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He was at his table by the window with his backpack in his lap, not looking at the panels. She crouched beside him and asked the question she should have asked on Friday.

“What were you painting?”

He studied her sideways for a while, the way children study a grown-up to find out whether she really wants the answer. Then he told her. If you lay down on the dock with your chin on the boards, the mountains were in the water. Upside down, and bigger than the real ones. You could hardly see the sky at all, just a little bit at the bottom of your eyes.

“It wasn’t a mistake,” he said. “It’s what it looks like.”

“I believe you,” she said. “Will you draw it for me? Everybody’s drawing first today.”

They drew. They laid their sketches across the panels like puzzle pieces and negotiated borders with the ferocity of small nations, and Allison ran blue tape down every line they agreed on. Marcus signed his corner in the biggest letters in the room.

Then Lily raised her hand and asked what everyone was secretly wondering, which was what you were supposed to do if you had a really good idea for somebody else’s part.

The room erupted. You just ask them. But what if they say no. Then you don’t do it. But what if they’re wrong. Allison let it run for a minute, because it was a good argument and she didn’t have the answer any more than they did.

Something touched her elbow.

A yellow sticky note. Sophie had come up from the front table, pressed it into Allison’s hand, and gone back to her seat so quickly that Allison almost missed her. In small, careful letters it said Put a note on it. They write yes or no. Underneath she had drawn two tiny squares, one with a check mark and one with an X.

Allison looked at Sophie. Sophie was looking very hard at her own sketch paper, and the tops of her ears had gone pink.

“Okay,” Allison said to the room, and held up the note without saying whose it was. “Here’s how it works.”

If you had an idea for someone else’s part, you didn’t paint it. You put it on a sticky note, and you stuck the note on the tape beside their corner, and the person whose part it was wrote yes or no. A no was a no. Nobody argued with a no.

Lily wrote the first note before Allison had finished explaining. She printed it in purple marker, carried it to Marcus’s corner, and stuck it to the tape with great ceremony.

can I do the sky? the upside down way

Marcus read it twice. Then he picked up his pencil and, with the gravity of a nine-year-old signing a treaty, wrote underneath: ok. its only a little bit.

Sophie didn’t paint that day. But every time a yellow square went up on the tape, Allison saw her look, and once, when someone wrote yes, she smiled at her pencil.

Marcus went back to his mountains.

Chapter 10

The Pie

She hadn’t meant to stay out this late.

It was a Tuesday, a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, the kind that arrived without announcement and had no particular business being memorable, and she’d stayed at school until six working on the panel project, laying out the underpainting with the older kids who’d volunteered to come in after hours, and then she’d walked home and stood in her kitchen for ten minutes thinking about cooking and decided against it, and then she’d walked to The Brook because it was close and because she was hungry and because, if she was being honest with herself, she’d been finding excuses to be in The Brook with some regularity now and had mostly stopped examining why.

She had meant to paint tonight. The roll of canvas was still in the spare room closet, still unstretched, exactly where it had been since August. It would keep, she told herself. It always kept.

The café was in its late evening mode when she arrived, quieter than its morning self, the unhurried quality of a place winding down. A few tables occupied, the conversations lower than they were in daylight hours, the lamps on rather than the overhead lights, which gave everything a warmth that the morning’s practicality didn’t have. Nora was behind the counter alone (Molly had gone home, apparently) moving with the same unhurried certainty she moved with at any hour.

She took her usual table by the window. Through the glass, Founders Square was lit by the streetlamps, the maple tree throwing long shadows across the gazebo. The nights were coming earlier now, the light going faster, and there was something in the air that had changed in the last week, a sharpness underneath the cool that said something was coming.

Fall, she thought. Actual fall, not the anticipation of it. Merrybrook in fall was going to be something.

“Soup or pie?” Nora said, appearing beside her table.

“Both,” Allison said. “Actually, what kind of pie?”

Nora looked at her for a moment with her steady eyes. “Apple.”

Allison looked at the small chalkboard on the counter. She could just read it from here. Pie of the day: Apple.