She had been up most of the night, dozing off for only moments at a time, always waking with her heart pounding. At long last, she was getting the chance to go to school—and she found herself dreading it.

Images from her younger years appeared in her mind’s eye. Children taunting her, shouting derisively in fake Chinese, pulling at the corners of their eyes to mock her. The few who spoke to her did so only on a dare: When she answered, they would screech in triumph and run back to their friends.

Their mothers were seldom better, and often worse. On spotting Hanna, they would cross the street hastily, sometimes covering their mouths as if she were diseased. Or they would pull their smaller children behind their skirts, protecting them. From what? Hanna always wondered.

As she stood on the threshold of the schoolhouse, it was hard for her to recall why she had wanted so badly to be here.

I could turn around and go home. Maybe Papa is right about a diploma being just a piece of paper . . .

Then Mama was in her head again, showing her how to weave the needle in and out of the last few stitches on the wrong side of a garment, pulling the thread through to ensure that the seam would not come unstitched.

“Finish,” Mama had said. “Good work is no good if you don’t finish.”

A diploma was more than a piece of paper. It was proof that she had finished her high school studies.

A big breath. One arm wrapped tightly around her books and her face far back in a deep scoop bonnet, she turned the doorknob.

Hanna had deliberately arrived early; she wanted to be seated before the other students came in. The teacher, a fair young woman with light brown hair twisted into a knot low on the nape of her neck, was sitting behind a big desk across the room.

“You must be Hanna Edmunds,” the teacher said. She did not smile, but her voice was kind. “I’m Miss Walters. I was told that you’re fourteen, which would put you in the class with the oldest pupils. Have you started the Fifth Reader?”

“Yes, miss.”

In fact, Hanna had already finished the Sixth Reader. She remembered the first time she had come across the poem titled “To My Mother.” Her breath had caught hard enough to make her cough.

I know thou art gone to the land of thy rest . . .

Although Hanna knew well there were plenty of people who had lost their mothers, it had still stunned her to find a poem about a mother dying. It was as if the poet had seen right into her heart, and the poem immediately became her favorite. She thought of it as “Mama’s poem.”

But she didn’t want to sound boastful about having already read the Sixth Reader, and besides, she loved the Fifth.