For the next week, she busied herself writing a grant proposal to the Walmart Foundation. She heard nothing else from Clay or Michelle. Nor did she answer Clay’s text. With varying degrees of success, she attempted to put both of them out of her mind.
Then Ruby came home from school and glumly announced that in the cafeteria that day, Mia had told Ruby that she wouldn’t be friends with her anymore unless Ruby threw out the remains of Mia’s lunch.
“What? Tell her to throw out her own frigging lunch!” cried Karen, shocked and outraged—possibly too much so. Karen had never been good at separating her own history of social rejections from those of her young daughter’s.
“I told her I didn’t want to,” Ruby continued. “So she got up and went to sit with Empriss and then she didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day.” Ruby made a sad-clown face.
“Well, that was a very mean thing for her to do,” said Karen, her upset now metastasizing into full-blown resentment at the entire Hernandez family—minus Mia’s tragic half sister, Juliana—even as a part of Karen wondered how Michelle would greet the news that Mia’s NBF, similar to Gisela and Juliana, lived in a shelter. With compassion? Further condemnation? “I don’t want you to talk to her anymore,” Karen went on. “Tomorrow I want you to play with someone else at recess and sit with someone else at lunch.”
“But there’s no one else to sit with,” said Ruby.
“What about Happy?” Karen heard herself invoke the name of one of the only other white girls in the class—a skinny thing with flyaway hair and buckteeth whose parents seemed strange and vacant-eyed and dressed as if they were in a movie or a play about nineteenth-century pioneers on the American frontier, or possibly a polygamous cult, the mother in long prairie skirts and high-necked lace blouses, the father in trousers with suspenders. Or maybe they were just hipsters. Karen had reached an age where she struggled to discern what was considered cool. But Ruby had mentioned in passing that Happy had reached the dizzying alphabetical heights of S-T on the leveled scale that all the teachers at Betts used to judge their students’ reading abilities. Or maybe it was T-U. Not that Happy was unique in the achievement. There was a sweet and taciturn African American girl named Essence who shared in the distinction. According to Ruby, Essence lived an hour and a half away from Betts and woke at five each morning so she wouldn’t be late for school. But given the physical distance between Ruby’s and Essence’s homes, Karen assumed that an outside-of-school friendship between the two would prove challenging. Or was that just an excuse? Was it the cultural distance between them that Karen assumed would present the largest obstacle?
Ruby scrunched up her face as if she’d just smelled something rotten and said, “Happy’s into girlie stuff like anime and My Little Pony.”
“My Little Pony is girlie,” said Karen, confused. “But Barbies aren’t?”
“Barbies are different.”
“Well, then, why don’t you sit with Zeke? You’ve been friends since kindergarten.”
“Mommy, I’m not going to eat lunch at the boys’ table!” Ruby rolled her eyes and shook her head as if her mother’s ignorance were almost beyond comment. Maybe it was.
Karen had always thought elementary-school scissors, with their rounded blades, were too dull to cut anything sturdier than a piece of construction paper. Until she learned otherwise, she’d also thought that Jayyden Price was just a boy who got mad when kids teased him; that is, a boy like any other boy, just a little madder and a little more troubled—and a lot more tragic. But that evening, Ruby reported in a tone that was more reportorial than frantic that Jayyden had tried to choke a boy in her class named Dashiell, then stabbed him with a scissors. And now Karen wasn’t so sure anymore. All of this had apparently happened in art class. “What? I don’t understand,” she said, hungry for a reason, or at least evidence of a provocation so outrageous that it would explain, if not justify, Jayyden’s anger. If there was no valid excuse, then Laura Collier and Evan Shaw weren’t conniving racists but overprotective realists, and it was possible that Karen’s daughter’s safety was at risk as well. “Why would Jayyden have done that?” she went on.
“Well, Dashiell accused Jayyden of stealing his Starburst,” said Ruby. “And Jayyden said he didn’t. And then Dashiell told him he didn’t believe him. And then Jayyden got mad and made fun of Dashiell for wearing boxer shorts, and Dashiell pushed him. Then they started fighting, and Jayyden put his arm around Dashiell’s neck and stuck the scissors into his arm.”
“Oh my God, that’s terrible! What did the teacher do?”
“She was screaming at them. They both had to go to the principal. Well, actually, Dashiell had to go to the nurse first because he was bleeding all over.”
Karen gripped Ruby’s arm and looked straight into her eyes. “Ruby, tell me the truth—has Jayyden ever bothered you?”
“Well, he’s usually pretty nice to me,” said Ruby. “But yesterday he did use the f-word.” She lowered her head and rounded her back. Though whether the stance was born of fear or embarrassment at having referenced a swearword, it was hard to know.
“How did he use it?” said Karen, alarm bells ringing. “What did he say?”
“He asked me what I was doing at recess. Because he said”—Ruby leaned in, so she could whisper—“he wanted to f-word with me.”
Karen felt her head grow light. Ruby was only a child—not exactly a trustworthy source or a reliable narrator. But the language was so specific, it was hard not to believe that she was repeating exactly what she’d heard. I want to fuck with you. Karen understood it to be some variation of the phrase I want to fuck you up. That is, mess with her, harm her. “But what do you think he meant?” she asked.
Ruby shrugged as if Karen had asked her to predict the weather on Friday and said, “I don’t know.”
“Well, did he seem like he was just kidding around? Was he mad at you about something?”
“Well, second period, I did tell him to leave Empriss alone, because he was making fun of her for not having her own bed.”
“That was sweet of you,” said Karen, her pride in her daughter’s defense of her impoverished classmate momentarily trumping her distress at Jayyden’s threat. Never mind Karen’s disbelief that someone in Jayyden’s situation would be teasing another classmate about her lowly status on the socioeconomic ladder. “But I thought you didn’t like Empriss,” she went on.
“I don’t like her,” explained Ruby. “But I felt sorry for her.”
“Well, good for you,” said Karen. But the song and dance that Ruby then began spontaneously to perform in front of Karen’s closet mirror only exacerbated her misgivings about the school. “‘When you’re ready, come and get it, na-na-na,’” she sang while wiggling her behind.