The Pubscriber Vol. 1 Summer 2012

disconcerting to see her at school, shoveling though all my things like that. I had once seen a dim photograph of her from when she was a student here (pigtails, slim arms full of books, plaid dress swaying in the wind, blurry tennis court in the background), but I always had trouble believing it was her. I might only have believed it was and that she had truly gone to this very same school, if I could have seen her for myself some bizarre day, with her golden pigtails and slim arms near the tennis courts, on my way to Geometry.

She stopped packing only once to recuperate, rubbing her eyes and taking in a deep, trembling breath. Then we were moving down the stairs, down the hall, and out of the doors of Bloomberg.

I put my suitcase in the trunk of her tiny green car and crammed into the front seat. The policeman had already left. I didn't believe what they had told me, not completely anyway.

Ginger sat holding the steering wheel for a while, peering blindly out the windshield at the cold stone steps leading up to the colossal front doors of the school. An impressive crow fluttered clumsily out of the snowy grass, its massive Plutonian wings pounding through the swirling gray air. A lean shape moved across one of the higher windows—a curious or bored student, like a shadow, fading away. Fresh snowflakes melted on the car windows. I wanted to take Ginger's hand. I started to reach out, but she pulled away without seeing my effort and blew her nose.

Ginger's parents and my parents lived in St. Louis, and Bloomberg was about a hundred or so miles outside of Chicago in tiny Bent Oak, Illinois. She and my brother had been on winter break since last Friday (today was only Monday), and it had been decided that she and her family were going to have Christmas dinner at our house. The dinner alternated from house to house each year (since neither of us had any other relatives in town) and last year we had eaten at