Her picture had been plastered across the screens almost as often as mine. I don’t know which one they used for either of us. My fourth-grade portrait was a likely candidate for me . . . but for my mother? I couldn’t even swear I would recognize a photo if I saw one. The only one I knew of was grainy and distant, of the three sisters linked by a tangle of arms thrown over shoulders. Lu couldn’t have seriously thought she could keep me from hearing something the entire valley considered old news. She must have known that someone, somewhere would bring it up.

Within a few hours of my return to the classroom, someone did.

There was a new girl in my class. Her name was April, and she was from up North. Not up North like over the river, or up North like Nashville or Louisville, but farther away—Chicago, she said, and you knew it was true. You could hear it in her vowels, and in her almost audible sneer. She believed that the more snow you got for winter the smarter you were; and consequently, the hotter your summers the more likely it was you’d marry a cousin. By the time I met her, she was the most hated member of my class. This is not to say she had no friends; on the contrary, she was quite popular with the richer kids, for they envied her cosmopolitan air and her bizarre clothes, which she insisted were the veritable height of fashion. But make no mistake, they hated her too. They hated her for the reason we all did: she thought she was better than us, and we were afraid she was right.

On my second day back we took a field trip to the train station, the Chattanooga Choo Choo. My apathy knew no bounds. Everyone knew it hadn’t been a real station for years, and it had since been converted to a Holiday Inn. After all the excitement of my last month, a mere hotel was not going to engage me. I might have complained aloud, but at least I wasn’t stuck in a classroom pretending to pay attention to the goings-on at a chalkboard. Any field trip—even a field trip down the mountain and into the ghetto—was better than a day of diagramming sentences.

I sat sourly in the bus on the ride down the mountain, taking an entire seat to myself so I could spread out, lean my back against the window, and let my head knock against it during rough patches of road. We parked, unloaded, and then all us fourth and fifth graders milled about together while our teachers made arrangements with guides. I stood in the parking lot with my peers and stared up. And up. And up. At what was really quite a grand building.