Istill recognize Miss Kaufman, 30 years later. When I was a teen, she seemed much older than me, with her coiffed dark hair and perfect makeup and trendy sweaters. But she probably had about five years on us. She was my teacher in tenth grade, and she got engaged and married when I was in seminary. So really, we were pretty close in age.

Today, her sheitel is the same brown as her hair and her makeup is almost identical, though the sweaters have aged with her. The smile is the same, infectious and bright, and she lights up when she sees me. That’s new. “You must be Leah Weingarten!” She swoops forward. “Aviva Jaffe. I’ve heard fabulous things.”

There is no recognition in her face, which is definitely for the best. I don’t need Miss Kaufman — Aviva — to remember Lulu Lippman.

Miss Kaufman was why I had started teaching Megillas Esther. She was an incredible teacher: dynamic, interesting, and engaging. She took a topic we’d learned annually since we were toddlers and brought it to life. Everyone loved her. I loved her. It’s no surprise that she’d be in Bais Nechama with the best of the best.

But I don’t think she realized I existed that year. Lulu wasn’t the kind of girl teachers noticed. I admired Miss Kaufman from afar that year, and today, all I can think is how unreal it is to be walking through the halls of my new school with her as the auditorium fills up.

“I’ve been here for fifteen years,” Aviva tells me. “I’m starting to feel a little like the old guard. I used to think of myself as one of the younger ones, but I might have to revisit that once I turn fifty next year.” She laughs.

I roll my eyes good-naturedly. Be cool, be cool! Lulu shrieks from the pit of my belly. “Don’t I know it. I had that revelation when my grandson was born.”

“I always say that we’re safe until the bar mitzvahs start,” Aviva says conspiratorially, eyes sparkling. “And when those hit? We push off old age until the weddings.” She still has the same charm as she did while acting out scenes from Achashveirosh’s palace, Queen Esther with a secret in her gaze.

I am as enthralled as I was at15. “That’s the spirit. The girls must love you,” I blurt out. Then, to save face, “You seem so… young at heart.”

“Of course they love me. I teach the best subject.” She winks at me. “Heard we had that in common. Guess that means you’ll sit with the cool kids at lunch. Well, it’s really just Shani and me. Shani does Megillas Rus. I’m sure you’ve met her.”

I nod. Shani is nice enough, though she doesn’t have Aviva’s magnetic personality. “You can join me in my office,” I offer swiftly. It’s team-building, when I consider it, building rapport with my teachers.

And when I check in and see that Shani’s schedule isn’t finalized yet, I adjust it so she doesn’t share a lunch break with Aviva twice a week.

It’s just a tiny indulgence. For the first time in my life, Lulu Lippman is getting Ms. Kaufman to herself.

And the amazing thing: Aviva likes me. Not just as a principal. At her suggestion, we grab coffee together before school on Mondays. We live in the same neighborhood, so she invites my family for a Shabbos meal. Conversation flows freely between us, and I’m always energized by it.

Aviva is effortlessly clever and charismatic, and I have to put on a performance to keep up, to be just as witty and act freely unintimidated by her. But it’s worth it to walk the halls of Bais Nechama with her. The girls whisper to each other and hurry to enter our orbit.

“Of course they’re best friends,” someone says as we disappear into my office. “They’re both so the type.”

That’s us. The type.

I do okay independently, but my friendship with Aviva opens new doors. The girls trust me immediately. They drift into my office while I’m lunching with Aviva, desperate to spend some time with both of us. Other teachers are drawn in by Aviva’s regard for me, are friendly and more open to the small changes I implement.

And when I do implement small changes, I consult with Aviva first. “No one knows this school like you.”

“Old guard!” She rolls her eyes. “Just call me ancient already. You’re one of the babies.” She pats my arm. “Five years is an eternity.”

“I was thinking about the detention system,” I venture. “Right now, all detentions are after school, which is a huge pain for parents.”

“Not really. The girls mostly walk to school.” Aviva sounds dismissive, which is nearly enough for me to surrender my idea. But I’ve been mulling it over since fielding a few calls from parents.

“Not all. And the clock is changing soon, so it’ll be dark out when detention ends. There’s that big road that separates Baywood from Riverside, and some parents are worried about their daughters crossing it at night. I’m thinking that we can switch to lunch detentions for first offenses.”

