“Hey, I bet you have a great room. Can you show me?” She is crouching down to their little circle and speaking to the oldest, a boy about the same age as Max. Within a minute, she has one in a piggyback and two holding her hands, and they squeeze past the buzzing people toward the back of the house.

“Why don’t I get you a cup of tea?” Mrs. Wine asks Mrs. Sandler, and Mrs. Sandler nods gratefully. “And I’ll check your fridge and the meals schedule while I’m at it.” Mrs. Wine gets up and heads toward the kitchen. I sit, rooted in my chair, by myself with Mrs. Sandler. My eyes keep finding the large tear in her blouse, like someone cut with scissors and then ripped the rest with their hands. Mrs. Sandler turns to me, her face brightening despite the hollows under her eyes.

“Are you the girl with the peeling-an-orange speech?”

I nod.

“Raphi thought it was hilarious—and smart.”

“Honey also did oranges,” I say quietly.

Mrs. Sandler cocks her head and then gives me another wan smile. “Yours was the one where how you do it reveals something about you, right?”

I nod again.

“Raphi told me about that speech—and that its writer was a bright student who had a lot to say.” Mrs. Sandler’s eyes are steady and sad as she looks directly at me. “Wouldn’t you say he was talking about you?”

I don’t know how to answer her, so I don’t say anything. But I do know that I want to believe her.

On the way back home, it is dark inside Mrs. Wine’s minivan, and I feel like the darkness is the sadness all around me.

If Mr. Sandler had never gotten into that fight with Rabbi Adler, maybe he would never have had a heart attack. If Rabbi Adler is thinking about that, he must feel very bad. My dad said a heart like Mr. Sandler’s is a ticking time bomb, that when someone so young has a heart attack it’s almost always fatal. Still.

“You never know how things are going to work out,” Honey says, reading my thoughts. “You just have to do what you believe is right. Mr. Sandler did, but Rabbi Adler did too.”

When Mr. Sandler left the first time, what I missed was that we didn’t get to end things normally, like at the end of the year. Because how many teachers, even the ones I really liked, had I ever really seen again after we said goodbye on the last day of school? I had wanted him to see the light inside me. And to bring it out through my shell, like the osmosis of an egg white in the science project I was doing with Natalie. And then I’d wanted to visit him when I was older. If I’m honest, I only imagined that happening once—but once would have been enough for me to feel that he had stamped that light and fixed it in place where everyone could see it.