Fin taught himself to throw a curveball, although his school did not have a baseball team. His school did not have any teams. Teams were competitive, and competition was unhealthy and fostered anger.

“And fascists,” Phoebe explained.

“Teams promote team work,” Fin said.

They were at a cafe with Lady and Jack having hot chocolate. It was pouring out and Jack had tried to leave Phoebe and Fin behind and take Lady to a movie, but Lady said it was cold and miserable, just the sort of day for hot chocolate, then made them all walk in the rain to the Peacock.

“What kind of commie school has no teams?” Jack said. “I thought commies liked working together.”

“The philosophy of the school does seem to be an obscure one,” Lady said.

Fin and Henry James organized a protest against the absence of a baseball team. They convinced the other students in their class to stand silently on the desks they had finally been given in seventh grade for ten minutes at exactly nine o’clock, when school began. It went off perfectly, each of them climbing solemnly onto a desk. Unfortunately, the teacher did not notice. She was a young, distracted woman who wore maxi skirts and sandals. In the winter, she wore socks with the sandals. She spoke very softly, which made the class unusually quiet as the students strained to hear her. They did not build a longhouse that year, which was a relief. Fin could not remember, so many years later, what they did do, but he did remember that the teacher, whose name he also could not recall, was a vegetarian who ate beans and brown rice from a squat, plaid thermos every day, and who had a sheepskin jacket from Afghanistan, embroidered in pink and gold. He remembered wondering if the people in Afghanistan who made the jacket had eaten the sheepskin’s actual sheep, and if not what a waste that would be, and if so, how hypocritical his vegetarian teacher was. She was a taut, nervous person, quite beautiful with startling grey eyes and shiny black hair that she wore in a long braid. She was also, as Fin could not help but notice, voluptuous. Her breasts were loose behind her white cotton peasant blouses. You could see the nipples, the shape and the brownish red color. Fin spent far too much time being distracted by Amy’s large wobbling breasts. He stared out the window to keep his mind clear of her bosoms, but they appeared there, too, in his imagination.

As the year progressed, however, his unhappy obsession became less and less of a burden, for both the teacher and her breasts seemed to shrink. She went from buxom to angular to gaunt. It was like watching someone melting. By spring, she looked liked a skeleton, a particularly frail skeleton, and when Fin remembered the way he had involuntarily leered at her previously robust anatomy, he felt almost frightened, as if he had somehow caused the deterioration.

When, in May, the teacher failed to show up and the principal, a gray man with long wavy gray hair, took her place, the only thing he told the class was, “Your teacher became ill and has taken some time off to recover.” They made her a large oaktag get-well card. He never knew if she got well or not. Just that she never came back to the school without teams.