My childhood high school had done lunch detentions. I’d never gotten one, but they had been in the auditorium, each girl seated far from the others and forced to eat in total isolation. It had seemed almost as unpleasant as eating in a crowded lunchroom as Lulu Lippman.

Aviva wrinkles her nose. “It never works. I used to teach in a school that tried lunch detentions. The kids who wanted to shmooze still found a way. It becomes a badge of honor when it’s during school hours. You don’t want to do it.”

“That’s a fair point,” I agree slowly. Aviva knows the girls better than I do. I’m still probably going to do the lunchtime detentions — the general studies principal thinks it’s a good idea — but there’s a flicker of doubt, a sudden lack of confidence that comes when I don’t have Aviva’s support.

“Besides, Hebrew teachers will have to cover more detentions, then,” she puts in, mischievous. “And I can’t spend 45 minutes in that auditorium with Perel Hauber.” I jerk a little, taken aback, and she clarifies, “I just feel so terrible for her. You want that girl to get it together so badly.” She shudders.

I sigh, my stomach churning. A steel door clangs shut over Lulu’s acne-pocked face. “Don’t I know it. Poor girl. She doesn’t seem to have many friends.”

“Her older sisters were such pleasures. I don’t know why they don’t help her.” Aviva shakes her head sadly.

And we are both very sympathetic, our hearts going out to poor, nebbish Perel, who slouches in desks and has things spilling out of her locker. I don’t know why I feel so unkind after that conversation, why a stab of guilt nearly doubles me over when I next see Perel shuffling down the hall.

“Everything all right, Perel?” I smile at her.

She looks trapped. I haven’t spoken to her since her belligerence the first day. Today, she shrugs and keeps walking, head down and a scrap of crumpled paper falling from a grubby binder.

I pick it up and discard it.

Iwill never shake off the sense that I am pretending to be someone I’m not. I was a charming little girl until eight or nine. I figured myself out in seminary, when I was finally far away from my lifelong classmates. It was just one decade out of four where I was the girl I don’t like to contemplate. But somehow, Lulu still looms, ever-present.

My own fault, for spending my life in high school.

I’m standing at the front of the auditorium today, talking about tzniyus to the girls. They listen raptly, nodding along as I discuss the nisyonos ahead of them. And I feel like a fraud. “It’s hard,” I say, as though I’d experienced it. “You see the outfit in the mirror. You know you look good. You know it’s gorgeous and current. But it’s just a tiny bit too tight.”

When I was 15, I wore everything loose. Too tight meant that I looked awful, that my mother would wince and I’d hurry to find a bigger size, something shapeless and dull and forgettable, like me. I didn’t pick up pretty dresses, anything that would make me be noticed. To be noticed, back then, was to invite averted eyes and whispers.

Instinctively, my eyes drift to the back of the auditorium, to Perel in a baggy sweatshirt, and I shudder and shove Lulu into a closet of thick, black fabric.

But the girls are nodding. One of them looks troubled, like my words have hit home. I press further. “Ask yourself: When you’re standing in shul, davening to Hashem for a good judgment for the year, do you want to tug down your dress as you bow? Do you want to feel like your clothes are hugging you?”

“You’re so good with them,” Aviva tells me after the assembly, and I feel like I’m flying. There’s nothing like Aviva’s approval to bring home that I’m doing the right thing. I remember this time in tenth grade when I’d gotten in the high 90s on a test — my first one all year, she was that good a teacher — and she’d written a metzuyan! at the top of my page. That comment had carried me for days. Aviva’s warm hand on my arm right now could probably catapult me into space. “You really get them, you know?”

“Of course I do. I still haven’t graduated high school,” I say, and I’m pleased when she laughs.

Perel walks past us, and I say pleasantly, “Hello, Perel.”

She looks up at me, then right through me, and gives me a jerky nod.

“See you in class,” Aviva says lightly. Even Perel isn’t immune to Aviva’s charm. She smiles, quick and tentative, and hurries on.

