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teacher, out in your Jeep. I saw them driving around the parking lot, tooting the horn.” She got up from her desk. “Let me see those pictures of yours.”
    Shirley lived on an island more deserted than mine. She was the only black girl preintegration at Forty-Five Elementary, and when integration occurred she was shunned by her black counterparts. Shirley survived six years of white kids mesmerized by her white palms and feet, then six years of white kids who no longer found her exotic and black kids who didn’t trust her surrounded-by-whiteys past.
    I said, “That’s a good one of you, Shirley. If we had a Xerox machine at this school I might go copy some of these pictures and put them on my wall back home.”
    Shirley said, “A
what?
” Everyone else in the room looked at me as if they’d heard me speak Russian. None of them knew of any copiers besides those mimeograph machines that produced purplish-blue inky facsimiles. Not much earlier—maybe in the 1960s—according to my father, Forty-Five High employed
monks
to handwrite duplicates.
    Shirley slid out the photos and spread them on Miss Ballard’s desk. No one in the homeroom got up to inspect them, which I thought to be odd later on. Were they so respectful of rules that they wouldn’t get out of their desks until they were told to do so? Did they have no curiosity whatsoever? Had one of the dozen P.E. teachers told them that they should conserve energy in order to live a long, long life?
    Shirley picked up the one of my mother and me. She said, “This is your momma?”
    I said, “You didn’t really see Miss Ballard and Senora Schulze driving around in my Jeep, did you? You made that up, right?”
    Shirley turned the photograph ten or twenty degrees to the left and right, which made those buttons shine more so. I made a point not to look down Shirley’s worn cotton dress front. Her nipples poked out like little fried-clam strips I’d eaten at a Red Lobster up in Greenville. She said, “I seen these buttons before. These are buttons a person remembers.”
    Then she put the photograph down on top of the picture of Charles Dunn wearing his mother’s high-heeled shoes and wig, walking around the den. I said, “They’re buttons.”
    Shirley leaned toward me and whispered, “I can take you to a place that has these buttons, Mendal Dawes. You want to see your mother’s buttons, I know where they is. But you can’t call it a date. We ain’t going out on a date or nothing like that.”
    Sergeant Penny Yingling came on and said, “The Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance, to the flag,” as if someone had shot her with a tranquilizer dart. Everyone in the absent Miss Ballard’s class stood up and acted accordingly. I said to Shirley, “Did my father give your mother this dress?”
    It wasn’t unlikely. My father and Mr. Ebo were friends. Sometimes Shirley came to school wearing T-shirts that I’d once worn. On those days she made a point not to make eye contact with me. One time she showed up wearing a watch cap I once owned, and another time some pointy wingtips. She said, “I don’t know nothing about the dress. But I know these buttons. Over in the old slave graveyard.”
    I said, “Don’t mess with me, Shirley. That ain’t funny.”
    She said, “
Ain’t
ain’t a word. You think you so smart. You can ask Miss Ballard when she comes back from driving around your car.”
    Sergeant Yingling finished up the Pledge and went into prayer. I sat down in Miss Ballard’s chair and put my hands out on her desk, the spilled Before photographs within reach. Mr. Botts, the assistant principal, came on the intercom and said, “Good morning. Miss Ballard won’t be in today or tomorrow. Anyone in Miss Ballard’s classes needs to report to the cafeteria for study hall today and tomorrow.