“Hanna, would you tell us where you were born?”

The teacher’s voice was calm and ordinary—yet it seemed to cut through that bleak dense fog.

Talk to her. To the teacher. Don’t think about anyone else. That’s how I can do this—with her help. Hanna lifted her chin and looked at Miss Walters’s face, then answered the question as if no one else was in the room.

“California, miss.”

The other pupils could no longer contain themselves or their astonishment.

“California!”

“—always wanted to go there!”

“Did she see the ocean?”

Hanna finally dared to look at the faces in front of her. Instead of the suspicion she had felt moments earlier, she saw surprise and curiosity, interest and eagerness.

Miss Walters had done that. With a single simple question.

The teacher held up her hand to dispel the clamor, then wrote California on the board. “Tell us something about California, Hanna.”

She was ready for this; she had thought about it while listening to the other pupils.

“There are lots of orange trees,” she said. “Mostly outside the city—outside Los Angeles, in groves. But sometimes you can see them on the hillsides or by the side of the road, or even in people’s yards.”

Sam stepped forward from the line of students, his hand raised.

“Yes, Sam?” Miss Walters said.

He turned to address Hanna. “Did you eat oranges every day? I only had one once, for Christmas. Two years back.”

This time, there was no doubt: He was looking right at her and smiling. Not a big smile, but she could see the spark in his eye.

“Me, too, miss! I had one for Christmas too!”

“I never had one! Are they good?”

“Best thing you’ll ever eat! Except for maybe Christmas candy.”

“—in my stocking—”

“—at a party once.”

Hanna remembered the bowl Mama had kept on the kitchen window ledge, of blue and white porcelain painted with lotuses and chrysanthemums. It almost always held oranges . . .

“Yes,” she said. “We had them nearly every day.”

And she felt a keen pang, realizing only then how much she missed oranges. Especially their sweet, sharp scent, which filled the air whenever one was peeled.

“Thank you, Hanna,” Miss Walters said.

The rest of the students had their turn. Sam was from Minnesota; it turned out that he was little Pearl’s older brother. Margaret and Albert, siblings from Iowa; Edith from Illinois. Ned was from Wisconsin. And Dolly’s family had come from upstate New York.

When it was Bess’s turn, she said, “I was born in Wisconsin. We also lived in Kansas and Iowa—that’s where Sadie was born—and like she said, we came here from Minnesota. Ma says it’s because Pa has an itchy foot.”

As Hanna listened to her classmates, she glanced occasionally at Miss Walters.

She made them—she made us see that we all came from somewhere else.