Carly walked up. She walked through the kindergartners, past Finn, who grabbed at her dress and said, "Mom, Mom, are you getting a star?" and she put her hand on his head without looking at him and kept going. She climbed the two steps. She stood next to Elsie, and Elsie looked up at her, and Carly didn't look down.
Mrs. Fjelstad lowered the microphone and spoke to her for a moment, privately. I couldn't hear what she said. Nobody could. But I saw Carly's face as she listened, and it was the face of somebody hearing their own name called from very far away. Then Mrs. Fjelstad raised the microphone again.
"Carly was in my second-grade class in the spring of 1996," she said. "She was seven. She wrote the truest thing I read that year. She left Field Day early, before I could give her this, and the next fall her family moved across the bridge to Superior, and I never saw her again. Until she enrolled her daughter in my class last September." She held out the envelope. "I've owed you this for thirty years, Carly. I'm sorry it took so long."
Carly took the envelope. Her hands were shaking so badly that she couldn't get the flap open, and Mrs. Fjelstad didn't help her, and nobody clapped, because nobody understood what they were seeing. Carly got the flap open. She tipped the envelope, and a little brass star on a blue-and-gold ribbon slid out into her palm, exactly like the one pinned on Elsie's shirt, except the ribbon was faded almost to gray. There was a folded piece of paper in the envelope too. Carly took it halfway out, and looked at it, and put it back, fast, like it was hot.
Somebody started clapping then, uncertainly, and a few others joined in, the way people do when they don't know what else to do. Mr. Bergquist stepped up and took the microphone back and said something cheerful about the bounce castle being open for another hour and to please make sure your kids had sunscreen on, and the music came back up, some country song about a dirt road, and the crowd started to break apart.
Carly was still standing on the platform. She was holding the star in one hand and the envelope in the other and looking out over the field, and that was when she saw me. I'd started walking forward without meaning to, through the parents going the other way, and she saw me coming and her whole body jerked, like she'd been touched by a wire.
"Galen," she said, when I got to the bottom of the steps. "What are you — you're not supposed to —"
"Boat broke," I said. "They sent us home."
"When did you get here?"