Page 67 of Slander
And when I do, I'm going to hand them to Dag and Esperanza and a courtroom instead of doing what the old me would've done.
The fact that I can feel both urges in me right now—the cold patient one and the hot stupid one—and reach for the cold one on purpose, that's the whole point of how far I've come.
"What is it?" Sophie's watching me. "Your face went somewhere."
"Dag." I pocket the phone and turn the key. "Esperanza filed. The clock's running on the school board now. It's good news, Soph. It's the first real good news of the week."
It's not a lie. It's the true part, the part she needs.
The other part—the cold part, the part where I'm already hunting—that one stays private a while longer.
I pull us out of the lot and point us toward home, and beside me, she leans her head back against the seat and closes her eyes, claimed and fed and one good shift lighter.
I drive us into the falling evening with a list forming in the dark behind my eyes and her hand resting loose on my thigh.
I'll get them.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sophie
Some part of me believed they wouldn't actually do it, right up until the letter is in my hands telling me they did.
It's not even a phone call.
After years in that building, after every late afternoon I stayed grading by the light of one lamp, after the laminated name tags and the reading nook I built with my own money out of a bookshelf I sanded down myself—they sent a letter.
I read it standing at Njal's kitchen counter with Hoagie leaning his whole warm weight against my shins.
The words don't do me the courtesy of being cruel. They're worse than cruel.
In light of the ongoing concerns, and following consultation with counsel, the Board has determined that continued employment is not in the best interest of the district or its students.
Not in the best interest of the students.
I taught those students to tie their shoes and sound outbecauseand sit on the rug like a friend instead of a tornado.
I held a bucket while one of them threw up blueberry yogurt and told him he was brave for making it almost to the trash can.
And the district has determinedI’mnot in their best interest, on the strength of pictures a program made of a woman who doesn't exist.
I think about my classroom.
Somebody else is in it now, or will be by Monday—some substitute with a rolling cart, teaching my kids out of my lesson plans, sitting in the chair I duct-taped the wheel back onto.
They'll find the height chart on the doorframe where I marked every one of them in September and promised we'd measure again in May.
Nobody's going to measure them in May.
Nobody's going to explain to a six-year-old why Miss Crockett left without saying goodbye, and the kids will make up their own reasons, the way kids do, and some of them will decide it was something they did.
I set the letter down on the counter, very flat, very smooth, like it's a living thing I don't want to startle.
Then I go out to the porch because I don't want to be inside the house when I make the sound I'm about to make.
Njal finds me out there twenty minutes later.
I've stopped crying by then.
