Ms. Hempel Chronicles

Sandman

IT WAS THE ANNUAL ALL-SCHOOL Safety Assembly. The police officer looked short and lonely in the middle of the stage as he reeled off the possible threats: flashers in raincoats; razor blades in apples; strangers in cars.

Ms. Hempel wanted to raise her hand. Wasn’t he forgetting something? He hadn’t even mentioned the predators she dreaded most. And wasn’t it all supposed to sound more cautionary, more scary?

The grisly details that the officer omitted, Ms. Hempel’s imagination generously supplied. The black and shining van, the malevolent clowns, their wigs in sherbet colors. The dim interior, the stains on the carpet. Doors that shut with a rattling slam.

Ms. Hempel clenched her muscles. Terror flowered darkly inside her.

In the very back row of the auditorium, the eighth grade sat and squirmed. Zander, upon completing a drum solo, crashed an invisible cymbal. Elias drew a picture of a small, slouching boy on the back of Julianne’s binder. Jonathan, with the toe of his sneaker, battered the chair of the seventh grader sitting in front of him. Here they were, arrayed before her: restless, oblivious, vulnerable, all of them.

“Come on, guys.” Mr. Peele, microphone in hand, glowered at the eighth grade. “This is serious.”

An assertion that prompted the entire back row to explode into laughter. The eighth graders were banished to their homerooms. As they exited the auditorium, banging into everything they touched, Mr. Peele, his palm clamped over the microphone, instructed the homeroom teachers to finish off the job. “And don’t forget to remind them about Safe Haven,” he said, but the homeroom teachers were already walking out the door, rolling their eyes at each other. They had inherited yet another mess, like the teaching of sex education, the chaperoning of Trip Days, the organizing of canned-food drives and danceathons.

Ms. Hempel’s class, jostling their way back into the homeroom, looked decidedly pleased with themselves. “We’re missing French!” Sasha announced. Victoriously, they slammed their backpacks down onto the desk-chairs. “How many more periods until lunch?” Geoffrey asked.

They had no idea of the danger. “Don’t you realize,” Ms. Hempel cried, shutting the door behind her, “all the terrible things that could happen to you?”

The class regarded her coolly. The whole assembly, they explained, was not for their benefit. They weren’t small or cute enough anymore. They were too wised-up. “Want some candy, little girl?” Elias said in a cooing voice. Who would fall for such a stupid trick? Probably even the fifth and sixth graders knew better.

“I mean,” Sasha said, “we’re not exactly the ones to worry about.”

“I know!” A chorus of agreement. And then, the cherished complaint: no one seemed to have noticed the fact that they were, virtually, in high school and thus fully capable of handling their own affairs.

“Haven’t you heard,” persisted Ms. Hempel, “about the clowns? Who kidnap you? Who drive around in vans!”

“Oh, Ms. Hempel,” Julianne sighed. “We’re fine. Really.”

“Can you imagine,” Sasha asked, “a clown taking off with Jonathan Hamish?”

The class turned and looked at Jonathan, who had peeled the sole off his sneaker and was now trying to insert it down the back of Theo’s shirt. The logic went: in the unlikely chance that Jonathan could be swayed by the promise of bottle rockets and lured into the back of a dark and fusty van, he would exhaust the clowns before anything creepy might happen. The kids chuckled at the thought: the clowns slumped over, wigs askew, wearing the same dazed, disbelieving expression they sometimes saw on the faces of Jonathan’s teachers.

Meanwhile, Theo wriggled valorously.

Ms. Hempel confiscated the sole.

“What is Jonathan, or any of you, going to do when the clowns sneak up behind you and clobber you over the head with a tire iron?” she asked. “Or stuff a chloroform-soaked towel underneath your nose, and you pass out? Dead to the world? What are you going to do then?”

“They do that?” Geoffrey asked.

“For real?” Julianne asked.

“Yes!” Ms. Hempel said. “I read it in the newspaper.”

The eighth grade looked appalled. Ms. Hempel felt appalled, at the enormity of her lie. Generally speaking, her lying was of the mildest sort, only because she couldn’t do it very well. A genetic failing. Her father was a terrible liar. “Did you get in touch with the insurance man?” her mother would ask, and he would answer, “Yes!” in a confident way that made it quite clear he had not. Once, when he picked her up from school, more than forty-five minutes late, he had glared at the dashboard and growled, “Emergency at the hospital,” even though his damp tennis shorts in the backseat were letting off a most powerful reek.

