Zero Tolerance (10 page)

My new friends,
thought Sierra.

“What did you do?” Shoplifter Brad asked Luke and Sierra.

“I got in a fight,” Luke said.

“I brought a knife to school,” Sierra said.

She didn't add any explanations. There was a bizarre delight in representing herself as so openly, brazenly bad.

Brad looked at her with new respect, but Graffiti Artist Julio said, “She's the one who was on TV.”

Brad didn't look any less impressed. Televised coverage didn't make a crime any less sensational.

“Wow,” he said.

“Yeah, it's pretty cool to be suspended with a big celebrity,” Luke sneered. “The perfect honor student who never did anything wrong in her life, and look how
unfair
it is that someone like
her
should get in trouble.”

Last Friday, when it had been just the two of them, Sierra had felt that she was starting to get to know Luke a little bit and even like him a little bit. Why was he being so hateful now?

“What got into you?” she asked.

“Nothing. Look, if you want to give Brad and Julio your autograph, go right ahead. I don't need one, though, so you can spare the muscles in your hand.”

Sitting where Luke couldn't see him, Julio gave Sierra a friendly shrug:
What's up with him?

Luke flipped on his Game Boy and made a great pretense of not even noticing that the rest of them were there.

“Why did you steal the candy bars?” Sierra asked Brad. “Didn't you figure you'd get caught?”

“I didn't get caught the other times,” Brad said.

She decided to ask Julio a question, too, to keep the conversation going in the face of Luke's silence. “Are you going to have to wash off your graffiti?”

“It doesn't wash off. But, yeah, I'm going to have to paint the whole side of the gym. And pay for the paint. It sucks big-time.”

“Was it worth it? I mean, was it fun doing it?”

She tried to imagine what it would feel like—to be out alone at night, slipping between the pools of light beneath the lampposts, a can of spray paint hidden under her jacket, and then to write something with it for anybody driving by Longwood Middle School to see.

Luke looked up from his game. “What's it to you?” he asked Sierra.

“It's called making
polite conversation
.”

“Ooh, ooh, tell me more about the bad things you did!” Luke squealed in a falsetto voice.

It was almost as if Luke was jealous, not of her, but of Brad and Julio.

“Your three-day fighting suspension ends today,” she said to Luke. “Can't you be nice to me for a few more hours?”

“Yeah,” Julio said, taking her side.

“Shut the frick up,” Luke told him.

“You shut the frick up,” Julio fired back.

She didn't have a chance to see what Luke was going to say or do next. Apparently having heard the commotion in the suspension room, Ms. Lin was there so suddenly that Luke didn't have time to whisk his Game Boy out of sight.

“
Mr.
Bishop.” She made the title sound like an insult. “You can be heard all the way in the front office where Mr. Besser is having a very important meeting.”

Sierra couldn't help wondering:
A very important meeting about me?

“And
Mr.
Bishop. I believe I told you that the use of electronic devices in this room is strictly forbidden. I am going to confiscate that toy of yours and keep it locked up in my desk until school gets out in May.”

Luke said nothing.

“Give that to me.”

Would Luke refuse? What would Ms. Lin do if he did?

Luke hesitated. Then he threw his Game Boy down the conference table toward Ms. Lin.

“That's not fair!” Sierra burst out. “You can't keep it for months and months like that.”

Ms. Lin's eyes, as they fell on Sierra, were black slits of fury.

“Ms. Shepard, I don't need you of all people to tell me what I should and should not be doing. And don't think for a minute that a petition signed by your little friends is going to make any difference whatsoever to me or Mr. Besser.”

Ms. Lin snatched up Luke's Game Boy like a bird of prey pouncing on a helpless small animal. As if to punctuate her departure, the tattered poster with the words RULES RESPECT RESPONSIBILITY RELIABILITY came loose from its tape and fluttered onto the scuffed linoleum floor.

 

21

 

“Whoa, Shep-turd.” Luke gave a low whistle. “I mean, Sierra. You really told her.”

