Mrs. Fjelstad looked at me for a while before she answered. "Because I thought I might be wrong," she said. "About what I was seeing. I thought, maybe I'm an old woman who's seeing the past where it isn't. I've done that before. So I waited and watched. And then today, at about eleven-fifteen, I was sitting at my table on the field with my class, and I watched Elsie walk across that field by herself. And I watched what happened at the cupcake table." She turned her head and looked at Carly directly. "Every word of it, Carly. I was close enough. Elsie came back and sat on the wall and I took her half my sandwich and she said thank you and she said she wasn't hungry, which is what she always says. And I got in my car and drove home to Woodland and got this out of my front closet, because I'd been going back and forth all spring about whether to do it, and I stopped going back and forth."
Carly was staring at the envelope on the table. "You did that in front of the whole school," she said. "In front of everyone. Do you have any idea —"
"I didn't tell anyone what happened at the cupcake table," Mrs. Fjelstad said. "I didn't tell anyone what happened in 1996. All I told them is that you were in my class and that you wrote something true and that I owed you a star. That's all true. What anybody else thinks about it is their business." She leaned forward. "But yes. I did it in front of everyone. I wanted you to have to walk up there. I wanted you to stand next to her. I wanted you to feel what it's like to have your name called when you didn't expect it, and to look out at a crowd and see if anybody's glad for you."
There was a silence. Across the room, Elsie had pulled a book off the shelf and was sitting cross-legged on the rug, holding it in her lap, not reading it. She had her head down. I knew she was listening to every word.
"Elsie," Mrs. Fjelstad said, without raising her voice. "Would you like to take your book out to the hallway and read on the bench for a little while? You can leave the door open."
Elsie got up and went out. She left the door open about a foot. I could see her sit down on the wooden bench across the hall, under the coat hooks, and open the book, and not turn the page.
"Open it," Mrs. Fjelstad said to Carly. "The paper. You haven't seen it in thirty years. I think you should."
Carly sat very still. Then she picked up the envelope and took out the folded paper. It was wide-ruled paper, like Elsie's, gone soft and yellow along the folds, with a small brown spot of something on the corner. The handwriting was a seven-year-old's, big and careful, in pencil that had faded to silver. Carly unfolded it on the little table and smoothed it flat with both hands. I read it upside down. I'll write it here the way it was written, because I've read it a hundred times since then, and I know it by heart.
The Girl Who Fit In A Pocket. By Carly Sundberg. Once there was a girl who wanted to go everywhere with her mom. But her mom was very busy because the girl's big sister was a famous ice skater and they had to go to the rink every day. So the girl made herself small. She ate less and talked less and was very good, and every day she got a little smaller, until she was so small she could fit in her mom's coat pocket. Then she got to go everywhere. She went to the rink and to the store and to the competitions. Nobody knew she was there. Sometimes she peeked out and watched her sister skate and it was beautiful. She was very happy in the pocket. One day her mom came home and hung up the coat in the closet and forgot the girl was in it. It was dark in the closet but it was warm, and it smelled like her mom. The girl decided to stay there. She was very good and did not make any noise. The end.