years from now he will be named North Dakota’s Teacher of the Year. In the gymnasium Knodel will rise and ascend the podium to the tune of a standing ovation by students, staff, and dignitaries. The governor will shake his hand and beam. Gym scent will be replaced by the perfume of clapping mothers. He will be wearing his NDSU pullover and appear to be caught off guard by the adulation.
Maggie rises when just a few students remain. She walks to the door and hands her favorite teacher this letter. Here you go, she says. Her face flushes because what she has just done is crazy. She gave a male teacher a note that divulges the loss of her virginity. He smiles and seems confused but something in the smile makes her smile back with conviction.
The next day in class Knodel says, I read your letter, you should come talk to me sometime soon.
Amid the cottony sea of students, Knodel has a knack for addressing one person so that only she can hear.
This time Maggie waits for everyone else to leave. She rubs her hands together. There are all these people you can be in high school. You can be the nerd, the jock, the hot girl, the bitch. Now she is the freak. She thinks of all the silk scarves she’ll need to buy, and the heavy cartons of cat litter to be ferried from Hyundais into condos. She checks her warm breath against the palm of her hand and realizes she doesn’t have gum anyhow.
Hey, he says when the last person is exiting, and waves her over. The way he says, Hey, she can tell he had been waiting for the last person to leave, too. It’s nice when you find out someone else has the same small goal as you. Little things like this save the heart on a daily basis.
I read your letter, he says. He already said this. Maggie nods.
How are you doing? he asks. He’s sitting at his desk and she’s standing. At home her parents, one or both of them, will start drinking within the hour. In Hawaii Mateo is probably having lunch at the base. Probably it’s on a carton-colored tray, multiple items forked unceremoniously from aluminum troughs. Her niece, Emily, is going down for a nap. Maggie is one of these billions. How can God possibly keep track of her and all her loved ones? So that here in this room with her teacher, she feels he’s been deputized, by God, to care just a little bit more than he needs to.
He begins by telling her that she didn’t do anything wrong. He asks her why her parents didn’t press charges, and then about her relationship with them as a whole. She is wearing jeans and a shirt she feels cute in. Her family doesn’t have the money for nice clothes from the Cities—Minneapolis and St. Paul—or for anything you’d see in a magazine, so she knows how to make certain pieces go a long way. The conversation lasts longer than any of their conversations have lasted in the past. He doesn’t give her any advice but he makes her feel normal. Sometimes all it takes is for another human being to nod and act as if something is no big deal, like it’s something that happens every day, it’s not a wicked thing, you are not a freak or a slut. You will not need twenty cats. It’s no big deal, and the only thing you need, you see, is a hug.
Maggie’s sister Nicole and her husband had recently moved to Denver and so the following Christmas the whole family decides to get together in Colorado. They rent a rustic cabin in the mountains a couple of hours outside the city. It’s the end of 2008 and the world is evolving in affirmative ways. Maggie is now a senior. She feels the full responsibility of this new period. She has friends and plans and high expectations.
The night before she leaves, Maggie is jamming clothes into the corners of an overstuffed suitcase. Thermal pants and socks and beanies and one last pair of underwear. Everything is folded neatly, aside from these last-minute additions. Her phone dings with the small, happy arrival of a text.
As part of the activities of student congress, it’s normal for the members to text back and forth with one another, and with Mr. Knodel, their adviser. But on this evening what strikes Maggie about the text from