But he was scrupulously honest about important things. When faced with a difficult question, he never lied or dodged or even faltered. “Toxic shock syndrome,” he once explained to her, “occurs when a woman leaves a tampon or an IUD inside her vagina for too long, allowing bacteria to gather. The bacteria then causes an infection that enters her bloodstream and can, but not always, result in her immediate death.” Mastectomy and herpes were described just as clearly.

It was a model she admired. “Sodomy,” Ms. Hempel now said to her class, “is what’s happening in the back of those vans. And though sodomy is a word that can be used in reference to any sort of sexual intercourse, it most commonly refers to anal sex.”

They seemed to have a good understanding of what that was. Roderick made a joke about taking a shower and having to pick up a bar of soap off the floor. The class laughed warily. They shifted in their desk-chairs.

“The clowns do this to you while you’re unconscious?” Theo asked.

“Exactly,” Ms. Hempel said, and the kids fell silent. The other clowns, the ridiculous ones wearing wigs and clutching candy, had been replaced: these new ones marched through the homeroom swinging their tire irons, waving their towels, unbuckling their pants.

“So do you see why we’re scared? Why we want you to be careful?”

The kids nodded. They seemed to have gone suddenly limp. Ms. Hempel felt horrible.

“But don’t worry!” she said. “There are stickers everywhere. You’ve seen them. The blue ones? With the little lighthouse on them.”

“Safe Haven,” said Sasha dully.

“Right!” Ms. Hempel said. “If you see that sticker in a store window, you know that you can walk inside and they’ll take care of you and call the police and call your parents.”

“You mean if the clowns try to clobber us,” Zander clarified.

“Or if anyone strange approaches you,” she said. “Anyone who makes you feel uncomfortable.”

“But Safe Haven doesn’t work!” Gloria said. “When this gross guy was following me home from the bus stop, I went into Video Connection, and the girl there didn’t even know what I was talking about.”

“A gross guy followed you home?” Ms. Hempel asked.

“He kept singing, You are the sun, you are the rain, really quietly, just so I could hear. You know that song?”

The other girls squealed softly in disgust.

“When did this happen?” Ms. Hempel asked.

“It happens all the time!” the girls cried out, and like a flock of startled pigeons they seemed to all rise up at once. Didn’t Ms. Hempel know? Weirdness was lurking everywhere: behind the bank, holding a broom; on the subway, grazing your butt; at the park, asking if he could maybe touch your hair. What book are you reading? What grade are you in? The girls bounced up and down in their chairs, seething, commiserating, trying to outdo each other. When I was walking to school. When I was visiting my cousin. No, wait! Listen: When I was, like, twelve….

Homeroom discussions always seemed to end this way. The girls in a glorious fury; the boys gazing dumbly at the carpet. What would possess a clown, Ms. Hempel wondered, to kidnap one of these beautiful girls? So lively, and smart, and suspicious. Such strong legs, from kicking soccer balls and making jump shots. So full of outrage.

The boys, though: brash and bewildered, oddly proportioned. Some of them were finally beginning to grow tall. They wore voluminous pants that hung precariously on their hips. They grinned readily. During the winter, when it was very cold, they refused to wear their coats in the yard: We get hot when we run around! they said. Their T-shirts flapped against their thin arms; their chests heaved. The ball rarely made it into the net, but they didn’t seem to mind. It was all about the hurling and the frenzied grasping and the thundering down to the other end of the court. And even though the girls were always plucking at Ms. Hempel’s sleeve, demanding that she listen, it was the boys who tugged at her heart, who seemed to her the ripest for abduction.

MS. HEMPEL WONDERED IF her story of that morning could be true, or if it were, factually speaking, impossible. The detail about chloroform bothered her; it struck her as transparently dramatic, like a woman who dashes about with a long, fragile scarf fluttering behind her. It was an anachronism; something from the days of white slavery, and opium smuggling, and jewel heists. Where had she learned about chloroform, anyway? Probably Tintin.

“If you wanted to kidnap someone, what would you use?” she asked Amit. They were lying in bed, with the lights off. “To knock them unconscious. So that you could drag them into the back of your van.”

“Chloroform, I guess.”

“Really?” She brightened. It made her happy that the person she was marrying would commit crimes in the same way as she would. “There isn’t anything more modern you would use? Aren’t there all sorts of new chemicals?”

“No, I think chloroform would do the trick,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “That’s what I thought, too.”

“Are you planning on kidnapping anyone?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

Then, “Of course not!” she said, and laughed, and slapped him on the arm. They settled into each other.

