Our theme for the month of March is “How to.”

I closed Encounters at the Heart of the World by Elizabeth Mann, the pages tumbling on my small desk in the U.S. History classroom, and looked up.

The person in front of me smiled his small, toothless grin.

The book Encounters at the Heart of the World wasn’t one of those books that fit nicely into a college backpack. It was a large, soft-covered, mind-bending journey back through the story of Lewis and Clark I thought I knew, focused on the Mandan People and their land by the Missouri River.

The nervous classmate was still in front of me when I turned around, coat and backpack thrown over my shoulders. He said something.

“Sorry?” I said. My coat zipper had drowned out whatever he had tried to say before my bad ears could grasp it.

“Are you heading to your car?” he repeated.

I was.

“Me too.”

I led the way out, shuffling in my pockets for my keys as I tried to remember the guy’s name. We’d talked in class, but he’d never introduced himself. And if I remembered right, he was a trumpet player in the orchestra. I could distinguish him from the other trumpet player because his nose was bigger and stuck out over the trumpet in a way I thought would make a good book character.

But big-nosed trumpet players don’t get called on in the orchestra either.

How late is too late to ask for someone’s name?

“Your book report was really entertaining,” he said.

The wind picked up my curly hair and tossed it in front of my face. “I liked the book. It made the report easy.”

“You make me want to read it too,” he said.

I thought of the Mandan people, and how their story only came together through the pieces of archaeology, anthropology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science put together. I thought about their story I learned in elementary school: a nameless group of natives that helped Lewis and Clark on their way toward “uncharted territory.”

It was snowing, I think. In the sort of way that makes me scrunch up my nose and frown at what’s in front of me to keep the snow from attacking your corneas.

He stopped on the path.

“Look, I was just wondering. Would you want to go get a hot beverage with me?” he said.

“What?” I said.

Except this time I’d heard him. I just couldn’t quite compute. Uncharted territory.

“I-I heard you don’t like coffee. So-so that’s why I said hot beverage.”

I blinked. “Oh!”

“I mean, not right now,” he said quickly. “Another day.”

I should ask him his name, I thought. He somehow knows I don’t like coffee, and I don’t even know his name.

And yet, despite knowing that I had no archeology, epidemiology, or any other puzzle pieces to slot together to find out, I didn’t ask.

“A bookstore,” I said suddenly. His shoulders slumped with relief. “What about Schuler Books? There’s a cafe there—and then you can buy a copy of Encounters at the Heart of the World.”

“What?”

Maybe he had bad hearing too. “My book report book?”

“Oh. Yeah, I’d love that.”

I told him my number. Then repeated it again when he struggled to type it out. His fingers were trembling. I took his phone and typed it for him.

“Where’s your car?” I said.

“I didn’t drive–I live in the apartments on campus,” he said.

***

I waved my arms at the stacks of books. I’d been dreading the date all week, but now that I was in the bookstore, I felt more positive about the night. It was the perfect setting—no loud restaurant noises for me to have to hear over, no awkward staring across the table at mouths to try and decipher, and no shortage of book-related conversation starters.

The big-nosed trumpet player wilted.

“Where should we start?” I said.

He said something, but he was looking away. I only heard a low rumble in the din of the bookstore’s mingling population. Maybe this wasn’t as fool-proof of a location for my sub-par hearing.

“What?” I said. The big-nosed trumpet player shrugged, his movement exaggerated.

“I don’t read books,” he said, huffing out a silly, shaky laugh. I didn’t laugh with him.

“Ever?”

“Not really. Unless I have to,” he said, pushing his glasses up.

“Oh.” I didn’t know that about him.

In fact, I thought the one thing I did know about him was that he read. He wanted to read Encounters at the Heart of the World. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe that was a line, like needing to walk to his car.

Elizabeth Fenn wrote: “I realize, as I hope you will, that the writing of history is neither certain nor sanitary.” I bet the big-nose trumpet player’s retelling of the bookstore date would be tragic and frustrating for very different reasons.

But at some part in the story, Lewis and Clark split up, regardless of the perspective you’re reading from. Maybe Lewis would write that it was to find a faster way home. Maybe Clark would argue in his version it was to explore a vast amount of territory. Maybe the Mandan people would know it was because they disagreed on whether picture books were just for kids.

I said goodbye first, relieved to be at the foot of our metaphorical Bitterroot Mountain. We smiled at each other. I walked to my car.

It was windy again. The kind of wind that steals words and doesn’t give them back. Not to people with ears like mine. So I decided I probably didn’t hear him right when he said it was fun, and that he’d like to see me again.

But he hadn’t even looked for Encounters at the Heart of the World by Elizabeth Fenn while we were there.