Although my conversation with Mr. C. makes me less than a minute late for my next class, I get sent to the principal’s office for a late pass, so I just walk out of the school and sit by myself on our old bench and wait for the bus. There’s about half an hour left until the end of school. In my upward mobility notebook, there is one blank page left. I turn to it and start writing a letter to Grimshaw. I describe what happened that day in that hot kitchen in Los Angeles. No interpretation, no justification, just the facts. I can see that any danger to me is in the past and many miles away. But it’s real, and I should have told her.

There is space at the bottom of the page, and I have time, so in the lower margin, I finish the letter by sketching in the suitcase with the bumper sticker for Niagara Falls. And then on top of the suitcase I draw my old friend Irony Man.

I hear a sharp whistle. It’s Prof, looking at me through the side window of the bus.

“You coming?” he yells.

“Hang on,” I yell back. As I hurry through clumps of Colchis High kids, people say hi to me and I respond, but I’m basically back to being the semi-invisible character I’ve always been. Nobody knows exactly what I did during my spring vacation, but it has gotten around that it was a little past the edges of accepted middle-class teenage behavior. I carry with me the whiff of the open world, and my peers draw back from it as if they’re afraid it’s contagious. I climb on the bus and sit in our usual seat. It occurs to me that Prof probably misses Grimshaw, too. She chatted with him every day for all those years, and now she’s gone. He watched her grow up. He watches everyone grow up. Even me. I lean forward.

“Are you looking forward to summer?” I ask him.

“You know it,” he says.

“What do you do during the summer?”

“Garden.” He holds up two fingers. “This many acres big.”

“Flowers? Or vegetables?”

“Both. Don’t you know my farm stand?”

“I go away every summer.”

“Summer is a very blessed time,” he says. “I think this Valley might have the most fertile ground in the country.”

We roll through the streets of Colchis. It’s the moment in spring where the little leaves are sticky and pale green and look like clouds of confetti. In the cemetery, the azaleas are out.

“You want to put some music on?” Prof asks.

“Sure.” I go up and look through his shoebox, but nothing speaks to me until I come to the last one in the box. “Who’s John Coltrane?” I ask.