"Thank you," she said. "I'm going to keep this short, because I can see the bouncy castle from here and I know where your hearts are." Laughter. "Mr. Bergquist is right. I've been giving out gold stars for thirty-six years. I want to explain, for those of you who don't know, what the star is, because it isn't what you think."
She opened the tin. I couldn't see inside from where I was, but she lifted something out, and it caught the light. It was a little pin, a brass star about the size of a quarter, on a short length of ribbon, blue and gold.
"In 1990," she said, "my first year teaching, I bought a box of forty of these at Woolworth's downtown, back when we had a Woolworth's. I paid nine dollars for the box. I decided I would give one away every year, to one child, and only one, and that it would never be for the best grades or the best behavior or the neatest handwriting. Those children get plenty of stickers." A few people laughed again. "Every spring my second graders write a story. Every one of them. And every year I give the star to the child who wrote the truest thing. Not the best story. The truest thing. Once it was a story about a hamster that was two sentences long. But I always know it when I read it, and I've never once been wrong."
She looked down at the star in her hand.
"Thirty-six years," she said. "Thirty-six stars. That leaves four in the box, and I'm going to give those to my grandchildren someday and tell them to give them to somebody who deserves them. This is my last one. This year's star goes to a girl who wrote a story about a lighthouse." She looked out over the crowd, down to the second-grade clump on the grass. "Elsie Ostlund. Would you come up here, please?"
I saw Elsie's head come up. I saw her look around, like she thought there might be another Elsie Ostlund. A girl next to her shoved her on the shoulder, grinning. Elsie stood up slowly. She walked up through the rows of kids, around the first graders, past the kindergartners in the front row, past her brother in his paper crown. And I saw Carly's phone come down. Just a few inches. Carly was standing there with her phone lowered, watching her daughter walk up to the platform, and her face was blank with surprise.
Elsie climbed up the two steps. Mrs. Fjelstad bent down and said something to her, away from the microphone, and Elsie nodded. Then Mrs. Fjelstad straightened up and unfolded a sheet of paper she took out of her cardigan pocket. It was lined paper, the wide-ruled kind with the dotted line in the middle, and I could see from where I stood that it was covered in pencil.
"I asked Elsie this morning if I could read the end of her story out loud," Mrs. Fjelstad said, "and she said I could, if I didn't read the part about the seagull, because that part is embarrassing. So I won't read the part about the seagull." Laughter. "Elsie's story is called 'The Lighthouse Girl.' It's about a girl who lives in a lighthouse on a big lake, and every night she climbs up the stairs, a hundred and twelve stairs, and she lights the lamp so that her father's ship and her little brother's little boat can find their way home in the dark. And her mother is down at the dock every night, waiting for the little boat, because the little boat is very small and the lake is very big. And nobody ever climbs up the stairs to see the girl. This is how it ends."
She put her glasses on. She read it slowly, exactly as it was written, and I could hear that she was reading the spelling too, the way a kid would say it.