“Trouble? Moi?” She absently touched the ladybug pin on her collar. “No trouble. No trouble whatsoever.”

  “And the extra desk? What’s with that?”

  “Oh, we might have an extra student tomorrow, that’s all.”

  “Extra student?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Is it temporary? Like for one day only?”

  Miss Lightstone said, “Let’s write, mm?”

  We wrote.

  I was on a dark path, closed in on all sides by thick trees, when suddenly the moon broke through with a bright shaft of light, illuminating a stranger on the path.

  At lunch, it became clear that a stranger had entered several other stories that day:

  In Arif’s castle story, the stranger was the long-lost father of the Knight of Onio.

  In Margie’s story of the old woman, the young man with the magnetic smile turned her into a complete stranger, someone she did not recognize.

  In Freddy’s story of the hidden chest in the hole in the ground a ghostly figure appeared. He called himself the Extra.

  Later, at the bus stop, Arif said, “I hope the extra student is friendlier than Gerald.”

  One Time

  The next morning the extra desk remained unoccupied.

  “Ohhh,” Margie moaned. “Where is the extra? I was hoping for some excitement this morning.”

  Audrey and Ruby lingered by the empty desk. “Do you think it’ll be a boy or a girl?”

  Gerald brushed past them, plonking books onto his own desk.

  “Poor kid,” he said.

  I was restless, eager to write that morning, eager to calm my jumbled thoughts. How did a person make sense of things?

  One time, when some were having trouble getting started with writing practice, Miss Lightstone said, “You might want to try what Gina does.”

  Heads swiveled to stare at me. I wanted to evaporate.

  Miss Lightstone continued, “Try starting with ‘One time’: One time I did this . . . or saw that or . . . whatever. Just concentrate on that one time.”

  I did that?

  Arif and Margie and Renaldo looked genuinely intrigued. Claire and Ruby did not. They zinged jagged eyebrow beams at me.

  Later, when I leafed through my notebook, I saw that Miss Lightstone was right. I did often begin with “One time . . .”

  Maybe I could shape my jumbled life into a string of one times. All the separate pieces—like Miss Lightstone and Antonio and Margie and Arif and Miss Judy and Auntie Pasta and the Clackertys and Angel Lucia and Nonna Filomena and the elephants and porcupines and mångatas and Sukeys and Tannerobbys and lasagna and ribbity rabbits and all of it—what did they all add up to? Could they loop and connect and make sense of me?

  I was trying to catch up with my brain, trying to make my way through the tangles, when one word popped into my head and flashed there like a neon sign: writer.

  And as I sat back to marvel at that one word, Miss Judy appeared at the door, waving to Miss Lightstone.

  “The extra!” Margie exclaimed. “Maybe it’s the extra!”

  Whispers swept through the room: The extra! The extra? The extra! We braced ourselves for the entry of the extra, all of us craning our necks toward the door, some of us half out of our seats in anticipation.

  “Sit down, Renaldo,” Ruby warned. “I can’t see!”

  “What’s taking so long?”

  I was wishing it could be Antonio. I was wishing I could go back to that day when he was the new student.

  Already, in my mind, I was thinking, One time a new student arrived . . .

  The Extra

  When the door reopened, Miss Lightstone entered, followed by a girl wearing a white sweater and puffy blue skirt. She looked like an angel with her dark curly hair all around her face and daylight streaming in from the window behind her.

  “This,” Miss Lightstone said, “is Kalifa. You might have questions, but let’s not bombard her, okay? She is not as fluent in English as you are.”

  I wanted to be in Kalifa’s mind, to know what she was thinking and feeling.

  “Do you want to say anything?” Miss Lightstone asked Kalifa.

  Kalifa looked slowly around the room. Her gaze was direct, taking in each of us. At last she said, “I will try to understand you.”

  “I could help!” Renaldo volunteered.

  “Me, too!” Freddy and four or five other boys added.

  At lunch someone asked her if she was afraid, being in a new country and a new school.

  “Afraid? No, not. This much better here.”

  Several times that day, she repeated, “This much better here.” Once she added, “No hiding from soldiers with guns and knives.”

  All day long, I watched Kalifa and wondered where she had come from and what her life had been like, and all day long I wondered what Antonio had thought and felt on his first day in our class, and I wondered why no one had ever called him son.

  The Substitute

  That Wednesday, Miss Lightstone was absent.

  I knew something was wrong even before I entered the classroom because students who had arrived earlier had come back out into the hall looking worried.

  “I don’t want to go in.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “You’re not going to believe—”

  “It’s a substitute.”

  “So?”

  “Go see.”

  I looked in. It was bad.

  It was the dreaded pointy teacher from last year.

  Renaldo, who had had an even worse time with her than I did, fled to the nurse’s office. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I just can’t.”

  The pointy teacher—I’ll call her Miss P. because I can’t bear to write her name—was staring at instructions that Miss Lightstone had left. “I don’t get this at all,” she said.

  Freddy went to the board and wrote:

  It’s Wednesday. Silent Day.

  Miss P. scowled.

  Freddy added:

  On Wednesdays we don’t talk.

