school.
        Helen gazed at Mrs. Henderson with weary eyes. “But didn’t she take the same tests that all the other students took? Didn’t she score well enough to be in the fast learners’ class like everyone else?”
        “Yes,” Mrs. Henderson conceded, her voice strained, “but I doubt if she was ever pushed very hard at Potomac.”
        Helen took this in quietly. “I guess that’s it. I’ll make sure she studies harder this semester.”

#

        For some reason, when the new semester started in February, Dina found the air lighter and life easier. Maybe she was getting used to the new surroundings. She still didn’t feel like an equal among her classmates even though she had evolved into a celebrity of sorts, maybe reminiscent of her father, the pianist, and though that role wasn’t entirely comfortable, it was better than before. When the class was given another reading assignment, a book report about a novel of their own choosing, Dina chose The Grapes of Wrath. At first, Mrs. Henderson thought that book was too mature for her class, then decided to let Dina take it on. When Dina read her book report to the class, telling the story of the dust storms in Oklahoma and the Joad family’s travels to California, their grandmother dying in the back of the truck, sleeping in camps and trying to get work and Tom Joad killing a policeman and running away and the family not knowing how they were going to eat, the class was transfixed. When she was done, they applauded. She smiled openly as she walked back to her seat. The book report was so thorough that Mrs. Henderson wondered if Dina had been tutored by her parents. But she remembered Dina’s mother and the show-and-tell photographs of her father and concluded that that was not the case, that Dina was simply an aberration, an anomaly, inexplicably talented despite her background.
        When in May it was Dina’s turn for show-and-tell, Mrs. Henderson called her name and she walked to the front of the class with a ragged shoe box, then explained that she’d been collecting buttons for a long time and wanted to share them with the class.  
        She held up a large orange button. “This used to belong to my sister in San Francisco but she gave it to me. She told me it’s the kind people wear there.” Then she held up a star-shaped button. “My sister gave me this one too. It used to be on a shirt of a rock musician but it came off and she got it.” She had square buttons, round, triangular, single-holed, double-holed, quadruple-holed, ones that looked like an eyeball or a cotton ball or a golf ball, ones that were no more than a small loop and made of resin, glass, plastic, iron, tin, stone and wood. There was one from a Civil War army uniform and several wood buttons from her grandmother including the human