Her Name in the Sky by Kelly Quindlen Page A

Simon’s tone. To be honest with you, neither did I. But what about the substance of what he said? Don’t you think he had a point?”
    “Come on, Ms. C, high school parties are just a given thing,” Michael Ramby says. “He can’t get mad at us for doing something that teenagers have done forever.”
    “What’s the big deal, anyway?” Jessica asks. “What’s so bad about parties? Adults always act like they’re the worst thing in the world.”
    “Adults are afraid of teenage partying,” Ms. Carpenter says.
    “Why? Like, what do they think is gonna happen, we’re all gonna be in the bathroom doing lines of coke?”
    “Some of your parents probably worry about that, sure.”
    “Ms. Carpenter, you know we’re not doing that kind of crap,” Harrison says.
    Ms. Carpenter shifts onto her high wooden stool at the front of the classroom. Her long skirt falls over her legs. “Adults are afraid of parties,” she says, leaning forward to look at them all, “because they remember, very acutely, what parties are like. The madness that pervades. How powerful it makes you feel, how special, but also how untethered it can make you feel. The things that can happen when you let it go too far.”
    Hannah breathes in the silence.
    “What do you mean?” Jackson asks.
    “Someone tell me how you feel when you’re at a party,” Ms. Carpenter says.
    “Really good,” Michael grins. “I feel really good.”
    Ms. Carpenter gestures at him to indicate that she expected that response. “The way I see it, parties can be very liberating, and that’s their appeal. Alcohol can be liberating, music can be liberating, the absence of parents can be liberating. The normal rules don’t apply, right? It’s just you and your friends acting on impulse. And sometimes, when a party makes you feel especially liberated, you’ll start acting from your deepest nature. The part of you that’s still an invincible little kid—that does whatever you want to do, that takes the world as if it’s all yours. It’s a return to your most basic nature, before you knew rules. So you find yourself acting with either earliest innocence or earliest evil. And sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart from each other. And that is what scares adults.”
    The classroom of students sits in rapt silence. Everyone around Hannah has his or her face turned toward Ms. Carpenter with a hungry, childlike expression, and Hannah remembers story time in elementary school, when her teacher would lead them to the rectangular blue carpet in the back of the room so she could read to them about talking animals and magical children and nightmarish monsters.
    So you find yourself acting with either earliest innocence or earliest evil. Hannah’s gut twists beneath her skin, and her heart rate increases like she’s preparing to sprint out of the classroom and through the hallways. To her left, Baker’s face is sickly pale, the way she looked just before she fainted at her volleyball match in ninth grade.
    “I don’t believe that,” Hannah says into the silence. Her classmates turn to look at her as if jarred from a daydream, and Ms. Carpenter’s eyes skip to her in surprise.
    “I don’t think Father Simon has thought about any of that stuff,” Hannah continues. “I doubt he’s ever even been to a party. And if he has, then he’s probably just yelling at us out of bitterness because he couldn’t get a hook-up to save his life.”
    The classroom breaks into shocked laughter. Some of the boys pound their desks with their fists, and the girls’ mouths go wide with delighted disbelief.
    “No ladies for Father Simon?” Jackson says, his expression gleeful.
    “No dudes, more like,” Hannah says. “You know how half these priests are.”
    The laughter in the room surges to a high pitch, and the boys pound harder on their desks, and the girls cover their mouths for just a fraction of a second before leaning towards each other to whisper Oh my god.
    Ms. Carpenter