Seminary With Chloe

"The mustard seed isn't the starting point of a big movement. It's the one person at the next bus stop."

The chapel car park was mostly empty. Two cars besides Brother Baker’s — Sister Ellingham's little green Corolla, and the Armitages' Ford that Becs's dad dropped her off in every morning before she continued on to school. Brother Baker parked in the same spot he parked in every morning, a few spaces down from the chapel entrance.

I got out of the back. Chloe's door closed a beat behind mine, and the two of us crossed the car park towards the side entrance — the one the seminary students used because it was closer to the classrooms than the main foyer, and which Sister Ellingham always unlocked first thing.

"You've got your scriptures?" Chloe said over her shoulder, already halfway up the path.

I patted the bag. "I've got my scriptures."

"Everything you need?"

"Probably not, but it's too late now."

She held the door for me without looking back. The heat of the inside met the cold of the outside, and the chapel smelled the way the chapel always smelled at this hour — the particular still-cold smell of a building nobody had been in yet today.

Down the corridor to our classroom at the far end. Voices from inside. One of them was Sister Ellingham's. Another I recognised as Becs Armitage's.

I followed Chloe in.

Sister Ellingham was at the whiteboard, writing Matthew 13 in small neat capitals. Her mug sat on the corner of her desk with a slice of lemon floating in clear hot water, and she spoke without turning round.

"Good morning, you two."

"Morning, Sister Ellingham."

"Morning."

She underlined Matthew 13 once and went on writing.

Becs was in the middle row in the seat she'd claimed at the start of the year and refused to surrender on the basis of first occupancy, which was, in Becs's worldview, all the authority anyone needed for anything. School uniform on under an oversized grey jumper. Hair still wet from the shower. She looked up as we came in, her finger paused on her scripture page where she'd been tracking down the verses.

"Late again," she said, without any real reproach in it, which was Becs's way — she'd observe the fact, file it, and not pretend it was something worse than it was. "Car trouble?"

"Charles trouble," Chloe said, already moving past her towards our corner.

"Charles trouble tracks."

"I'm standing right here," I said.

"Good. Then you can confirm it." Becs went back to her scriptures. Her finger resumed its progress down the page.

Chloe slid into the double desk at the back by the window — the one we'd occupied by unspoken agreement since early in the year. The window looked out on the car park and the scrubby garden between the chapel and the fence, which was currently a wet grey colour in the way things were wet and grey before sunrise in winter.

Chloe pulled the laptop out of its sleeve. The sleeve was battered grey, with a small faded eucalyptus-leaf sticker on the outside.

As the screen lit her face from below, I slid into the seat beside hers and opened my scriptures to look like I was doing something useful.

Behind us, the door opened. Tom Hadley came in with the particular expression of a boy who had been asleep six minutes ago and did not fully accept that he was not still asleep now. He lifted a hand in a general greeting to the room, dropped into the seat nearest the door, and did not take anything out of his bag. Tom would need another ten minutes before the world came into focus for him. Everybody knew this. Nobody asked him to hurry.

Dan and Josh Henderson came in together — Year 10, identical in face and opposite in everything else — already halfway through an argument.

"— it's not even a sport, Dan."

"Curling's in the Olympics."

"That wasn't the question —"

"Boys," Sister Ellingham said, without turning round.

They went to their seats in the front row without finishing the sentence, and one of them — Dan, I was fairly sure, but the confidence of a non-twin on this question was always provisional — muttered something under his breath, and the other one muttered back, and Sister Ellingham let them, because Sister Ellingham had long ago worked out that you did not need to stop twins from muttering, you just needed to stop them from declaring war on each other in public.

Chloe leaned across towards me, her eyes on the screen.

"Did you do the reading?"

"I did most of the reading," I said, which was partly true and mostly a construction.

She didn't look up. "Which most?"

"The most that was nearest the front."

"You did half a page."

"I did about half a page."

"You're going to be asked about something from the back half of the chapter, Charles, it's in the way these things always work." Her fingers were already on the trackpad, navigating somewhere.

"That would be very annoying," I said.

"It would."

A final seminary student came in through the door — Kate, one of the Smithfield kids whose surname I could never hold onto, quiet and consistent and permanently reading something. She took the seat next to Becs and opened her scriptures and did not say anything, because Kate never said anything at the start of class and only rarely said anything at the end of class, and when she did, it was usually worth having waited for.

