The Sweetest Thing by Elizabeth Musser

time.”
    Again I had a feeling that Dobbs understood heartache very well.
    She saw that I was holding Patches from the Sky . “Have you been reading this?”
    I nodded again. “Some . . . in the night. It’s lovely—so simple, so profound . ”
    â€œI knew it would be meaningful to you.”
    â€œBut how did you know, Dobbs? You gave it to me before we were friends, before you knew I loved photography.”
    She looked me straight in the eyes, and I wanted in that moment to peer through the sparkle and deep intensity straight into her soul. “Mother calls it woman’s intuition and Father calls it the moving of the Holy Ghost.”
    I tended to agree with Dobbs’s father. Something about her was deeply spiritual. I thrust Patches from the Sky into her hands. “I can’t keep this book. Hank’s grandmother gave it to him, and he must have given it to you.”
    â€œYes. Yes, that’s right.” Pain flittered right behind her black lashes. “Hank gave it to me when I was having a hard time. I found the poems, Scripture, and photographs somehow soothing.” She placed the volume back in my hands. “I thought you might too. I know Hank wouldn’t mind my giving it to you. I don’t want it back.”
    I didn’t argue at all. I was immensely relieved. Dobbs said the poems and Scriptures were soothing, and oh, how my soul needed to be soothed.
    Dobbs
    No one was expecting me at Washington Seminary—except perhaps Miss Emma, the school principal—so they didn’t miss me when I did not show up that first week. And given the circumstances, no one expected Perri to attend school either. But by the next Monday, I was itching to start school, and I knew Perri needed to return to a semblance of routine. She’d spent the whole weekend looking over accounting books with her mother and Mr. Robinson, and I worried she’d slip into a depression if she didn’t reintegrate into school life. Perri acquiesced, with her only request being that she and I ride to school together on my first day at Washington Seminary.
    People grieve in different ways. Perri’s way was stoicism. Her pale, pale face was expressionless as Jimmy let us out in front of Washington Seminary on that Monday morning in March.
    I’d seen pictures of the building in the yearbook, but living color changed my perception. It looked like a governor’s mansion with its white Corinthian columns—twelve of them—that gracefully curved in front of the redbrick building. Out front, dogwood trees were blooming in pink and white bursts of color, and hedges of flowering azaleas lined the entrance to the school. Just walking into the building, I felt completely out of place. Thank heavens I was wearing a uniform instead of my potato sack! Yet I also felt something else. I squared my shoulders and stood up a little straighter, and I literally felt a passion rush through me. It was my responsibility to educate the girls at Washington Seminary about how the rest of the world lived. My cause!
    I thought about my high school in Chicago—the soot-covered brick building, the boys and girls dressed in the most nondescript clothes, all just crowded into the place with absolutely no distinction, and how half the teachers had been let go and the rest hadn’t been paid in months. But here, in their crisp white uniforms with dark blue piping, the stylish skirts that fell just below the knee, these girls seemed set apart, elite, girls becoming women, girls who were perfectly aware that they came from somewhere and were headed somewhere else. Washington Seminary had a fresh, hopeful smell so unlike the odors from the streets of downtown Chicago that drifted into my high school.
    Perri directed me to the principal’s office, where I met briefly with Miss Emma, a thin, serious-looking woman with gray eyes and gray hair that she wore just below her ears. She