Macey had fifteen minutes before the bus arrived at the corner, and it was miserable out, threatening snow this late in the season, and she didn’t want to stand on the corner with a bunch of people who hadn’t met Venita.

She balanced her father’s book about the fifties on the hall table and read standing up. There was one other chapter on segregation.

The nine students were admitted to the white high school because the federal government forced it. It turned out to be war: two thousand against nine. The black kids were kicked, tripped, hit from behind; they had hot soup poured on them in the cafeteria. Their books were stolen and their lockers smashed.

But it was the name-calling that made Macey cringe.

In seventh grade she had wanted to be best friends with Lisa. One day she spotted Lisa with her girlfriends, and hurried down the hall to catch up to them and be part of their world, and Lisa said, laughing, and pointing at Macey, “Here comes toilet paper, wiping up the rear,” and Macey wept for days and wanted to move to California so she’d never see Lisa again. That was three years ago, and still whenever she met Lisa, she felt like crying.

She could not imagine those nine kids sticking it out, week after week, getting called ugly names again, again, again, again.

There was a nursery rhyme: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. Wrong. Names hurt all the time, and they hurt a lot, and they went on hurting.

Her mind would not lie down. It leaped like a mountain goat from crag to crag. It leaped from Venita to Elizabeth Eckford to Austin to Chamique to Lisa to Grace … to Mr. Sibley.

What does he have to do with anything? thought Macey.

She knew two things about Mr. Sibley. What he taught: science. And his color: black.

Somebody had wanted him, or they would not have hired him. A lot of people must have wanted him, to get the hiring accomplished. But somebody had not wanted him, or the barn would not have been burned down around him.

I don’t know that, she thought. Maybe the fire was accidental, and he just happened to live there, and it just happened that he was the first black teacher, and maybe it was a fire so ordinary you could mix it up with a beach bonfire, and maybe the fire in 1959 near my mother has nothing at all to do with a fire in 1997 that caught me.

And maybe it does.

Two o’clock.

Reverend Warren, who had welcomed them in the name of Jesus Christ, would be praying for the soul of Venita Loomis.