Seven of us this morning.

Sister Ellingham capped her whiteboard marker and turned from the board.

She was a small woman — shorter than Chloe, which I knew because I'd seen them standing next to each other in the cultural hall at some ward thing, and Chloe was not tall. Her hair was grey and cut short and practical. She wore the same pattern of cardigan in a rotation of colours. Her face had settled, over what I estimated to be sixty-something years, into the expression of a woman who was very hard to impress and quite easy to disappoint but who had decided, at some point, that she was going to love you anyway.

"Right," she said. "Let's start."

She turned from the board, her marker capped in one hand and the other hand resting on her hip, and she told us to open our scriptures to Matthew thirteen, verses thirty-one to thirty-two. There was the soft flurry of pages being found — Tom Hadley's slower than everyone else's — and the small rhythm of seven people settling at once. Sister Ellingham's eyes went round the room, landed on me, and stayed.

"Charles. Read it for us."

Fair enough. I found the verses on the page, and the typeface of the King James Bible in front of me — the narrow double columns, the small chapter numbers, the slightly yellowed paper of a book I'd had since my twelfth birthday — put me, as it always did, squarely in the head-space of seminary regardless of the time of day. I cleared my throat and read.

"Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field. Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof."

I closed the book on my finger and looked up. Sister Ellingham nodded once, unhurried, and took a mouthful of her hot water. The lemon slice bobbed and settled.

"Thank you, Charles." She set the mug back on the corner of her desk. "Hands up if you've had this lesson before."

The class did its usual delayed response — Chloe's hand up first, mine half a second later, Becs's after that without looking up from her page, both twins together the way the twins did everything together, Kate's quietly, and Tom's last and at half-mast. Sister Ellingham waited until every hand was up before she spoke again.

"Good." She looked at us over the rim of her mug. "Then I won't do the small-seed-big-tree speech at you, because you know the speech. You've all known the speech since Primary. What I want to know is whether the speech has done any real work in your heads lately, or whether it's just been sitting on a shelf in there."

Nobody answered. The question was not really for answering yet.

"Becs," she said. "When was the last time the mustard-seed parable changed your mind about something?"

Becs's finger stopped moving down her page. She looked up at Sister Ellingham, and I could see her weighing a real answer against a polite answer the way Becs always weighed things, with her mouth very slightly on one side. "Honestly?" she said. "Probably not for a while, Sister Ellingham. I mean — I know what it means. I could tell you what it means. But knowing what it means isn't the same thing as it doing anything."

"That's exactly what I'm getting at," Sister Ellingham said. She tipped her mug towards Becs in a kind of salute and took another sip. "Thank you."

Becs went back to her page, finger resuming its place, and I watched her write something small in the margin that I couldn't see.

"Tom?"

Tom Hadley looked up like he'd been caught, which he hadn't. He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. "Same question, Sister Ellingham?"

"Same question."

He sat with it, blinking, and you could see him trying to wake all the way up inside the sentence. "I don't really know. It's the Church, right? The mustard seed is the Church growing big from small. That's what the manual says. So I don't know what it's supposed to do for me today."

"That's the honest answer." Sister Ellingham came round to the front of her desk as she said it and sat on the edge of it, the mug cupped in both hands now, and the room's attention adjusted to the new geometry without her having to ask it to. "Thank you, Tom. That's the answer I was after."

She let the silence sit for a beat, then another.

"The standard reading," she said, "is that the mustard seed is the Church. Small beginning, big tree, birds in the branches, gospel spreading across the earth. It's a good reading. We teach it because it's true. But it's a reading you've had served to you so many times in so many contexts that I suspect — like Becs said — it no longer does any real work in your heads. And I'm not interested this morning in teaching you something that does no real work in your heads."

Dan Henderson's pen, which had been drawing on the corner of his scripture page, stopped. Josh, without looking at Dan, stopped drawing in exactly the same place on his own page. The twins were listening now.

"So let's try it the other way round." Sister Ellingham set her mug on her knee. "Forget the Church for a minute. The parable is about scale. Something tiny doing something huge. Something you barely notice connecting to something you can't see all of. That's the mechanism. The Church is one version of how that mechanism runs. But the mechanism runs on anything where small things add up. Anything you care about where what you do in your own life — which feels tiny, because it is tiny — connects to something much bigger than what you can see from where you're standing."

