“I know.” He took my hand, looked at me to see if it was all right. And somehow, for those few minutes, it was. I didn’t take my hand away. We hugged and kissed Sarah madly after the show. She went off to the cast party, breathless, and left us to our awkward good-byes. He went back to his girlfriend. I went back to my house. Sarah never saw us holding hands. Thank God. They were so glorious, those kids. There was so much life bursting out of them. I suppose that’s how you know you’ve left adolescence behind, when it looks that good to you. You’d think I’d know better by now. But I don’t know a lot of what I thought I did. That’s one thing that the last few years have taught me thoroughly.

I sighed and returned to my desk to start going over the essays for tomorrow’s class. The assignment was for the students to write about things they’d lost. I let them define that however they liked. I wanted to get a sense of what they’d do left to their own devices. As I had expected, I got a lot of silly pieces about keys and socks and the like. There was one rather touching one from Rob Bowen about the day his older brother went to college, and a very nicely written piece about his grandmother’s death by Tom Hendrickson, one of the more thoughtful boys in the class. I decided to read that one aloud. I was stacking up the papers and getting ready for bed when I realized that there was no essay from Rashid. I looked through the papers again to make sure—they had just left them on my desk in a pile, and I hadn’t counted them up right away: I forget what distracted me. Anyway, nothing from Rashid and no plea from him for an extension or anything like that. It was like he was hoping I wouldn’t notice. Damn.

I liked Rashid but I was starting to worry about him. This just added to it. He seemed so … well, terrified all the time. His hand never stopped moving across the paper in class—he wrote down everything. And whenever he got up the nerve to speak, though his ideas were usually good, he offered them in a tone of foot-shifting diffidence that made it both hard to hear him and to take him seriously. I’d seen boys like him before, and I knew how his nervousness must look to the other boys and to the teachers. This cross-country thing might help—he was clearly a very gifted athlete—but perhaps it would just add more pressure. That didn’t seem like such a hot idea. I wondered if I could find out what had happened with the essay in a way that wouldn’t send him into a panic.