Do Not Become Alarmed(83)

“Did your grandmother go home?” Ms. Hong asked.

“Yes.”

“How does that feel?”

“It’s okay,” he said. “She likes to take us to church.”

“Do you like to go?”

“It’s okay,” he said. “They have codes to live by.”

“Like what?”

“Like the Golden Rule. And that you shouldn’t lie. That map is wrong.”

“Oh?” Ms. Hong said, turning to look. Her hair was perfectly straight, and the tips of it brushed her shoulders.

“It still has Yugoslavia on it,” he said. “And Samoa is now on the other side of the International Date Line.”

“I guess it’s old.”

“There are other mistakes, I just haven’t found them yet,” he said. “Some of the city names I can’t see from here.”

“You like geography.”

“They skipped December thirtieth, when they moved the date line.”

“Who did?”

“Samoa. Also Tokelau, that’s another island.”

“So December thirtieth just didn’t happen for them that year?”

“Right.”

Ms. Hong smiled. “There are some days I would have liked to skip over, in my life.”

Marcus narrowed his eyes at her. She was trying to get him to talk about stuff, but he wasn’t fooled. On December 30 of this year, he had been in the house with the red couches and the wooden tic-tac-toe board, and he had not meant to bring up that house. “Everything still happened in Samoa,” he said. “It’s not like they could skip stuff that happened. They just called it a different day.”

“I know,” she said. “I was using the idea as a metaphor.”

“I don’t like metaphors.”

“Why not?”

“Because they aren’t real.”

She hesitated. “But maps are metaphors. The world isn’t really laid out flat. Imagining our world seen from above is a way of abstract thinking.”

“Satellites see it from above.”

“True.”

“But not with a Mercator projection,” he admitted.

They sat communing with those facts.

Then Ms. Hong said, “There’s a tribe in the Amazon that has compass points built into their language. I learned this in an anthropology class in college. When the people there are talking to someone, the way they address that person includes their spatial relationship to the speaker—I think I’m remembering this right. So if I were talking to you, I would say, ‘You, Marcus, who are northeast of me, what do you think?’”

“I’m not northeast of you,” he said. “I’m almost exactly south.”

Ms. Hong laughed. “I think you would pick up that language really quickly,” she said. “You always have that bird’s-eye view in your head. Most of us don’t. What I meant was that for those people in the Amazon, the fact that you are almost exactly south of me would be built into the word you, when I was talking to you. And in this conversation, you would refer to me as being almost exactly north of you.”

“I like that language,” he said.

“I thought you would.”

“Where in the Amazon? Brazil or Peru?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Noemi is from Ecuador,” he said. “Maybe she can do it.”

“Maybe,” Ms. Hong said. “But I think it’s a very isolated tribe, and languages there are pretty distinct.”

“Penny wants Noemi to come visit,” he said. “With her parents.”

“Oh?” Ms. Hong said. “How do you feel about that?”

He shrugged. “June wants it, too.”

“And you?”

“I barely know Noemi,” he said. “She doesn’t even speak English.”

“I bet she’s learned some in New York. And you’ve learned some Spanish.”

“We were just on a train together for a little while,” he said. “And Penny wasn’t even there. And then we saw Noemi at the hospital, but she had a fever for half the time.”

Ms. Hong picked at a thread on her skirt. “Sometimes—when we have a very intense experience, we feel close to the people who were there, even if we only knew them for a short time.”

Marcus said nothing, thinking of Isabel.

“And people have different responses to an intense experience,” Ms. Hong said. “I know sometimes it’s hard for you to be in school with Penny, when she’s had a very different response to what happened than you’ve had.”

“She was so mean to Isabel,” Marcus said.

“Tell me about Isabel.”

He shook his head.

“Please, Marcus,” Ms. Hong said. “I think it will help.”

He said nothing.

“I saw that photo of her jumping into a pool, on the news,” she said. “It looked like she was really happy.”

Marcus nodded. “She still posts a lot of pictures looking happy.”

“You follow her?”

“On my mom’s phone.”

“If someone has great capacity for joy, I think they can find it again. Even after something terrible happens.”