Loni feels the first flutter of new life at the start of seventh period history. Her high-school students have straggled in and are thumping their books and bags onto the scarred, wooden armrests of the chair-desks that wait in uneven rows.

“Hey, Mrs. Watson,” announces one of the students as he eases himself into his seat, “What are we going to do today?”

“Hey, Mrs. Watson,” says another, “Timmy’s got a problem.”

“Yeah, Timmy’s got a problem,” grins a third boy. “We gotta get him a date for the dance. Who do you think we could get?”

Some good-natured snickering ripples through the assembling class along with, “Come on, Dingo, that ain’t nice.”

“Yeah, Ding. How would you like it?” says someone named Benny who throws a crushed paper ball at Dingo’s head as the other twenty or so students chuckle and sprawl and gawk around at each other and adjust their notebooks and open and close pocketbooks and move desks and arrange their variegated teen-age selves.

It almost escapes detection, so tiny and soft is the fluttery wisp of a flip. But she feels it again, a little stronger, just before the bell rings.

“Pick it up, Benny,” she admonishes. And Benny ambles over to Dingo’s desk, high-stepping over Dingo’s leg which is outstretched in the attempt to trip him up.

As the bell rings to start class, Benny scoops up the crumpled paper, sweeps it in an arc over his head, and drops it squarely into the wastebasket.

“Settle down. Settle down,” demands Loni Watson to her tenth-grade history class. “You have your work to do. Your essays are due tomorrow. This is your last chance to see me about any questions you have.”

There is a comfortable, petulant drone in the teacher’s voice. Students begin to gaze over their notebooks, still conversing with each other, but settling, to a point, on the task at hand.

“I’m going to keep checking over outlines,” continues Loni. “If I haven’t seen yours yet, get it out and get it ready. The rest of you, get busy with your writing. Now, Brian. Cynthia, if that’s a letter you’re reading, I don’t want to see it.”

Cynthia shares a scowl with a girl named Sweeney and puts the letter into her pocketbook. Sweeney smirks a little and begins to write on her developing composition. Sweeney has been pregnant twice and twice has trekked up to Portland to end her misadvised beginnings. Loni wonders idly how much the other students know about Sweeney’s abortions.

Brian has ambled over to the pencil sharpener which he uses with studied interest. He blows the wood shavings from the pencil point, makes a mocking bow to the back of his teacher, gains some admiring chuckles and grins from his classmates, and returns to his desk.

Loni was “Ms. Sims” at school for ten years. Then last year the Sims-Watson title gave way to “Mrs. Watson” who, this year, has a fabulous, emancipating secret.

Not that Loni minds teaching. She is fond of her students. But her own baby! This is not going to be a child shared with other obligations—at least not for a while. This baby will be raised by its mother. Loni smiles.

“You got somethin’ on your mind, Miz Watson?”

“What did you say, Josh” threatens Loni.

“I said, ‘How do I know where to start the next paragraph?’ You said this paragraph was too long.”

“Well, let’s look at it,” she says and, bending over the boy’s work, discusses with him the beginnings and the ends of ideas.

Others in the class seem to have attained a natural rhythm between their work and their conversation.

“How do you spell ‘souvenir’? asks one student to no one in particular.

“Why do you want to know?” offers someone else.

“It’s in my paper! They made souvenirs of the bridge I’m writing about.”

“You could use another word—like odds and ends,” is offered.

“That don’t make sense.”

“Hey, I got a bridge,” says Dingo. “No kidding. My father inherited it and gave it to me. The Westport Bridge. Anybody want to buy it? Cheap. I’ll sell it cheap.”

“Get outta here,” is someone’s bored response. And a dictionary is passed to the researcher of bridges.

One student named Donald is stretched out in his chair-desk, leaning so far back that the front legs of the chair are off the floor and his back is against the wall. The boy next to him has been working quietly but stops suddenly and looks aside toward Donald before he whoops “Whew, Donald! Lay one on us!” Someone else says, “Oh, man, did he do it again?” Donald smiles slightly and eases his chair down.

Loni looks up for a moment, frowns briefly, then moves on to a girl who is showing a magazine picture to a friend. The student pauses a moment, then continues with her picture, as Loni’s attention shifts to someone else.

Her own child, Loni thinks without thinking, will grow up differently. The teen of her now forming, new thrill-flipping child is far away and whisper perfect. She has watched her sister’s children grow. The oldest, Susan, is nearly fourteen. Loni watched Susan’s baby years fade away and the crayon-wielding kid years come and then go.

She thinks vaguely of how her sister said she dies a little every step of the way. “When Susan first got on that school bus, you know I died a little,” she said. “Something was over.”

But Loni notices the feel of new moments. The Brownie pins, swim races, new shoes, and birthdays. Joys that follow dying. Joys that leapfrog over dying.

Loni is old for a first pregnancy. It is with the heady thrill of unwinding the clock, starting again, her way, that she anticipates her child, which shimmers again like a burgeoning, unfathomable idea.

“Is it hot in here?” questions one girl to no one in particular, as she glances toward the window.

“Open it just a crack,” responds Loni. And as Benny gets up to open the window, the fidgeting and chatting increase to a level of subdued chaos, then gradually subside. The classroom returns to the complicated, rumbling familiarity that surrounds and supports the students of seventh period history. The class of unwilling workers is in fact working. Spelling and learning and writing and working are swathed in the shifting, funky interaction. The room itself seems, in incomprehensible ways, to be nourishing and nurturing the life it contains. In a couple of years, the students will be birthed into the big messy world. The delivery will be hard for some of them. Their grades will need to be adequate, and some courage, or at least willingness, is going to be needed. Thinking too far ahead may not matter for these folks. The dance next week and the homework for tomorrow—these are their parameters.

Who can possibly know anything of their future lives when, decades from now, at some random moment one of them will think back to Mrs. Watson’s history class, and to a particular idea inside a particular paragraph. Someone will write “souvenir” with a touch of reflection.

“Hey, you know what happened to Ding last year?” announces one student. “They made a mistake in the office and put him in the college prep course. Man, some college coulda had the scare ‘a their life.”

“I wonder how they found the mistake?”

“You gotta be kidding.”

“That’s enough, people,” warns Loni. And, again, the shuffling and murmuring settles and quiets and slides along.

The school day will end after seventh period. Several of Loni’s history students will be on the detention list for after-school study—at least it usually works out that way. The others will drift out, fall back, to the world they are growing into.

“I’m cold,” says Cynthia.

“Close the window,” suggests one student to the class in general.

“I don’t like to wear tee-shirts to school,” mentions Cynthia.

“Nothing wrong with that,” articulates a boy on the other side of the rom. “Love it.”

“It exposes the breasts,” comments someone else.

Brian has found a pair of scissors and is leaning over the wastebasket cutting fringes off his notebook paper. Donald is balancing again on the back legs of his desk. Someone closes the window. Loni explains the use of a semicolon to Benny, whose outline she checks for sequence against his essay.

“Hey, Mrs. Watson,” calls someone, “all he likes is girls and bikes and brews. What are you going to do with him?”

“Yeah, whattaya gonna do with him?”

“Man, this kills me,” says another. “I’m dying.”

“Where is your essay?” questions Loni of this last boy.

“Well, this is my outline,” he answers.

“Yes, it is,” she says, as she opens his notebook for him to a blank page. “And this is where you start your essay. Let’s begin.”