“There, that's better. Man, I thought you were going to walk out on me.”

“I'm not a man.”

He cast his eyes upon her. “So I've noticed. “She was wearing a bulky fur coat-imitation raccoon or something vulgar like that-and his innocent lechery made her smile again. “In this thing you couldn't tell.”

“Oh, yeah, I can tell,” he said. He put an arm around her and kissed her. At first she wasn't going to kiss back, but of course she did.

“I'm sorry I scared you,” he said, and rubbed her nose companionably with his own before letting her go. He held up the mask. “I thought you'd get a kick out of it. I'm gonna wear it in homeroom Friday.”

“Oh, Johnny, that won't be very good for discipline.”

“I'll muddle through somehow,” he said with a grin. And the hell of it was, he would.

She came to school every day wearing big, schoolmarmish glasses, her hair drawn back into bun so severe it seemed on the verge of a scream. She wore her skirts just above the knee in a season when most of the girls wore them just below the edges of their underpants (and my legs are better than any of theirs, Sarah thought resent-fully). She maintained alphabetical seating charts which, by the law of averages, at least, should have kept the troublemakers away from each other, and she resolutely sent unruly pupils to the assistant principal, her reasoning being that he was getting an extra five hundred a year to act as ramrod and she wasn't. And still her days were a constant struggle with that freshman teacher demon, Discipline. More disturbing, she had begun to sense that there was a collective, unspoken jury-a kind of school consciousness, maybe-that went into deliberations over every new teacher, and that the verdict being returned on her was not so good.

Johnny, on the face of it, appeared to be the antithesis of everything a good teacher should be. He ambled from dass to dass in an agreeable sort of daze, often showing up tardy because he had stopped to chat with someone between bells. He let the kids sit where they wanted so that the same face was never in the same seat from day to day (and the class thuds invariably gravitated to the back of the room). Sarah would not have been able to learn their names that way until March, but Johnny seemed to have them down pat already.