  We write.

  “Nonsense,” Miss P. said, shuffling through more papers on the desk.

  Freddy underlined We write and turned to us and mouthed the word “Now!”

  Most of us quickly got out our notebooks and began writing. Only a few, like Ruby, seemed unsure and hesitated.

  Miss P. was agitated. Her skinny fingers flipped papers and her skinny arms flapped and her pointy nose wrinkled and her pointy teeth shone.

  We wrote.

  Her pointy shoes click-clacked as she marched around the room, peering over shoulders.

  “What’s that you’re doing?” she asked Arif.

  Bravely, he pointed to the board and put a finger to his lips.

  “I asked you a question! Answer me.”

  Arif whispered, “It’s Wednesday, it’s Silent Day, and we write. We don’t talk.”

  “Ridiculous!” she said.

  We kept writing, all of us except for Ruby, who sat there with her notebook open but her hand poised midair, frozen.

  Miss P. continued marching around the room, peering at our papers, until she stopped at Freddy’s desk. She snatched up his notebook and held it close to her pointy face.

  “What in the world? ‘Stuckity stuck stuck’? This is nonsense! Close your notebooks. Now. This instant!”

  And so we did, and then we listened to her lecture on sentence structure for the remainder of the period, and I wanted to crawl into a hobbit hole and hide.

  The next day, I begged to stay home from school, but my parents said that was “not an option.”

  “Think of it this way,” Mom said, “when Miss Lightstone does return, you’ll have something interesting to write about. You can turn Miss P. into an evil character.”

  Half the class was absent that day.

  But Miss Lightstone had returned, and those of us who were present practically drooled our relief and gratitude.

  The following day, the school principal sat in on our class.

  “Just happy to observe,” she said. This was the same principal who had been so understanding about my encounter with the angels a few years earlier. I liked her.

  But at lunch, the rumor went around (started by Ruby?) that the principal had received complaints about Miss Lightstone’s teaching, and that was why she was observing our class.

  The Announcement

  At the end of the next day, Miss Lightstone said she had an announcement to make. She looked so serious. I feared that she was going to say that she was leaving, and I didn’t think I could bear it.

  “I am sorry to say—”

  “Please don’t say you’re leaving,” Margie blurted. “Please don’t say that.”

  Others, who might not yet have feared that was going to be her announcement, gasped.

  “What? What?”

  “You’re leaving?”

  Miss Lightstone said, “Well, I am glad to see that some of you might mind if I left.”

  “All of us,” Renaldo said. “I bet all of us would mind.”

  “But that is not my announcement,” Miss Lightstone said. “I am not leaving.”

  Great relief all around. Several people clapped.

  “I am sorry, though, to tell you that Antonio will not be returning.”

  “No—”

  “Aw, no—”

  “Don’t say that.”

  Gerald asked who Antonio was.

  Miss Lightstone looked as sad as I felt. “Antonio used to sit where you are sitting now.”

  I felt as if air was leaking out of my body, deflating me like a punctured balloon.

  In answer to the chorus of Why? Miss Lightstone said that she did not know why Antonio was leaving, and in answer to a chorus of When? she said, “Apparently he has already moved.”

  “What?” Arif said. “Already?”

  I may have bleated like a pitiful lamb: “Already?”

  Others chimed in:

  “Without saying goodbye?”

  “Really already?”

  “Didn’t he like it here?”

  “Didn’t he like us?”

  Kalifa looked alarmed. “Did soldiers come?”

  “No, no,” Miss Lightstone reassured her. “No soldiers, don’t worry.”

  At home that afternoon, when I told Dad about Antonio’s departure, he said, “That would explain the moving truck, then. It came this morning. I went over to see if I could help but no one was around, other than the movers. No grandmother, no Antonio, no Princess What’s-her-name.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “But not to say anything? Just to leave—”

  “Well, there was this in our mailbox, with your name on it,” he said, handing me a small package wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine. “No postage on it, so someone must have put it there for you.”

  Inside was a small, carved blue frog. As I held it loosely in my palm, my thumb automatically stroked the smooth back.

  A short note was attached:

  This is for Gina. Antonio made it and wants her to have it. You hold it in your hand and it calms you.

  Carlotta (Princess Azalea)

  It felt comfortable in my hand, something smooth and solid to hold on to.

  That night, I remembered a recent update from Nonna Filomena about Angel Lucia:

  Angel Lucia has been so busy in our little village. It is always so in November when people become crotchety and rude because of the cold and the dark.

  One day she let loose a dozen puppies in the town square and another day she left an accordion on the steps of old Signor Franconi and a basket of warm bread on the steps of Mama Giordo and a violin on the steps of Signora Pesto.

  So: Angel Lucia does not always throw pine cones or hail or knock people on the head. Sometimes she brings puppies and bread and music.

  And it works. People feel better.

  What I Saw

  Late that same day, as darkness fell, I saw a strange sight from our front window. A large, gray, lumpy figure was moving slowly along, and on its shoulders was a small blob of blue.

  The elephant and the frog?

