Some students decided to play a joke on their teacher, who had a reputation for being humorless.
The teacher wouldn’t start her lesson until all the students were seated. That way, she said, she knew everyone was present. The students planned to bring an extra chair to the schoolroom. When everyone was seated and one chair remained empty, their teacher would assume someone was missing.
There were twenty students in the schoolroom. They sat in five rows of four.
First they needed a chair that looked right. The joke wouldn’t work if the empty chair was different from the rest. Luckily, one of the students had an identical chair at home. It had belonged to his sister, he said. Every day, for every meal, his family sat in the same places — his father, his mother, his older sister, and himself.
“Why doesn’t she need it?” another student asked.
“She was a changeling.”
A changeling was a human child who’d been taken by the little people, sometimes for hours or days, sometimes for years. The boy’s sister was still missing.
Now they had twenty-one chairs.
For the joke to work, the students couldn’t sit in their ordinary rows — the empty chair would be too obvious. For this reason they’d change the arrangement, from five rows of four to seven rows of three. Every morning a student volunteer lighted the stove to warm the schoolroom. The volunteer would arrange the chairs before their teacher had arrived. The empty chair would appear no different from the rest.
On the chosen day the students were especially rambunctious. They left their coats on the cloakroom floor. They chased each other around the schoolroom, laughing and shouting. Their teacher raised her voice — she told them to be seated. While the students tittered and fidgeted, she looked at their assembled faces, nodded to herself, and started her lesson.
The students were confused.
They looked around the schoolroom. As their teacher had already confirmed, every seat was taken — none of the seats was empty. A few students silently counted the chairs, but they all arrived at the same number, twenty-one. Somehow a new student had joined the class. Had the other students missed him in their rambunctiousness? Everyone craned their necks to identify the stranger.
The new student had pale blonde hair. He had pale blonde eyelashes. He sat at attention, his hands neatly folded in his lap, and listened to the lesson. Whenever he made eye contact with another student he would smile at them, but no one smiled back. No one had ever seen the stranger before. He wasn’t anyone’s older or younger brother — he wasn’t their teacher’s nephew or son. As far as they were concerned he hadn’t existed before the chosen day.
They waited until recess to confront him.
Outside the schoolroom they formed a circle around the stranger. Half of the students had retrieved their coats from the cloakroom floor — the other half stood in their shirt sleeves, unconcerned by the cold. The new student continued to smile. He didn’t seem alarmed to be surrounded. Everyone knew, without speaking, that he couldn’t be allowed back inside the schoolroom.
The students waited to see who would speak first.
Inside the schoolroom their teacher used the time to eat. She’d brought a sandwich from home, wrapped in wax paper. She only intended to eat half the sandwich now and save the other half for later — or offer it to a student, maybe, if someone had forgotten to pack a lunch. She knew what the students said about her, that she was humorless, but she tried not to take it personally.
The schoolroom felt colder when she was alone. She fed more wood into the stove and wiggled her toes as she chewed. Outside she could see the students forming a scrum. She would give them more time to play, she decided. It was important that they resolve conflicts by themselves.