book?”
        “Yes.” Her voice was barely audible.
        “Alright, Dina. Will you tell the class what it was about?”
        Dina wasn’t sure if she’d done something wrong but obediently explained that a lady named Lucie Manette went to France because she thought her father was in prison there but he had already been released and now he was crazy because he was in a cell alone for so long and always made shoes but she got him back home to England and nursed him back to health. Then there was a trial for a man named Charles Darnay for being a spy but he looked just like a lawyer in the court room so the court said it might be the wrong man . . .
        “Class,” Mrs. Henderson said, cutting her off. “Dina has already read the whole book. Now if she can read that whole book in two weeks, then each of you should certainly be able to read it in one month.”
        Dina was still uncertain whether she’d done something wrong but then Mrs. Henderson moved to another subject and the matter was dropped.

#

        Just as the third Thursday of every month was dance day, so was every second Tuesday show-and-tell day, a day when students shared something about their life such as a hobby or a memorable vacation. During the fall semester, Lance Bigelow brought in his snake collection. Bill Eagleton brought pictures of his trip to Sacramento and the State Capitol. Trish Sansa brought her rabbit Fluffy and Carolyn Pindar told about her trip to Washington DC and the Smithsonian Institute, a museum so huge it took a whole week to see it all. She’d seen the first airplane that ever flew, Abraham Lincoln’s desk, and a book printed before the United States was even a country.
        On the first show-and-tell day in January, Dina stepped quietly to the front of the room. With a serious expression, she explained that her father was a pianist and sometimes other musicians and singers came to their house. She said the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers had come to visit her father and they were very famous and she produced two glossy black and white pictures, their edges cut with pinking shears. In one, four or five black men stood in a murky living room, Dina standing in front of them, one of the men resting his hands on her shoulders. In the other, a group of black men stood around a piano, one of them playing and the others smiling to the camera. But she saved the best for last.  
        “And Jimmy O’Hare came to our house too.”
        The class gasped. Jimmy O’Hare of the Jimmy O’Hare Rabbit Show? The famous Jimmy O’Hare? The class watched breathlessly as Dina held up the photograph of Jimmy O’Hare sitting on the couch in her