She looked around the room as she said it, not hurried.

"I want you to pick one of those things. Pick something that matters to you. Something that's yours. Not the Church — I've taken the Church off the table for this exercise, just for today, just so you have to actually think. Work in pairs. Work out how the mustard-seed mechanism might do real work on that thing. Not in theory. In practice. With the tools you've actually got in your bag and on your laptop and in your head. At the end I want you to show me a thing — a presentation, a poster, a sketch, a speech — and the form is up to you, but the thinking is not."

She stood up, set the mug back on the desk, and looked at the wall clock above the door.

"Twenty-five minutes. Off you go."

For a beat nobody moved, the way a group of seven people never quite knows who's moving first. Then Becs capped her pen, turned half a chair towards Kate without saying anything, and Kate turned half a chair back — a pair made by a year of proximity and nothing more. The twins were already arguing about something, quietly, which was how the twins always started any task. Tom Hadley glanced at Chloe and me, saw the open laptop between us, assessed the situation with the unhurried calculation of a boy who had just woken up enough to do arithmetic, and looked towards the twins instead.

"Mate, you can work as a three if you want," Dan said over his shoulder — or Josh, I couldn't tell from where I was sitting.

"Yeah. Cool. Thanks."

Tom scraped his chair across and joined them, and the twins absorbed him into whatever they were arguing about without breaking stride.

Chloe tipped her head an inch closer to mine across the desk. Her eyes had not left the screen since the laptop opened.

"Environment," she said, under her breath.

"Environment."

Chloe was already moving. Her left hand left the trackpad and her right hand came across to the keyboard, and something in her posture adjusted — a small straightening of her shoulders, the kind of settling a person did when they were about to do a thing they were good at. A terminal window opened in the corner of the screen. A folder tree unfolded beside it. I watched the terminal fill with a string of text that had the density of something I would never understand, and Chloe was four steps ahead of me before I had worked out the first one.

"I've got the forest from Science Club," she said, her eyes on the screen. "I can repurpose the zoom-out. We lose the soil-science captions and write new ones."

"We write new ones."

She tapped something decisive on the keyboard and the folder tree collapsed and re-expanded further down. "You write new ones. I'll run the animation."

"Right."

Her eyes flicked to me for a fraction of a second — the glance of a person making sure a thing she had just said had actually landed — and then back to the screen. "You okay with that split?"

"I'm okay with that split."

"I need about twelve minutes on the animation," she said, a new window opening as she spoke, "and you've got twenty for the words. Overlap the last eight. Go."

I pulled my phone out because it was faster to open a Google Doc on my phone than to drag my own laptop out and boot it up, and across the room I could hear Dan Henderson making a case to Josh and Tom about homelessness while Josh made a counter-case about youth mental health, and Tom, as far as I could tell, was nodding alternately at both of them without being fully awake yet. Becs and Kate had their heads down over a single sheet of A4 that Becs was sketching on with a chewed biro, and Kate was pointing at something near the top of the page with the kind of quietness she brought to everything.

I started laying out the shape of the thing under my breath, half to myself, half to her.

"Opening. One image of a mustard seed. Literal. Not a metaphor yet. Just the seed."

Chloe made a small disapproving sound at the screen. "Boring."

"Obvious."

"Same thing."

"Not the same thing." I was half-typing on my phone, half-watching her spin the seed in the preview window with her fingertip, and I kept going. "Obvious is what the audience needs so they know where you're going. Boring is when they already know where you're going and you take them there anyway. Different thing."

She considered that without stopping what her fingers were doing. "Alright. Obvious. Keep going."

"Zoom out. Seed, shoot, shrub, tree, forest. Slow. We don't rush it."

"I can do slow." She said it with the satisfaction of a person being asked to do something they had already built and knew would work, and the preview window on her screen changed — the seed becoming a small 3D model that she rotated once with her fingertip and set still. Her hair had fallen slightly forward over her cheek. She tucked it behind her ear without looking.

I watched her do it and kept writing.

"Then at the forest," I said, "we stop. And I say — this is what faith looks like when it's done growing."

Her fingers paused. She looked at the screen for a beat longer than she needed to, reading the line I'd said as if it were something on the screen rather than something I'd just spoken aloud.

