But she was kinda cool weird, Vanessa Cox thought. At least Ms. Doogan cared enough to get excited about what she was teaching. Vanessa shrugged out of her daypack to pull out her lunch. She sighed a little over the PB &J. Sometimes she thought it was the only sandwich Aunt Telma knew how to make. But there was also a cranberry-raspberry Snapple and a Ziploc bag full of Thin Mints, so lunch wasn’t a total loss.

Ms. Doogan paced up and down at the edge of the water, talking and gesturing with what looked like a tuna fish sandwich. Her students were sprawled on the bank facing her and the lake, eating and trying to look interested. Her light olive skin was already starting to tan in the spring sun, and her short bob of fine dark hair was beginning to frizz from proximity to the glacial lake. She looked like a poodle, Vanessa decided. Moriah, her best friend back in Ohio, had had a standard poodle, a huge black dog named Matisse. Matisse was interested in and excited about everything, especially after he’d eaten a sixty-ounce bag of Nesde’s semi-sweet chocolate chips Moriah’s mother had bought for Christmas fudge. Vanessa wondered if Ms. Doogan ate a lot of chocolate.

“Grant Glacier descends from what ice field?” Mrs. Doogan said. “Come on, guys, we talked about this in geology.”

Vanessa knew the answer, but her teeth were a prisoner of peanut butter and she couldn’t suck them clean in time to beat Betty Freedman to reply. “The Grant Ice Field.”

“Correct. The Grant Ice Field, like the largest glacier descending from it, also named for Ulysses S. Grant, the nineteenth president of the United States.”

“The eighteenth president,” Betty said.

“The eighteenth, then,” Ms. Doogan said amiably, “you got me, Betty. It was so named by a couple of Army lieutenants on a survey mission back in, oh, 1880, I guess it was, after the purchase anyway. They had served under Grant in the Civil War and they were probably hoping that if they named an ice field this big after their commander-in-chief that they’d get promoted.”