3
I CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND ME, and in a watery haze I walked down the hall, away from the familiar, toward the unknown. I wasn’t crying, but there was a lump in my throat, my eyes were watering, and everything ahead of me was blurry, indistinct. I had closed the door of Room 218 behind me, but in a larger sense I had closed a larger door, and the echoes of its closing reverberated in the hazy corridor that lay ahead of me. I had closed the door on third grade, on a part of my childhood, forever. I was walking toward an uncertain future, and I couldn’t make out where I was going.
From my right, I heard Matthew Barber’s voice. “Peter,” he called, “watch where you’re going. You’ll fall down the stairs.” I felt his hand on my arm. He stopped me from going farther. “Come on,” he said. “Come into the boys’ room.” I followed where he led me, and after I had dried my eyes and washed my face I felt better.
“I feel better now,” I said. I clutched my camera a little tighter for strength, stood up straight, and added, “Let’s go to the fourth grade, shall we?”
“I don’t know, Peter,” said Matthew. “We’re probably making a big mistake. Do you think they’d let us back into the third grade?”
“Aw, come on, Matthew,” I said. “We would have gone into the fourth grade eventually anyway. We might as well face up to it now. Besides, I don’t think they’ll let us go back—there was something about the way the door closed behind me—and the way it echoed in the hallway.”
Matthew stared at the floor. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I heard that too.” He sighed. “We should have left well enough alone,” he said, shaking his head. “Things usually turn out wrong.”
I gave him a knock on the shoulder, as if to say, “Chin up!” and said, “Baloney, Matthew! Things are going to be great! We’ve got a great future ahead of us!” I was beginning to believe it. “Fourth grade, here we come,” I said. “Room 231, here we come!”
“Two thirty-four,” he said, still looking at the floor.
“No—231,” I said. From my shirt pocket I took a manila card. Matthew took a similar card from his shirt pocket. On his card was written miss MISS FIORE, ROOM 234. I showed him my card. On it was written MRS. GRAHAM, ROOM 231.
“I should have known,” said Matthew. “I let myself get excited about this, I let myself be happy, and look what happened. I should have known. I should have known.”
He walked out of the boys’ room, and I followed him. He walked down the hall to the door of Room 234 while I stood in the hall watching. He never lifted his eyes from the floor, and he was still looking at the floor, shaking his head and muttering “I should have known,” when he opened the door and walked in. I wondered how on earth he had been able to tell where he was going.
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