“Here,” she instructed, pointing to a spot inside the Taped Space. “Line it up with the edge.”

  Bo and Trey thumped the couch down as the class spurted questions.

  “Can I sit on it, Miss Loupe?”

  “Is that yours?”

  “What are we doing? Do we need a pencil for this?”

  Miss Loupe motioned Bo and Trey back to their seats, then walked deliberately around the outside of the Taped Space to a spot in front of the chalkboard, where she toed her stealthy black slippers to the edge. The class quieted.

  In the silence, she pushed her hands out in front of her, as if she were parting a heavy velvet curtain, and stepped, with careful grace, into the Taped Space.

  She confronted the couch.

  “I can smell your stench from here,” she said to it. “Didn’t you take a bath today?”

  The class giggled nervously.

  Suddenly, Miss Loupe grabbed a dingy pillow and whacked it against the arm of the Ugly, Ugly Couch.

  “You reeky, onion-eyed nut-hook!” she shouted.

  Bits of green fuzz burst into the air and floated before settling back onto the cushions. The class laughed, but even more awkwardly. What were they supposed to be thinking? Doing? Was Miss Loupe losing her mind before their eyes?

  Bo, strangely, felt a twinge of pity for the couch. It wasn’t its fault that it looked like a moldy block of partially shredded cheese.

  Miss Loupe approached Melissa and offered her the pillow.

  “Want to try it?” she asked.

  “Is this for a grade?” Melissa said.

  Miss Loupe withdrew the pillow. She turned to the couch, where she stretched herself out, as if to take a nap, with the pillow under her head and her feet crossed. She was so small that she only took up two of the three couch cushions.

  “Ahhhhh,” she said, sighing. “This is a most comfortable, cozy, and considerate couch.” She patted the back of it affectionately. “Too bad that everyone thinks you’re ugly.”

  Okay, Bo thought, now I must be sinking into the Quagmire, because I have no idea what she’s doing.

  “Too bad,” Miss Loupe went on, “that everyone thinks I’m crazy. Too bad no one wants to join us. Too bad no one wants to sit upon the same couch that starred in I Know When You’re Alone.”

  “I saw that movie!” Allison said. “There’s this girl, who keeps hearing this voice when she plays this music on this piano, but when she turns around, there’s no one there, just this green … couch. Yeah, this couch, and then she finds this blood under the cushions and — ewww! Is there blood on that couch?”

  “Special effects,” said Miss Loupe. She sat up. “I got the couch from a friend of mine who worked at MiraGrand when I was in college in Los Angeles. I needed a couch for my apartment, and they were going to toss it, so I took it.”

  Now the whole class was staring in fascination at the couch, even if they’d never seen the movie.

  Miss Loupe got up from the Ugly, Ugly Couch and moved behind it. She shoved the couch into the middle of the Taped Space so that it faced the class and stood behind it, her arms stretched out along its curved back.

  “What happens when we place an object in the Taped Space?” she said. “Do we see it differently than if it were in the teachers’ lounge or in a living room? What happens when someone talks to it? When I insulted it with my own weak language and then the bold words of Shakespeare? How did you feel when I hit the couch? Did you feel differently when I treated it kindly?”

  Of course, thought Bo. How could you not? His hand twitched as if it wanted to rise into the air.

  Wait. Maybe no one else had felt sorry for the couch. He wanted Miss Loupe to keep doing her crazy games, instead of real school, but he didn’t want everyone to look at him like he was moldy shredded cheese either. He sat on his hand and glanced over at the window. It was sealed shut under rippled coats of yellowed paint. He wished Miss Loupe could push it open a tiny crack.

  Miss Loupe was moving on. “Let’s try it with another object. Rick, may I borrow your ID card?”

  Rick handed over the tan laminated card.

  “What can we do with this?” said Miss Loupe. She waved the ID card. “And this?” She patted the couch.

  No one knew.

  “You’re right. We need one more thing. Would someone come sit on the couch, please?” She looked at the class expectantly.

  This time, Bo couldn’t help it. His hand rose into the air.

  “Yes, Bo, come on up.”

