I can tell she does blame a girl named Valerie, though, who one day defecates on the floor while we are sitting at our desks working. How does she do it? She has her underpants on and a dress, a plaid wool jumper in a red-and-yellow tartan that suddenly looks sad, and yet right there on the linoleum only a desk or two in front of mine are two little turds, firm, perfectly formed, and terrifying. Many of us know the poop has come into the room with us before the teacher does, and when she discovers it other things seem forgotten. The big printed letters that ring the room, each lowercase version beside its capital parent, the clumsy tablets with alternating solid and broken blue lines, to help us shape the letters we practice with our fat pencils—all are eclipsed by the poop. Teacher picks it up with tissues. I’m aware of her red fingernails, a faint sweet scent of talcum. She doesn’t shout or spank Valerie, but somehow it’s worse. She says, “Why didn’t you ask to go to the bathroom?” Valerie doesn’t answer. Of course there isn’t any answer, so Valerie looks all the smaller in her hapless Scotch plaid and I take it all in; I don’t ever want to ask to go the bathroom (marble, cool, noise of water, big boys), because somehow I wouldn’t want anyone to know I need to, but this means you have to choose between two kinds of shame, and Valerie made a bad choice.

A danger: out on the asphalt playground, from which the school’s flung up into the air vertical as a Venetian palace, is a shady corner where immense old trees have been allowed to stay. The huge circumference of one oak (treasure of fallen acorns, in September) borders the street, half on the playground, half buckling the sidewalk in a slow and undramatic earthquake. On this sidewalk, somebody said, a man in a car offered a girl candy. Come into my car with me, and I will give you candy. Then what happened? Something to do with safety.

I walk home from school on streets with big trees, sometimes wet in the rain, which brings new pleasures: dark navy and black umbrellas, unfurling vinyly smell. Safety patrols in their yellow slickers. Safety patrols! Another danger: big kids with shiny plastic sashes and authority with which they probably shouldn’t have been entrusted. They have their own cloakroom, a clubhouse repository for their uniforms, and five minutes before school is over for everyone else a special bell rings and the safety patrols hurry to their cloakroom, don their badges and sashes, and rush to their corners. I have been to their room, once, on Halloween, when there was a special showing of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The cloakroom itself seemed permanently moist, full of slick things, swathed in darkness.