She heard the bus. The new bus — a different sound from the old one, slightly different pitch. She heard it on the road below the school and she heard it stop at the school gate. She heard the doors open.
She heard them coming — the sound of thirty-two children between eleven and fourteen years old moving through a school corridor on the first day of school. The sound she knew from three years of substitute teaching, the sound she had been waiting for all week. The sound of a full class approaching.
The door opened.
They came in. All of them — Class 6-B plus the older ones who had been assigned to her English class, filling the room with the specific energy of students who had been at home for ten days and who were now back in school, which was complicated because school was where you went and also school was associated with the event ten days ago and both of those things were true simultaneously and would be true for a while. She could see both of them in the way the students came in — some of them confident, some of them with the careful quality of people checking an environment they were not entirely sure of yet. That was fine. That was honest. That was what ten days of a certain kind of experience produced, and it was her job to help them locate themselves in the room and in the ordinary rhythm of school days, and she was going to do that job.
Vikram came in last. He was not last from hesitation — she could see the reason. He had held the door for the Class 6 students, all of them, and then entered after them. He met her eyes across the room and nodded — the same nod from the first day, the contained acknowledgment of a student who was not going to perform what he felt. She nodded back.
