Zero Tolerance (7 page)

Once Em had left, Sierra snatched up Cornflake and carried the cat to the couch. Cornflake's lazy, contented purr seeped into her chest. She felt more tired than she had ever been before in her life.

 

13

 

Sierra reported to the office the next morning fifteen minutes before the first bell. If Ms. Lin or Mr. Besser said she could go back to class, she wanted to arrive at first period early so that she could talk to her accelerated language arts teacher and find out what assignments she had missed.

Ms. Lin looked up, wooden-faced, as Sierra came through the door. Until two days ago, she would at least have given Sierra a tight-lipped version of her parent smile.

“You can go on back.” Ms. Lin nodded in the direction of the suspension room.

Maybe Mr. Besser wasn't in yet; he might be too busy talking to reporters himself. Should Sierra ask Ms. Lin if she could wait for him here?

“Go on,” Ms. Lin said. “Go.” She could have been shooing a dog away from her flower beds.

Didn't Ms. Lin watch TV? Didn't she know how bad Longwood Middle School was looking right now? By the time Sierra had gone to bed, 482 people had posted comments on the three local news Web sites; of those, only four people—four!—had thought the school had done the right thing.

At breakfast that morning her father hadn't given her any specific instructions about what to do. He had just said, “I know one middle school principal who must be feeling like a royal, class-A jerk this morning.” Only he hadn't said “jerk.”

Sierra didn't dare disobey Ms. Lin. She started down the hallway—surely, Mr. Besser would come find her there once he arrived at school. Then she heard the main office door open, followed by the sound of Mr. Besser's booming voice.

“Cold out there! Let's hope the snow holds off until after dismissal.”

She turned around.

“Mr. Besser?”

One look at the muscles tightening in his jaw, and she could feel the hopeful smile freezing on her face.

“Sierra.”

He took two steps toward her.

“You can tell your father,” he said, “that he has destroyed any chance he might have had of avoiding next Friday's hearing. We might have been able to work something out”—he certainly hadn't said any such thing yesterday—“but now, with media from all around the country leaping all over this thing, our hands are tied.
Tied.
Did you hear that?”

Sierra made herself nod.

“Ask your father if he's ever heard of
behind-the-scenes
negotiations. Ask him if he's ever heard of settling things
off camera
. Will you do that for me?”

Sierra nodded again.

She wanted to say,
Did you check the Internet? 482 comments? Four for you, 478 for me?

But she had never said a rude thing to a grownup in her life, and she didn't know how to start now. She needed Tiffany. But Tiffany's in-school suspension had ended yesterday.

Without another word, Mr. Besser went into his inner sanctum and shut the door.

“Well, don't just stand there gaping like a goldfish,” Ms. Lin snapped.

Sierra fled to the suspension room before Ms. Lin could gloat over the hot tears that stung her eyes and threatened to escape down her burning cheeks.

*   *   *

“Hey.”

Luke dropped down in the seat beside her. “Are you crying?”

“No!” Sierra jerked her hand across her eyes. She tried to change the subject. “Isn't Mitch coming today?”

“He just got a one-day suspension. Because he told them I started it.”

“
Did
you start it?”

“Depends on what you mean by starting it. I hit him first. But he said something to me before that.”

“What did he say?”

“Something I didn't feel like listening to. You
are
crying.”

Sierra gave up pretending and pulled a tissue from her purse to blow her nose. “I'm just so mad. My father said they'd have to back down because I was on TV and all.”

She wondered if Luke had seen her on the news.

“But Mr. Besser said now they can't back down.
Because
I was on TV. He said all these awful things I'm supposed to tell my father. Why doesn't he call him and say them himself?”

“You were on TV?”

So Luke hadn't watched it.

“Uh-huh. And, like, almost five hundred people wrote in on the TV Web sites, and they all said Mr. Besser is an idiot. All of them. So how come he still thinks he's right?”

“Because he's an idiot?”

Sierra couldn't laugh.

