“My headmaster is visiting, can you open the gallery?” I pause for too long not because I’m wondering whether my key to the auditorium will also open the gallery, but because he says headmaster so lightly, as if we all have one. I’m reminded of riding the train to work one day, sitting next to a talkative woman who mentions her brother-in-law, the rocket scientist, and it was the first and only time I looked away from the window towards her and repeated, “Rocket scientist?” Headmasters and rocket scientists are, to me, the stuff of novels, like a high school romance or traveling to Europe as a child. But this is the kind of place where people do have headmasters, and famous last names and slow summers and time to think.
