Zero Tolerance (19 page)

Mr. Besser began by saying things Sierra had heard before, oh, so many times before. How important the new zero-tolerance policy had been to Longwood Middle School. How every student who enrolled in the school knew exactly what the policy said. Every single student and every single parent had signed a statement consenting to the policy.

“Here's the form signed by Sierra Shepard and by her parents, Gerald and Angie Shepard.”

So the school had actually kept those dumb forms everybody had to fill out and sign at the beginning of the school year.

“Do I believe that Sierra deliberately brought that knife to school? No. But does the presence of that knife in her possession on school grounds constitute a violation under our zero-tolerance policy? Yes. Is this an offense that calls for mandatory expulsion? It is. Do I deeply regret the necessity for this final step in this unfortunate case? Yes, I do.”

Sierra could feel her father's whole body growing tense; she could feel him drawing himself upright, leaning forward with squared shoulders, clenched jaw.

She wanted to excuse herself, say she needed to go to the bathroom, flee to the hall.

But now Mr. Besser was speaking directly, not to Mr. Van Ek, but to her.

“Sierra.”

She looked at him.

“Sierra,” he said again. “What you did.”

Blood pounded in Sierra's temples: Was he going to betray her publicly for her forgery, tell three television reporters what she had done to Ms. Lin?

“Yesterday. About the choir trip.”

Sierra took a ragged, gasping breath.

She realized that she hadn't told her parents, not even her mother, about the speech she had made to save the Octave's trip. It seemed to have happened many years ago.

Mr. Besser gave Sierra a shaky smile, matching the unexpected tenderness in his tone, as if his voice might start to wobble the way hers did sometimes.

“Right now,” Mr. Besser told Mr. Van Ek, “our a cappella choir, the Octave, is on its way to perform at the Colorado Music Educators convention, an enormous honor for our school. This is a trip that was on the verge of being canceled because of a student protest on behalf of Sierra, a trip that would not be taking place right now if Sierra hadn't come in yesterday morning to encourage—to implore—the rest of the choir to go without her. I haven't known many students who could be so selfless, who make rules, respect, responsibility, and reliability their own personal concern. Sierra, I thank you.”

Sierra's father had apparently had all he could stand.

“I presume,” he said, rising to his feet to interrupt Mr. Besser, “that the point of this hearing isn't to commend this fine student leader but to expel her. Do I have that correct?”

“Yes, but I also want to take this opportunity to thank Sierra publicly for what she did for this school, for all she has done for this school, now that she has to be leaving us.”

Sierra saw that her father had already taken his sheaf of papers from his briefcase.

“So you are going to continue to make the case for expelling this fine student leader, who has done so much for this school in so many ways, despite one tiny, innocent mistake that she sought to correct immediately upon its discovery.”

He spoke as if he needed to be completely certain on this one crucial point before he said what he was about to say next.

Mr. Besser nodded. “Regretfully, I am. In the circumstances, I have no choice.”

“Well, then.” Sierra's father remained unsmiling, but she knew that within his heart was wild, fierce exultation. The moment he had been waiting for had arrived at last, the moment for squishing Mr. Besser like a contemptible, hypocritical, soon-to-be-obliterated insect.

“It just so happens that I have some information to share with our esteemed superintendent of schools, and with our vigilant ladies and gentlemen of the press, information that I consider to be somewhat, shall we say, relevant to this case, or at least might be perceived to be relevant by those with a highly attuned sense of irony.”

Sierra forced herself to look at Mr. Besser. His ruddy face was several shades paler than it had been five minutes ago, and the kindly, regretful smile he had been beaming toward Sierra remained frozen in place, like the smile one might see on a corpse.

Not that Sierra had ever seen a corpse, or ever wanted to see one.

But it felt as if she were looking at one right now.

 

40

 

“Daddy.”

She was next to him, tugging at his arm.

“Daddy. I'm—I don't feel well. I think I'm going to be sick.”