"Which faith."

"Faith in anything. Faith that a small action matters. Faith that the thing you did that nobody saw counts for something. That's the hinge. Then we pivot to environment."

She nodded once, her left hand still on the trackpad, her right hand already moving again.

"Keep going."

"Each tree in the forest is one thing. One person recycling. One household on renewables. One kid who refuses a plastic straw at Hungry Jack's because they've read something about turtles."

Chloe made a small noise through her nose that meant she'd heard the line and had an opinion about it, and her fingers did not stop. "The turtle kid is you," she said to the screen.

"The turtle kid is absolutely not me." I watched her drag an icon across the preview window, rotate it, resize it with a two-finger gesture, and drop it onto a specific tree.

"The turtle kid is you and you know it. The kid who brings it up at Sunday dinner because he saw a video."

"Fine. The turtle kid is me."

She almost smiled — it didn't make it to her mouth, but I saw it in her cheek — and kept working. Under the desk her knee bumped mine, either because she'd shifted in her seat to get a better angle on the screen or because she hadn't, and neither of us moved away. The icon on the screen clicked into place with a small satisfying movement that I was fairly sure Chloe had programmed to do exactly that.

"After the forest is full," I said, "we layer icons. One at a time. Each icon is a real action. Something somebody in this room could do this week if they wanted to. No government programmes. No ten thousand dollars. Just small things."

Chloe nodded without looking up, her right hand sorting through a folder of icons I couldn't see the contents of. She pulled one out — a water droplet — and dragged it onto another tree without asking me whether it fit. It fit.

Her hand held still on the trackpad for a second.

"Can I add a bad meme."

She did not say it like a question. She said it the way a person says something they have already decided, and her cursor was hovering over a subfolder on her desktop that I could read clearly from my angle, labelled memes, and I realised she had come to this classroom prepared for exactly this opportunity.

"You can add one bad meme," I said.

"Good." The folder opened. A strip of thumbnails loaded along the bottom of her screen, which she angled away from me a fraction before I could lean in.

"One. And I get veto rights on the meme."

Her cursor selected a thumbnail. "You do not get veto rights on the meme."

"Chloe."

"One meme. My meme. Non-negotiable." She closed the preview strip before I could parse any of the thumbnails properly, which I was now certain was deliberate. On the far side of the room one of the twins laughed sharply at something Tom Hadley had said, and Sister Ellingham looked up from where she was perched on the edge of the twins' desk and raised her eyebrows in their direction until Dan stopped laughing and Josh stopped grinning and Tom went back to whatever he had not fully been doing.

I pulled my attention back to the phone.

"If it lands us in the bad books," I said, "I'm throwing you under the bus."

Chloe's cursor placed the meme onto a tree on the far right of the forest, slightly smaller than the other icons so it wouldn't dominate the visual, and her fingers paused for a beat that might have been satisfaction. "That's the spirit."

I wrote the closing structure on my phone. Across the desk, her screen reflected off the bottom of her chin in the low blue way screens did, and every so often her fingers would pause on the keyboard while she watched the preview render a frame, and I would glance at her face, and she would glance back at the screen before she caught me, and we were both doing this, I was fairly sure, and we were both pretending not to.

"After all the icons are up," I said, "after the forest is full, we close on the punchline. The mustard-seed mechanism. Small things compounding. And we say — it's us. The forest is us. The specific people in this room."

Her cursor paused mid-motion on the trackpad. "Is that too on the nose?"

"Sister Ellingham said in practice. That's about as in-practice as you can get."

"Fair."

"One line each for the close," I said. "We alternate. Last line is yours."

Her fingers stopped completely. She did not turn her head but her eyes came across to me through the edge of her vision, and for a second I thought I'd said something wrong. Then she gave one short nod that was mostly to herself, and her fingers started again, and she did not say anything about the fact that I'd just given her the closing line of the presentation because I thought she would land it better than I would, which was the truth and which she knew was the truth and which neither of us was going to make anything else of.

"Alright," she said.

I typed the opening line of the close into the doc. When I was done I tilted the phone across the gap between us so she could read it, and she leaned in to read it, and her shoulder came against mine as she did, and she read it twice, and she nodded without saying anything, which was Chloe's version of that's fine, keep going. She sat back upright, and my shoulder was briefly cold where hers had been.

