“Molly, thanks so much for coming.” Katie shifted the roses on her desk. There was a royal blue awareness ribbon pinned to her lapel. What was it for? It seemed not the time to ask.
“Of course. Why did you want to see me?”
Katie gestured toward the seat beside Beth’s. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
Molly sat, wondering why Beth was even there. Beth looked straight ahead, holding her papers to her chest.
“First of all,” Katie said, leaning forward to clasp her hands upon the desk, “we want you to know that we recognize your deep engagement with and investment in your students. We appreciate that. We really do.”
What did this have to do with the party, the accident? And who was we? The administration? Katie Norton and Beth Firestein? Molly forced a smile. “That’s nice to hear. Thanks.”
“So, we’re coming up on the end of the semester, and I believe constructive feedback is always valuable, even if it isn’t always appreciated at first…” Katie trailed off. She glanced at Beth, then nodded. “Here’s the thing. There have been some questions raised by certain members of the staff, questions about your pattern of behavior. It seems the tone that has been set in your classroom, I mean as far as student learning objectives are concerned, has not been especially productive. It has been suggested, and unfortunately I can’t disagree, that in fact it has not seemed entirely appropriate. And now it has come to our attention that there has been some activity on your part that has been found to be, for lack of a better word, untoward. Isn’t that so, Beth?”
Still Beth Firestein did not look at Molly. She didn’t say a word.
Molly stared back at Katie Norton—her gamine haircut, her cheerleader face—and struggled to untangle the maddening grammar of principal-speak: the convoluted scramble of ambiguous vocabulary, the passive construction that obscured any meaning. She still had no idea what this meeting was for, and she wondered if Katie and Beth somehow didn’t know about the weekend’s events—if her colleagues were really that clueless. Finally she asked, “Have I done something wrong?”
“No one’s here to place value judgments,” the principal said.
“I don’t understand,” Molly said.
“Katie,” Beth Firestein said, raising her hand, “why don’t you let me take it from here?” And Molly watched, amazed, as the principal nodded and stood and ceded her own office to Beth Firestein, shutting the door quietly behind her.
Without speaking, Beth took the papers she’d been holding and laid them out, one by one, across the desk. Molly froze. They were screenshots from Facebook, arrayed like evidence, but not the kids’ posts. Hers.
Molly had known in the abstract that her online comments were public, yet she’d believed that what she and her kids had shared there, like what they had shared in her classroom, was protected somehow. It seemed perfectly obvious but had simply never occurred to her that a person like Beth Firestein would have the means, or even the inclination, to so easily access the students’ world—a world it had taken Molly months to penetrate.
“What you’ve done here is highly inappropriate,” Beth said. “You know that.”
Molly stared at the papers, unable to speak.
“We all feel for the girl who was hurt.” So Beth did know. Her tone was calm and measured; she might have been describing the casualties of Gettysburg or the famine of some distant country, a tragedy too far away to feel. When the trouble was here, it was all around them.
“Emma Fleed is her name,” Molly said.
“It’s clear you were affected by her situation.”
“I’m still affected. We’re all affected, aren’t we?” Molly heard her voice grow strident but didn’t care. “She’s one of our kids. So what are we going to do to help her?”
“Molly, listen to me now,” Beth said levelly. Her eyes were luminous and dark. “These are not your kids. These are your students. Last year they were someone else’s, next year they’ll be gone. You can’t be their mother. You certainly aren’t their friend. You are the person who gives them grades. And if you go on caring for them in this way, you won’t survive.”
“But isn’t it our job to care?”