Curious and ready to judge, the children straightened in their chairs, awaiting word from the new creature flung into their midst.
“I am almost nine. I like birds—anything that flies really—and leopards. I don't like Brussels sprouts. The last time someone gave me Brussels sprouts, I dumped them behind the radiator when nobody was looking.”
The boys and girls laughed, but Mrs. Patterson's withering glare reproached them at once. “Where are you from, Norah?”
“Oh, I've lived all over, here and there. Right now, I live with Mrs. Quinn. My grandmother.”
The second outburst of gasps and giggles could not be suppressed by a mere stare. Mrs. Patterson rapped her knuckles upon the desktop. “Class, plenty of children live with their grandparents, so I don't think that's any excuse—”
Two boys in the back pointed at Norah's old shoes and enjoyed a conspiratorial laugh. Sensing her control of the entire day ebbing, the teacher cut short the introduction. “All right, class, back to your circles. Norah, there's a nice seat over there by the window.”
“If it's all the same to you, Mrs. Patterson, I would prefer that one in the back.”
“Sit where you please, child. I expect the rest of you to introduce yourselves to Norah during recess, and I'm sure you'll all become fast friends. We won't be going outside today, as it is entirely too cold.”
On her way to the fifth seat of the third row, she stopped to wink at Sean Fallon, and turning to the girl across from him, she asked, “Do you have an extra pen and paper, Sharon?” Without thinking, the girl held down her papers and opened the lid to her desk, and only when she had handed over the pen did she wonder how the stranger knew her name.
“I can read upside down,” Norah said, and put her finger on the Sharon in the upper right corner of the page.
The morning passed quietly until the bell signaled lunch. Mrs. Quinn had neglected to pack a meal, so Sean Fallon gave Norah half of his sandwich, apple butter on white bread. Counting out her pretzel sticks, Sharon Hopper divided and handed over half. Gail Watts offered her a small carton of milk that she bought at her mother's insistence and threw away unopened every day. Mark Bellagio presented the greater part of a tangerine. Dori Tilghman, a shortbread cookie in the shape of a keystone. “They're called Pennsylvanians,” she informed Norah, as if speaking to a student from some foreign land.
In the elementary school hierarchy, their table was far from the circle of popularity, though they were not the shunned freaks, merely the forgotten and the overlooked. The cafeteria hummed with the fall and rise of one hundred voices. Laughter rolled and slipped away. A shout rang out from a far corner, prelude to a chase around a table. Chair legs yelped across the linoleum, and a red-haired boy carried his tray to the trashcan, pulled out a paperback novel from his pocket, and leaned against the wall to read. At another table, a middle-aged lothario in a brown corduroy sports coat begged for potato chips from a gaggle of admiring girls. In a third direction, Norah spotted twin sisters licking pudding from plastic spoons, perfect mirrors of one another. All around her, the third graders traded stories about their friends and classmates, but she could not follow the gist of their gossip.
When the feast was over, Norah slapped her hands on the tabletop and thanked her tablemates for their generosity. Tearing a section from a brown paper bag, she folded the square into an intricate pattern, and taking care to tuck corners into fabricated openings, she blew into a tiny hole. Like an inflated balloon, the paper expanded into a hollow cube, which she served into the air with a pat of her palm. Sean watched the progress of the creation, hypnotized by the play of the trick. The children took turns batting it across the table like a volleyball, and when the cube came back round to Norah, she captured it in flight, brought it to her lips, leaned back her head, and with a steady puff of breath, kept blowing, spinning the box on one corner like a dreidel, until Mr. Taylor came along to snatch it midair and confiscate their fun. The children all cheered for her when, the moment his back was turned, she stuck out her tongue like a battle flag.
9