I did not comment on the cold. I kept writing.

The rhythm of the work took over then, the way rhythms do when two people have been working together long enough to know each other's shorthand — her on the animation, me on the script, both of us checking in every minute or two without wasting words on the check. She'd say timing on the icons? and I'd count the beats of the line in my head and say half a second later. I'd say is that word right? and she'd read it and say close, try a better one, and I'd try a better one, and she'd nod, and we'd keep going. The twenty-five minutes was going to be enough, or it was going to be nearly enough, and in either case we were going to find out.

Somewhere in the middle of it she reached across for the water bottle she kept in the side pocket of her bag, and I realised, without having consciously thought about it, that she was not going to be able to reach it without putting her hand on my leg for balance, and I moved half an inch before the problem arose, and she got the bottle, and she did not thank me, and I did not ask her to. She took a sip. She put the bottle back in its pocket without ever making eye contact about any of it.

Across the room Becs had set her pen down and was showing Kate the final version of whatever they'd been drawing, and Kate was nodding. The twins and Tom had stopped arguing and were clustered around Dan's phone looking at something. The room had the slightly hushed quality of a room where most people had finished the work and were waiting to see what happened next.

"Five minutes, everybody," Sister Ellingham said from the other side of the room, and Chloe's eyes flicked up to the clock on the wall and down again.

"I'm going to have to render the animation," she said, half to me, half to the screen. Her fingers found a command I didn't follow and executed it, and a progress bar appeared at the bottom of the preview window. "Two and a bit minutes. If I don't start it now we don't have it."

"Start it."

"I'm starting it."

The progress bar began to fill, slowly, in the way progress bars always filled when you were watching them. Chloe sat back a fraction in her chair, exhaled through her nose, and kept one hand resting lightly on the trackpad as if by maintaining contact with the machine she could personally will the render to behave.

A minute passed. The bar ticked past sixty per cent.

"You sound like you don't know it'll be fine," I said, because she hadn't said anything and because her hand was still on the trackpad and because the quiet was getting loud.

Her eyes did not move from the bar. "I know it'll be fine."

"That wasn't a question."

"It was an accusation." She said it without heat, the way she said most things. The bar ticked past sixty-five. "I know it'll be fine, Charles. It's a render. Renders finish."

"Renders finish."

"They do."

The bar was at seventy.

"Time," Sister Ellingham said.

The bar was at eighty-four.

"Okay," Chloe said, very softly, to nobody.

Sister Ellingham looked round the room, mug in hand, her eyes taking in who had finished and who was pretending to have finished and who was obviously mid-render.

"Who'd like to go first?"

Dan Henderson's hand went up. Josh's hand went up in the same motion, possibly the same hand for all I could have sworn in court, and the twins stood up together and made their way to the front of the room with Tom Hadley a step and a half behind them looking like a boy who had agreed to something he was now working out the details of.

Dan went first. "So — homelessness, right. We were going to do mental health but Dan said homelessness and I said mental health and then we kind of realised —"

"I said homelessness because —"

"— that if you look at it, a lot of it is the same thing —"

"— because the number one cause of youth homelessness in Australia is mental health stuff, actually —"

"— so we did homelessness."

Tom, standing between them, looked at Sister Ellingham with the face of a boy about to be asked a question he had no answer to, and Sister Ellingham gave him the small encouraging smile she gave people she wanted not to panic.

"Go on, Dan."

The twins settled down. They had a single sheet of paper between them that Dan held up to the class — a scrawled sketch of something that might have been a person sleeping rough, though whether it was Dan's drawing or Josh's or both of them taking turns I could not have said, and Tom stood beside them with his hands in his pockets and the expression of a boy committed to moral support if nothing else.

"The mustard seed is — like — if one person talks to one homeless person, right. Not even helps. Just talks to them. Treats them like they're actually there." Dan looked at Josh for confirmation. Josh nodded. "That's the seed. Then if that one person does it again next week — that's two seeds. If they tell someone else to do it — that's a seed for the other person. And most of what makes homelessness stick is the invisibility of it. So the mustard-seed mechanism here is visibility. One act of seeing somebody. Scaled."

Josh picked it up. "And we thought — we actually walked past a guy yesterday at the bus station and neither of us said anything to him, because we didn't know what to say. So this isn't — this isn't us telling you to do something we've been doing. It's us realising that we haven't."

