But instead of overturning the table, my mother told the keener in her gentle, lilting voice, “I think that’s lovely. But aren’t we all here to help one another?”

The kids nodded in drugged, cultish unison.

“So just as we help Kelli, doesn’t Kelli help us?”

The kids nodded some more, marionette heads at the ends of bobbing strings.

“And how does Kelli help us?” prompted my mother. A few jaws went slack. They didn’t know. But they were waiting to hear. And so was I.

“By teaching us,” said my mother, “to be selfless.”

“Selfless,” a few of the kids repeated. They were struggling with the unfamiliar word. It was not a word your average eleven-year-old would have had much use for up to this point.

“To give of ourselves,” said my mother. “To be kind.”

Now the nodding started up again. Kind, they understood. I even heard a few quiet, exclaimed ahs around the room.

At the end of the class, to Kelli’s delight, my mother encouraged everyone to go up to my sister and shake her hand.

And how about this: There was no exaggerated rocking and gibbering directed at me over recess. No mockery, no drooling idiot faces pushed into mine.

My mother’s magic had made my classmates, briefly, kind.

11

“What grade you in?” Kelli was asking Mike as she snuck quick, almost flirtatious glances at him. This was the stock question she had for every child she encountered. “What grade you in? What grade you in?”

Mike didn’t understand Kelli’s cadences so I acted as interpreter.

“She’d like to know what grade you’re in, Mike.”

“Just graduated from the big three, didn’t ya, buddy?” answered Trevor.

“Nice job,” I said. “Way to go.”

“What grade you in?” repeated Kelli. It wasn’t that she cared about the answer. She, like me, had just been trying to draw the kid out.

“He’s in third grade, Kell.”

Mike looked offended. “I’m finished third grade!”

“Heading into grade four,” I amended. Mike, it seemed, was quick to irritate, like his father. “Up for some cookies?” I suggested, looking to make peace, and because Mike had remained frozen in his spot since Kelli had arrived.

“What’s the holdup?” said Trevor to Mike, who still had a sneaker dangling from one foot. “Get your g.d. shoes off.”

There was a rap on the screen door and Trevor paused, looking out at who was there, before he pushed it open to let pillowy Brenna step inside. Brenna looked him up and down. The smell of tobacco wafted up to where Kelli and I were standing, overpowering the spearmint, which meant she must’ve just finished a cigarette — I imagined the only opportunity Brenna had to do her smoking was in the close quarters of her car, driving from one client to the next.

“Hey, Brenna,” I said.

“Hullo,” said Brenna, still looking at Trevor. “And if it isn’t Mr. Trebie.”

These words, parodying Kelli as they did, should’ve come across as playful, or teasing; but the unsmiling, inflectionless way Brenna uttered them threw everybody off. I was waiting for Trevor to reply with his usual cheery bluster — maybe he had a nickname for Brenna like he did for me and Kelli; maybe Brenna was yet another of his “best girls.” But no — Trevor was, to my surprise, at a loss for words.