“That girl needs help,” I murmur to Aviva, a constant refrain. Somehow, I can’t find it within me to be her guide. I can step in for girls with situations — with family tragedies, with emotional and physical impairments, with all the big and little issues that come up in life. But there is something about Perel Hauber that repulses me.

Fortunately, Perel doesn’t want help, or isn’t aware that she needs it. She’s happy to lumber around the school and give everyone a wide berth. And I’m happy to give her one, too.

It’s an unpleasant surprise when I get a report at lunch several days before Rosh Hashanah. “Three skipped classes,” Faiga, my secretary, informs me. “Perel Hauber is scheduled for a detention.”

I almost groan aloud. Because lunchtime detention is my baby, it means that I’m the one who will have to speak to Perel.

Aviva spears a piece of salmon from her salad. “Bet you’re regretting that lunchtime detention rule now,” she says slyly.

I roll my eyes at her. “Pretty sure you’re next on the rotation, actually. We can regret it equally.”

I call Perel in once lunch is over, unwilling to surrender my time with Aviva for this. Perel slouches in, avoiding my eyes. “Perel, I have you down for three skipped classes.” Chumash twice and Historia once. Even Perel Hauber doesn’t miss Megillas Esther.

Perel shrugs. “I had a stomachache,” she says.

“Three times.”

“I get a lot of stomachaches.” Her face gives nothing away. She isn’t anything like Lulu Lippman, I decide. Lulu wouldn’t be this hostile. Lulu was eager to please, desperate for attention, and didn’t know how much she cared. Perel doesn’t care at all.

“You’re welcome to bring in a doctor’s note,” I say coolly. “But without it, you’ll be sitting in detention at lunch tomorrow.”

“Okay. Can I go now?”

I hesitate. This isn’t… I’m principal now. As a teacher, maybe I can overlook a girl who doesn’t want to talk. But shouldn’t I say something to Perel? Shouldn’t I try? “Perel, is something wrong?”

Perel gives me a cool look, eyes sweeping over me like she sees what no one else does. Like she sees Lulu, lurking beneath the surface, and I recoil. It’s impossible. I’m just paranoid, afraid of being exposed. I’m too lost in my own mind.

“Can I go?” she says again, and I let her leave without another word.

Imake it to Rosh Hashanah without another encounter with Perel Hauber. She sits through detention without a doctor’s note and I suffer through lunch without Aviva, which is punishment for us both. The days until Yom Kippur are busy, with teachers getting in tests before Succos vacation, and the scent of vacation is in the air. Aviva and I compare menus for Succos and eat outside with the girls as the weather cools.

It’s a shame to return to my artificially lit office after lunch, and my eyes fuzz a little as they adjust to the indoors. I greet Faiga and head into the room, and someone says, “They said I could wait here.”

“Ah!” I jump. It’s the last thing I need right now, Perel Hauber lying in wait in my office.

But there she is. She’s in that sweatshirt, hands toying with the zipper, and her glasses slide down the sweaty bridge of her nose. She pushes them up again.

With another girl, there might have been a lead-up. Maybe uncertainty, vulnerability, some quiet explanation for why she’s coming forward. Maybe a pause, like she’s about to impart information that could shatter everything.

But Perel Hauber doesn’t understand how to talk to other people, and so she says bluntly, “Mrs. Jaffe abused me.”

I almost laugh. It sounds absurd. “Excuse me?” Aviva is beloved, a favorite teacher to every student. Is this some kind of joke?

“Verbally abused me. At detention.” Perel’s face is defiant. “I told my parents, but they said I should report it first. Mrs. Jaffe verbally abused me.”

She whirls around, knocking over a chair in the process, and stalks out.

I rub my eyes. I don’t believe it for a second, of course. If I had to pick the student most likely to invent an allegation for attention, it would be Perel Hauber.

But she’d said the magic words. I told my parents. This isn’t just acting out. It’s going to blow up, and I need to do damage control.

Aviva’s last class of the day has already begun, so I call her in after she’s done. “Perel Hauber was here with the most ridiculous story,” I say, avoiding her eyes. I don’t want to tell her this. I want her to know I have her back. “She claims that you verbally abused her during detention. But she told her parents, so I need to give them a call, and I thought you could give me some context so I can explain it to them.” We don’t have cameras in the auditorium, so it’s Aviva’s word against Perel’s, and I know who I trust.

