Sebastian walks right into Miss Amber’s classroom, but Jennifer puts her head in the door, trying not to feel like she herself is the guilty one. Milo isn’t in the room. Ben is playing trucks in the corner with another child, a Band-Aid cross high on his left cheek. Sebastian crouches next to him and picks up a truck. As far as Jennifer can tell he’s not asking about the incident. He crashes his truck into Ben’s, and then Ben crashes his into Sebastian’s. On the other side of the room Miss Amber is enmeshed in a hug from an adoring little girl. She looks up and sees Jennifer and her expression changes. As she comes over to Jennifer, her face is grave. “Milo’s in Miss Helen’s office,” she says. Miss Helen is the preschool director, a woman in her sixties who is either sweet or stupid or very cleverly disguised. “What happened?” Jennifer says, because it’s her obligation to know.
Miss Amber holds up both hands as if to forestall attack. “I didn’t see it,” she says. “First thing I knew, Ben was crying and his face was bleeding. Milo says he did it but he won’t apologize. I’ve seen nothing wrong between them. They play a little rough every now and then, but that’s just boys. I’m surprised Milo would be so aggressive. Has something been going on at home?”
Jennifer hates this question: the teacher’s polite way of asking how you’ve fucked up your child. She got it frequently with Zoe, who behaved and tested well but often half-assed her homework. Sometimes Jennifer suspected Zoe of doing it on purpose—her messy unfinished algebra or partially plagiarized essay on Huck Finn—so that Jennifer would have to have these conversations. So that again and again she’d have to lie. “No,” she’d say. “Nothing’s going on at home.” She says it now, and for once she’s not lying. “I don’t know why he’d do that.”
Miss Amber makes a moue of sympathy, which may or may not be genuine. “Well, it’s probably just a one-time thing,” she says.
“Either that or he’s a sociopath,” Jennifer says. Miss Amber looks like she doesn’t quite know how to respond to this, so Jennifer smiles, to signal that she’s joking, and Miss Amber makes a sound that gestures toward laughter, and Jennifer says she’ll talk to Milo and withdraws into the hall. Once, after Milo had been in the classroom about a month, Jennifer arrived unseen and heard Miss Amber saying to the children, “You’re killing me.”
Inside Miss Helen’s office, Milo is slouched in a child-size plastic chair with his arms folded across his chest. Her baby, her boy-child. Her reward. He radiates defiance, and Jennifer can tell from the edge in the director’s voice that she’s been trying and failing to inspire remorse. “We’ve been talking about what happened,” Miss Helen says.
“What happened, Milo?” Jennifer asks.
“Didn’t Miss Amber tell you?” Miss Helen asks.
“She told me what happened,” Jennifer says. “I was asking him why.”
“Well, he hasn’t told us that. We’ve asked, but he refuses to say.”
Milo slides from the chair to the floor and picks two cars out of a plastic bin. In an echo of Ben, he crashes the cars together. “Ow, ow, ow,” one car cries, and the other says, “Ha ha ha,” and smashes down again. She could tell him not to smash the cars like that, not to act out the infliction of pain. She could make it a permanent rule. But then he’d just do it when she wasn’t there to see. Is that all morality is? Concealment?
Miss Helen stands up behind her desk as if to signal that she wants the both of them to get the hell out. “Milo has refused to apologize. I’ve explained we need to control our bodies. We need to be sorry when we’ve hurt someone.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Jennifer says. Milo suddenly launches himself up from the floor and into Jennifer. He smashes his face into her leg and clings with both hands to her jeans. He growls. Jennifer steadies herself and puts a hand on his head. “I’ll talk to him,” she says again, and then she crouches and picks Milo up—awkwardly, he’s getting so big—and hustles him out of there as fast as she can. He’s still clinging, still intermittently growling. “Milo, Milo, Milo,” she says into his ear. “Why did you do it?”
“I didn’t,” he says, ferociously, as if he believes it. Maybe he can persuade her to believe it, too.
How could he stab his friend in the face, her sunny, innocent creation? How could he do that? Because he’s hers? What she should do is drive away from this Mountain, flee the scene. Now there’s not just her reputation to escape but Milo’s as well, and in the next place there will be no preschools, no lunches, no playdates, so that no one can know them. No one can ever know them.
Back outside, she’s surprised to find Sebastian and Ben lounging on the playground, as if waiting for them. She assumes Sebastian wants to see Milo apologize, so she complies with this unstated request—crouching down, looking Milo seriously in the eye, pointing at Ben. At first he refuses, but she walks him over and makes him repeat the words until they approximate sincerity. Throughout this Ben twists from side to side, as if he finds the whole scene excruciating. When it’s over, he looks up at his dad. “Can we go to the playground?” he asks. “With them?”
“We’re on a playground.”
“No, the other playground. The one me and Milo like.”
Sebastian looks at Jennifer and shrugs. A master of ambiguity. It bothers her that Ben is so quick to forgive Milo, so recently his abuser. And yet she’s also glad. “Okay,” she says.