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By the second autumn Riri spent in Sister Mary-Agnes's classroom, staying after school no longer required invention. There were legitimate reasons often enough: a paper that needed clarification, a book to return, an athletics schedule Mary-Agnes had promised to check, a question that had been too complicated to fit between bells. Riri understood that the legitimacy mattered. She could feel the temptation to manufacture errands simply for another five minutes in the room, and she distrusted herself enough not to indulge it. The crush had become unmistakable during the previous year, not dramatic but persistent, woven through admiration so thoroughly that Riri could not pull one from the other. She wanted Mary-Agnes's company. She also wanted not to become foolish in pursuit of it. Pride helped where maturity was still developing.
One Wednesday in November, she stayed because of a book. Mary-Agnes had recommended it after Riri complained that the history text made the northern economy sound as if resources appeared in southern markets through weather rather than labour. The book was a collection of essays about work, transport and settlement in western and northern Canada. It was not written for adolescents, and parts of it were dense enough that Riri had read entire pages twice. She liked that Mary-Agnes had given it to her without announcing that it was advanced. The gesture contained no praise about being mature for her age. Mary-Agnes had simply judged that Riri might get something from it and let the reading itself settle the question.
Riri brought it back with six scraps of paper marking sections. She waited until the room had mostly cleared, then placed it on Mary-Agnes's desk. "The third essay cheats," she said. Mary-Agnes looked up from a stack of exercises. "That is a strong opening to a book review." Riri explained that the writer described displaced communities as if relocation were an unfortunate side effect of progress rather than something planned by people with names and offices. Mary-Agnes leaned back slightly and asked which passages had led her there. Riri opened the book to the marked pages. For the next fifteen minutes they argued, not about whether the displacement had occurred but about how confidently Riri could assign intention from the sources available.
This was one of the things Riri loved most: Mary-Agnes did not let agreement become laziness. She shared Riri's suspicion of language that concealed responsibility, but she still made her prove what she claimed. Riri had begun to notice how often adults praised young people most enthusiastically when the young person happened to agree with them. Mary-Agnes seemed almost more demanding when she agreed. She asked what evidence would change Riri's mind. She asked whether an institutional outcome could be deliberate without every person inside the institution sharing the same motive. She asked whether Riri was criticizing a sentence, an author, a policy or an entire period and made her choose.
Riri answered as well as she could. She loved the pressure of being taken seriously. It was different from being treated as older than she was. Mary-Agnes never confided adult burdens to her, never complained about colleagues, never made Riri responsible for understanding the hidden loneliness or disappointment of a grown woman. Instead she took Riri's ideas seriously while leaving adulthood where it belonged. The distinction was so clean that Riri barely recognized how unusual it was. She only knew she could walk into the classroom with a thought and expect Mary-Agnes to meet the thought rather than pat the girl on the head.
At half past four the building changed character. Most students were gone. Doors closed along the hall, voices carried farther, and the heating system became audible beneath everything else. Snow had started outside, not heavily, but the light flakes moved almost horizontally past the north window. Riri had hockey later and enough time to get home first. Mary-Agnes glanced at the clock and asked whether Evelyn knew she was still at school. Riri said yes; she had called from the office before coming back upstairs. Mary-Agnes nodded and returned to the book.
The question should have been ordinary by then, yet Riri felt a small sting of disappointment whenever Mary-Agnes made the boundaries visible. Some adolescent part of her wanted to be exempt from ordinary supervision because exemption could be mistaken for intimacy. Another part, the part Mary-Agnes had been quietly educating, understood that being cared for did not require becoming an exception. She was beginning to learn that people could make you feel important without making rules disappear around you. The knowledge would matter later in ways she could not yet imagine. At that moment it merely made her sit straighter and continue the argument.
They were interrupted by a younger student looking for a lost mitten. The girl hovered at the doorway, uncertain about entering. Mary-Agnes stopped mid-sentence and helped her search. Riri joined without being asked. They checked beneath desks, behind the radiator cover and in the coat area outside. The mitten finally appeared beneath the teacher's cupboard, grey wool gone darker where melted snow had soaked into it. The child looked close to tears with relief. Mary-Agnes handed it over and told her to put both mittens inside her sleeves next time if she was carrying them rather than wearing them. There was no sweetness in the instruction and no irritation either. The girl left clutching the recovered mitten.
Riri returned to her chair and found herself watching Mary-Agnes cross the room. Attraction arrived in a rush so physical it embarrassed her. The habit concealed most of Mary-Agnes's body, but it could not conceal movement. Riri knew from running how lean and strong she was beneath the fabric, and that private knowledge gave ordinary gestures an intensity they had not possessed the year before. Mary-Agnes bent to pick up a pencil, straightened, pushed one sleeve back from her wrist, and Riri's attention snagged on the visible forearm. She looked away at once, furious with herself for turning a woman she revered into a collection of parts.
