Monday arrived with the particular, neutral quality of a day that had decided nothing about itself yet.
Nathan drove to Crestwood in the early grey of a November morning and parked and walked through the main building with the composed, unhurried quality he had spent two months perfecting — the bearing of a teacher who knows where he is going and why and has no particular interior weather worth noting. He had performed this walk approximately forty times since September. He was, by now, very good at it.
He unlocked Room 214. He set up his desk. He arranged the day's materials with the focused, methodical attention of a man who is thinking about what he is doing and not about anything else, which was the intention if not entirely the reality.
Second period filed in with the Monday energy