She had gone to the same high school as Amit, even graduated the same year, but they had barely spoken then. She remembered him as black-haired and elfin and somewhat aloof: in an innocent, not a superior, way. His one distinguishing trait had been his devotion to cross-country running. Sometimes her carpool passed him on the road, and she would lean her forehead against the cool glass, wondering how many miles he had already covered and feeling glad that she was splayed across the backseat of a station wagon. She never once saw him panting; it seemed as if he could bound along interminably. Both of her best friends had seen his penis. As part of a short-lived weight-loss regimen, they had joined the crosscountry team, and as they straddled the lawn, stretching their muscles, they glimpsed the head of his penis, appearing from beneath the edge of his delicate, shimmering shorts.

When she saw him again, years later, this detail reared up before her as soon as she sat down beside him. It was an alumni event, an idea that embarrassed her, but her school had reserved seats at a French-Canadian circus that she badly wanted to see. Amit was there, he said, for exactly the same reason. They discovered many other things in common: warm feelings for Mrs. Kravatz, the biology teacher; a passion for the novels of Thomas Hardy; regret that they hadn’t joined a circus themselves. They admitted to each other that even though, as students, they had regarded their high school as detestable and oppressive, they now sometimes caught themselves yearning for it.

The circus, too, filled her with longing. As soon as the lights fell, and the audience hushed, and the circus master appeared barking out his welcome, and the acrobats came tumbling into the ring, and the quaint little orchestra struck up its tinkling song, and the lovely women pranced about with thin velvet ribbons tied around their necks, as soon as all this began, she felt herself missing the circus even as it unfolded before her. Folded and unfolded — this circus was famous for its contortionists. But what they did seemed like the most normal thing in the world; their bodies, glittering in the blue light, appeared enormously relieved, as if they had been permitted, finally, to relax into their most natural states. Clearly she saw how the feet longed to roost behind the ears, how the spine was as stretchy as chewing gum. It made her feel sorry for her own creaking vessel, shuffling along dimly, made to stand upright on two feet. No, not vessel — because if this circus, so full of secrets, revealed anything, it was that the body does not contain, but is contained; rather than comb through the jungles of Asia and Africa and bring back, in shackles, the wildlife found there, this circus had coaxed out of hiding a strange beast, the body.

“Oh, those Canadians!” she murmured, and Amit nodded ardently, as if he understood precisely what she wasn’t able to say.

It was the circus, she felt sure, that had made possible all that followed. Where else but in the company of acrobats could she imagine her own body fitting with his? Watching him from the station wagon, his black hair, his small frame skimming along the road, she could not have imagined it. Her imagination would have balked, recoiled: why, she wasn’t sure. But it was subdued now, compliant; she sat beside him at the circus and the unimaginable became suddenly, forcefully possible. Everything else seemed easy: the long correspondence, the breaking off with his girlfriend, the bringing together of their two libraries.

And his penis she forgot all about, even after she had herself encountered it. Her two best friends had to remind her of the story.

HER BEST FRIENDS, GRETA AND KATE, had their hearts set on a bridal shower. It was held at a Victorian tearoom, with mismatched china and plates of watercress sandwiches. Only the three of them were invited.

In a wobbly rattan chair, her legs firmly planted, sat Kate. “Don’t sit there,” she said to Greta. “Floral chintz is for Beatrice. The Angel in the House.”

Greta tucked herself into a wing chair. With a great show of ceremony, she unclipped her beeper and stuffed it deep inside her purse. “No interruptions!” she declared. The symmetry was pleasing: a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, the professions you aspire to when you’re a child, before you learn about all the other possibilities.

“Ooooh, look at you!” Greta said to Beatrice, who had removed her sweater.

Beatrice looked down at her breasts. “Do you think it’s too much?”

“No!” they said at once.

“You wore that to school?” Greta asked, and Beatrice nodded.

“Those poor boys,” said Kate, reaching for the sugar cubes.

“Pup tent!” Greta cried, and though Beatrice tried to protest, tried to explain that her students didn’t look at her that way, that they were inflamed by other teachers like Ms. Burnes, who taught science, and Madame Planchon, who wore seamed stockings, her two best friends were already slapping hands above the teapot.

“Your breasts are lovely.” Greta leaned over and squeezed Beatrice’s leg. “You should show them off.”

“Absolutely,” Kate said.