I peek up at Aviva. She looks calm, unruffled, and I breathe a sigh of relief. Some part of me still sees her as my teacher and mentor, the one who can guide me through this new, unpleasant piece of my job. “It’s the way girls are these days,” she assures me. “They’re so entitled. So coddled. They take every criticism as a personal attack.”

“I don’t even remember what I said.” She considers. “I must have asked Perel to clean up after herself? You know how she leaves garbage everywhere. And I explained the importance of looking cleaner — tucking in her shirt, taking care of her belongings… nothing I’ve never said before.”

“Sounds reasonable.” Perel is a disaster, and of course she’d taken some well-meaning advice from a teacher as a personal attack.

Armed with the truth, I phone her mother, who sounds wary. “Yes, Perel told us what happened at school. She’s been having a hard time. And I know that Mrs. Jaffe is very influential—”

“It’s not about influence,” I assure Mrs. Hauber. “We take all allegations very seriously. I spoke to Mrs. Jaffe immediately after Perel spoke to me, and it sounds like a simple misunderstanding. You understand that Perel was in detention for skipping classes?” It feels relevant to the conversation that Mrs. Hauber understands where Perel was during this alleged incident, that Perel isn’t some delicate victim.

“Yes, we got the email.” Mrs. Hauber’s voice is strained. “Perel gets… she’s anxious around some classmates. She really looked up to Mrs. Jaffe.”

“I know how difficult it can be when a teacher we really admire gives us mussar,” I say, my voice gentle. “And I think Perel was overwhelmed when Mrs. Jaffe made it clear how important her cleanliness was. But Mrs. Jaffe was just worried about her. She’s spoken to me about her a number of times.” I twist a pen between my fingers. “She cares about Perel, and she sees that Perel is struggling. And sometimes, when a girl is struggling, she might… what she’s doing now is a cry for help.”

Mrs. Hauber hesitates, then says very slowly, “Are you saying that Perel is lying about what happened?”

“I think Perel perceives that it happened that way,” I amend carefully. “But realistically… we know that Perel has a history of… creative truth-telling.” I don’t know that, not really. I’ve been working in this school for a month. But I know Perel’s type, and I’m sure that there is a history there. Lulu Lippman used to make excuses for missing homework and makeup tests six times a month.

And I’m right. Mrs. Hauber’s tone is weaker now, less certain. “I guess you’re right. We’ve been trying to get Perel to speak to someone. Her older sisters are much closer in age, and it’s harder for her to find her place.”

This is an easier conversation, the kind that I’ve had a dozen times before. I direct it easily, make some suggestions — Yom Tov plans, new outfits, executive functioning — and I settle into my role, relieved that the tension has passed and the strange allegation has been lifted from Aviva’s shoulders.

I know Aviva. I’ve been her student. I’ve been her equal. She’s earned my loyalty from the start. And Perel might be struggling, but I can support her without letting her pull Aviva down along with her.

Yom Kippur passes, and there’s a brief dip into school again, a couple of days in which I don’t hear from Perel’s parents again. I see Perel in the halls, lingering in corners and avoiding my eyes. She must be ashamed at how easily I’d debunked her accusation. She walks with shoulders hunched and arms tight around her binder, as though guarding herself from the rest of the school.

She’s anxious around some classmates, her mother had said. She doesn’t look anxious. She looks defeated. I turn from her and focus on girls who are actually happy to see me.

And then, finally, Succos vacation. This is my first vacation since the summer began, and as much as I’m enjoying my new job, it’s a pleasure to be home for so many days.

My boys return from yeshivah to help Sruly with the succah, my daughter does some of the cooking at her apartment, and Yom Tov prep is a far cry from the old scramble to get everything done on time.

We troop out to Aviva’s succah for the second day seudah. Our grandkids mingle in the backyard while Sruly and the boys sing with Aviva’s husband. Aviva and I sit on lawn chairs outside the succah, basking in the last few days of nice weather before the cold sets in.

“You know, sometimes I miss teaching during the summer,” Aviva comments. “Two months in camp! It’s enough to make me dream of Bais Nechama. But I never miss it on Succos.”

