Page 26 of Slander
They take my keys at eleven in the morning.
That's the part that stays with me after—not the meeting, not the specific words, not the man from the district sitting in Karen's office with a folder and a face he'd practiced in the car.
The keys.
The little brass one to my classroom, the bigger one to the supply closet, the plastic fob that lets me into the building before the sun's up.
All of it slid off my ring and into a manila envelope while I sit there with my hands folded in my lap the way I was taught to fold them as a little girl.
"It's unpaid." The district man clicks his pen and won't quite meet my eyes. "Pending the outcome of the review. I want to be clear that this isn't a determination of anything. It's procedure."
"How long is procedure?"
"It varies."
"Weeks? Months?"
He clicks the pen again, twice. "It varies, Miss Crockett."
I don't cry in the office.
I want that on the record somewhere, even if the only record is my own.
I sit in that chair with my keys in an envelope and my whole life laid out on a folding table.
I keep my crap together, and I don’t give them one single tear to carry back out into the hallway.
I save it for the truck.
Karen walks me out the side door, the one by the dumpsters, so I don't have to pass the front office where the aides can see me.
She keeps her hand flat on my back the whole way. At the door she stops and glances back down the empty hall, then digs something out of her cardigan—a folded stack of papers, warm from being held against her.
"I'm not supposed to have these." She presses them into my hands. "I printed them before they locked the file. You didn't get them from me."
I take them. They're heavier than paper should be. "Karen?—"
"Listen to me." She catches my wrist, and her eyes go wet and fierce at the same time. "I've known you for eleven years. I know what you are and I know what you're not. This isn't going to fix itself by you being good, quiet, and waiting for it to pass. You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"Get a lawyer. Today. A damn good one." She squeezes hard enough to leave a mark. "Don't you dare just take this, Sophie."
She pushes open the door to the gray morning and the first spit of rain, and she nudges me out into it.
The lock clicks at my back before I've made it to the truck.
I sit in the driver's seat with the engine off and the rain ticking against the roof, and I unfold the papers in my lap.
I make myself look at them.
The first page is the letter.
I skim it—grave concern, pattern of conduct, the well-being of a student—and my stomach rolls, becausenoneof it is real, and every word is written like it is.
The rest is worse.
Screenshots. Text messages laid out in those little gray and blue bubbles, a phone number across the top that isn't mine but is labeled with my name. A conversation that never happened.