Tom, surprising me, spoke. "And the tree at the end — the full tree. That's what a community looks like when enough people treat the guy at the bus station like he exists. That's not a metaphor for the Church. That's a real thing."

He stepped back half a step and looked at Sister Ellingham as if to ask whether he had just done the right thing. She tipped her mug towards him in a small salute that I recognised from earlier in the lesson.

"That was honest," Sister Ellingham said. "Thank you. All three of you."

The twins went back to their seats with the slightly glazed post-presentation expression that the twins always had after they'd done a thing together, and Tom followed them looking like a boy who had not expected to speak at all and had somehow spoken the best line of the three. Dan clapped him on the shoulder as they sat down. Josh clapped him on the other shoulder. Tom accepted both claps with the equanimity of a boy who had survived being two-twinned.

"Becs," Sister Ellingham said. "Kate."

Becs stood up, and Kate stood up beside her, and they walked to the front of the room with the quieter coordination of two people who had not needed to decide who was going to speak first. Becs carried the sheet of A4 they had been working on. Kate carried nothing. She stood a half-step behind Becs's shoulder with her hands folded loosely in front of her school skirt, and she did not look at anyone in particular.

Becs held up the paper.

It was a drawing — Becs's sketch, clearly hers from the quick confident lines of it — of a family at a bus stop. A mother holding a baby. Two older children. A man standing behind them with a bag. A bus in the distance, approaching. The drawing was unfinished in the way a sketch is unfinished when the artist has trusted the viewer to read the rest of it.

"Refugees," Becs said. Flat, the way Becs said everything. "Specifically, displacement. Specifically, people who have already been moved once, or twice, or five times, and who are waiting for the next bus to wherever they have to go next." She paused. "Kate picked it."

I glanced at Kate. Kate was looking at the floor.

"Here's the mustard seed," Becs said, turning the paper round and pointing at the bus in the distance. "Not the family. The bus." She tapped the bus once with the end of her chewed biro. "A family like this doesn't need a rescue operation. They need somebody at the next stop who knows they're coming. One person at the other end. That's the seed. One person who's made a phone call. Who's made up a bed. Who knows a name. That's the whole mustard seed."

Sister Ellingham had set her mug down on the desk and was giving Becs the specific attention she gave students when they had said something she wanted to hear them say again.

"If that one person has done that once," Becs said, "and they tell one other person what it was like, and that person does it the next time the next family comes through — that's the tree. There's no organisation. There's no programme. There's just a network of people at bus stops. That's what the parable looks like if you take the Church out of it and put real people in."

She lowered the paper.

"That's our presentation."

Kate did not speak. She nodded once, at Becs, and Becs nodded back, and the two of them walked to their seats as quietly as they had walked to the front, and the room was different for a second. Tom Hadley blinked, which for Tom was an emotional response. One of the twins muttered something to the other one that was not an argument.

"Thank you, Becs," Sister Ellingham said, and her voice had a slight shift in it that I had heard her do maybe twice in three years. "Thank you, Kate."

Kate looked up, briefly, and back down.

"Charles. Chloe."

The progress bar on Chloe's laptop was at ninety-one per cent.

"Okay," Chloe said, under her breath, and she picked the laptop up from the desk and carried it to the front with both hands, and I walked beside her, and she set it down on Sister Ellingham's desk and turned it so the class could see the screen. The render was ninety-two per cent done. Chloe pulled up the intro slide — the single image of the mustard seed, against a plain background — and stepped back.

I did the opening.

I was nervous, which surprised me, because I was not normally nervous in front of this room. I was nervous because Chloe was standing beside me, and her sleeve was two inches from mine, and the laptop she had made work was between us, and the progress bar at the bottom of the screen — not visible to anyone in the front row but completely visible to me from my angle — was still climbing. I did the opening line. The image of the seed held.

"The kingdom of heaven," I said, "is like a mustard seed."

I did the next line. Chloe clicked the trackpad. The zoom-out animation started — seed, shoot, shrub, and the class tipped forward slightly in the way a class tips forward when something is working, and the shrub grew into the beginning of a tree —

and the screen froze.

It stayed frozen. The tree did not come.

I kept talking. I did not look at Chloe. I felt her go very still beside me and then felt her sit down at Sister Ellingham's desk and pull the laptop towards her, and I kept talking, because talking was my job and looking at the laptop was hers.