“Not enough time to miss it.” I tilt my head back to enjoy the sun on my face. “I do miss it. Being in the classroom was such a thrill.”

“You can always take a class,” Aviva suggests. “We’ve had principals who did. Unless you want to go back to it full-time?”

“Not at all. I like being a principal. It’s so satisfying to organize all those moving parts. And I love working with other teachers. I’m teachers’ biggest fan.”

Aviva laughs. “You haven’t even seen us in action!”

“Well, I’ve seen you,” I say without thinking, and Aviva’s brow furrows in confusion.

“You’ve never observed my class.”

No. No. My stomach curdles. “Oh.” I can laugh this off, can shrug it away. I wasn’t a memorable student, just a blur in 30 years of Aviva’s students. “Have I never mentioned? I’m pretty sure I was in one of your first classes, back in Bais Yaakov. You were Miss Kaufman, right?”

“No!” Aviva leans forward. “You didn’t! You were my student?” Her eyes scan my face like she’s trying to remember me. It feels silly to keep it from her. She won’t know me. “What’s your maiden name?”

“Uh, Lippman.”

“Leah Lippman?” Aviva frowns, trying to place me. Her fingers are drumming a beat against the side of her chair, steady and reassuring. “Leah Lippman. Lippman.”

Then, a pause. A scattering of finger-beats, breaking up the rhythm. “Lulu Lippman.” And something crosses her face, a flicker of distaste so swift that I might have imagined it. A curl to her lip, a flash of hardness in her eyes, her hand shifting away from mine.

“I had some awkward teenage years.” My laughter feels forced and uncomfortable. “I always say it helps me understand the girls.”

My friend is back as though she’d never been gone. “Oh, sure.” Aviva winks at me. “Who wasn’t a disaster in high school? I definitely didn’t have the brains or looks to justify my attitude. I lost half my friends by fifteen and gave myself two makeovers before senior year.”

But I am briefly unnerved. The sun feels hotter now, more menacing, and it floods the backyard like a spotlight, exposing every imperfection and putting them on display to the audience around me.

I don’t stay long after the meal, making an excuse and fleeing Aviva’s home. She is perfectly pleasant to me, exactly as she’d been before. I’m only lost in my own head, I tell myself. I’m imagining ghosts where they don’t exist.

But that night, after the fifth meal of this three-day stretch of Yom Tov, Aviva’s expression flashes before me again. It had been… had it been disgust? Had she thought of Lulu Lippman and felt the same kind of intense aversion that I do?

It’s fair, I tell myself, suddenly wide awake. Lulu had been… off-putting. I’d always imagined myself invisible, but I had also been unlikable. It’s no surprise that my teachers hadn’t liked me, either. And someone as popular and classy as Aviva would have recognized me for who I was.

There are students I haven’t liked. I don’t tell them, obviously. No student should ever be aware that her teacher dislikes her, should ever see that flicker of disgust on a teacher’s face. But not every personality is going to mesh, and even I hadn’t liked myself back then, so…

My cheeks are wet, and I feel so stupid, so vulnerable and weak, like a round-faced girl sniffling back ugly tears at a shabbaton because no one will speak to her. Like a girl burrowed in a coat at lunch as though it might hide the fact that the others are squeezing into another table rather than sitting at hers. Like a girl gazing at Miss Kaufman, craving a smile. 

Maybe Sruly senses that something is wrong, because he offers to take the kids to the amusement park himself on the first day of Chol Hamoed. “You’ve been working so hard,” he tells me. “You deserve a day to breathe.”

“You mean, a day to grocery shop for second days,” I inform him. A part of me wants to come with him, to wipe this pain from my mind with the exhaustion of a hot, crowded amusement park. But even I don’t hate myself enough right now to suffer through a park on Chol Hamoed.

A month ago, drunk on my new relationship with the teacher of my dreams, I would have gotten coffee with Aviva. Maybe we’d have gone for a faux-hike together at the park, an easy little walk that would make us feel like we got some exercise. Maybe we’d have just chatted away the day.

Today, there’s a lump in my throat when I think about her. It’s irrational. It has to be. I’m only so self-conscious about Lulu that I can’t bear Aviva knowing about her.

