Picture Day

In the end, I let her put me in school.

I want that on the record, because afterward I would think about it for years, the way you press a bruise to see if it still hurts. She did not force me. She asked, and she asked again, in the soft careful voice that adults use when they are carrying something breakable across a room. And on the third morning after the letter, I was sitting on the cot with my notebook open on my knees, watching the heat shimmer on the wall of the shed outside the window, and I thought: what if she's right?

What if I was wrong? What if it was a thing I had made up, in the dark, out of fear and a bad dream, and the world had been trying all along to tell me it was an ordinary world?

It was a very comforting thought. That's what should have warned me.

"Okay," I said.

My mother's whole body slackened. She sat down hard on the end of the cot and put a hand over her mouth.

"I'll go. But I'll walk, and I'll walk the same way every day, and I'm taking my shoes."

"You can wear your shoes."

"And you'll pick me up."

"Every day," said my mother. "At the gate. I'll be the one in the car."

…

Sunrise Canyon Middle School was a long low building the color of sand, with a flat roof, a flagpole, and a courtyard planted with palo verde and prickly pear. It had a sign in front that said HOME OF THE ROADRUNNERS, with a cartoon bird in sneakers. There were about nine hundred students. The hallways smelled of floor cleaner and sunscreen. And on the first day, a girl with braces and a purple backpack named Tessa Alvarado looked at my sneakers and asked if I played soccer, and when I said no she said "Then why are you wearing them in class?" and I said "In case," and she said "Cool," and that was that.

I will say this for Tucson. They were incurious people. Nobody asked where I was from. Nobody asked about the cut on my hand or why I never took off my coat. I was a quiet new girl in a school of nine hundred, a name on a roster, a blank, and I spent two weeks being no one, and it was the nearest thing to a vacation I had had in my life.

I made one friend. I learned the bus routes. I learned that the cafeteria served a pizza on Thursdays that tasted like warm cardboard. I learned to sit with my back to the wall in every room. I counted the exits. In the third week, in a social studies class with a teacher who wore a bolo tie, I raised my hand to answer a question about the Gadsden Purchase and found, with surprise, that I had known the answer.

I went home that afternoon and I did not look at the calendar.

It was the first time I had skipped a night.

I regretted it for the rest of the day.

…

Picture Day was the second Tuesday in December.

I remember the flyer. It came home in my folder in the first week, a neon green sheet with a picture of a smiling child holding a diploma. Order your packages now! Bring your best smile! My mother, who has never been able to resist a form, filled it out at the kitchen table in her tiny precise hand and put a check in the envelope. She wanted me to have a photo. It was the only evidence, she said, that the girl at Sunrise Canyon had existed.

I went in a gray cardigan with my hair brushed, in my sneakers, because the photographer did not look below the chest.

The line stretched out of the gym and down the hall. Kids in their good clothes jostled against the lockers. A boy had gel in his hair that smelled of coconut. The photographer was a bored man in a vest with a ponytail who said chin down and big smile now a hundred times an hour, and a lamp on a stand threw a hard white light on the blue backdrop. I stood in line behind Tessa, who was explaining the plot of a show about dragons. I heard none of it.

It was ten past eleven. I know, because I looked at the clock above the gym door, the way I always did. I was looking at it again when the office aide came in, a plump woman in a lanyard, and bent to say something to the teacher at the front, and the teacher looked over her shoulder at the line of children, at me.

"June Ostrander?" he said.

I stepped out of the line.

"Your cousin's here to pick you up. Early dismissal. Dentist."

I did not say anything. I stood in the gym with my hands in my cardigan pockets. The lamp hummed. A hundred faces turned toward me, curious, bored. And I thought, with a clarity that felt almost like peace: I don't have a cousin.

"Where is he?" I said.

"At the front office. He's got your student ID."

…

I did not go to the front office.

I walked, instead, down the long hall to the east, past the library and the art room, to a window at the end of the corridor. It was a tall wide pane of safety glass that looked out over the front lot, the flagpole, the bus lane, and the long sandy drive that curved down to the road. It was a clear cold bright morning. The sun lay on the parked cars like paint.

A man was standing at the gate.

He was young. Twenty-four, twenty-five. He wore a gray baseball cap pulled low and a hooded sweatshirt in a color between charcoal and slate. He had his hands in the front pocket. He stood with his weight on one leg, loose and casual, at the edge of the parking lot, and he was looking at the school with the idle patience of a man waiting for a bus. In his right hand, between two fingers, he was holding a small white card. It caught the sun.

My student ID.

It was the one they had issued me the first day, with my picture on it, taken against a green wall, in which I looked as though someone had just told me bad news. It had been in my backpack. My backpack was in my locker, the locker was locked, and the combination was in my head.

I looked at the hat.

It was a plain gray cap. No logo. A curved bill, slightly frayed at the edge where somebody had picked at the thread. There was a small dark stain on the left side of the brim, a smear, like a thumbprint, and I knew exactly what it was. I had seen that hat before. I had seen it in a hallway, in a gray light, eighteen inches from my face. I had seen it bend over me. It had come very close, and I had watched the frayed edge of that brim go by against a smoke-dark ceiling, and heard a boy's voice, young, breathless, a little scared, say: "Jeez, she's a little thing. Is she still breathing?"

