I looked right at him, wondering if he could read minds.
“I happen to know exactly what’s ailing you, Ruth, because I caught that bug once too. It was just after I took over programming at the network. I had a fancy office and everyone was falling all over each other to try to make me happy, and you know what? I felt sick as a dog.” He glanced at me. “I was sure that any minute everyone was going to look at me and realize I didn’t belong there.”
I thought of what it felt like to sit down in the beautiful wood-paneled cafeteria and be the only student with a bag lunch. I remembered how Ms. Thomas had shown us pictures of American heroes, and although everyone knew who George Washington and Elvis Presley were, I was the only person in the class who recognized Rosa Parks and that made me proud and embarrassed all at once.
“You are not an impostor,” Sam Hallowell told me. “You are not there because of luck, or because you happened to be in the right place at the right moment, or because someone like me had connections. You are there because you are you, and that is a remarkable accomplishment in itself.”
That conversation is in my thoughts as I now listen to the principal at Edison’s magnet high school tell me that my son, who will not even swat a bug, punched his best friend in the nose during their lunch period today, the first day back after Thanksgiving vacation. “Although we’re cognizant of the fact that things at home have been…a challenge, Ms. Jefferson, obviously we don’t tolerate this kind of behavior,” the principal says.
“I can assure you it won’t happen again.” All of a sudden I’m back at Dalton, feeling lesser than, like I should be grateful to be in this principal’s office.
“Believe me, I’m being lenient because I know there are extenuating circumstances. This should technically go on Edison’s permanent record, but I’m willing to waive that. Still, he’ll be suspended for the rest of the week. We have a zero tolerance policy here, and we can’t let our students go around worrying for their own safety.”
“Yes, of course,” I murmur, and I duck out of the principal’s office, humiliated. I am used to coming to this school wrapped in a virtual cloud of triumph: to watch my son receive an award for his score on a national French exam; to applaud him as he’s crowned Scholar-Athlete of the Year. But Edison is not crossing a stage with a wide smile right now, to shake the principal’s hand. He is sprawled on a bench just outside the office door, looking for all the world like he doesn’t give a damn. I want to box his ears.
He scowls when he sees me. “Why did you come here like that?”
I look down at my uniform. “Because I was in the middle of a shift when the principal’s office called me to say my son was going to be expelled.”
“Suspended…”
I round on him. “You do not get to speak right now. And you most definitely do not get to correct me.” We step out of the school, into a day that bites like the start of winter. “You want to tell me why you hit Bryce?”
“I thought I don’t get to speak.”
“Don’t you back-talk me. What were you thinking, Edison?”
Edison looks away from me. “You know someone named Tyla? You work with her.”
I picture a thin girl with bad acne. “Skinny?”
“Yeah. I’ve never talked to her before in my life. Today she came up at lunch and said she knew you from McDonald’s, and Bryce thought it was hilarious that my mother got a job there.”
“You should have ignored him,” I reply. “Bryce wouldn’t know how to do a good honest day’s work if you held a gun to his head.”
“He started talking smack about you.”
“I told you, he’s not worth the energy of paying attention.”
Edison clenches his jaw. “Bryce said, ‘Why is yo mama like a Big Mac? Because she’s full of fat and only worth a buck.’?”
All the air rushes from my lungs. I start toward the front door of the school. “I’m going to give that principal a piece of my mind.”
My son grabs my arm. “No! Jesus, I’m already the punch line for everyone’s jokes. Don’t make it worse!” He shakes his head. “I’m so sick of this. I hate this fucking school and its fucking scholarships and its fucking fakeness.”
I don’t even tell Edison to watch his mouth. I can’t breathe.
All my life I have promised Edison that if you work hard, and do well, you will earn your place. I’ve said that we are not impostors; that what we strive for and get, we deserve. What I neglected to tell him was that at any moment, these achievements might still be yanked away.