Chapter 20: Room 114

I went to my school before I went home.

The security guard at the front desk had seen the news on his phone, and he stood up when I came in.

"Ms. Bannon," he said. "Or. Chair. Sorry."

"Ms. Bannon is fine here."

"There's a man in your room. He said you'd said yes."

"I didn't."

"I figured." He picked up his radio. "I didn't let him in. He's in the hall."

Room 114 was at the end of the first floor, next to the janitor's closet.

It smelled like wet clay and tempera.

Carter stood outside it in a wrinkled suit with his tie in his pocket and a gray stubble on his jaw.

He had not slept.

He looked up when I came around the corner, and for a second I saw the man who had brought me lilacs.

Then I remembered the spreadsheet.

"One last request," he said.

"You said that in the text."

"Five minutes. In your room. I've never seen where you work."

"You've seen it. You visited three years ago and logged it."

He flinched.

"I want to see it as a person," he said. "Not as an assignment."

I looked at him for a long moment.

Then I unlocked the door.

Thirty-one student drawings were pinned along the wall.

A half-finished papier-mâché heron stood on the back table with its wing wired up and drying.

Carter walked in slowly and looked at all of it.

He stopped at a charcoal drawing of a woman with her hands in her lap.

A sophomore had done it, and it was good.

"Who's this?"

"My student's grandmother."

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