This type of flattery — excessive, heartfelt, slightly barbed — was their favorite activity. They served as each other’s most passionate advocates: no one, in Beatrice’s mind, was as intelligent and beautiful and kind and brave and talented as Kate and Greta. And Kate and Greta, in turn, would insist the same of Beatrice. It was puzzling, then, that together they had managed to collect such a number of men who seemed less alert to these qualities. Amit was a departure in this regard. And Beatrice wondered if she might be a disappointment to her friends, not because she was getting married, but because she had stopped falling in love with men who were childlike, or ill-tempered, or flat-footed, or unkind. Or maybe simply indifferent.

Which was not at all what they had planned when they were in high school. These plans had imagined graceful men with slim hips and luminous skin. At least that was what Greta described. The fact that he might be gay to begin with would only make his conversion all the more remarkable. Kate wanted a looming, overpowering man, one who could make her feel petite (for once) and envelop her entirely. And then? A nighttime wedding, with Japanese lanterns. Quails and asparagus. A honeymoon in Prague. Nearly every lunchperiod was spent in this fashion. Pushing their trays to one side, they huddled over the table and spangled their futures with intrigues and travels and children and accolades. For the sake of realism, they threw in obstacles: a callous lover for Kate (she eventually comes to her senses); Beatrice’s close call with pharmaceuticals (from which she emerges chastened, but stronger). Then they liked to skip far ahead and picture themselves on a porch, widowed, delighting in each other’s company once again.

Now, having arrived at the future, they liked nothing better than to recall their days around the lunch table. They exclaimed over their miscalculations. Holding up their tearoom selves and measuring them against their lunchroom selves, they tried to account for the discrepancies. How did wild-eyed Beatrice become a teacher? How did she succeed in getting engaged before anyone else? The trajectory was not at all what they had predicted.

“Who would have thought,” Greta asked, loosening a strawberry from its stem, “that you would marry Amit Hawkins?”

“Can you imagine,” Kate said, “sitting there in practice and knowing, That penis, one day, is going to penetrate our beloved Bea.”

“I bet he never would have dreamt it,” Greta said.

“Did he?” Kate asked, excited. “Did he notice you then?”

Beatrice had asked him that very question, even though she felt it vain and somewhat despicable to do so.

“Oh no, not in that way. He was scared of me.”

“He was?” Kate and Greta laughed.

“Yes!” Beatrice said. “I can see why.”

Her infected nose piercing. Her scarlet bra straps. Her eagerness to take off her clothes: for the spring play, for the advanced photography class, for any tedious game of Truth or Dare. Her fits of weeping. Her steel-toed boots. Her term papers on “Edie Sedgwick: Little Girl Lost” and “Get Your Motors Running: The Rise and Fall of the Hells Angels.” A quote on her yearbook page from the Marquis de Sade.

“But who could be scared of Ms. Hempel?” Kate asked, cheerfully.

“Speaking of which — we have a present for you!” Greta said and dove beneath the tea table.

Kate cleared a space in front in Beatrice: “Whenever you wear it, you must think of us.”

Greta resurfaced, beaming, and brandishing a box.

“Open it!”

Carefully Beatrice tugged at the bow, lifted the lid, burrowed through the crackling tissue paper.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Keep going,” Kate said. “It’s in there somewhere.”

She felt something slippery and grabbed it.

“What can it be?” she asked, as she imagined, very clearly, a silk nightgown. She pulled her present from its box.

Greta and Kate shrieked. “Do you love them?”

Beatrice nodded.

“Crotchless panties!” they cried, and clapped their hands, as if applauding all the stunts she would perform while wearing them.

They weren’t at all silky. Beatrice brushed her cheek against them: 100 percent polyester. And smelling of something sweetly, sickly rubbery.

The saucers rattled. Greta leaned forward, dunking her lovely beads into her cup. “Do you like them? Really?”

Beatrice smiled bravely. “They’re perfect,” she said, though they absolutely weren’t. They were woefully inadequate. Not up to the task.

“I hope they won’t shock Amit,” Greta said, as Beatrice gently returned them to their box. She looked up from the present at her two best friends, her two talented, brilliant, unintuitive friends. They had no idea.

If someone had asked, Beatrice might have described her notion of sex thus: warm bodies in the dark, sighing and rustling, then arcing up in perfect tandem, like synchronized swimmers. Amit’s concept involved something much more strenuous and well lit and out of the ordinary. His requests often alarmed her. She knew the crotchless panties would strike him as silly, or simply beside the point. This thought made her feel sad, both sad and spooked.

