She kind of smiled into her fingers at that remark, cupping her chin and looking at the people flecked in dark gold and silver thronging and filing around her. We were sitting in a restaurant. She folded her legs under that black slip which she saved for just such an occasion, I could tell, because it wasn’t quite the right size, like pants you would wear going to do yardwork for an afternoon. Her freckled shoulders were on display. Her hands were freckled too, and one of them was swilling a wine glass at the bowl and exposing the pink flesh of her flush-cut fingernails. She was looking at the people, smiling in a sad sort of way, how you might at a favorite memory which had not fully subsided.

I pinched her above the elbow. “You wanna go?” I said.

She turned to me like someone had switched a light in her bedroom.

“Yeah.”

She lingered on it. Then she sat up and smoothed the dress around her legs. “That’s a good idea.”

We were outside. There were only a few headlights in the streets. She was ahead of me, carrying her purse like a briefcase. We moved like big kids going to take a bow after a stage show; she kept a swift pace.

Then—she must have thought of me—she asked, “Do you, like… hate your parents as much as I do? At least one of them, come on,” she said with sort of a girlish, confiding smirk. She brushed her hair out of her face and looked down at her steps again. “I’ll let you guess which one I’m talking about.”

For some reason, I noticed the vigor of her movement in the car lights, all the parts working under the slip in the balmy night air. “That can be a hard thing,” I said. “I like to play a game where I imagine what helpful things I’ve gotten from them and what I’m trying to give away… You know? We ask a lot . My father had three children by the time he was our age.”

She gave a quiet affirmation and kept on. There was a foot or so between us. I was caught up by the sound of her heels clicking the sidewalk. “I bet she has her father’s legs,” I thought, “if he wore heels.”

Every few weeks we met for coffee. It was starting to get cold out and she liked to wear big sweaters, and I teased her that she could pass for a bag of wool. Sometimes she would already be there when I arrived. Another few weeks went by. We were on our phones and talking about what bands we liked.

“I used to be in one myself,” I confessed. “It was called ‘Postmodern Effigy’. We mostly improvised,” I said, laughing.

“That’s cool,” she said. She retrieved a picture from her phone and added, “I went to see Bright Eyes in San Fransisco last summer. My sister lives over there. They’re kind of her favorite band, too.” She cupped her chin and seemed to look past the people moving around the café. “The Bay area is such a blast. I’d really love to go back there, soon.”

Then, we didn’t see each other for a long time. I was support staff in a middle school, and one day I was assigned to her class. Rene Thompkins. Her room was new, and sparse, as white as a walk-in clinic, except for a few posters extolling historical figures—Cesar Chavez, Frederic Douglas, Katherine Johnson. She gave a lot of talks about mutual respect. The room itself was oversized for its population—maybe eight kids, and part of it went totally unused.

I remember she was trying to get the class to make a charter, to vote on the class environment. Then a big eighth grade girl came in late. She had a pink skull backpack and was loud enough for an amphitheater.

“Oh, god!” she roared. “Please don’t tell me I’ve got to stay in this weird ass class.”

Rene answered in a deep voice that the class wasn’t weird to her. But whatever spell she had with the kids had been broken. At the end of the class that day, the loud girl spotted me with the swiftness of an owl coming down on a mouse scurrying through pine needles. “Are you two dating?”

“Well, no,” I answered, trying to be clever. “We just happen to be in the same room.”