At games she waits by the painted lines. Hands folded. Eight years old, exact, as printed.
At nine the room reads the register. Wet coats on hooks. At the fourth name, the pause a child takes to stop whispering. From the window seat, in the standard voice, with the standard brightness: Present.
The desk fee falls between milk and swimming. The card renews on a Thursday.
Will she get older? asks a boy.
The desk is the same desk. The register is the same register. He accepts this. They hide things in her desk, the one nobody's mother turns out. She thanks them by name.
By spring the autumn photograph has her in the middle row. The children beside her have moved apart. Neither remembers moving.
The renewals stop in the year of long division. The head keeps her name another term. Unpaid. The headcount holds. The funding holds.
The teacher asks to remove the name. At the end of term, she is told. She reads it each morning until then. The next year she leaves. Gives no reason.
Another name takes the seat. Pencil shavings. Marbles.
Twenty years later, at the reunion, someone finds the paper register. The one the funding never read. They read it for a joke. Present, says the room in grown voices. Name after name.
At the fourth, the woman who sat beside her has put a hand flat on the table. She did not decide to.
The silence that answers is eight years old.