He closed the textbook. He opened his notebook to a blank page and began to write — not homework, not notes for class. Just the day. What had happened, in order, as accurately as he could remember it. He wrote for forty-five minutes without stopping, the specific detail that he had been carrying all day and which needed, he had found, to be put somewhere outside himself so that he could sleep. When he finished he read it through once and put it in the drawer of his desk and turned off the light and lay in the dark and thought, for a while, about the kind of teacher he had thought Ms. Nair was going to be at seven AM and the kind she had turned out to be by the end of the morning.
They were very different. The second kind was better. The second kind was, he thought, the kind that only certain situations revealed, and you couldn't know which kind a person was until the situation happened. He was glad they had found out.— — —