Even worse, she felt duplicitous, as though she had worked on him an unforgivable deception. He now carried about with him a baffled, slightly disappointed air. But she couldn’t help it: how her body clenched, how the alarm was raised, how her every muscle responded with a panicked shout of Sodomy! He had mistaken her for something else entirely, and who could blame him? The scarlet bra straps, the Marquis de Sade. The fondness for acrobats.

She wondered at what point his appetite had turned. As far as she understood, an interest in anal sex was not something one was born with. She imagined an early, unsuccessful coupling; flickering filmstrips; a summer spent in Europe. All it took were some crooked signposts, some conspiracy of events and influences. Because he couldn’t have always wanted this. Why hadn’t she stopped the car? Why hadn’t she sprung out of the station wagon and loved him then? When a kiss was a surprise, the introduction of tongue an astonishment. When a small, black-haired boy would have swooned at the thought of her underwear. Would have died, nearly, at the touch of her hands, her chewing gum breath, her permission to enter. It would have been enough; it would have been the whole world, then.

So much more was asked of her now. Stamina, flexibility, imagination (or, perhaps, a quieting of her imagination). A willingness to endure, and to enjoy, what she feared would be a rupturing pain. It all made her feel exhausted and very far away from him, as if he were standing atop a flight of stairs and she were stranded at the bottom, too breathless to climb up. Even though he waited there, full of love, full of patience, full of expectancy, she wondered how long it would be before he stretched out his hamstrings, took a deep breath, and bounded off.

But maybe she was remembering it all wrong; maybe there was never a time when a kiss could stun and astonish. Maybe, if she aligned the years correctly, she would discover that while Amit was devoting himself to cross-country running, Greta was contorted (the true contortionist) over the stick shift in her mother’s car, offering an illustration of how to manage a penis inside one’s mouth, and Beatrice was sitting in the backseat, watching very closely. Greta, who now leaned across the tea table and grasped Beatrice’s hand and said, suddenly, “We love you so much, Bea.”

TO BEATRICE’S SURPRISE, Amit liked the crotchless panties. He wore them on his head and danced around the apartment. All of me, he sang. Why not take all of me.

He sang and danced with his eyes closed. He snatched her up, and held her close, and, with a snap of his wrist, unfurled her. She dangled out in space, teetering on her tiptoes, ready to crash into the snake tank — but then he spooled her back in again. Together they danced wildly. They dipped and spun and almost knocked over a lamp. He tried to lift her off the floor, but he wasn’t quite tall enough, so she gave a little push and folded up her legs, and it was nearly the same as being swept off her feet.

Can’t you see, he sang. I’m no good without you.

She hung on to his neck and they waltzed over her pop quizzes. And into the bookcase, where he stumbled, and books toppled, and he pulled away from her, doubled over. She stooped down to help and suddenly he shot up, taking her with him, slung over his shoulder like a squalling child. She flailed and shrieked. Staggering about the room, Amit huffed, You took the part that once was my heart.

With a thump, he deposited her onto the sofa. So why not take all of me?

He then twirled around and lurched down the hallway and out the door. To buy them two bottles of ginger ale.

Beatrice lolled on the sofa and hummed a coda to his song. What luck! What fortune! A thousand blessings had been bestowed upon her. A springy sofa, a clean apartment. A pile of pop quizzes that could wait until morning. A dancing fiancé. An airborne Beatrice. A pair of best friends, and a beautiful bridal shower.

Abruptly, she stiffened. For where was her present? Still perched atop her fiance’s head. Preening itself. And ruffling its polyester feathers.

And where was her fiancé? Walking down the avenue, with a small lilt, a small stutter, in his step.

Beatrice retrieved her shoes from beneath the sofa and ran out into the street. She looked both ways. She saw a dumpster, a dark alley, and a brand-new van with a voluptuous woman painted on its side. She didn’t see Amit. She didn’t see anyone on the street, as if she had rushed out of their apartment and into her own bad dream.

Her nightmares took a truly frightening turn when she was ten, and her father began to appear in them, to save her. But she always knew, through the inevitable logic of nightmares, that her father would be destroyed, that he would struggle valiantly but to no avail, and that his knees would crumble and his eyes would dim and he might try to speak a few loving, gurgling words to her before he expired. She knew it with an awful, churning certainty. It didn’t matter what shape the menace took: sometimes it was a sticky pink substance that came bubbling under the door; sometimes it was an infernal drug lord, disguised as her principal, who was trying to bring her school under his narcotic control. These terrors were acute, yet relatively benign, as long as she was battling them by herself. Once her father got involved, the nightmares would escalate: for what was more paralyzing than the sight of your father, corroding in acid, pinned down by a pitchfork, drooling and drug addled? In one dream she sat in the back of his car and watched his eyes in the rearview mirror as he slowly melted into his seat.

