This past week, B has been helping out at our church's vacation bible school. The program runs for the week and attracts a mix of kids from the neighborhood and church members. As I understand it, B has no assigned job - instead, he fills in wherever he is needed. Asking him about the experience or what he's been doing is like talking to a well-coached witness in a trial. His answers are terse and very specific to the question asked - extra information is rarely given. Normally, N would be attending VBS but this year the dates coincided with drama camp and drama camp won. N is a little more forth-coming about his day, thus I know which friends are with him and what they're working on.
We were talking about the day at dinner one evening, both boys had seemed to have pretty good days. The conversation was drying up when B offered a rare piece of unsolicited information: on the first day, some girl had asked him where N was. Glad to have something to talk about, A and I pushed him for more information. What was her name? Was she in his class? What did she look like? This may be the reason B is reluctant to give us very much information. Like an opposing attorney who's just gotten a witness to divulge a secret, I peppered him with questions. In the end, all he could say was that he thought she was in his class and that she was tall. My wife and I rattled off the names of various tall girls in N's class and mused about who it might be. B went back to his dinner, probably regretting having opened his mouth.
A couple of days later, I was on Facebook and noticed that our church had posted numerous photos of VBS. I paged through them, hoping to glimpse B and maybe figure out what he was doing with his time. Apparently, he must have spent a good deal of it avoiding the camera as he only appeared in a couple of shots. Along the way, however, I happened upon a photo of a smiling tall girl from N's class. I showed it to B and asked if this was the girl who had asked about N. He nodded that it was and told me her name, which he'd learned the day following our dinner conversation. I guess the information was there if we had thought to ask him again.
The girl was not one of the names we had guessed, although when I saw her, it made perfect sense that she would be there. In our mostly white neighborhood, knowing that she was not would certainly have helped us in our search. On the other hand I'm kind of glad that, in B's mind, the thing that made her stand out was her height, not her race.
