I carried it.
I thought about calling her. She had a cell phone but it was often off — the nature of her work meant communication windows were irregular and unpredictable, and I had learned not to expect her to pick up. I thought about the photograph in my notebook, the one of her on the runway in the flight suit with one hand resting near the cockpit ladder and her dark sunglasses on and her expression that looked to other people like blankness but that I knew was the face she made when she was completely in her element. She never liked posing for photographs because posing required you to perform something, and my mother did not perform things.
I thought about the assembly.
Heroes’ Week at Northwood always ended with an assembly — the whole school together in the auditorium, honored guests from the community, the kind of event that was mostly administrative but occasionally, when the guest list was right, became something else.
I had seen the program. I hadn’t paid it much attention.
I went back to my tray.
Admiral William Carter.
Even in a school where most students divided the world into things that directly affected them and things that didn’t, Admiral Carter’s name had a gravitational pull. He had been in the news — not in the constant breathless way of celebrities, but in the way of someone whose actions had consequences that reached beyond the immediate, who had made decisions in rooms where decisions mattered and whose name appeared in the kinds of sentences that also contained words like command and operations and distinction.
He was tall in the way that some people are tall — not just physically but in terms of the space they occupy in a room, the quality of presence that registers before they speak. Silver hair. The posture of someone who has worn a uniform for decades and whose body has incorporated its requirements so thoroughly that the posture persists into civilian clothes. He sat on the stage during Principal Harris’s welcome address with the still attention of someone who is always listening.
I was in the freshman section, halfway down, in the middle of a row. I had chosen the middle deliberately because middle seats don’t attract attention from either the front or the back, a calculation I made automatically in large group settings.
