“Leni?” Dad said, his face falling in disappointment.

She forced a smile. “It’s perfect, Dad. Thanks.”

He sighed and smiled. “Oh. Good. I spent a long time picking through the bins.”

Salvation Army. So he had planned ahead, thought of her the other day when they were in Homer. It made the ugly clothes almost beautiful.

“Put them on,” Dad said.

Leni managed a smile. She went into her parents’ bedroom and changed her clothes.

The Irish sweater was too small, the wool so thick she could hardly bend her arms.

“You look gorgeous,” Mama said.

She tried to smile.

Mama came forward with a metal Winnie the Pooh lunch box. “Thelma thought you’d like this.”

And with that, Leni’s social fate was sealed, but there was nothing she could do about it.

“Well,” she said to her dad, “we better move it. I don’t want to be late.”

Mama hugged her fiercely, whispered, “Good luck.”

Outside, Leni climbed into the passenger seat of the VW bus and they were off, bouncing down the bumpy trail, turning toward town, onto the main road, rumbling past the field that called itself an airstrip. At the bridge, Leni yelled, “Stop!”

Dad hit the brakes and turned to her. “What?”

“Can I walk from here?”

He gave her a disappointed look. “Really?”

She was too nervous to smooth his ruffled feelings. One thing that was true of every school she’d been at was this: once you hit junior high, parents were to be absent. The chances of them embarrassing you were sky-high. “I’m thirteen and this is Alaska, where we’re supposed to be tough,” Leni said. “Come on, Dad. Pleeease.”

“Okay. I’ll do it for you.”

She got out of the bus and walked alone through town, past a man sitting Indian-style on the side of the road, with a goose in his lap. She heard him say, No way, Matilda, to the bird as she hurried past the dirty tent that housed the fishing-charter service.

The one-room schoolhouse sat on a weedy lot behind town. Green and yellow marshes spread out behind it, a river meandering in a sloping S-shape through the tall grass. The school was in an A-frame building made of skinned logs, with a steeply pitched metal roof.

At the open door, Leni paused and peered inside. The room was bigger than it looked from the outside; at least fourteen-by-fourteen. There was a chalkboard on the back wall with the words SEWARD’S FOLLY written in capital letters.