Mr. Van Ek was on his feet. Sierra could tell from his quick motions that he didn't like it if people threw up in his special room for expelling students.

“Take her outside for a few minutes,” he instructed Sierra's father.

Sierra's mother had jumped up, too. “Here, lean on me,” her mother said. “Let's get you out in the hall, or to the ladies' room. I knew you needed to eat a proper breakfast.”

Outside the door of the hearing room, Sierra dropped down onto a bench.

“Put your head between your legs if you're feeling dizzy or light-headed. Or do you need to throw up? We passed the ladies' room on the way in, it's not far from here.”

“I'm okay,” Sierra said as her mother, sitting beside her, smoothed her hair. “I just felt—I can't—”

Her father, still standing, looked mildly annoyed.

“Talk about bad timing,” he grumbled. “Now he knows what's coming. Did you see his face? Now we've lost the element of surprise. Not that he can figure out how to save himself during a five-minute recess. Because there isn't any way that he can save himself. Okay, sweetie, are you ready to go back in? Angie, see if you can get her a paper cup of water, or a Coke from the vending machine.”

“I'm not going back in,” Sierra said.

“But, honey,” her mother said, keeping her encircling arm around Sierra's shoulders. “I think you have to. It's your hearing, our hearing. We all need to be there.”

“That's not what I meant. It's Mr. Besser. Telling what he did. Telling everyone. It's too—awful.”

“Oh, give me a break,” her father said. “What he's doing to you—that's not awful? Being a pompous hypocrite is one thing. Being a pompous hypocrite who is destroying a little girl's life is another thing. I'm the father of that little girl, and I'm not going to allow him to do it unpunished.”

“Daddy.”

He was looking at his watch. Maybe he was wondering how long it was going to take to destroy Mr. Besser, given this unfortunate interruption, and if he was going to have to call his secretary to reschedule his late-morning appointments. Sierra waited until he looked back at her to continue.

“Daddy, I'm not a little girl.”

Not anymore.

“And my life's not being destroyed.”

She had never felt as fully alive as she did right now.

“Expelling someone for an innocent mistake?” her father said.

“He knows it's wrong,” Sierra said. “He just can't back down. Because he got locked in—”

“And needs to save face,” her father finished the sentence for her. “But he's going to find out that, guess what, it didn't work, and he's never going to be able to show his sorry face in this school district again. And that's going to be the best thing that has happened to this school district in a long, long time.”

“I don't want you to do it,” Sierra said.

“I'm your father, and I have to do what I think is right.”

Was it right to destroy someone's career because he was a pompous hypocrite? Because he was a pompous hypocrite who had driven a car while under the influence of alcohol and might have killed someone?

Why did it matter so much, being right?

“Daddy, if you tell them about Mr. Besser, I'm going to transfer to Beautiful Mountain, whether I get expelled or not. If you try to make me stay at Longwood or go to Braxton, I'll fail every class on purpose.”

Her father looked as stunned as if Cornflake had quadrupled in size and pounced on the neighbor's pit bull.

“And who, may I ask, is going to pay your tuition at Beautiful Mountain?”

He had better not add that her mother couldn't afford to pay it from her income as an unpublished playwright.

“You are,” Sierra told him.

He glanced over at his wife, his eyes steely with anger. “Angie, this is your doing.”

Her mother's eyes were steely, too. “Having a strong-willed, assertive, feisty daughter is
my
doing?”

“This Beautiful Mountain crapola is your doing.”

The attorney for the school district poked his head out into the hall.

“Is she feeling better now?” he asked Sierra's father.

“I'm feeling fine now, thank you,” Sierra said.

“Then the superintendent would like you to come back in so that we can finish this up.”

Sierra led the way back into the hearing room. She didn't look to see if her father was following her, or to monitor what expression he had on his face.

In the end, her father would do whatever he chose to do.

“Mr. Shepard, you were about to present some new information for my consideration,” the superintendent said once Sierra and her mother were seated again. Her father remained standing in front of the table.