The fury softened when she remembered that attraction did not erase respect simply because it existed. She liked girls' bodies. She was beginning to understand that she liked women, too, though the understanding came with rules the world would teach her unevenly. Desire itself was not a moral failure. What mattered was what she did with it. Riri had never heard Mary-Agnes state that principle in those words, yet much of what she was learning from her pointed toward it. Feelings were not the same thing as permission. Wanting did not create entitlement. Strength did not create authority. The lesson applied to much more than a schoolgirl's crush.
Mary-Agnes looked over and asked whether Riri had finished with the book. Riri said she wanted to borrow it again if that was all right. Mary-Agnes told her to keep it until Monday. Riri put it carefully into her bag. The care made Mary-Agnes glance at her. "It is a library book, Riri. You need not handle it like a relic." Riri's face warmed. "I'm not." Mary-Agnes raised an eyebrow at the way the book had been placed between two folders to prevent its cover from bending. Riri refused to defend herself.
The next week, the class discussion turned to public institutions and trust. A student named Daniel argued that rules existed because people could not be relied upon to do the right thing voluntarily. Another student said rules often protected the people who wrote them. The argument grew louder, and Mary-Agnes let it breathe until it became repetition. Then she asked them to separate the existence of a rule from the legitimacy of a rule. Riri watched her work the room, not imposing a conclusion but forcing distinctions. It struck Riri that Mary-Agnes's authority was strongest precisely when she did not demand that everyone end where she had begun.
That evening Riri told Evelyn about the discussion while helping put groceries away. She quoted Mary-Agnes twice before catching herself. Evelyn kept arranging tins in the cupboard. "You like her," she said finally. The words were mild enough to mean many things. Riri froze with a bag of flour in her hands. Evelyn did not look at her. She added that it was good to have a teacher worth liking. Riri set the flour down and muttered something about Mary-Agnes being fair. Evelyn agreed. The conversation moved on.
Riri understood afterward that her mother knew more than she had said. This produced a full evening of mortification followed by an unexpected sense of safety. Evelyn had not laughed. She had not warned her away as though feelings themselves were dangerous. She had not encouraged her, either. The crush could exist in the house without becoming a family joke or a family crisis. Riri slept better once she stopped rehearsing imaginary explanations.
Her adoration began changing through such ordinary permissions. It became less frantic, more capable of sharing space with the rest of her life. Hockey remained important. Friends mattered. She noticed girls her own age and sometimes enjoyed being noticed in return. Mary-Agnes did not occupy every thought. Then a small thing would bring the feeling back at full strength. A note in the margin of an essay. A hand briefly on Riri's shoulder to move past in a crowded corridor. The sight of Mary-Agnes laughing with another teacher, head tipped back enough to make her look younger. Riri could go an entire afternoon without thinking about her and then spend ten minutes replaying one sentence.
Late in December, she saw Mary-Agnes angry for the first time. The anger was not loud. A visiting administrator had spoken dismissively about an Indigenous parent's complaint regarding how her son had been disciplined. He used the word sensitive in a tone meant to close the matter. Riri happened to be in the office delivering attendance sheets and heard only part of the exchange. Mary-Agnes's voice became colder, not raised. She asked whether the same behaviour had resulted in the same consequence for other students and whether anybody had checked. The administrator tried to shift the discussion toward intent. Mary-Agnes returned it to outcome. Riri stood beside the filing cabinet with the sheets in her hands and felt something inside her settle.
She already knew adults could be kind. She knew Mary-Agnes could be fair to individual students. Seeing her press another adult was different. It meant her principles did not depend on the easier power relationship between teacher and pupil. She was willing to make a colleague uncomfortable. The admiration Riri felt then was not romantic in any narrow sense. It was almost vocational, though Riri had no vocation beyond hockey and the vague certainty that she wanted to be useful. She wanted to become the kind of adult whose values survived rooms where nobody was giving marks for them.
Mary-Agnes noticed her after the administrator left. She asked whether Riri needed something. Riri held up the attendance sheets. Mary-Agnes took them and thanked her. Nothing about the previous conversation was explained. Riri was not invited into the adult dispute. That restraint completed the lesson. Mary-Agnes could model something in front of her without turning Riri into a confidante afterward.
On the last Friday before winter break, Riri returned the essay collection. This time she had removed all her paper markers and written notes in her own notebook instead. Mary-Agnes checked the cover for damage out of habit, then placed it on the desk. Riri lingered for one second too long. She had spent the walk to school imagining that she might say thank you in some way large enough to match what these months had meant. Every sentence she invented sounded foolish. In the end she only said that the book had been good.
Mary-Agnes replied that she had thought Riri might like it. The simplicity of that nearly undid her. Not because Mary-Agnes had revealed some hidden bond, but because she had known enough about Riri's mind to choose correctly. Riri nodded, wished her a good Christmas, and left.
At home that evening she opened her notebook and found the page where she had copied a quotation from the book. Beneath it were her own notes about omission, responsibility and how institutions described harm. In the margin she had written a question Mary-Agnes asked during their half-past-four conversation: What would change your mind? Riri drew a line beneath it. She did not write Mary-Agnes's name. She did not need to. The question already sounded like her.