The Drive to the Lincoln Memorial

And then we came around a line of trees, and there it was.

I had seen it on the back of a five-dollar bill my whole life, and on television, and in the picture on the fridge in purple marker.

None of it was anything like standing at the bottom of it. The white marble went up and up, step after step, and the columns at the top looked like they were holding up the sky.

It was a sunny June morning, already warm, with the sun coming over our shoulders and lighting up the whole front of the building. Avery had worn a plain navy shirt, the same color as the class ones, because the crest shirt Mrs. Hollis ordered in January had been paid for with money that was gone.

She had decided that navy was still hers anyway.

I had on my denim jacket, because it was the only jacket I owned that did not smell like hair dye.

We climbed slow. Avery stopped every ten steps or so and turned around to look back down at the reflecting pool and the long green Mall and the monument at the end, getting smaller.

At the top, inside, she stood in front of the statue for a long time without saying anything.

It was seven fifty-two when we came back out onto the steps. I know because I was watching my phone.

Avery sat down about halfway up and put her chin in her hands and looked down toward the road where the tour buses pull in.

At eight o’clock exactly, a charter bus pulled up along the curb at the bottom. And then the doors opened, and a line of navy shirts came out of it, one after another, and started up the steps toward us.

Avery did not move. She told me later that she thought about standing up and walking away so nobody would see her.

She thought about going back inside and hiding behind a column. She stayed where she was because, she said, she had pulled too much corn to hide behind a column.

They were maybe twenty steps below us when a girl at the front stopped dead and grabbed the arm of the girl beside her and pointed.

“Avery?” she yelled. “Avery Briggs? Oh my gosh, it’s Avery!”

It was Emily, the girl she had wanted to room with.

And then Kaylee saw her, and a boy named Jake who had been in her class since kindergarten, and then it seemed like the whole line of navy shirts was coming up the steps two at a time, all of them yelling her name at once.

Emily got to her first and threw both arms around her neck so hard they almost fell over. “What are you doing here? How did you get here? Did you fly? Is this real?”

“My mom drove me,” Avery said. Her voice was shaking. “Sixteen hours. We left yesterday at four in the morning.”

Behind them, coming up slower with her reading glasses bouncing on their chain, was Mrs. Hollis. She stopped two steps below us.

She looked at Avery, and then at me, and then back at Avery, and I watched her face do something I had never seen it do in twenty-two years in that town.

“Well,” she said. “Well, now.”

I need to say this part carefully, because I know how school trips work and I did not want anybody in trouble.

Avery could not ride the bus with them. She could not stay in their hotel or eat their meals. Those are the rules, and they are good rules.