Beatrice hurried down the street. She passed a ladder, a trash can, a pool of broken glass.

In her dreams, death always took her father by surprise. Even up until the very end, he’d remain convinced of his immunity. With this same conviction he would, in real life, pick fights with fellow motorists, climb up onto the roof rather than call the handyman, and disappear into the wilderness for whole days at a time. Beatrice found these weekend excursions particularly infuriating. What better way to court calamity than canoeing? She had seen movies; she knew about the dangers. The willful rapids, the bears snuffling about the campsite, the invisible parasites infesting the water. Not to mention the belligerent, banjo-picking locals who would immediately recognize her father for the city-slicking, fancy-pants doctor he was. She would try to tempt him with alluring alternatives: “We could go to the mall,” she’d say, “get some of those soft pretzels that you like.” Or she would volunteer to help him load up the car, and then tell him mournful stories about a girl in her class, whose grades — due to her father’s death in a tragic canoeing accident — had experienced a precipitous decline. But these tactics rarely worked.

Her mother didn’t want him to leave, either. She would not make him sandwiches to eat on the road; she would not smile; sometimes she wouldn’t even appear in the driveway to say good-bye. On the weekends that Beatrice’s father went away, she and her mother would catch glimpses of one another as they each stalked about the house in an undisturbed rage. But when the telephone rang, her mother, answering it, would say gaily, “Oscar? He’s off canoeing!” And somehow, the way she said it — in a bright, emphatic tone that left no room for further questions — made it seem as if Beatrice’s father were right there with them, uttering the words himself. She spoke in the voice he always used when asserting what was most obviously untrue. The effect was strange — hearing this voice come out of her mother. Then, with a slight shrug, she would return to herself, her face slackening, her pen circling the telephone pad, and Beatrice, confronted with the mystery of her father, the mystery of her mother, could only write repeatedly, in ever tinier cursive, Canoeing is a perilous outdoor sport. She wrote it five times on the last page of her science notebook, stopped, remembered herself, and neatly tore out the page; at the end of every two weeks you had to turn in your notebook for a grade.

By Monday morning he would be back again, in time to make Beatrice breakfast and deliver her to school. She softened at the sight of him standing there in the kitchen, flushed and rumpled and stubbled, placing her favorite antique spoon on the table. The wilderness had released him, had given him back. And, just like that, all her fury would be snuffed out. Any irritation was now redirected at her mother, who upon his return had camped out in her bathtub, listening to NPR at a deafening volume. She should come downstairs! Beatrice would silently fume. She should come fluttering in, full of kisses and gratitude and relief!

Disaster had been held off once again. Wasn’t that cause for rejoicing?

For there Amit was, waiting in the checkout line, his small black head shining above the magazine racks. No crotchless panties in sight. Beatrice stood on the sidewalk and watched him pay for the two bottles of ginger ale. What luck, she felt. What extraordinary fortune.

THE EIGHTH GRADERS WERE less fortunate. The next morning dawned drearily, with assurances from the weatherwoman that the sky would remain overcast. The sky was always overcast on Trip Day, the one day out of the whole year when the eighth grade took a very long bus ride to a rather grimy beach. They showed no signs of discouragement, however. Even at the stoplights, the school bus rocked back and forth crazily.

“Rule Number One!” Ms. Hempel hollered, before she let them disembark. “Don’t go in past your waist. There’s only one lifeguard on duty. And don’t forget to wear sunscreen. Those ultraviolet rays will burn you up, even though it’s cloudy!”

“And don’t talk to clowns,” someone shouted from the back.

“Right,” Ms. Hempel said.

The eighth grade clattered off the bus and, without awaiting further orders, stormed the beach. Ms. Hempel and the three other homeroom teachers trudged grimly behind, trying to balance between them the poles for a volleyball net. Yelps could already be heard from the water.

As they cleared the boardwalk, Ms. Hempel saw her students frisking bravely in the surf. It was still very cold out. Some girls wore cheeky little two-pieces flecked with polka dots and daisies; others skulked about in their fathers’ T-shirts. The boys were already immersed up to their necks, their sleek heads bobbing atop the waves. “It’s freezing!” the girls wailed. “Ms. Hempel! It’s freezing!”

Ms. Hempel held their towels in her outstretched arms and rubbed their backs when they scrambled, dripping, up from the water. The girls clustered about her, reaching out their trembling hands and pressing them against her cheek: “See?” they asked. “See how cold I am!”

