"Who cares about chickens?" Candy said.

"Chickens are the lifeblood of this town, Candy Quackenbush. Without chickens, your father wouldn't have a job."

"He doesn't have a job, Miss Schwartz," said Deborah.

"Oh. Well—"

"He likes his beer too much."

"All right, that's enough Deborah," said Miss Schwartz, sensing that things were getting out of hand. "You see how disruptive you are, Candy?"

"What did I do?" Candy protested.

"We waste far too much time on you in class. Far too much—"

She stopped speaking because her eyes had alighted on Candy's workbook. She snatched it up off the desk. For some reason Candy had started drawing wavy patterns on the cover of her book a couple of days before, her hand simply making the marks without her mind consciously instructing it to do so. "What is this ?" Miss Schwartz demanded, flipping through the pages of the workbook.

The interior was decorated in the same way as the cover: tightly set lines, hundreds of them, waving up and down all over the page. "It's bad enough you bring these morbid stories of yours into school," Miss Schwartz was saying. "Now you're defacing school property?"

"It's just a doodle," Candy said.

"Good Lord, are you going crazy? There are pages and pages of this rubbish." Miss Schwartz held the workbook at arm's length as though it might infect her. "What do you think you're doing? What are these?"

For some reason, as Miss Schwartz stared down at her, Candy thought of Henry Murkitt, sitting in Room Nineteen on that distant Christmas Eve, waiting for his ship to come in.

Thinking of him, she realized what she'd been drawing so obsessively in her workbook.

"It's the sea," she said quietly.

"It's what ?" said Miss Schwartz, her voice oozing contempt.