  Bo made his way to the front of the class. As he crossed the edge of the Taped Space, he deliberately tripped over the flat, beige strip of tape and sent himself rocketing into the cushions of the Ugly, Ugly Couch. The class laughed, and he wondered for a second if Miss Loupe had any rules about how to treat her couch. She had whacked it, but … He turned around and sat up.

  Miss Loupe didn’t say a thing. She began to take his picture, only she used the ID card instead of a real camera. Her fingers gripped the rectangular edges of the card as she lifted it to her face and squeezed one eye shut. She peeked around the card with the other eye, regarding him intently. Then she advanced on the couch, rotating her imaginary camera from side to side, searching for the best angle.

  The whole class was looking at Bo as if he should be doing something in response. Trey had overlapped his hands so they formed a line in front of his neck and was slowly raising the Quagmire over his chin and mouth and nose, his lips glubglubbing silently.

  He wasn’t going to sink, thought Bo. It couldn’t be that hard. He slicked down his hair and pasted a fake grin on his face. He beamed from the lobe of one freckled ear to the other. He twinkled his eyes, one at a time. He shook his head as if dazed from the repeated flash and waved to his legions of screaming fans.

  “Trey! Good to see you, man! Zac! Check it out! I’m a rock star! Yo, Melissa! Want to interview me?”

  But inside, he was wondering: What did Miss Loupe want him to do? Was this right?

  He began to bounce on the couch. It felt like a trampoline. Could he launch himself over the side?

  Now Miss Loupe was acting as if there was something wrong with her camera, shaking it and repeatedly looking through the imaginary viewfinder at him, and then taking her eye away and surveying him and the Ugly, Ugly Couch. It was as if she was trying to tell him something. Should he get up? Leave the couch and take the camera from her?

  Then, suddenly, Miss Loupe had stopped taking pictures of him. Her imaginary camera transformed back into an ID card, which she handed to Bo. “Here you are, sir. It looks exactly like you.”

  Bo did the only thing he could think of. He took one look at Rick’s picture, did a double take, and passed out. He flopped his head over the arm of the Ugly, Ugly Couch and let his tongue loll uselessly from his mouth. His toes twitched in a last shudder of consciousness.

  The whole class, except Rick, broke out laughing, and Bo stretched his tongue out a millimeter more, completing his lifeless pose.

  “Well,” Miss Loupe said, looking down at his limp body, “that’s one way to end a scene.” She turned to address the class. “As a general rule, you should try not to pass out or die. It gives your partner nothing, absolutely nothing, to work with.”

  Bo recovered his extended tongue, which was making him leak drool onto the couch cushions. He opened his eyes and tried to look as alive as possible.

  “The best thing to do,” Miss Loupe went on, “is to say, ‘Yes, and …’”

  She handed Rick back his card, which he stuffed into his pocket without looking at it. She motioned for Bo to return to his seat.

  Yes? Hadn’t he said yes? thought Bo. He trudged to the back row, sat down, and stuck both hands under his legs.

  “That means you add new information to the scene. I should have explained it better before we began. Think of it like cooking: What new flavor can you throw into the pot that will go with the rest of the ingredients but make it somehow different, somehow better?

  “Let me give you an example,” Miss Loupe said. She walked over to her desk and turned a picture frame around.

  “This is my brother Marc,” she said. The man in the picture had close-cropped hair and a wicked grin. He looked like Miss Loupe, minus the earrings. “He’s two years older than I am, and he’s in Afghanistan with a Special Forces team right now.”

  “He’s cute,” said Allison.

  “Warriors aren’t cute,” said Trey.

  “We can’t talk much,” said Miss Loupe, “but we e-mail each other as often as we can. I promised to tell him about my adventures here with you, and he promised to tell me about his adventures there. Except that there are things he’s not allowed to write in an e-mail — things that might endanger a mission. So sometimes we play games in our e-mails instead. He gives me a line of a story, and then I give him one, and we try to keep it going for as long as we can.”