“What will I do if I really get expelled? I'll never get into college. I'll never get a job.”

“Wrong.”

“How would
you
feel if
you
were expelled?”

“For something stupid? I wouldn't care.”

“You would. Anybody would!”

Ms. Lin stuck her head in the door. “Keep it down, you two. This is supposed to be a
suspension
. If you can't talk quietly, there'll be no talking at all. And you, Mr. Bishop, you put that thing away.” She pointed to the Game Boy that Luke had placed in front of him on the table. Then she gave Sierra and Luke a final glare before disappearing down the hallway.

“Bitch,” Sierra said under her breath.

It was the first time in her life she had ever said that word.

“Whoa, Shep-turd,” Luke said. “Somebody is developing an attitude.”

“That's right,” Sierra said. “Somebody is.”

 

14

 

Sierra didn't make any more note cards about Mayan temples that morning.

What was the point?

If she was really going to be expelled, driven from Longwood Middle School forever in disgrace because she had grabbed the wrong lunch off the kitchen counter, she wouldn't be handing in her Mayan culture report for social studies, or writing her
Lord of the Flies
paper for accelerated language arts, or firing her pot in the art-class kiln.

It was Friday now; the pots were going to be fired today.

Sierra thought of her pot. She had worked so hard on it, shaping each clay coil with such precision and care. Now it was sitting on the classroom counter abandoned, as the other pots, made by the nonsuspended students, were carried away to be glazed and fired so they'd last forever like the Mayan pottery she wasn't writing about anymore in her Mayan culture report.

For the second time that morning, Sierra's eyes stung with tears.

Luke looked up from whatever he was killing and dismembering in his game.

“What is it now?”

“I didn't get to fire my pot today,” Sierra told him.

Luke shook his head as if to clear some obstruction from his ears that was keeping him from hearing her properly. “
You
smoke
pot?
”

“Not that kind of pot! The clay pot I was making in art class. Today was the day it was supposed to go to the kiln to be fired.”

Luke still looked puzzled. “And you're crying about it?”

Sierra nodded. “I loved my pot.”

“You loved your pot,” Luke repeated. “Okay.”

“You don't love anything about school, do you?” Not that it was any of her business, but if she wasn't going to be trying to keep up with her schoolwork anymore, what else was there to do except make herself sad over her poor, orphaned pot or talk to Luke Bishop?

“Can't say that I do.”

“Did you ever? Like in kindergarten? Did you like being in the Pilgrim play at Thanksgiving? Or making a cast of your hand in plaster of paris to give your parents at Christmas?”

“I liked one day,” Luke said. “It was called Backwards Day. We put our clothes on backwards, and zipped up our coats in the back and not the front. The parent helpers zipped them up for us, because we couldn't reach in the back. And the whole day went in backwards order. We started with resting time instead of ending with resting time, and we ended with the Pledge of Allegiance instead of starting with it. I thought it was totally cool, Backwards Day.”

“So what happened after that? To make you stop liking school?”

Luke shrugged. “The rest was all Forwards Days. I don't do so well on Forwards Days.”

“But you're smart,” Sierra said.

“How would you know?”

“I can tell. The way you talk. You talk like you're smart. So you could do well in school if you tried.”

“Maybe I don't want to try. Or maybe I can't try. My parents had me tested back in second grade. For ADD. Because I could never settle down and listen to the teacher droning on about subtraction or the names for all the different kinds of clouds.”

“Nimbus. Cirrus. Cumulus,” Sierra recited. “Don't you like to know the names of things? Do you just want to go around saying ‘cloud'? Or ‘big white puffy cloud'?”

“It was the way the teachers did it. Like the only reason to learn about clouds was to tell it back to them on a quiz so you could get a grade on your report card, and maybe if you got enough good grades on your report card, your parents would take you to McDonald's and buy you a Happy Meal.”

“So did you have ADD? When they tested you?”

“They said I did. But maybe the teachers just had VBD.”

Sierra tried to decode what the initials could mean.

