I realized only yesterday that I left the story of Kerwin‘s ostracism unfinished. When I left off, I had just–whoops!–Mary had just walked into the front room of the library and found Kerwin sitting beside the door, where she had left him over a half-hour before.
He looked a little pale.
Mary felt a little surprised.
She had escorted the rest of his class out the library’s back door, as she did every week, and had forgotten Kerwin wasn’t with them. His teacher was no doubt wondering where he was.
“Kerwin, what are you doing there?” she said.
“You told me not to move.”
Oh.
He was correct. That’s what Mary had said. It hadn’t occurred to her that he would take the instruction so literally.
“All right, Kerwin, go on back to class.”
Color returning to his cheeks, he jumped from the chair and shot out the door.
Mary packed up and walked back to the high school library, where she officed.
The end.
I regret the story ends so anticlimactically. For literary purposes, I wish it had a dramatic ending.
If I were writing fiction, I’d have stopped with Part II. But I wanted to make clear that everyone survived intact.
I’m sure I’m the only one involved who remembers.
M. K. Waller 
I like the bit about the colour returning to Kerwin’s cheeks. I always permit myself an affectionate glance after such an encounter, even when I have proverbially wiped the floor with said minor.
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I’m usually the one whose color has to return. I hate these confrontations. The singular thing about this incident is that nothing happened. No harsh words, no glares, no threats, no nothing. I calmly removed a child from the classroom and in so doing got everybody’s attention. Twenty children worried about what had happened to their classmate, and Kerwin worried about what was going to happen to him. Scared the stuffin’s out of them for a while with no side-effects. Except I felt bad about forgetting Kerwin.
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