In all her time in Cortland Hill, Karen had entered Fairview Gardens only once—on a charity mission with Ruby’s predominantly white Girl Scout troop, the year before. (The residents of Fairview Gardens were almost entirely black.) The Daisies had been working on their Rose Petal, an embroidered uniform badge whose coordinating motto was “Make the world a better place,” when a ferocious storm had cut off electricity to the buildings in the project for more than a week. It had been the troop leader’s idea for the girls to make and deliver platters of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to Fairview’s community center. Karen had supported the plan wholeheartedly and offered to help. But entering the community center, a desolate affair featuring haphazardly arranged metal fold-up chairs, a Ping-Pong table with no net, and not a soul in sight, Karen had been simultaneously embarrassed and frightened. Reports of gang-related shootings at Fairview Gardens were not uncommon.
There was a personal angle to Karen’s sympathy for Jayyden as well. In the beginning of second grade, he’d taken to imitating Ruby and, on those days when Karen picked Ruby up from school, and even though he hardly knew Karen, coming over to embrace her as if she were his own mother. As she’d patted his head and said, “Hello, sweetie,” she’d felt proud and despondent in equal parts. He’d cut out the behavior after a month or two. Sometime the following spring, Karen heard rumors that an unnamed relative had been found to be abusing Jayyden. Children’s Services had become involved. For a nanosecond, Karen imagined taking Jayyden into her home as a foster child, but then realized it was probably beyond her capabilities. Besides, who knew if Jayyden would even want to come? In any case, it had become clear in recent months that Jayyden had serious behavioral problems, if not an actual violent streak. Even before today, there had been reports of shoving and hair-pulling. A year older and larger than his third-grade classmates—he’d been left behind in kindergarten for not knowing his letters or colors yet—he’d also begun to cut a figure in the classroom that Karen imagined other children might find, as much as she hated to put it this way and as confident as she was that it had nothing to do with the color of his skin, physically intimidating.
But it was also the case that Karen aspired to a life spent making a difference and helping those less fortunate than herself. She tried to live in accordance with the politics and principles she believed in. These included the notion that public education was a force for good and that, without racially and economically integrated schools, equal opportunity couldn’t exist. And so, the year Ruby turned five, Karen had happily enrolled her at Betts, aware that it lacked the reputation for academic excellence of other schools nearby but pleased that Ruby would be exposed to children who were less privileged than herself.
Yet over the previous three-plus years, a part of Karen had also come to feel thankful for any and all middle-class Caucasian or Asian children who attended Betts—and desirous that there should be more. (At present, the white population of the school hovered around 25 percent.) The truth was that she’d yet to grow entirely comfortable with being in the minority. Nor had she ever fully recovered from the shock of walking into Ruby’s new classroom on her first day of kindergarten and finding herself gazing out on what appeared to her eyes to be a sea of beaded braids, buzz cuts, and neon backpacks with rubberized cartoon decals that ran counter to her finely honed bourgeois-bohemian aesthetic sensibility, which prized natural materials and a muted palette.
Karen had also failed to fully exorcise the deep-seated fear that a school having both an abundant population of brown and tan children and middling standardized test scores, as Betts did, must by definition offer an inferior educational experience.
But she also saw the school’s diversity was an educational experience unto itself and, once or twice, had even felt teary-eyed at the spectacle and promise of so many beautiful children of so many different hues and hair types walking down the hall together.
And by any measure, Ruby had done well at Betts. A voracious reader, she was also proficient in adding, subtracting, and even early multiplication; sociable to the point of overbearing; and knowledgeable about many of the great figures of U.S. history, in particular Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. In kindergarten, the white children in Ruby’s class had had to sit in the back of the classroom for a period to see how it felt. And according to Ruby, her class had completed the same study unit on MLK four years in a row. Ruby could even recite the date he’d married Coretta (June 18, 1953). At Betts, it sometimes seemed to Karen that every month was Black History Month—except when it was Latino History Month. In keeping with the new Common Core curriculum, Ruby had recently written an “informative text,” as essays were now known, on Cesar Chavez’s advocacy on behalf of Latino migrant workers. Karen knew this because, out to dinner with her family one night, Ruby had asked the waitress if the Caesar salad was named after the aforementioned man, drawing a bemused look from the woman. Which Karen had found hilarious and embarrassing at the same time. “Sweetie, it’s probably named after Julius Caesar,” Karen had told her.
“Who’s that?” Ruby asked—a question that Karen had found less charming.
Later, Karen learned that Caesar salad was actually named after the restaurateur Caesar Cardini—and felt foolish herself and a little more forgiving of her daughter and her school.
Yet during parent-teacher conferences, when Miss Tammy informed Karen that Ruby was the strongest reader in the class—or, in Miss Tammy’s words, the “most awesome reader in Room Three-oh-three”—Karen’s first thought was not pride but paranoia that Ruby’s classmates must all be behind.
Moments after Nurse Smith led a still sniveling, now bandaged Maeve out of the classroom, Principal Chambers appeared in the doorway in a black pants suit and low heels, her expression stern. After a low-voiced conference with Miss Tammy in the corner, she took Jayyden by the back of his shirt collar and marched him out of the classroom. The other students looked on in stunned silence. The mood had shifted from celebration to sobriety.
“Fun morning,” quipped Lou.
“What that kid needs is a serious whupping,” muttered Sa’Ryah’s mother, Desiree Johnston, an attractive single mother in her late twenties who worked in a Medicaid office.
“With all due respect, violence is not the answer to violence,” demurred Ezra’s mother, April Fishbach, a late-life PhD candidate in cultural anthropology as well as the president and sole active member of Betts’s Parent Teacher Association.
Desiree rolled her eyes.
Marco Cicetti, who was the father of Maeve’s other best friend, Amanda, seemed similarly unimpressed by April’s argument. “Yeah, wait till it’s your kid who ends up in the ER,” he said.
“I completely agree—he needs to leave the school,” said Bram’s mother, Annika Van Den Berg, a five-foot-eleven Dutch architect who dressed in avant-garde fashions that resembled crumpled sleeping bags and who was clearly just slumming it for a few years before the family moved back to a canal house in Amsterdam filled with ultramodern molded-plastic furnishings.
“The whole Jayyden situation just makes me sad,” muttered Karen. It was the only thing she felt it was permissible to say, striving as she always did for a tone of compassionate neutrality that would counteract any suspicions that she was just another white parent wishing the school would gentrify more quickly than it was.
“But where are these parents of Jayyden?” asked Annika in her stilted English.
“Mom in jail—dad, who knows,” Lou said, shrugging.