“Very boring disorder.”

Sierra laughed.

“Did they give you medication?” she asked.

“My parents got in a big fight about it. My father was like, ‘You're not going to put my kid on drugs just for being a hundred percent all-American boy.' And my mother was like, ‘We have to do something, I can't take this anymore.'”

“So who won?”

“Nobody. The medication didn't help anyway, and then my parents split up. You know how parents tell their kids, when they're getting divorced, ‘Now, remember, honey, this isn't because of you, it's about Mommy and Daddy'? Well, guess what. It was because of me. Because they couldn't stand fighting about me. Are your parents divorced?”

“No. My friend Lexi's parents are, though. She lives during the week with her mom, and on the weekends with her dad.”

“I live with my dad. Because my mom really couldn't take it. She wasn't kidding. She married someone else, and they moved to California and have two kids now. I see her for a couple of weeks in the summer, and then she sends me back. It's okay.”

“Does your dad care that you're suspended?”

“Not really. He would have fought someone, too, for calling him a name.”

“What did Mitch call you?”

“What are you, a lawyer like your dad?”

It was the second time she had asked Luke that question and he hadn't answered.

“Besides,” Sierra went on, “
you
call people names. You call me names.”

“Shep-turd isn't really a name.”

“No?”

“It's like—a play on words. It's supposed to be funny.”

“Ha ha,” Sierra said.

“Okay, I won't call you that anymore. Didn't you ever call someone a name? Even just behind their back?”

Sierra thought for a minute. “No.” It was hard to believe, but she had never called anyone a name, ever.

“Except when you called Lintbag a bitch.”

“Oh,” Sierra said. She gave Luke a small smile. “I guess there was that.”

 

15

 

Sierra hadn't brought her lunch—she had really thought she'd be back eating in the cafeteria with her friends, constantly interrupted by all the kids who wanted to tell her how they had seen her on TV. So when Ms. Lin came into the suspension room at the start of 4A, Sierra got up from the table and walked with Luke to the door.

“They're all yours,” Ms. Lin told Mrs. Saunders.

Mrs. Saunders gave Sierra a reassuring smile as she got up from her desk, which was next to Ms. Lin's. It was obvious that Ms. Lin was the head secretary and Mrs. Saunders was her underling. What a fun job that would be, under Ms. Lin's thumb all day, doing whatever she told you to do and smiling while you did it.

Mrs. Saunders looked older than Ms. Lin, her hair gray and spiky in a way that made her look as if she could be funny and fun.

“I'm sorry about what happened,” Mrs. Saunders said to Sierra while the three of them were heading down the hall.

The kindness in her voice caught Sierra off guard, but Sierra was not going to let her eyes start filling with tears in the hallway of Longwood Middle School.

“Thanks,” Sierra managed to say.

“I hope something can be worked out,” Mrs. Saunders said.

“Me too.” Not that Sierra could see any way that could be possible.

As they entered the cafeteria, Sierra passed Sandy sitting on her stool, yelling “Keep it down!” to some kids who were getting too rowdy. How different everything would have been if Sandy had told her to put the knife back in the lunch bag and call her parents to come right away and get it.

Colin's lunch period was 4A. Sierra saw him before he saw her. He was sitting at a table by the window—actually, the same table where Sierra and her friends ate lunch every day during 5B. She made a mental note of the chair where he was sitting, the chair closest to the window.

As if drawn by her gaze, he looked in her direction.

Then he was getting up from his seat and walking toward her.

“Hey, Sierra,” he said as she reached the front of the lunch line.

Ms. Lin wouldn't have let her talk to anyone; Sierra was sure of that. But Mrs. Saunders didn't do anything to stop Colin from continuing.

“I made a petition.”

Sierra saw that Colin held in his hand several sheets of lined paper. The top one was completely covered with names.

Colin read to her: “We, the undersigned, believe that it is unfair to punish a student who brought a knife to school by mistake and turned it in as soon as she found it.”