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“That’s totally a yes,” somebody else whispered.

“It means warm gray,” Allison said.

“It means yes,” Marcus said, with deep satisfaction, to his whole table.

She turned around to the board very quickly, before any of them could see her face, and wrote WARM GRAY in large letters that had absolutely no reason to be that large. Her cheeks were on fire. She could hear them giggling behind her. She could hear them whispering about time to each other, and she stood there with her back to twenty-two nine and ten-year-olds and the chalk in her hand, and she was smiling so hard it hurt.

It took her four minutes to get them back to warm gray. It was the best four minutes of her week.

* * *

Sophie waited until recess.

She came up to Allison’s desk while the other kids were putting on their coats. She had a sheet of heavy paper in her hands, held flat against her chest with the drawing turned inward, the one she’d spent all week hunched over and humming, the one she wouldn’t let anyone see.

“I finished it,” Sophie said quietly.

She turned it around.

It was Main Street in the snow. She’d done it in colored pencil and a little watercolor, careful and precise, the way Sophie did everything. The Brook was on the left, with its fogged windows glowing gold. Colter Hardware was on the right, with the sign above the door. Snow on the rooftops. Snow on the pine garlands. And on the sidewalk right between them, very small, two figures standing close together.

One was tall, in a dark blue plaid. The other was smaller, in a knit hat, with a little smudge of blue on one hand.

Allison stared at it.

“Sophie,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound like hers. “When did you draw this?”

Sophie thought about it.

“All week,” she said.

All week. Since Monday. Since the morning Allison had sat alone at her table with a coffee that tasted like nothing, and the afternoon a man at the top of a ladder had nodded at her like a stranger.

Sophie had drawn them standing together the whole time.

“You told us to paint what it looks like from where we stand,” Sophie said, a little anxiously, watching her face. “So I did.”

Allison felt the heat climb all the way up her neck to her hairline. She could not have stopped smiling if someone had paid her. It was the biggest, most helpless smile of her entire teaching career, and she was beaming down at a student’s drawing like a fool with her face gone pink, and she didn’t care even a little.

“Sophie,” she said. “This is wonderful.”

Sophie’s shoulders came down half an inch.

“Look at the windows at The Brook,” Allison said, leaning closer. “They’re glowing. How did you get them to glow like that?”

“I left the paper white in the middle,” Sophie said. “And put the yellow around it.”

“That is exactly what real watercolor painters do. Exactly. People take classes for years to figure that out.” Allison pointed. “And your shadows in the snow are blue, not gray. Did you know snow shadows are blue?”

Sophie nodded. “I looked.”

“You looked,” Allison said, and her eyes stung, because that was the whole thing. That was everything she had been trying to teach since August. “And the garlands have snow on them. And the sign is perfectly straight. And the street gets smaller as it goes back, see how you did that? That’s perspective. That is really, really hard, and you did it on purpose.”

Sophie was trying very hard not to smile, and losing.

“Could I hang it in the hallway?” Allison asked. “For the winter display? Everybody should see this.”

Sophie shook her head. She held it out with both hands.