“I have here in my briefcase,” her father said, “some highly relevant news reports.”

Sierra stared down at her lap.

“News reports about how other school districts across the country with strict and absolute zero-tolerance policies have handled similar cases.”

She let out her breath.

“In Tennessee: exception made for a student who had a toy gun in a Civil War diorama. In Minnesota: exception made for a student who brought in a razor blade to cut out paper snowflakes for a collage project in art class. In Oregon: exception made for a student who had her mother's prescription medication in the wrong lunch bag by mistake.”

He paused for effect.

“In the wrong lunch bag by mistake,” he repeated. “I have seven more cases I could present, instances in which sanity and common sense prevailed over bureaucratic rigidity and foolish face-saving by school officials.”

Here her father did look directly at Mr. Besser with a barely restrained smirk.

“If you'd like, I can continue sharing them with you.”

“That won't be necessary,” Mr. Van Ek said. “Thank you for your very helpful research, Mr. Shepard. Mr. Besser, do you have anything that you would like to add before I make my ruling in this case?”

Mr. Besser didn't look at Sierra's father; he looked directly at Sierra, a long inscrutable gaze, and then rose to face Mr. Van Ek.

“I believed, and continue to believe, that I had no option under my school's stated policies—policies, I repeat, that were consented to in writing by every student and every parent at this school—no option but to enforce those policies conscientiously to the letter of the law. If ‘zero tolerance' means anything, it has to mean precisely that, however lax other school districts may have been in their interpretation: zero tolerance.
Zero
tolerance.”

Maybe now Sierra's father would wave that other news report in Mr. Besser's plump, bland, self-satisfied face.

“But,” Mr. Besser said, “I can understand and appreciate the grounds for ruling otherwise in this particular case, especially given the outstanding contributions of this particular student. So I will respect your ruling, Mr. Van Ek, whatever it might be.”

Mr. Van Ek nodded judiciously.

“Thank you, Mr. Besser. While my office has the right to review the arguments put forward here for seven days before handing down a ruling, I don't see any benefit in prolonging the resolution of this unfortunate case.”

Sierra willed her heart to keep on beating. Was there hope for her after all?

“I believe that the new zero-tolerance policies put in place under Tom Besser's leadership of Longwood Middle School have been significantly responsible for making this school one of the highest-performing middle schools in the state of Colorado.”

Mr. Van Ek didn't look toward Sierra and her parents as he spoke in defense of all that Mr. Besser had done.

So next Monday Sierra would be starting at Braxton Country Day School, if her father could expedite the admission and registration process in her case. Which she had no doubt he could do. She didn't know if she could make good on her threat to force him to let her attend Beautiful Mountain.

“But I also believe,” Mr. Van Ek said, “that we should follow the precedents presented to us by Mr. Shepard from our peer districts and permit some very few exceptions. Indeed, Mr. Besser, I would urge you to craft a more carefully worded policy that makes clear that zero tolerance will not apply to accidental violations when the student takes immediate steps to notify school officials of the mistake, as Sierra Shepard did in this case.”

He paused.

“Sierra can stay at Longwood Middle School. She should receive no academic penalties for the time she has already been absent from class, and she should be given every opportunity to make up the work she was forced to miss so that she can continue in her record of outstanding academic achievement.”

It was over.

Her mother, who had been gripping Sierra's hand throughout Mr. Van Ek's speech, swept her into a hug.

Her father was grinning. He had, after all, won, and winning was what he loved more than anything else in the world.

No, not more than he loved Sierra. For her, he had given up the exquisite pleasure of squishing Mr. Besser like a bug. Her mother was right. Love was still the chink in her father's armor.

She watched her father shake Mr. Van Ek's hand and then offer his hand to Mr. Besser as well. Winners could afford to be generous. He even gave Mr. Besser a playful slap on the shoulder, as if in promise that he held no hard feelings toward the man he had been about to ruin.