Peaceable Kingdom by Francine Prose

climbed onto the steamed-up bus.
    Our classroom was in chaos, but through it all rang Miss Haley’s strained voice, yelling, “Hang on to your coats,” which struck me as the most deeply kind, the most thoughtful thing she’d ever said. There was one moment, as we lined up to leave, when I knew I was in danger, that I should tell someone and go home. But then I felt someone bump into me, and even through all those sweaters, I knew who it was. Kenny was right behind me in line, and as we pushed toward the narrow bus door, he whispered, “Can we still go see it?” It took me a while to think what he meant, though for days it was all I had thought of.
    What he meant was the Ghirlandaio painting, which he’d heard about from me. It had required astonishing bravery to approach him in the schoolyard, to speak to him for so long, but that was minor compared with the courage it took to mention the unmentionable—that is, Miss Haley’s nose. I don’t recall how I’d phrased it, how precisely I’d made it clear that there existed a work of art with a nose like our sixth-grade teacher’s. It had left us both feeling quite short of breath, as if we’d been running and had gotten our second wind and were capable of anything. And in that light-headed state I offered to take him to see it. It would be easy, I said—I knew the museum so well we could sneak off and get back before anyone noticed.
    Yet now the idea of walking even the shortest distance exhausted me, and my plan (which I’d never expected him to agree to) seemed to demand impossible stamina—though less than it would have taken to shake my head no. I told him to be on the lookout for the right moment, and my voice dopplered back at me through an echo chamber of fever.
    At the museum, a guard instructed us to throw our coats in a rolling canvas bin. And this is my clearest memory from that day—the panic I felt as my coat disappeared, how it looked to me like someone jumping, vanishing into a sea of coats. Suddenly I was so cold I felt I had to keep moving, and I caught Kenny’s eye and we edged toward the back of the crowd, and dimly I heard my fever-voice telling him: Follow me.
    Not even running helped. I just got colder, wobbly, and unsure; of course we got lost and crisscrossed the damp medieval hall, where the shadows climbed the chill stone walls, pretending to be doorways that vanished when we got close. At last we found the staircase, the right gallery, the Ghirlandaio. And I gloried in the particular pride of having done what I’d boasted I could.
    Kenny stared at the painting. Then very softly he said, “Wow. Disgusto.”
    “Disgusto” was the word, all right. And yet I felt strangely hurt, protective of Ghirlandaio’s old man, as if he and his grandson were relatives of mine and Kenny had passed judgment on my family, on my life, on those afternoons when I stood here with my father pretending that this was something compelling and beautiful and not what it was: disgusto.
    At that moment we heard footsteps, angry taps on the parquet floor, and we knew whose steps they were, though not how Miss Haley had found us. Instinctively, we moved to the center of the gallery, so no one could tell what painting we’d been near, and I thought—as fast as the fever allowed—that if she noticed the Ghirlandaio, I would direct her eye to the grandson, at how he gazed at the old man, how trustingly and with what love. But she just stood there, glaring at us in the silence of the gallery.
    Then Kenny burst into tears. Miss Haley and I looked away from him, embarrassed and upset, though I doubt that she could have been feeling the same emotions that I was—revulsion, and the strong desire to be anywhere, with anyone but him. Sometimes, in later years, I ran into old loves and wondered what I had seen in them; but that day, in the whirl of eleven-year-old love, this shift of emotion happened instantaneously. The love I had felt just a few hours before now