She had never told me to be proud of her publicly. She had never said tell people about this or let them know. That wasn’t how she operated. But she had also never told me to be quiet about it, and Heroes’ Week was Heroes’ Week, and she was my hero, and when I stood at the front of Mr. Reynolds’s third-period English class with the photograph folded carefully in my notebook, I told the truth because it was the truth.
The laughter started before I finished the sentence.
I need to describe Mr. Reynolds the way he actually was, because stories about teachers who are wrong about students sometimes make the teacher into a cartoon, and he wasn’t a cartoon. He was a real person with his own system of beliefs about the world, and one of those beliefs was that he could read a situation accurately from surface information, and another was that the appropriate response to a student who seemed to be reaching beyond their station was a gentle public correction before the reaching became embarrassing for everyone.
