Polly and I joined the rest of the holiday performance planning committee in our classroom. We all sat on kiddie chairs around the long rectangular table. I automatically reached down to feel how much of my hips and thighs were spilling over the sides of the seat, a little test I always did to make sure I’d notice if they started to spread at an alarming rate. So far, so good.

As if on cue, Lorna tore open a bag of peanut butter cups and dumped them out on the table top.

“Bless you,” Gloria said.

“Are those gluten free?” June asked.

“Of course they are,” Lorna said. “They were in the 75%-off Halloween candy section at CVS. All the good stuff with gluten is gone by now.”

“Don’t listen to her, honey,” Gloria said.

We peeled the foil wrappers off our peanut butter cups. June took a tiny bite of hers, then wrapped it up again. I contemplated doing that, too, realized it wouldn’t actually make me young and beautiful like June, popped the whole thing in my mouth.

“So,” I said. “Ethan and I met yesterday. I think we have enough ideas to start reaching out to the individual classroom teachers. One performance per classroom, plus some extras for the third-year students, no solos no matter how extraordinarily gifted any of the kids’ parents think they are. If the teachers have their own ideas for their class performance, we can help them with those, or they can use one of our ideas, or we can come up with something together.”

Everybody nodded. Ethan reached for another peanut butter cup, so everybody else did, too. June took a tiny bite of that one as well, then wrapped it back up again. I’d never really noticed when she was my assistant, but maybe she did that with everything she ate all day long. It was kind of genius in its own way. But I’d rather eat or not eat, instead of bouncing back and forth between the two.

“What I was thinking,” I said, “is that it might be better if we had some kind of story that pulled the whole performance together.”

“That’s a good idea,” Polly and Ethan said at the exact same time.

“Owe me a Coke,” they both said. They smiled at each other, looked away. Polly’s cheeks turned pink.

Ethan looked at me. “What were you thinking?”

I shrugged. “Tell me if this is stupid, but what if we have a couple of the kids dressed up as a cute little dog and a cat, or we have a couple of dogs and cats, and they don’t have a home.”

June’s big blue eyes teared up. “That’s so sad.”

Lorna rolled her eyes. Gloria elbowed Lorna.

“Anyway,” I said, “they go around the world, watching all the multicultural performances along the way, looking for a place to stay, and at the end they find homes.”