What Kabir Guarded

The report cards went home on the Friday, in sealed envelopes, with the child’s name on the front and the parents’ worry already inside.

Kabir did not, as a rule, worry. Worry lived in a drawer he had never learned to open. But he had opened a great many drawers this week that he had not known were there, and now, holding the envelope with GILL, KABIR on the front, he found he was holding it the way you hold a thing that could go off.

“Is it bad?” he asked Aarav.

“You don’t know till your mom opens it. That’s the whole point of the envelope.” Aarav, whose report cards were events the Bhatias framed, said this kindly. “Why do you care? You never care.”

“I care now,” said Kabir, and did not explain, because the explaining lived in a store, and a parking lot, and a blue coat, and he had promised to keep at least some of it in.

It was the end of the day, the coats-and-boots stampede, when Kabir saw the notebook.

It was Ms. Dhillon’s. The private one, the small grey one she wrote in and never read aloud from, and it was sitting open on her desk, and Ms. Dhillon was not at her desk. She was by the window with her back to the room, doing her breathing, in for four, hold for four, the way she did it when the day had been the kind of day that needed it, and Kabir knew that breathing, because he had once watched a substitute borrow it.

He looked at the open notebook. Anybody could read it. Twenty children and their boots were between it and the door, and anybody could stop and read the private grey book of a teacher who was standing at the window not looking.

So Kabir, who told everyone everything, who had never in his life protected a secret because he had never understood there were any, closed the notebook gently and put it in his bag, to keep it safe, to give it back, because he had learned this week, the hard way, in a parking lot, that a person’s hidden things were real, and could be broken, and that the breaking did not undo.

He meant to hand it back Monday. He was proud of himself. He had guarded a private thing. It was the most grown-up act of his life, and it was, of course, a catastrophe, because now the small grey notebook was in a seven-year-old’s bag next to a sealed envelope, riding home through the snow.

At home, Suman was waiting for the envelope the way she waited for all envelopes now, which was badly.

It had been a hard week to be Suman. She had stood in a store and been unmade by her own child in front of the one woman in Moose Jaw whose good opinion she had been rationing herself toward for two years, and she had not recovered, because there is no recovering, there is only the next thing, and the next thing was a report card. A report card was a page on which a stranger wrote down how the Gills were doing at the one job Suman had left that she was allowed to be proud of. She had been dreading it for a week.

“Bag,” she said, when Kabir came in. “Let me see.”

Kabir gave her the bag. He was watching her face, which was new. He had spent seven years not watching people’s faces, on the theory that faces lied and only words were true, and this week had taught him that faces were the place the true things went when the words had promised to keep them in.

Suman opened the bag and took out the envelope, and under it, the small grey notebook.

“What is this.”

“That’s not mine,” said Kabir quickly. “Don’t. That’s Ms. Dhillon’s. Her private one. I was keeping it safe. You’re not supposed to read it. Nobody is. That’s the whole point of it being private.”

But Suman had already opened it, the way you open a thing before your manners catch up with your hands, and her eyes had already fallen on a page, and the page had already begun to do its work.