  She lifted a piece of paper from her desk and held it up. “Yesterday he sent me a new one and dared me to try it with all of you.” She read the e-mail out loud:

  “So, Room 208, I hear you have my baby sister as your teacher. Did she tell you about the time I taught her how to tie her shoes wrong? She came home from kindergarten and punched me.”

  The class laughed.

  “But unlike me, she’s good at teaching things. You’ll see. Have you learned the ‘Yes, and …’ game yet? If you have, here’s a line for you.”

  Miss Loupe picked up the picture of Marc and acted as if he were saying the words: “The students of Room 208 were walking in the mountains of Afghanistan when they met a huge, three-eyed, double-jawed, dirty-furred, snarling monster….”

  She pointed the picture frame at Kylie. “What should I tell him happens next?”

  “We run away!” said Kylie.

  “Well, yes,” said Miss Loupe. “Wouldn’t we all? But for the sake of this game, let’s see what happens if the rule is: You can’t run away. Then what?” She pointed at Kylie again, prompting her: “Yes, and …”

  “Yes, and … we looked around for a cave to hide in!”

  “Good!” said Miss Loupe. “Yes, but we couldn’t find one and it was getting dark….” She pointed to Zac.

  “Yes, and my pants fell down….” The boys laughed, but the girls looked disgusted. Miss Loupe pointed at Aimee.

  “Yes, and your underwear glowed in the dark….”

  Miss Loupe grinned. She pointed at Martina.

  “Yes, and the monster said you looked like a humongous marshmallow….”

  “Yes, and he built a roaring fire….” added Miss Loupe.

  “Yes, and I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t,” said Melissa, “so I went to the river and jumped in to make myself all wet —”

  Allison interrupted. “I don’t get it. Why are we talking about monsters? And Bo was acting stupid up there. Like, I had no idea where you were.”

  Bo’s mouth opened. “We were ON STAGE!” he yelled.

  The whole class turned around to look at him, but Miss Loupe flashed him a huge smile.

  “Yes!” she said. “When we’re on stage, we can be anywhere. We can see what happens next when we don’t run from monsters. And if we say yes, we can take ugly or stupid and turn it into a new picture altogether.”

  She put the frame back on her desk. “I can’t wait to tell Marc he’d better send us another first line, because all of you aced that one!”

  The bell rang, and the second day of school was over. Miss Loupe reminded them about their math homework for the next day. The class shoved pencils and books into their backpacks and lined up at the door.

  What happens next?

  What happens next?

  What happens next?

  Bo left Room 208, but he felt the possibilities bouncing around his brain, like golf balls launched off chunks of concrete.

  “I’m not going to North Carolina.” Gari trailed her mom down the hallway, talking steadily to her mom’s back, as if it weren’t moving away from her. “I have it all worked out. I can stay here, and you won’t have to worry because I’ll be —”

  Her mom stopped at the end of the hallway and looked up at a cord dangling from the ceiling.

  “— staying with Tandi,” finished Gari.

  Gari’s mom yanked at the cord. A set of attic stairs unfolded, creaking and popping. The springs that held them together swayed like they were going to break.

  “Tandi isn’t family. I want you to be with family while I’m gone.”

  “Maybe I could stay with Tandi until … you know … until the Army or somebody could find … could find … I mean, I do have other family … if we knew where —”

  “No,” her mom said. She shook the stairs to make sure they were locked in place. Little puffs of dust clouded the air. “If your dad was going to show up, he would have done it by now. It’s always been you and me. Always.”

  Gari watched the dust drift down and pushed her glasses tightly against her nose. “But I could …”

  Her mom put a foot on the stairs. “No. The Army’s only giving me three weeks to get ready, and we have enough to do without arguing over this.”

  Gari discovered that she was biting her lower lip so hard that she had torn the skin. She wasn’t arguing. She was proposing a different plan. What was wrong with that?

  But her mom ended the discussion, reaching out and hooking one of her fingers around one of Gari’s.

  “All the time,” she said, and the familiar words, like the beginning of a song, called up the response from Gari.

  “Love you all the time too, Mom,” she answered. She did. Just not so much at this exact moment. She slid her finger out of her mom’s grasp.

