The blinds were half up. She could see the tops of the bulletin boards, construction-paper leaves in red and yellow and an alarming purple, and the fluorescent tubes in their grid, and nothing else. It was 2:44. At three o'clock, every day, ten minutes before the dismissal bell, Ms. Oduya let the class have five minutes of what she called closing circle, and the children were allowed to get up and stretch and put their chairs up on their desks, and at some point in those five minutes a small face would appear in the third window from the left, a small face with a dark, blunt, chin-length haircut that Brooke had given it herself in a motel bathroom in Mansfield ten months ago with a pair of sewing scissors, and that face would find her at the third post past the maple, and it would not wave. It never waved. It would only look, for as long as it could, until somebody called it back. And then Brooke would let out a breath that she had not entirely known she was holding since 7:50 that morning, and she would walk back to the gate and wait with the other walker parents for dismissal.
That was the deal. Juno had proposed it herself, in February, on a whiteboard, in purple dry-erase marker, in her careful slanted print. U stand by the tree evry day at 3 so I can see. And then, underneath, after a long think, the marker squeaking: Not the gate. Where nobody is.
So Brooke stood where nobody was.
She was thirty-four years old. She was five foot six and weighed less than she had at any point since high school, not from trying. Her hair was dark brown and cut short, above the ears, in a style the girl at Great Clips had called a pixie and Brooke privately called a disguise, and it had been dark brown for ten months and she still sometimes caught her reflection in a shop window and thought, for one cold half second, that there was a stranger walking beside her. She wore what she wore every day: black work pants with a hole worn in one pocket from her keys, black sneakers, a navy Tri-County Linen polo shirt with her first name stitched over the heart in white thread, and over that, because it was October and the wind on the hill had teeth, a gray zip-up hoodie she had bought for six dollars at the Goodwill on Route 33. She had a canvas bag over her shoulder with her lunch container in it, empty, and a water bottle, and a paperback library book, and her wallet. She thought about her wallet a great deal lately. She thought about it more than any person should think about a wallet.
In the wallet, behind the clear plastic window where a driver's license would ordinarily be, there was a sheet of thin paper folded in quarters. It said STATE OF OHIO across the top, and BUREAU OF MOTOR VEHICLES, and under that TEMPORARY DRIVER LICENSE, and under that, in a dot-matrix font that looked like it had been printed in 1991, BROOKE ELLEN GARVEY. It had her date of birth. It had her height and her eye color. It had an issue date of September 30 and an expiration date forty-five days out, by which time the real card was supposed to arrive in the mail. It did not have her picture. Ohio did not put your picture on the paper one; they took your picture at the counter, under the bad light, and then they mailed you the card from a central facility, and in the meantime you carried a sheet of paper that looked like a receipt for an oil change.
And behind the paper, in the slot behind the window, where she could not see it unless she went looking, was the old card. The real card, the plastic card, with its holograms and its little ghost portrait. It had a hole punched through the lower right corner where the woman at the BMV counter had put it through a machine that looked like a stapler and made a sound like a stapler, and slid it back across to her and said, "There you go, hon, that's yours to keep," and Brooke had looked at it lying on the counter, the punched card with the punched name, and she had thought about leaving it there. Just leaving it. Walking out. Let the woman throw it away.
She had not left it. She did not know why. She had told herself it was because she might need it, for the bank or the pharmacy, some clerk somewhere who wanted to see the history of her, but that was not why. It was because the photo on that card was the last picture of her in which she had long hair. It was the last picture of her in which she had been the color she was born. And she did not know yet whether she wanted to keep that woman or throw her away, so she had done what people do when they do not know, which is nothing, and the old card had ridden around in the back of her wallet for nine days like a stone in a shoe.
The name on it was ASHLEIGH MARIE HATCHER.
Brooke did not say that name out loud anymore, not even alone. She did not think it in words if she could help it. When she had to think of it, she thought of it as the old card, or before, or up north, which was where it had happened, the whole of it, in a split-level house with a basketball hoop over the garage on a cul-de-sac in a county three hours north of here, in a town she did not name either.
At 2:47 the car line began to form.