Zero Tolerance (3 page)

Had her mother even noticed that she had taken Sierra's lunch? Had she thought to herself,
Wait, what about the knife?

Apparently not.

Her mother didn't notice things like that.

Her father did.

Just as the dismissal bell rang, Sierra's mother came bursting into the office, coatless despite the January weather, her frizzy hair standing out from her head like a wild halo.

The first thing she did was gather Sierra into a hug, holding her so close that Sierra could feel her mother's heart throbbing.

“I'm sorry I couldn't come sooner,” she told Sierra. “There was no one else to watch the children.”

Sierra couldn't help herself. A gulping sob shook her shoulders. It had been too awful. Kept out of all her afternoon classes. The way Ms. Lin had called her “missy.” That terrible trapped look in Mr. Besser's eyes as if he might really be ready to expel her—to
expel
her—for one tiny, infinitesimal moment of carelessness as she had grabbed her lunch off the kitchen counter.

Her mother held Sierra for a long moment. Then she turned to Ms. Lin. “We cannot wait until tomorrow morning to speak to Mr. Besser. I need to see him now.”

“I'm afraid that's impossible,” Ms. Lin said, making a big show of busying herself at her computer. “Mr. Besser is in a meeting.”

“Where is his meeting?”

Ms. Lin didn't answer.

“He's in his office, isn't he? I'm sorry, Ms. Lin, but he is not sending this poor child home to worry about this ridiculousness all night long.”

Sierra had never seen her mother so angry. Before Ms. Lin had time to leap up and block the door—if she would have done such a thing, which Sierra doubted, even on this bizarrely topsy-turvy day—Sierra's mother had pushed her way into the inner office.

“Stop,” Ms. Lin called after her. “You can't just barge in there like that.”

Sierra didn't follow after her mother. She couldn't bear to see the kindly, affectionate light gone from Mr. Besser's eyes when he looked at her. She lowered herself back down onto the hard plastic chair where she had already spent her long, miserable afternoon.

Two minutes later, her mother was back, eyes flaming, cheeks burning.

“Let's go,” she told Sierra. Then she turned to Ms. Lin. “Sierra's father and I will see you tomorrow.”

Even if Sierra's mother couldn't fix this hideous mess, her father could. Her father had to.

 

5

 

When Sierra turned on her cell phone in the car to check her messages, she had three texts.

Celeste:
Why weren't you in French?

Lexi:
What did Sandy the lunch Nazi do to you?

Em:
Call me.

Sierra decided she would call her friends, not just text them, but waited until she was upstairs in her bedroom with the door closed.

She called Em first.

“What's going on?” Em asked.

Sierra could hardly bring herself to say it. “Ms. Lin and Mr. Besser? They're making a big deal about this.”

“What kind of a big deal?”

“I don't know. Just a big deal. Like, they wouldn't let me go to any of my classes, and they called my mom to come get me. My dad's going to go ballistic when he finds out. Em, what will I do if they expel me?”

“Get real. They're not going to expel someone like
you
,” Em pointed out. “Not for something like this, whatever the rule says.”

Sierra was lying on her bed, her beautiful four-poster bed with the old-fashioned blue-and-white fabric canopy like the ones in Colonial Williamsburg. Her cat, Cornflake, was lying there with her. It was hard to believe that anything too bad could happen when an overweight orange tabby was purring on her chest, one lazy paw stretched out across her shoulder.

“I know,” she said, trying to sound confident. “It's just über-annoying. Now I have to make up the French quiz and the science lab, and it's, you know, one more thing.”

“Colin asked me where you were in French class,” Em said.

Sierra jerked up so abruptly that Cornflake jumped off her chest and settled himself nearby on the blue-patterned log cabin quilt.

“Did he really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“He said, ‘Where's Sierra?'”

Sierra laughed. “How did he look when he said it?”

“Like he always looks. His voice was quiet—you know how it's almost whispery, sort of?”

Sierra did. His soft voice made him sound not wimpy, but soulful and poetic.

She felt embarrassed asking the next question, but she couldn't resist. “I mean, did he look worried?”

There was a silence: Sierra knew Em was carefully considering the question. Em never said anything that wasn't as accurate as she could make it.

“Not worried as much as puzzled. Because you were there for language arts and math this morning, and then you weren't there at French.”

Sierra felt a twinge of disappointment. She didn't want Colin asking about her out of idle curiosity.

“What did you tell him?”

“I just said you had some stuff you had to do in the office.”

“Then what did he say?”

“He said, ‘But she's missing a quiz.'”

That sounded more like being worried than being puzzled. She could hear him saying it, too.
But she's missing a quiz.
Colin had definitely been concerned, concerned about
her
.

Sierra called Lexi next.

“You should have just kept the stupid knife in the lunch bag,” Lexi moaned. “Em told you, and I thought so, too. Then none of this would have happened.”

“Well, you were right, I guess.”

“Lin is a bitch,” Lexi said.

A few hours ago, Sierra would have said,
Oh, she's not so bad
. And “bitch” was such an awful, ugly word. But right now it seemed pretty accurate.

“You know what she did to me once?” Lexi went on. “I was running down the hall by the front office—not completely running, but going pretty fast. And she made me stop. Okay, I can see making me stop. But then she said, ‘Now go back to the library, and let me see you walk down the hall like a young lady.' It was so demeaning. Like I was two. And the bell rang, and she still kept watching me to see if I was walking slowly enough to please her, and I was late for pre-algebra.”

“She called me ‘missy,'” Sierra confessed.

“I hate her,” Lexi said.

“I hate her, too.”

Sierra didn't feel like calling Celeste. Celeste's silence at the lunch table had felt so superior, even smug. But if Sierra didn't get back to Celeste, Celeste would just keep texting.

