The Question of Miracles by Elana K. Arnold Page A

didn’t remarry, not right away, but my mom did. She married a man named Paul, who became my stepfather. I was pretty angry about the divorce, but even more I was upset on my father’s behalf that he had been replaced so quickly. That’s what it felt like—that he’d been replaced.”
    Iris took another tissue and shredded it in her lap.
    â€œI didn’t want to like Paul. And I didn’t want Paul to like me. I was actually pretty rude to him.” Dr. Shannon smiled, remembering. “I used to hide his shoes,” she confessed. “Not whole pairs, just the left ones. There was a panel in the ceiling of my bedroom closet that accessed the attic, and I would push that aside and throw Paul’s left shoes up there. Not all the time—that would have been too obvious. Just every now and then. I don’t know if they suspected me right away, or if it took them a while to figure out that I was the culprit, but Paul never yelled at me or even confronted me about it. He just kept buying more shoes.”
    â€œDid you ever give them back?” Iris asked. “The shoes?”
    â€œI did,” Dr. Shannon said.
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œWhen my father got engaged to his next-door neighbor,” Dr. Shannon said. “About eighteen months later.”
    â€œDid he say anything then? Paul, I mean?”
    â€œNope,” said Dr. Shannon. “Not even then. He never said a word about the shoes.”
    Iris thought about the stories grownups had been telling her lately about leave-takings. She thought of Claude, about how her best friend had abandoned her. She considered Dr. Shannon’s parents, and how their separation must have felt to Dr. Shannon.
    There were, Iris felt, so many ways for a heart to break.
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    When Iris got home, she called Boris. When he came to the phone, without even saying hello, she told him, “Sarah was funny, and smart, too. And she was brave.” Iris could hear Boris breathing on the other end of the line. Then she said, “Back home, our teacher, Mrs. Preston, used to post all our test grades up at the front of the class, right next to our names, from best to worst.”
    â€œHuh,” said Boris.
    â€œShe thought it was a good way to encourage us to do better. And this one time, after our U.S. geography test—we had to fill in the names of all the states and capitals on a blank map—this kid, Jimmy Dermer, his name was right at the bottom, dead last.”
    â€œI guess someone had to be,” said Boris.
    Iris ignored the interruption. “He was doing that thing when you have to cry but you don’t want anyone to notice—where you pretend that you’re rubbing your eyes because you’re tired but really it’s to keep the tears from falling. No one was paying any attention to him, anyway. They were all too worried about their own place on the list to care about Jimmy. And you know my friend Sarah?”
    Boris was silent, but Iris could feel that his silence had weight. “Sarah’s name was the first one,” she went on. “She got one hundred percent, plus extra credit for writing in the names of all the state birds. That’s how she was . . . super competitive, and smart. Anyway, she didn’t notice Jimmy either, but I pointed him out to her.”
    â€œThen what happened?” Boris asked.
    â€œShe went right up to Mrs. Preston and told her to take down the list. Sarah said that if Mrs. Preston didn’t take it down, she would start a petition to make her, because it was illegal in the state of California to post students’ private information, like grades and stuff, without their permission.”
    â€œWas that true?”
    â€œWho knows?” Iris said. “But since Sarah had just scored a hundred and ten percent on a test all about the states, I guess Mrs. Preston believed her. She went over and untacked the whole list, and that was the last time she