Station

Alex, 7^th grade

Miss Brunswick and I stayed in the police station for a few weeks. During that time, she met with half a million different people. Lawyers, social workers, teachers, you name it. They were trying to figure out something to do with me.

I overheard snippets of the conversation sometimes, when they were arguing particularly loudly and I happened to be passing by. It always made me angry that they never involved me in these arguments, like they didn’t care what I wanted to happen. I’d had enough of people that didn’t care to last a lifetime.

I absolutely point-blank refused to go to school. I said that if I needed to learn, Miss Brunswick was going to teach me, and they dropped the subject after that. So there was nothing to occupy my long days except wandering aimlessly around the halls, and that’s exactly how I spent my time.

On Tuesday morning, my eighth day at the station, I woke up quickly from a horrible dream. The details were slipping away fast, but I had a vague mental picture of a monster chasing me through a huge gray building. Shaking my head, I slowly got up and got dressed.

The cafeteria was only down the hallway, a forty-five second walk, at most, but I lingered in the hallway, having no desire to get there. I wanted to think, and that was difficult when you had three hundred people staring at you. What did I want to happen, if I got any say? That was a hard question. I knew that I absolutely wanted to stay with Miss Brunswick, but the rest was a mystery. Did I want to go to school? Did I want to go back to Pennsylvania? Did I want to move clear across the country to put as much distance as possible between me and the source of my nightmares? I wasn’t sure yet, and really hoped they would let Miss Brunswick decide.

A loud thump right against my head brought me back to earth unpleasantly. Jumping up and looking around, I discovered that the door I had been leaning against was the door to the conference room, and I was holding it shut. Rubbing my head, I scrambled to move out of the way, and a bunch of people left in a big hurry. After I thought all of them had left, I turned to go to the cafeteria, but a hand on my shoulder stopped me.

“Nat?”

It was Miss Brunswick.

I turned around slowly.

“The council has arrived at a decision,” she said, “and I thought you might want to know before they tell you.”

“Okay,” I said, “I want to know.”

“Well, they’ve decided that a foster home is a bad idea, so you’re going to be staying with me. I hope that’s okay?” she added nervously. After I nodded, she kept going.

“They’re not letting us go back to Pennsylvania, obviously, so we’re going to New Hampshire. It’s still really close to Pennsylvania, though, so I want you to be careful, Nat. I’m very reluctant to even let you go to school-”

“Whoa! Back up!” I exclaimed. “I’m not going to school, no way! You’re a teacher, aren’t you?”

Miss Brunswick sighed.

“Nat, I thought you were smarter than this,” she said. “I don’t have any qualifications as a teacher. There’s no way I could teach you and have the government accept that.”

She kept talking, but I didn’t hear a word of it. My brain had gone dead.

“So, Nat? What do you think?” said a voice from very far, far away. I blinked and looked up.

“Huh?”

“Nat, I was asking you what you thought about our plan,” someone was saying.

I was looking into the concerned eyes of Miss Brunswick.

“I’m sorry…I lost you,” I mumbled.

She looked at me skeptically.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” she asked. “You know you can tell me if you want to. I’ll listen.”

I thought about it for a few seconds.

“How come you’re not a real teacher?” I blurted out all of a sudden. The words kind of came out in a pile, but I think she understood me. Well, she started crying, if that was any indicator.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled again, feeling really stupid. “I didn’t mean to-”

“No,” she said, wiping her eyes. “You should know.”

She crossed the hallway to a bench, sat down, and gestured for me to follow.

“What should I know?”

Miss Brunswick paused for a few seconds.

“Nat, what I’m going to tell you is very sad,” she said. “You might be able to handle it, and I’m confident you can, based on what you’ve dealt with before, but I’m just warning you.

“This starts about thirty years ago, in a little town in northeastern Pennsylvania. I was born on July 20, and I had a family.”

I noted the past tense.

“My brother Colin was four years older than me. My father had never liked children, but he was very devoted to my mother. Colin told me her name,” she whispered. “Her name was Katherine. She died giving birth to me. Colin said that I looked exactly like her, and our father couldn’t stand to have such a reminder around, so the next day he brought us both to an orphanage. And the year after that we were on a train to the drill camp. I stayed as close to Colin as I could while I was there, until-”

She was crying again, so it was difficult to understand what she was saying, but it made sense. I wanted to cry.

“I was six when he died,” she said, speaking to the floor rather than to me. “He had pneumonia. I remember the guards dragging me away from his body. I was sick too, and I got a whole lot worse after that, but then I got better. After I was well again, I didn’t want to think about him, so I studied. I learned. I did everything I could think of to keep my mind off of him. That turned out to be a really big mistake.”

“How?” I asked.

“One, now I can’t remember enough about him. I have a vague picture of him, but I can’t see his face. Two, when I jumped so far in academics, the Commander had the thought that I would replace Mr. Clancy as the teacher.”

I stared.