I did not scream. I have thought about that. I did what you do, which is nothing at all.

I turned and walked back down the hall, with my back straight, and entered the front office with its wall of trophies and its smell of copier toner. The plump aide was at the counter with a clipboard. A security guard in a tan uniform stood by the door, a big, soft, sandy-haired man with a name tag that said MR. SALAZAR.

I stopped.

I looked at his face, a bland broad ordinary face, and I looked at his hands, which were thick and freckled, and I checked them for anything that did not belong: a gray cuff, a smell of oranges. There was nothing. I was beginning to check everyone.

"Excuse me," I said. "Is that man at the gate here for me?"

"Your cousin? Sure, hon. He said he'd wait outside. Nice young man. He had the paperwork."

"I don't have a cousin."

The aide looked up.

"I don't have a cousin," I said again, loudly, clearly, in the voice I use for adults who aren't listening. "I have an aunt. I don't have any cousins. I've never met any of my father's family. That man has my ID, and I didn't give it to him. Please don't let him in. Please."

There was a silence. The aide's mouth opened a little. On the wall behind her, a clock ticked off a second, and another. And then the guard moved. He was surprisingly quick, for a big man. He stepped out through the glass doors and onto the front steps with one hand on his radio, and I saw him say something sharp and I saw the young man in the gray cap turn his head.

He did not run.

He looked at the guard, and at the school, and at me through the glass. It was a long look, a calm, thoughtful one. He seemed to be trying to decide if I was worth the trouble. Then, with the same loose and easy gait, he slid the white card into the pocket of his sweatshirt, shrugged, touched two fingers to the brim of his hat, and walked away across the lot to a car I had not noticed, parked in the shade beside the bus lane.

It was a black sedan. The license plate was smeared with mud.

I watched it pull out onto the road. I watched it turn left, toward town, without hurry, signaling at the corner. A good, careful, law-abiding driver. I stood with my forehead against the cold glass of the door, and a hot wetness ran down my face, and I realized I was shaking so badly that my teeth clicked.

…

They let me use the office phone.

The guard stayed with me. He'd come back in with his radio crackling, saying that he'd taken a plate number he'd be happy to give to the sheriff's office, though it was a funny thing, the mud, in this weather. He had a kind, worried face. The aide gave me a cup of water. The principal, a tall woman in a suit, appeared in the doorway and then disappeared again to make a phone call. I dialed the number of my mother's landline from memory, and it rang five times.

"Hello?"

"Mom."

"June? Honey, what—"

"Don't leave the house."

There was a short silence.

"I'm coming to get you."

"Don't. Please. Stay with Aunt Corinne. Lock the door. Don't answer it for anyone, not for Gary, not for the mailman, not for—" My voice broke. "I'm okay. I'm fine. I'm with the guard. But he was here, Mom. He had my card."

"Who?"

"The hat," I said. "The boy in the hat."

I heard her breathe in. I heard it catch.

I couldn't tell her the rest. I couldn't say it over a school phone, with an aide listening, to a woman who had just spent three weeks learning how to sleep. It would take a year to explain. I held the receiver in both hands and shut my eyes, and I thought of the man's voice in the smoke, so young, so uncertain, saying Is she still breathing? and I understood that he had not been the one to hurt me. He had only been standing near.

He had been sent to look.

…

She arrived in eleven minutes, in Corinne's red truck, with the dog.

She did not say anything. She walked into the office, put her arms around me, and held me until the aide had to look away, and then she signed a form, and then we went out together through the double doors into the glare. The sky was an enormous cloudless blue. On the school roof a flag snapped. I got into the truck and she locked the doors and sat with her hands on the wheel without starting the engine, looking straight ahead through the windshield at nothing.

"Tell me," she said. "In the car. All of it."

"I will."

"Not a piece."

"All of it." I took a breath. "But not here. Not at the school."

We drove. The road ran out through the desert, flat and white and empty, past a gas station and a feed store and a row of leaning mailboxes. In the rearview mirror, a long way back, a single pair of headlights sat in the dust, and then did not.

At home, the house was exactly as we had left it. The gravel was raked. The door was locked. Corinne's truck rattled to a stop in the drive, and Biscuit leapt out to sniff the saguaros, and my mother walked ahead of me up the steps, fishing for her key.

Her phone was on the porch.

It was the new one, the little cheap phone with the prepaid number that nobody knew, which she had bought three weeks ago at a Walgreens and kept in a drawer. She had left it on the rail. Or she hadn't. It lay face-up on the wooden railing, in the sun, very neatly, as though someone had set it there for her to find. The screen was lit. It showed a message, no sender, no number, just a single photograph. Beneath the phone, held down against the wind by its weight, lay a glossy print of the same picture. It was a picture of a door.

A plain door, painted blue. A porch light. A doormat that said WELCOME in faded letters, and the number on the wall above it in brass: 2417.

I knew the number. It was on our mailbox.

I looked at my mother. She had not made a sound. She stood on the porch with her key in her hand and the sun on her hair, looking at a photograph of the door she was standing in front of, and I watched her slide the print out from under the phone with one trembling finger and turn it over, the way a person turns a page.

On the back, in blue ballpoint, in a square upright hand, was a line that I had known by heart for a month.

Don't let the child die for you again.