I wrote it down. Deferral. May 15. I underlined it twice.
"Mr. Hale," I said. "Why are you being this nice to me?"
He was quiet. I heard a chair creak.
"My mother cleaned houses in Clarksville for thirty years," he said. "When I got into college, my father took the money she'd saved for my books and put it into a bass boat. He said a man needed something that was his. He wasn't a bad man. He was a proud one, and he was scared, and he was losing his job at the plant, and he wanted to walk around town with something people would look at." He paused. "I've thought about that boat a great deal in my life, Josephine. I'm sixty-one years old and I could draw it for you from memory. I'm being nice to you because I can, and because about once a year somebody calls this office and I hear that boat in their voice."
* * *
Mr. Okonjo noticed before anybody else at school did. I'd stopped raising my hand. I sat in the back of AP Physics and stared at the torque equations like they were in Portuguese. On Monday he asked me to stay after class, and he closed the door, and he sat on the edge of a lab table so we were eye to eye.
"Calder," he said. He called everybody by their last names. "You have been somewhere else for a week. Where?"
I don't know why I told him. Maybe because he'd asked the question exactly like a physics problem, and I've always been able to answer those. I told him the short version. Car. Account. Couch. Deferral.
He listened, and when I got to the part about Mr. Hale and the gap year, he nodded slowly and got his phone out of his back pocket.
"I'm going to make a phone call," he said. "I want you to listen and not be embarrassed."
He called a woman named Margaret Oduya. No relation, he said, before I could ask; there are a great many Nigerians in the world named something close to Okonjo and Oduya and we do not all know each other, though in this case they did, because she had been his lab partner in a structural dynamics course at Georgia Tech in 2004 and she had gotten an A and he had gotten a B-plus and he had never forgiven her.
"Mags," he said into the phone. "Are you still looking for somebody to do CAD cleanup and carry the clipboard on inspections? Yes. I have one. She's eighteen. She's going to Vanderbilt for civil a year late, and she needs to work full-time between now and then, and she is the best student I have had in eleven years, and I have had some very good students. Yes. I'll send her Thursday."