Field Trip Forms

The forms go home two weeks early, on purpose. Science center, a Thursday in spring, a permission slip and a lunch order on one sheet. You count them back as they come in, and by the Monday before the trip there are twenty-one in the folder. Three to chase. You will send a note home with each of them tomorrow.

Tomorrow a substitute is covering next door and half her class spends the morning in yours. The note does not go home. On Wednesday you remember it at recess, out on the yard with no paper and no pen, and by the time you are back inside the reading group is waiting at the table.

On Wednesday afternoon the office asks for the slips. You hand over twenty-two — one came back on its own, crumpled at the bottom of a backpack — and say the other two are coming. You believe it as you say it.

Thursday is the trip. At 7:50 the bus is at the curb and a boy is standing by the door with his lunch in a paper bag, the only one without a form. His family was never going to say no. Nobody asked them in time.

So you are in the office with the phone, calling his dad at work while the driver checks the clock. He picks up. He says yes, of course, he is so sorry, he never saw it. The office will take a verbal yes this once. The boy gets on the bus. He sits near the front, and he is quiet the whole way there.