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“You wrecked it,” Marcus said.

“It was upside down.” Lily pointed with the brush. “The mountains were upside down. I fixed them.”

“They were supposed to be.”

Lily’s chin began to wobble. Marcus’s face was already past wobbling, and twenty other kids had stopped painting to watch, which was how Allison knew she should have been across the room several seconds ago.

She did what she knew how to do. She knelt between them. She said that accidents happened and that Lily hadn’t meant it. She said the wonderful thing about paint was that you could always paint over it again. She asked Lily to tell Marcus she was sorry, and Lily told the floor, and Allison said they could fix it together right now and it would be even better than before.

Marcus looked at her.

Then he put his brush in the water jar, very carefully, the way you set down something you’ve decided you’re finished with, and went back to his seat, and laid his head on his Spider-Man backpack. He didn’t lift it again until the bell.

* * *

She went to Colter Hardware after school because eight panels were going to need a great deal of painter’s tape. She couldn’t have said yet what for. Tape just felt like the beginning of an answer, even if she didn’t know the question.

Doug looked up from his inventory sheet when the bell rang. He looked at her. He looked at Shane, who was behind the counter with a clipboard. Then he picked up his coffee and went into the back room with an expression of tremendous neutrality.

“I need painter’s tape,” Allison said. “A lot of it.”

Shane set down the clipboard. “Panels hold up?”

“The panels are perfect. It’s the nine-year-olds.”

He didn’t say anything. He waited, and she was learning that he could wait in a way that left a space exactly the size of whatever you needed to put in it, and before she had decided to, she had put the whole morning there. The purple mountains. Lily and her wet brush and her good intentions. Sorry, said to the floor. Marcus’s brush going into the water jar like a verdict.

“I said all the right things,” she said. “It was an accident, she apologized, we’d fix it together, it would be even better. I’ve said that a hundred times. It usually works.” She stopped. “Sorry. You asked about the panels.”

“I asked,” he said.

He came around the counter and went down the third aisle and came back with six rolls of the blue kind, the kind that pulled up clean. He hadn’t asked how many she needed. When she counted it out later, six was exactly right.

He rang them up. He put them in a paper bag. Then, with his hand still resting on the bag, he asked her one question.

“What was he painting?”

She opened her mouth.

She knew what had been covered. Purple and deep blue, a jagged shape along one edge, Lily’s careful sky where it used to be. She knew who had covered it, and that it was an accident, and exactly how sorry everyone was supposed to be. She had spent the whole morning on all of that.

She had never asked him what it was.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly.

Shane nodded, as though that were an answer, and slid the bag across the counter.

* * *

She spent Saturday at her kitchen table with a legal pad and the lake in the window, and by Sunday night she had a plan in three parts. She was sure of two of them.

The first part was a planning sketch. Every child would draw their piece on paper before it went anywhere near a panel, so that nobody’s idea lived only inside their own head. The second part was the tape. The class would agree on who painted what, and she would mark out every area in blue and have each child sign their own corner in pencil.

The third part was the one she couldn’t solve. Kids had ideas about each other’s work, and some of those ideas were good. She didn’t want a room full of walls. She just didn’t know how to build a door.

* * *

On Monday she got to Marcus before the bell.