"Let me tell you," I said, "about Broken Hill."

The room adjusted. Five faces in front of me, plus Sister Ellingham, and the class came with me without me having to pull them because I had just said a thing that wasn't on the script and they were curious.

"I lived there until I was four. I don't remember most of it. What I remember is the rain." I could hear Chloe's fingers on the keyboard behind me, quick and precise. "When the rain came, it came down on the tin roof of our house, and it was the loudest thing that had ever happened to me. Mum would go out onto the verandah and stand with her face up, because in Broken Hill you did that. The rain was the whole point. We had a water tank at the back of the house, and every time it rained, the tank filled a bit, and my dad watched the tank the way you watch a thing you need."

Behind me Chloe's fingers paused, and then she said something under her breath that I caught the end of. No. Come on. Come on, come on, come on.

"I had a bath once a week," I said to the class. Becs was watching me now, specifically, her pen down on her desk. Sister Ellingham's mug was in her hand, her eyes on me, not on Chloe. "Once a week. And after my bath, Mum would go out with a bucket and she'd take the bath water, and she'd put it on the garden, because Mum grew vegetables and the vegetables did not have any water of their own. So the water did one job and then it did another job, and then —"

The laptop chimed behind me. Chloe whispered there you are.

"— and then when Mum watered the vegetables," I went on, "the bit she didn't use she'd tip under the gum tree in the front yard, because the gum tree didn't have anyone else looking out for it either."

I turned round.

Chloe was standing again. The laptop was in her hands, the screen back on, and the zoom-out was running. Shrub. Tree. Another tree. Another. The forest.

"My mum's bath water," I said to the class, turning back towards them, "went to the lettuce. The lettuce water went to the gum tree. One bath did three jobs. That's what a mustard seed looks like in practice. It looks like nobody letting the water go to waste because nobody can afford to."

Chloe set the laptop back on the desk and took over. "Each of these trees," she said, her fingers on the trackpad, "is a single choice somebody made." Small icons began layering across the forest, one tree at a time. "A bath re-used. A meal that didn't end up in the bin. A thing bought second-hand. A thing not bought at all."

I came back in for the penultimate line. "The mustard-seed mechanism isn't about any one of us. It's about enough of us doing small things at the same time."

Chloe's cursor placed the last icon. The forest was full.

"The seed is the smallest thing," she said, and paused, and looked at the class. "The forest is the biggest thing. The distance between them is just a lot of people doing a little."

She did not look at me. She did not need to. The line landed the way she had said it would land, and the class was quiet the way it had been quiet for Becs.

Sister Ellingham set her mug down on the desk.

"That," she said, "was well done. Both of you."

We went back to our seats. Chloe closed the laptop without looking at me, and I sat down without looking at her, and her hand went to the eucalyptus-leaf sleeve and my hand went to my scriptures because both our hands needed to be doing something that wasn't what they wanted to do.

"It crashed," I said, under my breath, eyes on the page.

Chloe did not look up either. "I noticed."

"I was good, though."

"You were okay."

"I was good."

"You were okay." She was fighting a smile, losing, and I could see it in the corner of her mouth. I was fighting a smile and losing on my end too, and neither of us was going to acknowledge any of it on the record, and that was fine.

Sister Ellingham let the moment settle. She brought the room back together quietly, one hand on the edge of her desk.

"Before we close," she said, "I want to read you one last thing."

She opened her scriptures to a page she'd marked with a slip of paper and read, in her unhurried voice, from Doctrine and Covenants 86 — a passage I had heard before and only half-remembered, about the wheat growing with the tares until the harvest, about the gathering, about patience with small things becoming great ones. She did not elaborate. She closed the book on her finger and looked at the class.

"Kate," she said. "Would you close us with a prayer?"

Kate stood up, folded her hands in front of her, and bowed her head. The room bowed with her.

"Dear Heavenly Father," she said, and her voice was quiet but entirely present, "we thank thee for this morning. We thank thee for the scriptures we have read, and for the chance to think about them in a new way, and for Sister Ellingham who teaches us with patience. We thank thee for the people who are hard to see, and for the seeds we do not know have been planted. We ask that thou wouldst help us be the person at the next bus stop. We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen."

"Amen."