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her students’ heads to the sky outside.
    When the PA popped to life, they could all hear Sister Margaret breathing into the microphone. “Due to the coming storm, classes will be dismissed at noon today. Your parents have been notified. Children who take the bus will begin lining up at eleven fifty-five.”
    Kate found it difficult to sit still on a normal day but with a snowstorm scuttling the classroom routine—they had to retrieve their lunch boxes from the lunch shelf and return them, uneaten, to their backpacks; they had to go over the vocab words at ten o’clock since they wouldn’t be there at one fifteen—it was as if she’d lost the power of hearing. Peter could feel her frenetic buzzing all the way from his seat, two rows away. Mrs. Duvin was still talking at the front of the classroom, rapping on the blackboard, telling them not to move a muscle until her say-so while Kate was shoving folders and marbled notebooks into her bag, twisting around in her seat to get a better view out the windows. She wanted to make an ice rink in her backyard, she was saying to Lisa Gordon, who Peter could tell was trying to ignore her, or at least not be seen by Mrs. Duvin to be engaging her. Her dad had given her the idea, she said.
    “Kath-leen Glee-son!” Mrs. Duvin said, isolating each part of Kate’s name so there were four separate rebukes. But instead of sending her out into the hall like she usually did, she just gave her a pleading look and then pointed at the clock. At precisely 11:55, Kate, Peter, and the other bus kids were walking down the hall. Kate was swinging her backpack, walking on the toes of her navy bucks as if at any moment she might break into a sprint. When they got outside she slid across a patch of black ice, arms wheeling like in a cartoon.
    Peter followed close behind her as they bumped down the aisle of the school bus to the emergency exit row. She paused at their seat to let him slide past—since kindergarten he’d been sitting by the window. As always, Peter threw his backpack to the floor and then slid down until his knees jammed up against the vinyl back of the seat in front of them. Kate knelt facing backward so that she could see and talk to everyone.
    “You beat John this morning,” Kate said as she settled in beside him. “Was he mad?” The boys played wall ball every morning while the girls clustered in groups to watch. Once, at the beginning of the year, Kate took position alongside the boys, and when one of them asked what shethought she was doing, she looked around like it was the most obvious thing in the world, like it was a completely normal thing for her to join the game when in fact in all the years they’d been at St. Bartholomew’s no girl had ever played before. She was fast, which kept her in for a few minutes, but the boys were stronger and, of course, gunning for her. She fumbled. She fumbled again. In no time she had three strikes and was standing at the wall with her hands flat against the brick while they pelted her in the butt, one by one. John Dills took a running start and threw from such close range that Peter winced and Kate took one hand off the wall to clutch the spot where she’d been hit.
    “You’re such a dick,” Peter said when John returned to his spot, snickering. The girls looking on glanced between Kate and the boys and didn’t know whom or what to root for. When it was his turn, Peter threw lightly, the ball barely brushing the back of Kate’s legs, and they called him on it. “It’s a stupid rule,” he said, refusing to throw again, but strangely, Kate was the one most annoyed about it. “Why didn’t you throw it for real?” she fumed later, glancing left and right to make sure no one could hear them. He was afraid he’d hurt her, he’d stammered. She didn’t speak to him for the rest of the day.
    “Hey, Kate,” he said now. A thought had occurred to him when Mrs. Duvin was putting the homework on the board, of his mother coming