I go to the store instead, push my cart down aisles of produce and force my mind to my menu. I see parents and teachers and greet them like an accomplished actress, a star performer playing the role of perfect principal. I wander to the Greek yogurts and contemplate getting the Monterey Jack cheese for dinner. I turn at the frozen food aisl—

And there she is, in front of the garlic cloves, eyes fixed on me.

She looks away when I notice her, but I can’t do the same. I haven’t thought about her since vacation had begun, but she is unmistakably in front of me now, moving down the aisle with that shuffling gait, a basket in hand.

Perel Hauber turns the aisle, and my heartbeat quickens like I’m about to let an opportunity slip between my fingers.

I skip the cheese. I skip the frozen aisle altogether and go straight to the register. I’m not thinking about what’s next or why I feel this urge. Somewhere deep within me, Lulu Lippman isn’t laughing at me, is quiet and watchful.

I finish before Perel makes it to the express checkout, rush to my car and empty everything into the trunk. And then I wait, lingering at my car, and when Perel emerges from the store with a bag of groceries, I walk over to her.

Wariness crosses her face as I approach. I know that I’ve put it there, as much as everyone else in her life, and I feel a wave of uncertainty and shame. But she waits, her shoulders stiffening, and she doesn’t run when I say, “Perel, do you think we could talk?”

She’s brave. Braver than I ever was.

I buy her a hot cocoa at the café where Aviva and I go. We sit in the outdoor area in the back. Today, it’s quiet, the neighborhood emptied for Chol Hamoed, and only the waiters are there when she begins to speak. Her fingers twist around the shopping bag, leaving red marks behind on her skin.

“I left a wrapper on the bench. I guess that was my fault. I should have… I should have thrown it out. But I didn’t expect Mrs. Jaffe to get so angry. She always seemed… she was such a great teacher. She was so nice to everyone else.”

“Yes,” I agree, because she was. She had this way of bringing in the brightest girls, the popular ones, channeling their energy and making it her own. It was the girls in the shadows who stayed in the dark.

Perel ducks her head. “She just blew up at me. She called me a… she said I was a slob. That Chaya and Racheli were so put-together when they were in school, and what was wrong with me? That this was why I had no friends, because no one wanted to be around me, because I was so careless.” She stares determinedly at the table. “She said I didn’t have the brains or the poise to justify my attitude, that I was never going to get anywhere in life with the way I acted.”

The words have emerged in a monotone, but now she sounds suddenly lost, suddenly desperate. “I didn’t think I was acting like anything. I was just trying to — I was trying to get by, you know? High school is hard. And she’s right, I don’t have friends, and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I just… I don’t think a teacher should speak to me that way, even if I deserved it.” She looks up at me, eyes wet and beseeching beneath her thick glasses, and I am immured in her plea, my throat dry and my heart clenched like a fist.

“No,” I whisper. “No, she shouldn’t have.”

No, you didn’t deserve it, is what I should have said, but the words don’t emerge. I am stricken, an anvil dropped from the sky flattening me to the ground. Part of me wishes that I could shrug it off, that I could write this off as a vengeful exaggeration.

But I remember Aviva two days ago, the curl of disgust on her face as she’d recalled Lulu. The way she’d said, light and airy, I definitely didn’t have the brains or looks to justify my attitude.

And I believe Perel.

Iduck Aviva’s texts during Chol Hamoed and send her a quick one wishing her a good Yom Tov before second days. She’s still my employee, and I would like to have a positive relationship with her. Maybe she senses my cooling feelings, because she sends more messages than usual, pursues me more than I do her. It doesn’t send the familiar glow through me this time.

I think about my classmates when I was younger, the ones who hadn’t needed a teacher’s approval, and what they might have thought of a teacher so desperate to be liked. From the outside, Aviva had always seemed larger-than-life. But I wonder suddenly what kind of student she was, and how much she’d really reinvented herself after high school, too.

None of it matters. What matters is the girl who sat opposite me in that cafée, twisting a plastic bag around her fingers, repeating Aviva’s words as though she’d deserved them. What kind of principal am I, that I’d let this happen? That I had put Aviva first and shrugged off a girl, just because I didn’t like her?

Just because she’d looked like a girl I’d once seen in the mirror?