He was grinning at her now, his friendly Friday self again, but his eyes were glistening with some darker emotion.

Julio punched her on the shoulder in playful tribute. Brad clapped his hands three times slowly in applause.

“Well, it
is
unfair,” Sierra said. “She told Luke not to let her catch him again with it, but she never said she'd take it away practically forever if he did.”

“Don't worry,” Luke said. “I'll get it back.”

“How?” Sierra asked. “You can't just go into her desk and
take
it.”

“Oh, can't I?”

Julio joined in. “Forget it. She's always at her desk. Or Saunders is there. Plus Besser walks by a hundred times a day.”

“Lintbag has to go to the
bathroom
,” Luke pointed out. “She can't go all day without peeing. Besides, I don't think Saunders is here today.”

“She isn't,” Sierra said. She could hardly believe that she was supplying information to assist Luke in his raid. But Ms. Lin had gone too far this time. Actually, as far as Sierra was concerned, she had gone too far a long time ago.

Sierra went on, “I heard Ms. Lin say something to Mr. Besser this morning when I was coming in, that Mrs. Saunders was taking her son to get his wisdom teeth out.”

Brad hadn't yet made any comment, but Sierra knew he wouldn't tell on Luke, no matter what Luke was planning to do. She would never tell on any of them, either, whatever they did in suspension.

“We'll be real quiet so we can hear if she gets up and goes anywhere,” Luke said. “And then if she does, I'll slip out and grab it from her desk, just like that.”

“What if she comes back while you're out there?” Sierra asked.

“You can watch out for me,” Luke said.

Was he challenging her? To see whose side she was on? She already knew whose side she was on.

“Okay,” Sierra said. “I will.”

*   *   *

Even with the door to the suspension room kept open, it was hard to know exactly what was going on in the main office. Sometimes Sierra could hear Ms. Lin's voice on the phone, but not loud enough to make out more than a phrase or two.

“I got it at Costco…”

“My sister-in-law told me last week…”

Ms. Lin's lack of concern about having her personal phone calls overheard suggested that Mr. Besser's meeting must be over and he was no longer in his office.

Finally, Sierra heard Ms. Lin's heels click across the floor, not coming toward the suspension room but heading in the other direction.

Sierra peeked out, Luke standing next to her. Ms. Lin was putting a sign on the glass window facing out into the front hallway. Maybe it said:
BACK IN FIVE MINUTES
. Then Ms. Lin left the office through the door into the front hall.

“Let's go,” Luke said.

Sierra followed as Luke hurried over to Ms. Lin's desk. Her heart leaped around in her chest like a Ping-Pong ball in a clothes dryer.

Mr. Besser's office door was ajar; Sierra glanced inside and saw to her relief that he wasn't there.

She watched as Luke tried Ms. Lin's top drawer. It opened to disclose a neat tray filled with pens, paper clips, rubber bands. No Game Boy.

The side drawers were unlocked, too. In the top right-hand drawer was a stack of Longwood Middle School letterhead and envelopes. In the middle drawer was a pair of shoes, an umbrella, and a bag of wrapped butterscotch candies. Sierra felt guilty peering into Ms. Lin's private things. But not so guilty that she would abandon Luke now.

In the bottom drawer there it was: a heap of cell phones and Game Boys, as if Ms. Lin were the overlord of a crime ring that specialized in robbing electronics stores.

Luke's was right on top. He shoved it in his pocket. “Should we take the rest?”

Sierra shook her head. “What would we do with them? We don't know who they belong to. I don't think
she
even knows who they belong to.”

Nothing was marked with a name or labeled in any way, though surely there were parents who came into school demanding to get back the expensive phones they were paying for. Maybe these confiscated phones belonged to kids who had lied to their parents and said that they lost them, when all the while they were in Ms. Lin's desk.

Hatred of Ms. Lin beat an erratic jungle tom-tom in Sierra's chest.

Luke idly touched a key on Ms. Lin's computer, and the screen-saver image—a safari scene—disappeared. Ms. Lin's school e-mail account was open.