  Her mom climbed up, and her head and shoulders disappeared into the attic.

  “Here’s my old trumpet,” her mom called, her voice muffled. “You can take that with you, if you want. Maybe you can try …” She went on talking, even though her head went farther up inside the attic and Gari couldn’t hear her words anymore.

  Gari stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking at her mom’s feet.

  There had to be a better plan. There had to.

  Over the next several days, Miss Loupe had the class transfer her mysterious quotes about frames, art, and saying yes to strips of shiny white poster board, which they mounted with blue putty to the pitted and scarred cinder block walls of their classroom.

  “Say yes?” said Melissa, as she struggled to get the poster board to hang straight. “What happened to ‘Just say no’?”

  “You should have hit the couch when she said you could,” said Bo. “Why did you say no?”

  “I couldn’t help it,” Melissa said. “I never can tell what she’s thinking. Sometimes she teaches like a normal teacher, and then … WHAM!”

  “It’s her shoes, dummy,” said Allison. “My mom says a person’s shoes are important, and if you paid attention to clothes, you would know that.” She bumped her name-brand tennis shoe against Melissa’s plain white one.

  It was true. Miss Loupe did teach them sixth-grade math and science and social studies and English. But every afternoon, for at least a few minutes, she kicked off her regular footwear and slipped on her black stealth shoes. What happened after that was anybody’s guess.

  One afternoon she began with:

  “Give me the name of an object.”

  “A boat!” yelled Zac.

  “A place?” said Miss Loupe.

  “On the couch!” said Melissa.

  “That’s kind of boring,” said Bo.

  “An event?” continued Miss Loupe.

  “PT!” yelled Martina.

  “What’s PT?” whispered Kylie to Shaunelle. She knew some military stuff, like PCS (Permanent Change of Station), because her mom was fluent in the language of selling houses to everyone who moved in and out. But some things still puzzled her.

  “Physical training,” Shaunelle whispered back. “Like P.E., except for grown-ups. You have to —”

  She gasped, because Miss Loupe had jumped up on the Ugly, Ugly Couch. She was perched on its flat, squat back, one leg hanging over each side. And then she started rowing. And singing.

  “When my great-granny was ninety-one,” she belted out, pulling with all her might against imaginary oars, “she did PT just for fun!”

  Martina giggled. She knew this jody call. Her mom sang it while she shined her boots. Then her dad would tease her mom and say, “Hey, aren’t YOU going to be ninety-one when you finally retire?”

  “When my great-granny was ninety-two,” Miss Loupe bellowed, “she did PT better than you!”

  She looked sideways at her class, continuing to row, and pretended to wipe sweat from her brow. “Come on, I’m fading out here all alone!”

  The class laughed. But they didn’t sing or row. They watched.

  “When my great-granny was ninety-three,” Miss Loupe sang, more weakly now. She paused, her oars trailing as if she were faltering in the water. She listed to one side of the couch. She looked like she might pass out or die.

  But that would end it! thought Bo. Didn’t she just tell him the other day not to do that?

  “She did PT better than me!” he called out.

  Miss Loupe gave a whoop of delight and righted herself on the couch.

  “You! Let’s go!” she said to Bo. “On the boat!”

  Bo hustled to the front of the room. He kicked off his shoes and scrambled up the cushions onto the top of the couch. He’d done lots of rowing on the lake near his grandparents’ house in Tennessee. He mimed spitting into each hand, then grabbed for the oars, pulling in tandem with Miss Loupe.

  “Who’s next?” said Miss Loupe. “We need more crew!”

  Bo yelled, “When my great-granny was ninety-four …”

  He pointed his imaginary oar at Trey.

  “She ran two miles and ran ten more!” said Trey.

  Trey ran to climb aboard next to Bo.

  “When my great-granny was ninety-five …” Trey chanted.

  “She did PT to stay alive!” Zac yelled, racing for the couch.

  “When my great-granny was ninety-six …”

  “She did PT backward just for kicks,” called Kylie, before another boy could yell out. She tucked herself in between Miss Loupe and Bo.

 

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