A Bronx teacher asked. Tommy Orange replied.

Tommy Orange sat at the front of a classroom in the Bronx and listened as a group of high school students discussed his novel “There There.”

A boy with blue glasses raised his hand. “All the characters have some kind of disconnect, even trauma,” says Michael Almanzar, 19. “That’s the world we live in. That’s all around us. It’s not like it’s in a far away land. That is literally your neighbor.”

The class broke into a round of finger-snapping, as if we were at an old-fashioned poetry slam on the Lower East Side and not an English class at the Millennium Art Academy, on the corner of Lafayette and Pugsley Avenue.

Orange took it all in with a mixture of gratitude and humility – the semicircle of serious, committed teenagers; the bulletin board decorated with words describing ‘there there’ (‘hope’, ‘struggle’, ‘mourning’, ‘discovery’); the shelf of well-thumbed copies with dust jackets in various stages of disintegration.

His eyebrows shot up when a student wearing a sweatshirt that read “I Am My Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams” compared the book to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” When three successive students talked about how they related to Oranje’s work because of their own mental health issues, he was on the verge of tears.

“That’s what attracted me to reading in the first place,” Orange said, “the feeling of not being as alone as you thought you were.”

It’s not often that an author walks into a room full of readers, let alone teenagers, talking about characters born into his imagination as if they were living, breathing people. And it’s rare for students to spend time with an author whose fictional world feels like a refuge. Of all the classroom visits he has made since “There There” was released in 2018, the one at the Millennium Art Academy earlier this month was, Orange later said, “the most intense connection I have ever experienced.”

The catalyst for the visit was Rick Ouimet, an energetic ponytailed English teacher who has worked in the fortress-like building for 25 years. Ouimet is the kind of teacher students remember, whether for his contributions to their literary vocabulary – synecdoche, bildungsroman, chiasmus – or for his battered flip phone.

He first heard about “There There” from a colleague whose son recommended it during the pandemic. “I knew from the first paragraph that this was a book our children would identify with,” he said.

The novel follows twelve characters from indigenous communities as they lead up to a powwow at a stadium in Oakland, California, where disaster strikes. “Orange leads you over the drawbridge, and then the span begins to rise,” wrote a critic for The New York Times, Dwight Garner, when it came out. The novel was one of The Times’s 10 best books of 2018 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. According to Orange’s publisher, well over a million copies have been sold.

Ouimet’s suspicion turned out to be true: “Students love the book so much that they don’t realize they are reading it for English class. That is the rare find, the gift of gifts.

Some relevant statistics: Attendance rates op Millennium art are below the city average. Eighty-seven percent of students come from low-income households, which is above the city average.

In the three years since Orange’s novel became a mainstay of the Millennium Art curriculum, pass rates for students taking the Advanced Placement literature exam have more than doubled. Last year, 21 of 26 students earned college credits, exceeding state and global averages. The majority of them, Ouimet said, wrote about “There There.”

When three students in the school’s art-decorated hallway were randomly asked to name a favorite character from “There There,” they all responded without hesitation. It was as if Tony, Jacquie and Opal were people they might encounter at ShopRite.

Briana Reyes, 17, said, “I connected with the characters so much, especially because I had family members with alcohol and drug abuse.”

Last month, Ouimet learned that Orange, who lives in Oakland, would be in New York to promote his second novel, “Wandering Stars.” An idea started to percolate. Ouimet had never invited an author to his class before; Such visits can be pricey and, as he noted, Shakespeare and Zora Neale Hurston are unavailable.

Ouimet wrote a message in his head for over a week, he said, and on Monday, March 4, just after midnight, he sent it to the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau.

“The email felt like a rough draft, but I wasn’t worried,” he said. “It was my midlife college essay.”

The 827-word missive is written in the style Ouimet encourages in his students’ work, full of personality, texture and detail, without the business language that infiltrates so much important professional correspondence.

Ouimet wrote, “In our 12th grade English classroom, in our diverse corner of the South Bronx, in a tight but vibrant urban neighborhood not unlike the Fruitvale, you are our rock star. Our more than rock star. You are our MF Doom, our Eminem, our Earl Sweatshirt, our Tribe Called Red, our Beethoven, our Bobby Big Medicine, our email to Manny, our ethnically ambiguous woman in the next stall, our camera pointing into a tunnel of darkness . ”

Orange, he added, was a hero to these children: “You changed lives.” There was Tahqari Koonce, 17, who drew a parallel between the Oakland Coliseum and the Roman Coliseum; and Natalia Melendez, also 17, who noted that a white gun symbolized the oppression of indigenous tribes. And then there was 18-year-old Dalvyn Urena, who “said he had never read a whole book before ‘There There,'” and now compared it to a Shakespearean sonnet.

He ended with, “Well, it was worth a try. Thank you for taking the time to read this – if it ever finds its way to you. In appreciation (and awe), Rick Ouimet.”

“I took a chance,” Ouimet said. And why not? “My students take a chance every time they open a new book. There is a sigh and they open the page. To see what they gave this book? The love was palpable.”

Within hours, word reached Orange, who was in the middle of a 24-city tour with multiple interviews and events every day. He asked Jordan Rodman, senior director of publicity at Knopf, to do whatever she could to get Ouimet’s class into the mix. There would be no compensation involved. Knopf donated 30 copies of ‘There There’ and 30 copies of ‘Wandering Stars’.

In a large, busy school full of squeaky soles, walkie-talkies and young people, moments of silence are difficult to find. But when Oranje opened his new novel, you could have heard a pin drop.

“It’s important to pronounce things, to pronounce them, like the way we learn to spell by saying words slowly,” Orange read.

He continued: “It is just as important for you to hear yourself speak your stories as it is for others to hear you speak them.”

The students followed along in their own copies, heads bowed and necks looking vulnerable and strong at the same time. Their meaning proved that books, like the spiders described in “There There,” contain “miles of stories, miles of potential home and trap.” On this inconspicuous gray Thursday, Oranje’s work offered both.

After the 13-minute lecture, the questions came, fast and furious, with refreshing bluntness: “What even inspired you to write these two books?” and “Did Octavio die?” and perhaps most pressing: “Why did ‘There There’ end like that?” Not since ‘The Sopranos’ has an ambiguous ending caused more consternation.

“We were like whaaaat?” said one student, keeping the last word in a high pitch.

“It was a tragic story,” said Oranje. “Some people hate it, and I’m sorry.”

He admitted that he had not been a reader in high school: “No one gave me a book and said, this book is for you. There was also a lot going on at home.” He talked about how he staves off writer’s block (by changing his point of view), how he reads his drafts out loud to hear what they sound like. Orange shared his Cheyenne name – Birds Singing in the Morning – and introduced a childhood friend who travels with him on tour.

Despite all this, Ouimet stood quietly at the side of the room. He cast a soft, stinking glance at a group of talkative girls. He used a long wooden pole to open a window. Usually he beamed like a proud parent at a wedding where everyone was dancing.

The truth is that ‘There There’ didn’t just enchant his students: it also had a profound effect on Ouimet himself. When he started teaching the book, he had just retired from coaching football and softball after 22 years.

“I was afraid: If I don’t get coaching, will I still be an effective teacher? ‘There there’ was a renaissance of sorts. “I don’t want to get too sugary,” he said, “but it saved my career somehow.”

Finally the bell sounded. The students stepped back from their desks and lined up to have their books signed by Orange, who took a moment to chat with everyone.

Over the din, Ouimet shouted to anyone still listening, “If you love a book, talk about it!” If you like a story, let other people know about it!”