She smiled. I caught that out of the edge of my vision, but mostly I just felt it.
"That's the first time you've called me anything but 'ma'am'," she said. "I'm not an old-maid schoolteacher, you know."
That probably meant she was a schoolteacher, though. "No, miss," I said.
"It's Miss Casey—Vivian Casey," she corrected. She was a schoolteacher, all right. No other girl would introduce herself as Miss Last Name. Then there was something in her voice....
"What's your name?" she said to me.
I choked a little on a bite of stale bun.
I had a name, of course.
Everybody has a name, and I knew if I went off somewhere quiet and thought about it, mine would come to me. Meanwhile, I would tell the girl that my name was ... Kevin O'Malley. Abruptly I realized that that was my name.
"Kevin," I told her. "John Kevin."