Jennifer would’ve liked to deny this, but instead she looked down at the notebook, closed the cover on its words. Jennifer wishes Margaret didn’t know Megan’s name.
Her phone rings in her pocket and she checks the screen and sees the number for Milo’s school. She pauses, panting a little from exertion, and holds on to a small tree. Right here the trail’s at the very edge of the bluff, and it’s a long way down. She makes herself wait one more ring before she answers, makes herself say a calm hello, as though to behave as if something bad had happened would guarantee it had.
But something bad has happened. Milo is fine, Milo is fine, but he’s harmed another boy. “I don’t understand,” Jennifer says, after the first description, and so Miss Amber explains again. Her Southern accent has an edge during the second telling, sweetness that isn’t sweet. “But I don’t understand why he would do that,” Jennifer says.
There’s a shrug in Miss Amber’s voice. “He says the other child took his toy, but of course that’s no excuse.”
“Of course not,” Jennifer says blankly.
“We’d like you to come pick him up,” Miss Amber says. “He’ll have to go home for the rest of the day. We don’t tolerate this kind of violence. That’s our policy.”
Jennifer has an impulse to ask what kind of violence they do tolerate, but she doesn’t. She assures Miss Amber that she’ll be there soon, and then she stands there clutching the tree in a daze. What Milo did today was stab another child in the face with a pencil. “Thankfully,” Miss Amber said, “not in his eye.”
Yes, thankfully not in his eye. But why at all? Why would her tiny child, her baby, her sweet, sweet boy, put a hole in another child’s face? Because she spanked him today? This is what she knows—she with her repository of secrets, her comforting, healing touch: that none of us is good, as much as we might want to be. And yet somehow she believed that Milo would be the exception. Now, like everyone else, he’s an inflictor of damage. He’s left a scar.
When she gets out of her car in the preschool parking lot, Sebastian is a row ahead of her, getting out of his. She stops, surprised and unnerved, and hoping his presence doesn’t mean that Ben was the victim of Milo’s attack. Ben and Milo proclaim themselves best friends at every opportunity. Again and again Jennifer and Megan have shared affectionate smiles at the sight of the two boys whispering together, one with his arm around the other’s waist. If Milo had to stab somebody, she would rather it be Ethan, a pushy and obnoxious child who runs up to her at pickup for the sole purpose of giving her an animal’s predatory grin, baring his sharp and tiny teeth before darting away. She’d like to stand here a moment, let Sebastian walk into the school ahead of her, but that would be cowardly, and even if she waited chances are slim that she could avoid him completely in the narrow hallways, crowded with cubbies and bins of picture books. So she walks, at a normal pace, and before he reaches the gate into the playground he hears her footsteps and turns. Then she has to keep walking toward him, with him watching her, which she doesn’t like.
“Well, this is a surprise,” he says, when she’s very close. “Was it Milo?”
“Was it Ben?” she answers.
“With the pencil in his face? Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
He shrugs. “You didn’t do it,” he says. “I assume you’re not at home doing weapons training with school supplies.”
She smiles, against her will. “No,” she says. “But I’m still sorry. I can’t imagine why he’d go after Ben. He loves Ben.”
“We hurt the ones we love,” he says. “Let’s go survey the aftermath.”
Jennifer realizes, following him inside, that she’s relieved it’s Sebastian and not Megan who’s come to deal with this. She’s afraid Megan will be terribly upset, will take this as a sign that both burgeoning friendships should be quashed. Sebastian, though, seems calm. We hurt the ones we love. Maybe he takes that for granted.