The driver for the class trip can’t believe I’ve never been to Lansing. She is incredulous. I’m from New Jersey, I offer. Silence. You know. The Garden State. She feeds sections of the enormous wheel into one hand, then the other, and back, a snake eating its tail. I wonder if I’d know this woman if I saw her at Kroger, absent the distortion of the convex mirror. Around Grand Ledge she shouts above the wind and children, I was in New Jersey once, in the summer. I had a job in Atlantic City. I nod, urging her on, because this was good. Now we were getting somewhere. She continues. We told Jewish folks about Jesus. We exit. Off the highway she wrests the bus left, right, left. The view washes across the windshield—smokestacks, brutalism, smokestacks—until she stops at the statehouse. Well,she says and throws open the door. This is Lansing. You’ll like it.