Ten

It was a beautiful morning at the end of the summer, with just the barest hints of fall beginning to flicker into the air. The sky was blue with those puffy white clouds like in a child's drawing, and the air was still warm, though you could tell autumn would be on its way in a few weeks.

I was in art class, gamely attempting to carve a flower shape out of a small square of copper sheeting with a wooden tool. I am (and was) terrifically awful at most artistic things, but was soldiering on anyway, chatting with the three other people in my Tuesday morning class, probably faintly worried about my "advanced placement" history class (this was a Big Deal in sophomore year of high school), but generally enjoying a relatively peaceful morning.

It was, really, the kind of morning that you picture when you get nostalgic about your childhood. Filled with back-to-school feelings and those oh-so-typically high school concerns. Will I pass that history test? Will I ever be good at the multiple choice? Geometry is a nice surprise, but what if my writing isn't good enough for the AP? Blue sky, and the smell of new notebooks, and the feel of concentrating exclusively, in that way that you can when you're a child but is so much more elusive as an adult, on what is happening under your carefully focused hands. Because we were children then, for all that we felt so grown-up in our second year of high school, with our skirts trimmed higher and shirts defiantly un-tucked.

It was a lovely morning. And then the loudspeaker came on, and it wasn't.