“Brrrrrr!” Ms. Hempel said, and rubbed them harder.

The girls then arranged their towels into a beautiful mosaic on the sand. Dropping down upon their knees, they dug into their beach bags, emerging with plastic containers and painted tins and shoeboxes lined with waxed paper. These they gravely placed in the middle of the mosaic. Julianne circled about them, distributing paper plates, while Keisha handed out Dixie cups half filled with soda. One by one the lids were removed, revealing jerked chicken, fruit salad, crumbling banana bread, couscous, fried plantains, sesame noodles, sticky little rice balls. The girls fell upon the food. “We organized a pot-luck,” Sasha explained, forking a pineapple wedge and making room for Ms. Hempel. “Please help yourself.”

Meanwhile, the boys had straggled up onto the beach and were now huddled around the school cooler, peering down into sodden paper bags. They consoled themselves by clapping their sacks of school-issued potato chips and making them explode.

“They thought a potluck was stupid,” Alice said, with profound satisfaction.

A family of seagulls and the three other homeroom teachers patrolled the area. Ms. Hempel shouted out, “Everything’s okay over here!” and accepted a lemon square, reminding herself that her presence was required. She would make sure that no paper plates were left in the sand. She would apply sunscreen to the girls’ shoulders, and provide an adult perspective on their discussions. Drowsily, she gazed out at the ocean. “I can’t believe you went in,” she murmured.

The morning passed slowly. Swimming and lunch had already taken place, and it wasn’t even eleven yet. No one dared return to the water; common sense had set in. And the volleyball net kept collapsing. The girls wrapped themselves in their towels and asked Ms. Hempel personal questions. Was she wearing, underneath her sweater, a one-piece or a two-piece? Did she propose or did he? But everything she said seemed only to remind them of something more urgent that they needed to say. Each one of her answers was interrupted, and then abandoned, as the girls hurried from one new topic to the next: discriminatory gym teachers; open-minded parents; plus-sized models. The animated nature of the discussion kept them warm. When they wanted to make a point, they threw off their towels, baring themselves like superheroes.

Ms. Hempel found herself noticing a group of boys off in the distance, bending themselves to a task with a suspicious degree of concentration. “What do you think they’re doing?” she asked.

“Who knows?” Gloria sighed.

“Maybe I should go check on them,” Ms. Hempel said.

“They’re fine,” Julianne said, a bit sternly.

But they didn’t look fine. They were crouching over something. Maybe they had found a stash of hypodermic needles, washed up by the tide.

“I had better go see,” Ms. Hempel said.

“Ms. Hempel…,” the girls called, but she was already on her feet and walking away from them.

Upon closer inspection, she saw that the boys were absorbed in a fairly harmless activity. It involved one boy lying down on his back, the other boys heaping sand on top of him and patting it down, and then the boy heaving himself up and lumbering to his feet. The boys took great care to smooth out the sand so that when the body began to stir, the grave would crack and fissure in a dramatic fashion. She wasn’t sure where the pleasure lay: in burying a classmate, or in freeing oneself from the sand. They attacked both roles with equal gusto. She stood to one side and watched them.

When it was Jonathan Hamish’s turn, the boys began to add, at his behest, anatomy to his burial mound. As they shaped two sandy breasts, they glanced over at Ms. Hempel, to see what she would do. Their glance both defied and invited reproach, a look with which she was very familiar. She smiled at them permissively, then rolled her eyes to show how unflappable she was. An argument arose as to the size of the outcroppings: some boys, among them Elias and Theo, felt they should be round and realistic, while others, like Roderick, wanted to keep building the breasts until they sat high and pointy on Jonathan’s chest. “That’s not what they do,” Elias muttered, but sand was an imprecise medium to begin with. Jonathan grinned down at his protrusions.

The breasts turned out so well the boys decided to add a penis. They glanced over, again, in Ms. Hempel’s direction. They even cleared a little space for her so she could stump over to the penis and object. But didn’t they know? She was the young teacher. It was her job to indulge them, to be impervious to shock, to watch all the same television shows that they did. She laughed when they made off-color jokes. She allowed them to use curse words in their creative writing. She taught sex education with unheard-of candor. Of course, they were constantly testing her. When she asked her homeroom to anonymously submit any question, any question at all, regarding puberty or sex or contraception, she received some very graphic queries. She stood at the front of the class and read each question aloud. Competently, intrepidly, she described the consistency of semen, what purpose lubricant served, why a woman might enjoy receiving oral sex.