“You weren't in French,” Celeste said as soon as she answered her phone. “And I heard you weren't in art or science either.”

“Well, you know Ms. Lin.” Sierra tried to put the best face on it. “She's such a stickler for rules. She just has this huge thing about them, so I had to sit there forever to wait for Mr. Besser, and then I couldn't really talk to him anyway.”

“Are they going to let you go to school tomorrow?”

The question punched Sierra like a fist in the stomach. What if she didn't get to go to class tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that? What if she really did get expelled and never returned to any of her classes ever again?

She couldn't let herself think that way.

“Of course!”

“Then why wouldn't they let you go to class this afternoon?”

“Because Ms. Lin's crazy.” Sierra still couldn't bring herself to use Lexi's word. “And Mr. Besser was busy in a meeting with this other principal who was doing a tour of our school to get ideas for his school.”

“Sierra,” Celeste said as if she were a grownup trying to get a child's attention. “Don't you get it? If anyone brings a knife to school,
for whatever reason
, they get expelled. You could get
expelled
for this.”

Sierra's chest tightened. What if Em was wrong and Celeste was right?

“Look,” Sierra snapped. “They're not going to expel someone for a total and complete mistake! Anyway, I've got to go. I have a ton of homework.”

“Okay,” Celeste said mildly. But then she asked, “So you'll be at choir?”

Sierra
wasn't
going to be at choir tomorrow morning. During the before-school choir practice, she was going to be in a conference with Mr. Besser and her parents. But she couldn't bear to say that to Celeste.

“Sure,” Sierra said with false bravado. “See you then.”

Maybe she'd be done with the meeting in time to get to choir after all.

Or maybe she'd never be allowed to go to a choir practice ever again.

She pulled Cornflake close to her after she hung up the phone, wanting the comfort of the cat's warm, plump body cuddled against her, but Cornflake struggled out of Sierra's embrace and stalked away.

 

6

 

Sierra had thought her dad might come home early—she knew her mother had called him at the office—but he stayed at work even later than usual, so Sierra and her mother had dinner alone. She heard his car pulling into the garage at half past eight and hurried downstairs to see him.

Before he even took off his coat he said, “Sorry I'm late. We're just two days away from trial on the Wilson case. I had to take care of some things tonight in order to clear my calendar for tomorrow morning so that I can go into school with you and your mother and see what the hell is going on there.”

“I saved you some taco casserole,” Sierra's mother told him.

He waved her away. “We had dinner delivered at the office. Sierra, honey, you tell me everything that happened. Okay? Every single thing.”

Sierra's mom hung his coat for him in the hall closet as he settled himself at the kitchen table and opened his laptop to take notes.

Sierra couldn't decide if she felt relieved or even more frightened. Her dad was an attorney, one of the best in the city, or at least that's what everybody always told her, including her dad himself. But the grim set of his jaw and the way he drew his eyebrows together made him look as if he was readying himself for a battle, and not a little battle, either.

Sierra told him how she had found the ham sandwich and then realized she had the wrong lunch. She told him how she had spilled out the entire contents of the lunch bag and seen the knife.

He stopped her. “You should have called me right then. That's what you have a cell phone for. Not to text your friends all night long, but to call us in case of an emergency.”

Sierra felt as if she were facing her father in the courtroom, waiting to see if he was going to stop her for cross-examination after every single sentence.

“We're not allowed to use cell phones at school,” she explained. “That's the rule.”

“None of this would have happened if you'd called me first.”

Sierra was curious now. “What would you have told me to do?”

“I'd have told you to put the fool thing away before anyone else saw it, and I'd have sent your mother over to school to switch lunches with you immediately.”

“I couldn't have left work like that,” Sierra's mother put in. “Not in the middle of lunch. It's our busiest time of the day. As it was, I couldn't even get away until almost three.”

“So this is what we ended up with instead? Hell, I'd have left my meeting and hightailed it over to your school myself. Okay. Go on. What happened next?”

“Well, I took the knife to Sandy—she's the lunch lady—and she went with me to the office, and then we gave it to Ms. Lin—she's the school secretary.”

Her father interrupted her again. “And neither of those women had the sense to have you call your parents to come get the knife right away, before all this got blown out of proportion? A murderer gets to make a phone call, but a seventh grader who took the wrong lunch to school by mistake isn't instructed about her legal rights?”

He was typing furiously on his computer as he spoke.

Sierra told him about Mr. Besser's arrival in the office with the other principal and the conversation the two men had had about Longwood's zero-tolerance policy for weapons and drugs.

Her father stopped typing.

“Oh, this is bad.”

Sierra's heart clogged her throat. “It is?”

“I know Besser. My office did some work for his wife's business years ago. He's a decent enough guy. A bit in love with himself, as principals tend to be, a man surrounded all day by a bunch of women, spending most of his time bossing around short people.” Her dad gave a mirthless chuckle.

Sierra would have expected her father to want her to have respect for school principals in general, and her school principal in particular. This was the first time she had ever heard him talk about Mr. Besser in this way. But it was also the first time Mr. Besser had ever done anything to upset him.

Her father continued: “But, as I said, he's decent and he means well, and I give him credit for turning the school around, reclaiming it from the druggie kids and their loser parents, and making it a place where smart kids get the education they deserve.”

Sierra's dad raked his hand through his thick silver hair. His hair had turned completely gray before he was forty.

“But now he can't back down, don't you see? Because the other guy has heard him do all his grandstanding. Now he can't do what any reasonable person with half a brain and half a conscience would do and forget all about this. Because he's painted himself into a corner.”

“The other principal seemed pretty nice,” Sierra said timidly.

“Nice has nothing to do with it.”

Sierra remembered that trapped look on Mr. Besser's face. Now she saw that same look on her father's face, too.