She took refuge in the media center. For an hour after school it was an unofficial computer club, kids drifting in and out, sending e-mail, surfing the Web. People didn’t bother you when you were on the computer. It was a public activity that gave you privacy.

Graff and Mrs. Johnson were circling, helping people who were at the last stages of despair, with no hope of finishing their projects.

Macey’s chief occupation was not to cry. Her second occupation was to look busy enough that nobody would interrupt her.

She fiddled mindlessly, eventually typing in the address she knew best right now: the local newspaper. She scrolled down their home page and there, way at the bottom, where she thought she’d been, but obviously not, Macey discovered an online obituary file.

Who did she know who was dead?

She cringed at this sentence, but—the last dead guy she had talked about was Adam Devers, several husbands ago for Alice Yinson. Macey typed. Waited.

Pages began to form. There was something so neat about the Net: facts slowly painting themselves out of the unknown.

Mr. Devers had died by his own hand, in November 1960.

Macey shut down the computer without getting out of Netscape and thought, Great, I probably crashed it, nobody’ll ever be able to use it again. And who would want to?

She sat staring at nothing, until finally Mrs. Johnson was available. She forced every other thought out of her mind; forced away the presence of Aus.

“Mrs. Johnson, remember that I got interested in the very first black teacher ever hired here? And people wanted him out of here, so they burned his home down around him to make him go?”

“Macey,” interrupted Mrs. Johnson, upset, “that kind of thing never happened here.”

“That’s what everybody says. But it isn’t true. Listen to me. Please listen.”

Mrs. Johnson didn’t sit down to listen to Mr. Sibley’s story. She didn’t look at Macey and listen. She didn’t stop what she was doing to listen. She went right on checking off a list of students whose outlines and progress she had not yet seen.

Macey wanted Mr. Sibley to have undivided attention. With nobody listening, the story dwindled down to a few sentences, which weren’t gripping because there was nobody to grip.

“Mace,” said Mrs. Johnson at last, “what do you think you’re doing—scripting a television series? You can’t write a paper that’s nothing but neighborhood gossip. This is not research, Macey. This is very unattractive rumor-spreading.”

A terrible anger, born against Aus but impossible to use against him, began rising in Macey. “Mrs. Johnson!” she said. “In one of my books, they told how even libraries were segregated. In the South, they didn’t lend white people’s books to people whose black skin might rub off on the page.”