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“our most dedicated parents are already doing all they can, volunteering as crossing guards and lunchroom helpers and the like. I know you depend on several women to sew costumes for the musical every year. The vast majority, I needn’t tell you, only seem to show up when they want to complain about Susie’s math grades or Johnny playing second string on the football team.” He straightened his tie. “It isn’t like it used to be.”
    â€œHow’s Dot feeling?” she asked gently. Arthur’s wife was a hometown girl, and everybody liked her.
    Arthur’s worries showed in his eyes. “She has good days and bad days,” he said.
    Julie bit her lower lip. Nodded. So this was it, she thought. The showcase was out, the musical was in. And somehow she would have to make it all work.
    â€œThank you,” Arthur replied, distracted again. Once more, he sighed. “I’ll need dates for the production as soon as possible,” he said. “Nelva Jean can make up fliers stressing that we’re going to need more parental help than usual.”
    Nelva Jean was the school secretary, a force of nature in her own right, and she’d been eligible for retirementeven when Julie and her sisters attended Blue River High. But aged miracle though she was, Nelva Jean couldn’t work magic.
    Julie and Arthur went their separate ways then, Julie’s mind tumbling through various unworkable options as she hurried toward her classroom, her thoughts partly on the three playwrights and their own hopes for the showcase.
    She’d met with the trio of young authors all summer long, reading and rereading the scripts for their one-act plays, suggesting revisions, helping to polish the pieces until they shone. They’d worked hard, and were counting on the production to buttress their college credentials.
    Julie entered her classroom, took her place up front. She had no choice but to put the dilemma out of her mind for the time being.
    Class flew by.
    â€œMs. Remington?” a shy voice asked, when first period was over and most of the students had left.
    Julie, who’d been erasing the blackboard, turned to see Rachel Strivens, one of her three young playwrights, standing nearby. Rachel’s dad was often out of work, though he did odd jobs wherever he could find them to put food on the table, and her mother had died in some sort of accident before the teenager and her father and her two younger brothers rolled into Blue River in a beat-up old truck in the middle of the last school year. They’d taken up residence in a rickety trailer, adjoining the junkyard run by Chudley Wilkes and his wife, Minnie, and had kept mostly to themselves ever since.
    Rachel’s intelligence, not to mention her affinity for the written word, had been apparent to Julie almost immediately. Over the summer, Rachel had spent her days at theBlue River Public Library, little brothers in tow, or at the community center, composing her play on one of the computers available there.
    The other kids seemed to like Rachel, though she didn’t have a lot of time for friends. She was definitely not like the others, buying her clothes at the thrift store and doing without things many of her contemporaries took for granted, like designer jeans, fancy cell phones and MP3 players, but at least she was spared the bullying that sometimes plagued the poor and the different. Julie knew that because she’d taken the time to make sure.
    â€œYes, Rachel?” she finally replied.
    Rachel, though too thin, had elegant bone structure, wide-set brown eyes and a generous mouth. Her waist-length hair, braided into a single plait, was as black as a country night before the new moon, and always clean. “Could—could I talk with you later?”
    Julie felt a tingle of alarm. “Is something wrong?”
    Rachel tried hard to smile. Second period would begin soon, and students were beginning to drift