And then Charlotte blew off Ruby. The only reason Karen knew about it was that, finding her daughter unexpectedly glum at pickup on Friday, she proposed that Ruby invite over one of her new friends for a playdate. It seemed to Karen that enough time had passed that it was safe to reveal where they actually lived. Following Allison’s advice, Karen could always say they’d just moved. By city decree, a child who changed addresses didn’t need to change schools as well.
“I don’t have any friends,” Ruby told her.
“What?” said Karen, a twinge in her stomach. “But what about Charlotte?”
“She only talks to Finley now.”
“Who’s Finley?”
“A girl in my class.”
“But why can’t she be friends with you and Finley?”
“You don’t understand.” Ruby shook her head.
“I don’t understand what?” said Karen.
“Everyone has a best friend but me.”
“Well, I didn’t have a best friend when I was in third grade.”
“You grew up in the olden days.”
“Are you sure you’re not just being oversensitive?”
“I’m not being oversensible,” insisted Ruby, mispronouncing the word. Karen decided to let it go. “When I tried to sit down next to Charlotte in the cafeteria, she said, ‘This seat is taken.’ So I sat across the table. And then Finley sat down next to her, and they didn’t talk to me once the whole lunch period.”
Was it something about her daughter that caused other girls to push her away? Karen found herself wondering. Was she too clingy? Too bossy? Or were girls her age just mean? Karen had read in one of her parenting books that elementary-school-age children and especially girls were constantly changing friends. It was part of the developmental process and had something to do with identity formation and was therefore not a cause for concern. But then, why wasn’t Ruby sometimes doing the leaving instead of always being left? In any case, Charlotte Bordwell, like Mia, was too young for Karen to be angry at and, at the same time, too old to be considered an appendage of her mother. So Karen couldn’t very well hold Susan responsible. Moreover, in Karen’s experience, children came out of the womb with their personalities more or less already formed.
And yet…she found she was angry. Angry and hurt. It was intolerable to Karen that someone should have made her daughter feel so excluded and so unloved. It made Karen feel those things too. “Well, if Charlotte’s going to be rude, why don’t you sit with someone else?” she said.
“Like who?” said Ruby.
“What about Maeve?”
“I never see her. And when I do, she doesn’t talk to me anyway.”
“Well, then you’ll make new friends,” insisted Karen.
But would she? That was the question that nagged at Karen for the rest of the afternoon and evening.
The next morning, Karen turned on her phone and discovered a group e-mail from Principal Chambers. The administrative office of Betts must not have realized that Ruby had left, Karen thought. Dear Betts Families, it began. The e-mail concerned an emergency meeting that was being held in the school auditorium that night. It seemed that the city’s board of education had not only approved Winners Circle’s co-location inside the Betts building but had granted the WC network permission to begin immediate renovations on their portion of the school building, even though the charter was not planning to move in until the fall. This meant that Betts students would likely be spending their last two months of the school year breathing in construction dust and shouting to be heard over jackhammers. According to Principal Chambers’s e-mail, the CEO of Winners Circle was a close personal friend of the mayor, and this wasn’t the first time that the mayor had gone out of his way to accommodate her. To add insult to injury, due to budget cuts, Betts had no choice but to let its librarian go at the end of June. Since the library space would therefore be off-limits to Betts students, the city was allowing Winners Circle to take it over as their new robotics room.
As Karen read through the e-mail, she felt angry and frustrated, but also relieved that Ruby wouldn’t be personally affected. Those emotions, in turn, were followed by amazement at the randomness of life. Were it not for Nathaniel Bordwell having tossed out his gas bill and Karen having walked by the particular bag of trash in which he’d tossed it while she was in a particularly upset mood, Ruby would likely still be at Betts. But he had, and so had Karen—and now Ruby wasn’t. And so Karen gave herself permission not to dwell.
But as the day progressed, she found she couldn’t stop feeling outraged at Clay and his ilk for what she considered to be their misguided munificence. It was above all the impulse to punish and shame, not seduce and be seduced, that made Karen break down and e-mail Clay that afternoon—or, really, forward Principal Chambers’s e-mail to him without comment. Though as soon as she’d done so, she realized that her e-mail was bound to elicit a response, the thought of which filled her with excitement and trepidation.
In the meantime, arrangements for the fund-raising picnic needed to be finalized. Karen had planned on joining Susan in the school library the next morning to go over the details, but Susan e-mailed that night to say she had a plumber coming to deal with some kind of pipe leak and she didn’t want to miss the guy—would Karen mind swinging by her house after drop-off instead? Having already made a decision not to involve herself or Susan in the Ruby-Charlotte schism, Karen promptly replied that it would be no problem at all, though secretly she wondered why Nathaniel couldn’t handle it. Hadn’t Susan said her husband worked from home? In any case, the Bordwells lived only a block from the school, so, for Karen, the change of location presented no particular inconvenience.
There was a certain type of woman who always carried a good umbrella, the kind with a smooth wooden handle, a wide span, and a bright-colored block print or stripe. Not Karen, who had never bought a nice umbrella in her life, having always assumed she’d lose it as soon as she acquired it. Instead, she regularly purchased the semi-disposable made-in-China versions that were sold in outdoor kiosks by train stations. After three weeks, she inevitably either lost them or found that the spokes had become detached from the canopy, in which case she threw the whole business in a trash can and bought a new one the next day. But the truth was the plastic handle never felt solid in her hand, especially when she gripped it too tightly. That was what she found herself doing the next morning while standing in a light drizzle at Susan’s front door.