Jonathan Hamish, who didn’t even try to disguise his handwriting, had submitted a question of a more challenging sort. He grinned at her when he saw that she had pulled his crumpled paper from the pile. Whose the best lover you’ve ever had? Jonathan watched her closely, as if waiting for her to discard it, frown at him, send him downstairs to Mr. Peele’s office. But she found herself mysteriously touched, felt herself blushing in a pleasurable way. Another word, surely, would have been the more obvious choice: What’s the best sex you’ve ever had? Who’s the best fuck? But even in his efforts to provoke her, he had selected a word that was exceedingly charming. Full of solicitous, gentlemanly concern. And he grinned at her — not devilishly, not leeringly — but sweetly almost, sweetly and frankly. As if he really wanted to know. As if he were asking only because all aspects of her life were of interest to him. As if the thought of her embroiled in sweaty sex were unimaginable. In Jonathan Hamish’s view of the world, Ms. Hempel would make love.

When she read the question aloud, the homeroom swiveled in their seats and glared at Jonathan. They knew that only he would ask such a question.

“Well,” Ms. Hempel said, displaying her ring finger. “Shouldn’t the answer be obvious?”

THE PENIS, HAVING A MORE slender base, proved more difficult than the breasts. It kept on toppling over. After a few frustrated attempts, the boys settled on a suggestive hillock (a pup tent, Ms. Hempel realized). They stepped back and admired their handiwork.

“Keep going,” Jonathan commanded, waggling his hands and feet. “I’m not completely covered.”

They heaped more sand upon him, making it necessary that he remain absolutely still, for even the smallest twitch of his fingers could disrupt their progress. Jonathan, as Ms. Hempel well knew, was a child unable to stop moving. And perhaps it was a relief to him, this stillness, this weight pressing down on him.

But he still was not satisfied with the effect. “Try putting more sand on my neck, and up around my ears,” he instructed.

The other boys squatted down beside his head and carefully shaped the sand. “More,” Jonathan said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

He could no longer move his head, but his eyes darted back and forth, monitoring their efforts. “You can put more on my forehead, and my chin,” he said. “Get as much on my face as you can.”

His voice kept getting quieter and quieter. Ms. Hempel peered down at him anxiously. “Are you all right in there?” she asked. “Jonathan, do you want them to stop?”

Finally, in a very small voice, he said, “Enough.”

The boys were proud of what they had done. “Picture!” Roderick yelled. “We have to take a picture!” None of the boys had brought a camera. Only the girls had thought to do that. So off they went, thundering down the beach. “Don’t move!” they shouted back at Jonathan.

“Okay,” he whispered.

Ms. Hempel knelt down beside him. “Jonathan,” she said. “Are you really okay?”

“I’m okay,” he whispered. His mouth had turned a funny dark color, as if he had just finished eating a grape popsicle.

“Promise me.”

“I’m just resting,” he said, and closed his eyes.

“Jonathan?” she asked. “Do you want me to get you anything? Do you want some water?”

“No,” he sighed, his eyes still closed.

Then he asked, “Do you see them?”

“They’ll be back any minute now,” she said. “It’s not very far.”

“This sand is heavy,” he whispered.

“Do you want to get up?” she asked. “Jonathan?”

“I’m okay. It’s just a little hard to breathe.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “Are they back yet?”

But only Ms. DeWitt appeared on the horizon: teacher of advanced math, coach of girls’ basketball. When she called out, Ms. Hempel waved back at her and smiled.

“Everything’s fine!” she shouted, despairingly.

Another teacher would have intervened, she knew, would have brought it all to a halt. Stand up, she imagined Ms. DeWitt barking. Right now. This is dangerous.

Words that Ms. Hempel should have said from the very beginning.

“Can you see them?” Jonathan whispered.

“Yes,” she told him, though it wasn’t true. “They’re running straight at us.”

THE BOYS RETURNED, EVENTUALLY, and the picture was taken. Jonathan had become quite blue by that point. He wasn’t able to burst forth from the sand as the others had. It was much more of a struggle for him, and when he pulled himself to his feet, he was shivering violently. The other boys draped him in their towels. “Let’s go back to the bus,” Ms. Hempel said. “We can ask the bus driver to turn on the heater.”

Together they climbed up the beach toward the parking lot. The boys ran ahead and tripped each other and kicked sand, but Jonathan walked behind them, still trembling, a towel thrown over his head like a hood. Ms. Hempel made him stop.

“Come here,” she said, and she held him.