We crowded classroom of kids. We snap rubber bands and bra straps. Hurl wads of chewed paper. Get punished into hallways. Other heads lie on desks, sleep or wipe noses on wood. Conversations rumble and run.

Snuck book in my lap. Steady lines, fetal beat. The teacher’s hair wrapped and tucked under itself like a bath towel. My eyes try to lift her skirt that clings to freckles above the knee. She says, “I have a vocabulary question. Anyone?”

I wave my arm. “Somebody else for a change,” she says. The others slide their desks behind mine, until my head eclipses all. She sighs, then to me, “What does ‘completed’ mean?”

“It’s like when the dog escapes out of the house, and I’m right after grabbing at its leash and tripping over weeds and my shins hit the bluestone, and hydrangea petals smear on my sneakers, and piles of dead lawn from the mower stink all over the place and everything’s sort of chasing with me as if I’m dragging it along.”

Finger on chin, she nods. “Close, but: what does ‘satisfied’ mean?” My mouth opens and my eyes dart around the room as if the answer is a hornet and I’m ducking it and want to bark but have no tail and so say what I feel: “Desperate.”

Leaning back, hands gripping the desk, she raises her face to the ceiling. I can’t watch her leave. My eyes return to the book’s pages: hillocks of white sand under the dark-footed journey, each sliding over to the next. I ask, “How do they keep so many voices in here?”

She doesn’t answer. Nobody answers. Not even the words.