day. I’d read it. Most of us had, I think. It wasn’t bad. There was a pretty sordid love triangle right in the middle, which always helps.
    “So, anyone want to fill me in on how this usually goes?” Ms. Slater asked.
    While she spoke, she hoisted up the lectern that Mr. Mitchell had banished to the corner at the beginning of the semester, and heaved it to the table at the front of the room. The spectacle of a woman in a fitted dress and kitten heels carrying a huge wooden lectern in her arms should have been hilarious, but it was actually kind of badass.
    “Um,” Emma hesitated. “Mr. Mitchell was going to hand back our quizzes today, I think.”
    She looked around at us for confirmation, and we all nodded.
    “And then we were going to start talking about the play. That’s our whole next unit.”
    “The play?” Ms. Slater said.
    She strode over to my desk and flipped the book faceup.
    “
The Crucible,
huh?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “We’re doing the Salem witch trials this month. Quiz next week, then short response paper due sometime after the quiz. That was what Mr. Mitchell said Monday.”
    “If you’re doing the Salem witch trials, what the hell are you doing reading a play about the 1950s?”
    We looked around, baffled. Ms. Slater didn’t wait for an answer.
    “Yeah,” she said.