After half an hour, I broke them into groups and assigned each a task: you discuss the narrative persona Styron employed to do this work; you discuss why he might have chosen not to disclose his childhood trauma until the end of the book; you discuss the way he grapples with whether language is adequate to the task he is asking it to accomplish. As they turned to one another and their adolescent din filled the room, I remembered how excruciating I had found this type of group work as a student, how I’d wanted to work on my own or to sit listening to my teacher. Was it just that I wanted control? Or was it the intimacy of group work—being obliged to respond, being looked at—that so distressed me? Sitting in the classroom, I could be invisible; even when my teacher and I locked eyes, there was the protection of that roomful of other students. I had known then that I wanted to teach, to get to come to a classroom every day forever. One of my students covertly reached into his backpack to check his phone, and I remembered my message to the analyst and felt a swell of anxiety and grabbed for my phone, too.

But there was nothing. She hadn’t called.

Nor had she by third period. That was also the class in which I had the student I’d spoken to sharply on Friday, Lacey. For fifty-five minutes, I averted my eyes; she was blatantly texting, and though technology was prohibited throughout the school, I pretended I didn’t notice. I was reminded of Langham, passing his gaze over me so easily, then the encounter on the street—fuck you—and dove with increased fervor into the text, close-reading a paragraph line by line, until the train of thoughts abated. Could I get away with not talking to her one-on-one? It wasn’t like she had skipped school; obviously she was acting out with her texting, but not so disruptively that I couldn’t just ignore it for the rest of the year. But what if she never recovered? What if she texted the entire year long, disrupting class—what if the rest of the students followed suit? She probably talked to the other students about me behind my back. They probably had a lot to say about how often I’d worn these pants.

After class, I called Lacey over. As she approached, I put great attention into arranging the papers on my desk, avoiding looking at her until the last possible second.

She stood a few feet away from me, hip jutting out, backpack slung over one shoulder—distant, defiant, like the popular girls I’d gone to school with here. I was scared of her. But then I remembered the teenage girl talking on the phone on the street, how vulnerable she was under all that bravado, how young.