She leaned across the counter and whispered, “Since we have a new principal. He’s big on protocol and accountability. Insists we call him Dr. Matthews because he has a Ph.D. in child development. Doesn’t have kids of his own, so he’s an authority. In his opinion, anyway.”
Frank was in a chair by Paula’s desk, clutching his crushed fez to his chest and rocking. She shepherded him out to me without touching him once, a tour de force performance worthy of a theremin virtuoso. Before passing him off, Paula stooped to make herself eyebrow-to-eye level with Frank. “We’ll lunch together soon, okay, honey?”
“Pip pip,” Frank said.
She straightened up and said to me, “Dr. Matthews says Frank can’t come back to school until Frank’s mom comes in to meet with him.”
“The new principal is a doctor?” Frank asked. “My grandfather was a doctor. He stitched soldiers back together in the trenches during World War I so they could go home and be with their loved ones again.”
“Different kind of doctor,” Paula said.
In the car, I asked Frank what had happened to the old principal. “Paula told me he went to a better place,” he said.
Oh, dear. “What better place?” I asked anyway.
“Istanbul,” he said. “Or Constantinople. I forget which.”
I decided to let it go. “So, what happened to your fez?” I asked, checking him in the mirror as I did so. He cradled its battered carcass and started making a horrible sound, like the shrieks of a clubbed walrus. I’d never heard Frank cry before so it took me a minute to realize that was what he was doing. I didn’t waste time pulling over to comfort him. The kid needed to go home.
FRANK HAD STOPPED crying by the time we pulled into the driveway, but it was a struggle getting him out of the backseat as he’d gone all statue-of-a-deposed-dictator on me again. Somehow I managed to drag him out and lean him against the car. I was trying to boost him up over my shoulder when Xander appeared. “What’s up, pal?” he asked Frank.
Frank broke away from me and stumbled over to Xander, pressed his face against his shoulder, and said, “I don’t belong here. I want to go home.”
“You are home, my friend,” Xander said.
“No, I’m not, no I’m not, no I’M NOT!” The howling started again.
Before I could fill him in, Xander swept Frank up and ran into the house with him. I followed. He lay the kid across his bed and I wrapped Frank up tight in a blanket. Then Xander sat on the edge of the bed and took him across his lap. He rocked and hummed something to him I couldn’t quite make out. Frank stopped making the walrus sounds and said, “‘Over the Rainbow.’ Louis B. Mayer tried to cut that number from The Wizard of Oz because he thought it slowed the story down.” Then he fell asleep.
Xander eased Frank onto the mattress and I wedged pillows around him. “Nice touch with the blanket,” Xander murmured. “What the heck happened?”
I felt my face flush dangerously. Why was Xander the only one who ever seemed to appreciate me? “There’s a new principal at Frank’s school,” I said.
“Uh-oh.”
We backpedaled into the hall and found Mimi just outside Frank’s door, pressed against the wall and looking as terrified as a jumper on a ledge working up the nerve to end all the suffering once and for all. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Frank got sent home,” I said. “They wouldn’t say why and he was too upset to tell me. Paula in the office said to give you this.”
Mimi opened the note and read it in front of us. She put the paper back in the envelope when she was done. “My life was so much easier before I had Frank,” she said.
WE LEFT XANDER with Frank while Mimi changed into her Audrey Hepburn ensemble and we drove back to the school. It wasn’t an outfit I would have chosen, but I think she wore it in solidarity for her son. I was glad to see she left the head wrap and glasses at home this time.
Since I wasn’t a custodial parent Paula “showed me to the waiting room,” which meant she set me up on boxes filled with Xerox paper in a storage room, pointed to the air vent it shared with Dr. Matthews’s office, then held a finger to her lips. I nodded.
The guy had the kind of piercing, self-satisfied voice that carried well. Good for clandestine listening-in, but undoubtedly hellish for anyone trapped in an elevator or an office or an area code with him. Mimi was a lot harder to hear, but I was able to make out enough words here and there to follow the conversation. Seems our darling Fiona had asked Frank if she could try on his fez. I could imagine Frank’s face as he handed it over, his sweet, blank expression only those closest to him could read as delight. I could see him thinking maybe Fiona wasn’t like the others after all.
Fiona took the fez, threw it down, and stomped it. When Frank snatched it back she incited the mob of bullies she’d gathered to chase Frank around the playground, trying to grab it again.
We talk, and then we join hands and run from our enemies.