I ask Aviva to meet me in my office during davening on the first day back, and she breezes in, all smiles, with a cup of coffee for each of us. “It’s been too long,” she pronounces, setting mine down. “My grandkids wanted a different bouncy house every day of Chol Hamoed. Somehow, being an incredibly doting grandmother, I agreed to go twice. I didn’t jump, in case you were wondering.” She slides into her regular chair. “What’s going on? You can’t be that upset to be in school after that much cooking.”

“Aviva,” I say carefully. “I spoke to Perel Hauber again.”

The smile fades from her face, replaced with a furrow of her brow and a roll of her eyes. “She isn’t still complaining about that detention, is she?”

“Aviva,” I say again, and something in my eyes makes her hesitate, makes her face go guarded and uncertain. “Do you want to tell me again exactly what you remember saying to her?”

Aviva sags in surrender, and I know.

We both know.

“I don’t know what happened to me,” she murmurs. “I’m not… I don’t do that. I got so frustrated and I’ve… I guess I’ve been feeling a little burnt out this year. It’s been thirty years in this same job, you know? So many girls, and the world keeps changing. I slipped up.”

“You can’t slip up like that.” I hardly recognize the voice emerging from my throat, the strength and certainty of it. It’s not Lulu. It’s Leah Weingarten, the one that people admire, the one that I so rarely hear when I speak. “This isn’t a job where a mistake is a production error. This is a job where mistakes like that can ruin a child. An entire world.”

Aviva bows her head. This is different for us. I have been following her around like an eager student, hungry for approval, instead of the principal who should have been her leader. Today, I will not stand behind her. “Have you slipped up like this before?”

“No. Never.” I don’t know if I believe her, and she must see it, because she says, “I haven’t. You know me. I was your teacher, too, remember? Did I ever say a word to you?”

Not a single word.

“I’m going to discuss it with the menahel,” I say instead. “But this is a first documented offense. We’ll call a meeting with Perel and the Haubers where you’ll personally apologize to her. And you’ll probably be put on probation.” I don’t know what that means beyond a first strike, but it’s something, a reminder that she’s on thin ice. “I think that sounds reasonable.”

“I think so, too.” Aviva looks up at me, agonized. “Leah, I’m sorry. I don’t… I don’t know why I did it. I hope this won’t…” She gestures between us, eyes pleading. “I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you.”

“You’re a wonderful teacher,” I say. “Bais Nechama is lucky to have you on their staff. I hope that you’ll be able to do better in the future.”

“Of course.”

When she leaves, I feel lighter, like shackles that have held me down are gone. I call Perel into my office once davening is over, and she walks in uncertainly, but she meets my eyes. She has strong eyes, I notice, blazing out from behind those glasses. Determined.

“Mrs. Jaffe is going to apologize to you,” I say, gesturing for her to sit. “And I need to, also.”

Perel shakes her head. “You listened. Even when you didn’t believe me.”

“I should have listened earlier.” I should have fought through my own insecurities, should have put aside my vaunted friendship, should have—

Perel shifts slightly, and I catch the ever-present girl in the mirror behind her, staring back at me: Lulu Lippman, the stubborn set of her jaw and the way she watches me, mocking and defiant, like she’ll never let me go.

There is fire there, too. Not Perel’s courage, but there is something in those eyes that is powerful, too. That is worth something, and my eyes remain locked with Lulu’s for a breathless moment before I return to Perel’s upturned gaze.

I should have said this before, too. “You didn’t deserve to hear any of that. You do deserve friends. Sometimes we find our stride after high school.” Perel shrugs, shrinking into herself again. “And I know that you’re someone who’s… you’re going to go far, no matter how tough these years are,” I say, and I mean it. “You were brave to come forward and you were brave to go back to class every day after that detention.”

Perel scoffs. “It’s not like I had a choice.”

“It takes strength to go to school every day when you’re invisible,” I murmur, and Lulu is still so unnaturally quiet within me, still missing. “To make it through classes without being seen. Through breaks and lunch without being spoken to. And it shouldn’t be that way. But you aren’t careless and self-centered. You’re fighting for your life, and you’re going to win. Okay?”

Perel’s chin is trembling, but she manages to nod, and she blinks a few times before she whispers, “Okay.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 915)