Kurt Miller and Peter Lefkowicz were two among thirty in their sixth grade classroom. They were the bad apples in Miss McDaniels’s thirty-sixth year of elementary school teaching; frankly, she didn’t have the patience any more.

Kurt was kind of ugly and naturally insolent. He wore a habitual smirk, he spoke out (loudly) without ever raising his hand, and when he wasn’t speaking he rocked in his desk chair, pushing forward and snapping back in the small space. Autistic children rock like that, and Rita McDaniels knew it, but Kurt wasn’t autistic. He was too mean to be autistic.

Kurt was fat, freckled, and clumsy. His brown hair was chopped off in a careless home style. He bit his nails.

Pete was rather good looking. Dark-haired and fair-skinned with fine features. His eyebrows would bush out and meet over his nose by the time he was in high school, his features would sharpen, his posture would bend and his hair would grow coarse, but in sixth grade he was handsome. He had a facial expression that looked cutely confused then, but it would mature into a look which was usually sardonic and sometimes mean.

They were only two out of thirty, but Rita McDaniels knew that they’d require attention out of all proportion. They were brighter than average, neither working to potential of course, so there they sat, rocked, laughed, and siphoned far too much of her away from twenty-eight others.

“I’m too old for this,” she thought that first day of the school year. “No,” she amended as she set her bag on the teacher desk, “it’s not that I’m too old; it’s just that I’ve done this for too long.”

She was sixty-two then, and more of an observing psychologist than a teacher. She could run through the sixth-grade curriculum on automatic. Her teaching for the last decade or so had not been inspirational to her students or herself; what popularity she still had came from her reputation. The parents of some of her current students had been in her classes twenty-five years ago; they remembered the dictionary quizzes and current events contests that Rita no longer had the energy to run.

She didn’t get satisfaction out of teaching any more, but she enjoyed forecasting. A long time ago Rita noticed that when she looked at the childhood photograph of an adult she knew, she could see the face of the adult in that child. She figured that she ought to be able to see the face of the adults in the children before her, and she often played a predictive game. The students found Miss McDaniels’s way of sometimes looking at them unnerving; rumors grew about her stare the way they grew about Miss Selman’s stubbly forearms.

She didn’t do much predicting on that first day of school. Rita was preoccupied instead with the seating plan. If she separated Kurt and Pete it seemed to her that she’d have problems in two areas of the room. She decided to concentrate the issue and she seated the boys close but not next to each other. She put Betty Sue in between.

Betty Sue Stuben was… well, trailer trash would have been Rita’s father’s phrase for her and her family. They didn’t actually occupy a trailer – there was no court or mobile home park in the area anyway – but the large family was crowded into a three-bedroom box house on the flat land near the freeway. Betty Sue was the third of eight children; her two older brothers as well as her alcoholic father came and went in that household so that they were sometimes an unsupported seven and at other times an in-fighting ten.

Rita didn’t think Betty Sue was stupid, but she could tell the girl wasn’t bright either. She had stringy mousy brown hair, nondescript features in a pasty face, a firm average-size twelve-year-old body. Most of the other sixth graders started the year at age eleven, but Betty Sue hadn’t been sent to kindergarten and had only been enrolled in first grade when she was seven and a representative from the school district came calling. No; Betty Sue wasn’t bright, but she was feisty and wouldn’t tolerate Kurt’s and Pete’s habitual hostility.