  When I opened the door, the large figure and the small blob both waved. It was Mr. Clafferty, bundled in a gray raincoat, and perched on his shoulders was one of the littles in a blue jacket.

  Trailing behind them was their tiny yippy-yappy dog, with its fur sticking up at odd angles. In its mouth was its own floppy, red leash.

  Was this the porcupine eating red licorice?

  And then I thought of the pair of sheep, gray and dirty, that Antonio had seen, and the clump of sheep Gerald had drawn, his vision of so many of us perhaps, all smiling or all not smiling, all blathering away.

  I was not sure what the pancake light and the red flowers dripping pollen—that first vision Antonio shared with me—resembled, but maybe I would discover that in time.

  I wanted to peer into Antonio’s future and see what he would become.

  The Exchange

  One day in class I wrote again about mångata, the moon’s light trail upon the water, and it occurred to me that both the moon and the water needed each other to create this stunning effect. Without the water, the moon was merely a bright light in the sky. Without the moon, the water was but a dark, blank void.

  When Miss Lightstone asked for voluntary contributions, I offered to read mine. There was an eerie silence when I finished, and I felt uneasy. Was it dumb what I had written?

  Renaldo said, “I guess it’s obvious now that you said so, but I never really thought of it that way.”

  Freddy said, “It’s the combination of the two, right? The combination is what makes it special.”

  Miss Lightstone rested one finger on her chin. “Hm. Yes. The moon amplifies the beauty of the water, and the water amplifies the beauty of the moon.” Her slowly emerging, full-on smile was so like Antonio’s.

  It worked. I felt better.

  Does it seem sappy to mention it?

  A person is more than a smile.

  I know that.

  When I revised that piece about mångata, I ended like this:

  And I know that the moon is magnificent on its own and doesn’t need the water, and the water is appealing all by itself and doesn’t need the moon. But together, ah! So rich.

  Onward Time: Twenty Years Later

  A month after Antonio left, I received a postcard from him, saying he wished he had had time to say goodbye to everyone, but he hadn’t known he would be leaving for good. A few months later, he sent a letter explaining that his grandmother had been ill and they had had to move in with an uncle in upstate New York. This time he included an address so that I was able to reply.

  We have exchanged letters for twenty years—sometimes every few months, sometimes less often. I did not see him again until college, but soon we will be living in the same town. Antonio is a playwright, best known so far for the play Mångata and for the distinct imagery in his works: elephants with frogs, porcupines with licorice, rapidly growing plants, swooping lights, moons and lakes.

  Margie, Arif, Freddy, Renaldo and I have remained friends, although we are spread out across the country, meeting up from time to time. It is easy enough to tell you what has become of them, but it would require at least a whole book about each to record all the ups and downs and twisty roads that got them to this place now, this time now, and to the complex individuals they have become. But the brief version is this:

  Margie is a kind and thoughtful friend and a lunar researcher for NASA, and Arif is an activist and journalist specializing in environmental issues. His mission is nothing less than to save the planet.

  Freddy studied drama and worked as a waiter while appearing in several off-Broadway plays, one of which starred Antonio’s cousin, Carlotta. Last year, he got his big break and appeared in his first film, a comedy. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of him onscreen.

  Renaldo became an English teacher and married Kalifa (the extra) and both work in the same school we attended when Miss Lightstone was our teacher.

  Miss Lightstone is now Mrs. Fortuna and has three children. She is still a teacher in our old school, inspiring students every day. My life, and I suspect the lives of many others, pivoted on that year with her.

  From time to time, I hear about Audrey, who is a rock singer in a band called Running Redheads, and Ruby, who manages a rescue facility for aging horses.

  Gerald is a cartoonist. I see his cartoons (Sheeplandia) each day in the newspaper.

  No one seems to have heard from Claire since we were in school together.

  Mr. Blue, the cat, died of old age, as did the Clackertys’ yippy-yappy dog.

  Some of the Clackerty-Claffertys still live on our old street. I’ve heard that one of them is now a chef, another is a grocer, and others include a fireman, a pilot, a waitress, and a librarian. One is in prison. They all have lots of children.

  Uncle and Auntie Pasta are definitely not invisible. They are creating havoc in a nursing home. Uncle still wants his pasta and Auntie still wants to make it, because that is how she communicates, she says: “If you love people, you make them pasta.” She is no longer allowed in the nursing home kitchen without supervision, though, because of the fires she started. Accidentally.

  My parents are taking a year off from their jobs and are staying in Italy with Nonna Filomena, who is ninety-nine years old and continues to update me on Angel Lucia’s actions. Most recently, Angel Lucia tossed mice down the chimney of the Luigi brothers because they poisoned the cat of Signora Fibocino.

  Miss Judy retired. She and Miss Marlene are active in women’s rights groups, are studying Japanese, taking yoga classes, and fostering two or three (it varies) dogs from the local animal shelter.

  As for me, Gina Filomena: I am a writer, a novelist. One of my books is about a family like the Clackertys, one features an Italian nonna, one is about an eccentric angel, and several include great teachers. The moon and water (rivers, lakes, streams, oceans) seem to surface in nearly everything I write.

 

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