"You're going to wear a hole in that," said Mrs. Agard behind him.
He turned. Mrs. Hetty Agard taught World Cultures and American History II and advised the History Day club, which in the 1986 to 1987 school year consisted of Calvert, a junior named Deborah Mazurek who was doing the Johnstown Flood as a performance and had been practicing her monologue in the girls' locker room since six thirty, and a pair of freshman twins doing a documentary about the Molly Maguires on a borrowed camcorder. Mrs. Agard was small and gray haired and wore enormous glasses on a beaded chain, and she had the habit, when she was pleased with something a student had written, of drawing a tiny star in the margin and nothing else, no words, just the star. Calvert had three of them in his folder from the fall. He had looked at them more often than he would have admitted to anybody.
"I'm just making sure it doesn't fall over," he said.
"It's not going to fall over. You've got enough tape on that back hinge to hold up a garage." She stood next to him and looked at the board with her arms folded, the way she looked at a paper before she started reading it. She had seen it before, of course. She had seen it in pieces on her desk at lunch for six weeks. But she looked at it now as though she had not. "You decided not to put his name up," she said.
"It's in the inquest quote. The full one is in the binder." He nodded at the white three-ring binder on the table in front of the board, which held his process paper and his annotated bibliography and the full transcriptions. "If a judge reads the binder, it's there. I just didn't want it to be the biggest thing on the board. It's been the biggest thing for twenty-six years."
Mrs. Agard nodded slowly. "Have you talked to the family?"
"No."
"Calvert."
"I tried," he said, which was half true. He had gone to the Kostkas' house on Pine Street in the middle of February, after school, and stood on the sidewalk across from it for twenty minutes with his hands in the pockets of the cardigan, looking at the aluminum awning over the porch and the plastic sheeting stapled over the upstairs windows against the cold and the white Ford pickup in the driveway with a ladder rack and a sticker on the back window that said I'D RATHER BE HUNTING. He had watched Mick's father come out once and take a bag of garbage to the can by the alley and go back in. He had not crossed the street. "I didn't know what I'd say," he said. "Hi, I'm the kid your son calls Mister Rogers, I found your dad's name in my grandfather's notebook."