“Me neither.”
“We’ll come up with a plan, though. Maybe … Maybe after we find your dad, we can try and get an apartment or something? Some place we can stay for a while. Until we turn eighteen, I guess. We’ll have to figure out jobs and …” She yawns. “I don’t know. But once we’re eighteen, we can go anywhere. We won’t have anything to worry about. Right? Just you and me.”
Even in the pitch-black, I can’t face her. “Yeah … Right.”
“Do you know where your dad is?”
“No. But I’ll find him,” I say. “I got to.”
I’ll never forget the day Miss Bixley, the guidance counselor, walked Bo Dickinson into my English class.
“Mrs. Hartman,” she said, tapping on the open door. I knew it was her before she opened her mouth. Miss Bixley had the biggest hair I’d ever seen. It almost touched the top of the doorframe. Even I couldn’t miss it. “Sorry to interrupt, but I have a new student for you.”
“Oh?”
“Bo Dickinson,” Miss Bixley explained, ushering Bo into the room. “I’ve decided to switch her into your class. I think this will be a better fit for her.”
By “this” she meant the advanced class. Our school wasn’t real big. Every high schooler in the county was bused into Mursey, and we still had less than four hundred students. But we did have some honors and remedial classes. Maybe it was wrong of me, but I’d assumed Bo Dickinson would be in the latter. I’d just never thought of her as being advanced at anything school related.
And I clearly wasn’t the only one. There was a sudden rush of whispers. They started quiet and got louder and louder, like a swarm of bees closing in.
“What?” Christy growled into my ear. “There’s got to be a mistake.”
Finally, Mrs. Hartman cleared her throat and everybody went silent again.
“Glad to have you, Bo,” she said. “There’s an extra textbook on the shelf in the back. You can take whatever seat you find.”
“Thanks.”
As Bo headed to the back of the room, Miss Bixley called after her. “Good luck, Bo. Thank you, Mrs. Hartman.”
The classroom door shut, and Mrs. Hartman cleared her throat again. She was a constant throat-clearer. She did it before almost every sentence. Sometimes loud, to get our attention. Sometimes not. But I always heard her.
“We’re reading Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ today,” she explained to Bo. “Page three thirteen. While Bo catches up with that, why don’t the rest of you take another look, too, so you’re ready to discuss in a few minutes.”
I didn’t have a book—the print was too small for me to read, and using a magnifier was slow and a little exhausting. Instead, I just had a couple of pages Mrs. Hartman had enlarged with the copy machine in the main office. A poem that took up less than a page in the book took up three sheets of paper for me. But at least I could follow along. Every once in a while Mrs. Hartman would just read out loud whatever it was we’d be discussing, but I liked this better. I could underline or circle things I liked. Not that I ever understood any of it. I liked fiction, but poetry usually went right over my head.
Which is why I didn’t raise my hand when Mrs. Hartman cleared her throat and asked, “So, what is this poem about?”
Christy raised her hand, though. She always raised her hand. Her arm brushed past mine as it shot into the air.
“Go ahead, Christy.”
“It’s about being an individual.” Christy had on her sweetest voice. The one she reserved for teachers and Brother Thomas. “It’s about doing the thing no one else has done and how that can change your future. ‘I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’ It’s a really lovely poem.”
“Nice job, Christy.”
“But that ain’t what it’s about.”
Everybody except me turned. This time, I recognized the voice. It was Bo.
“Yes, it is,” Christy snapped.
“Now, wait a second, Christy,” Mrs. Hartman said. “Let’s hear Bo out. That’s what this class is for, after all.”
I could tell by the crack in Christy’s voice that she might be close to tears. She didn’t handle correction real well. “Sorry, Mrs. Hartman.”
“Go on, Bo. What do you think it means?”
“It ain’t about individuality or any of that. The road wasn’t less traveled. He says it right there in the poem. ‘Though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same.’ They’d both been traveled just as much.”
I looked down at my own copy of the poem. She was right. It said it right there, in the second stanza.
“Then how do you interpret the last line?” Mrs. Hartman asked.