Suddenly Sierra had an idea so daring she could hardly believe what she was contemplating. It would serve Ms. Lin right to find out what it was like to get in trouble when you were innocent.

“Go stand by the window and watch the hallway,” Sierra told Luke, whispering even though there was no one else there to hear them.

“Let's go,” Luke urged. “She's going to be back any second.”

“I'm going to send an e-mail from her account.”

Luke gave one harsh, hard laugh.

As Luke stood guard, Sierra began typing.

Luckily, she had been the fastest keyboarder in the computer skills class in sixth grade.

Luckily, she remembered the e-mail address by heart for the letters column for the
Denver Post
; she had sent the paper half a dozen letters in the past year.

Luckiest of all, she no longer cared very much about Longwood Middle School's supposed core values of rules, respect, responsibility, or reliability. In fact, right this minute she no longer cared about them at all.

 

22

 

“She's coming!”

Sierra had just finished deleting the new e-mail from Ms. Lin's Sent folder, so Ms. Lin would have no way of finding it on her computer.

She and Luke reached the suspension room as Ms. Lin was unlocking the office door. Sierra dropped down into the chair next to Julio's and took a few long, deep breaths to force herself to calm down.

Now that it was all over, she felt overwhelmed with her own daring, and even more with the coolness with which she had executed her revenge. She could have been a master criminal.

She
was
a master criminal!

She, Sierra Grace Shepard, had just done the most illegal and subversive act of her life, an act that even Luke Bishop hadn't thought to do.

She was crazy to have done it.

She was wrong to have done it.

But it was already done.

“Did you get your Game Boy?” Julio asked.

For answer, Luke flashed the device before hiding it back in his pocket.

Then he looked over at Sierra. She knew he wanted to ask her what e-mail she had sent from Ms. Lin's account but didn't want to talk about it in front of the others. She'd tell him when they were alone, if they were ever alone. Maybe she'd call or text him that evening.

It would feel very strange to be calling or texting Luke Bishop.

Sierra opened her library book,
The Diary of Anne Frank
. Anne Frank had also known something about being confined in a very small space with people who got on your nerves after a while. Sierra stared down at the page, but it was hard to quiet her racing heart and her scolding conscience.

So she was relieved when Luke broke the silence. “Here's a question for everybody. In your whole life, which teacher did you hate the most, and why?”

Sierra didn't hate any teachers. The only adult she had ever hated was Ms. Lin, and she had only hated her since last Wednesday. She couldn't even make herself hate Mr. Besser, remembering the tears she had seen in his eyes after the horrible meeting with her parents.

Julio took his turn first.

“Mrs. Fletcher in second grade. She could never pronounce my name right. She kept calling me Jule-ee-o, like Julius, or Julia. Like, how hard is it to say Hoo-lee-o?”

“Did you correct her?” Sierra asked.

“I tried, but she was really mean about it, like she knew better how to pronounce things than some little second grader, because
she
was the teacher, not me.”

“Mrs. Nolan,” Brad said, going next.

Sierra knew who Mrs. Nolan was: one of the math teachers who taught the lowest-level math classes, not the accelerated math sequence that Sierra was taking.

“She made me go to the board for some dumb-ass problem. A whole bunch of us were up there, writing problems on the board. I got the answer wrong. Two girls did, too, and she didn't make fun of them, but to me she said, ‘Do you want to repeat sixth-grade math, Bradley? I didn't realize you liked my math class so much that you'd want to stay with me next year.'”

“What did you say?” Sierra asked, appalled.

“I said her class sucked, and math sucked, and she sucked.”

“Then what happened?”

“That was my first suspension. She did fail me for that quarter, but I passed for the year, so I never had to be in class with her again.”

Sierra still didn't know what she was going to say when it was her turn, so she was glad when Luke spoke.

“I hated them all except for Miss Boyle in kindergarten; she was cool. But the worst was Mrs. Bieber in third grade. She wanted to help the rest of the class understand why I was so
difficult
, so they'd have
compassion
for me instead of being pissed off at me all the time.