Jonathan glanced at his watch. ‘I wonder where Michael is. He said he would come to this.’
Sylvie’s heart leapt into her head. She hadn’t considered that the new headmaster might show up. She didn’t want to see him.
‘Has counseling been made available?’ Geoff asked.
‘They’re using Judith.’ Jonathan laced his hands together. ‘She really helped out when those girls on the crew team died in the car accident last year. And during that school shooting at Virginia Tech. A lot of kids saw her after that.’
‘Judith is so good,’ Martha cooed.
‘Which one’s Judith?’ Geoff scratched his head.
‘The one with the long hair,’ Dan said.
‘She’s so gentle,’ Jonathan added. ‘But firm.’
Everyone looked again at the boy’s photo. Unnatural hair colors weren’t allowed at Swithin – teachers were required to immediately send home anyone who wasn’t adhering to the dress code. So how had Christian’s hair gone unnoticed long enough for him to sit for his portrait? Maybe Christian was the type of boy who fell between the cracks, even with acid-green hair. Sylvie thought about what Michael Tayson said on the phone – You probably wouldn’t remember him from the matches. But Sylvie did remember him, an image of him with the wrestling team flashing into her mind.
‘So what about the boy’s mother?’ Geoff looked at Martha. ‘You only mentioned the dad. Are they divorced?’
‘Out of the picture for some reason or other, I guess,’ Martha said. She looked at the piece of paper, presumably some kind of dossier on Christian. ‘He is a scholarship boy. Was. The address we have on file has him living over at Feverview Dwellings.’ She flipped a page. ‘It doesn’t list an employer for the father.’
‘Maybe he’s unemployed,’ Jonathan suggested.
‘Or on disability,’ Martha said.
‘Do we remember admitting this boy?’ Dan asked. ‘What’s the father’s name?’
‘Warren,’ Martha read.
‘Warren…Givens,’ Dan repeated. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’
Everyone looked around, sheepish. Sometimes they had a say in admitting students, especially those receiving scholarships. But there was a separate committee for that, people with actual credentials to judge one candidate from another.
‘If we wanted to set up a scholarship in his name, what could it be for?’ Geoff said quietly.
Martha picked at her cuticles. ‘Well, we’d do the standard scholarship, of course. Needs-based, I would imagine. How does that sound?’
‘Or we could make it kind of specific,’ Dan suggested. ‘You know, according to what he was interested in. Do we know if he liked particular subjects in school? Art? Music?’
‘He doesn’t look like he’d be involved in anything,’ Jonathan said, holding up Christian’s photo. ‘I suppose we could look for his transcript…’ He started to leaf through the papers.
‘Good Lord, stop,’ Sylvie blurted out.
They all paused, raising their heads.
‘I mean, the poor boy died only days ago.’ Sylvie’s voice was a tautly-held string. ‘We should have some respect.’
The grandfather clock in the corner bonged seven times. Sylvie had to stop them. If they looked through his transcript, they’d see that he’d wrestled. Then the conversation would turn to Scott, the tape recorder still rotating, still capturing everything. She could picture their faces. Did Scott know this boy? Funny he was on the wrestling team…he doesn’t look like the type. She had no idea what would come after that. She had no idea what she might say after that, either. She kept thinking about the look on Scott’s face when he’d tried to suffocate that mouse in the basement. And all the times he’d dressed up as slashers from horror movies for Halloween. And the music he listened to, my God some of that music! Full of such violence and hatred! Could she – should she – have kept him away from the school, from all these delicate kids?
Geoff sat back. ‘Goodness, Sylvie. You’re right.’
Martha coughed quietly. ‘Of course.’
The others hung their heads. They don’t know, she thought. She wondered instead if they thought she felt sensitive about them talking behind this boy’s back because so many people had talked behind hers. It was what Michael Tayson meant by character assassination – all those rumors about how her grandfather selectively chose who did and didn’t get to attend Swithin. All that tut-tutting that Scott was so unruly and different. And what was with that ring Sylvie had started wearing, they might have hissed more recently. What do you think that means? They probably even gossiped about how James died, that cleaning woman finding him on the floor soaked in urine. It had gotten out, she knew it had. So many things had gotten out.
Dan leaned over and patted Sylvie’s hand. Jonathan brought her a box of tissues from the librarian’s desk. Or maybe they thought that with James’s passing so fresh and raw, Sylvie couldn’t talk about any deaths right now. If that was the case, it was wrong to accept their pity.
They moved off Christian immediately, and the rest of the meeting bumped along. They made decisions and doled out who should do what. Jonathan wrote down phone numbers in his leather booklet. As they were finally leaving, Geoff reminded them of the cocktail party at his house next week for his wife’s birthday. ‘The party’s on a Monday,’ he warned. ‘But she insisted on having it on the day.’ He rolled his eyes as if to say ahh, youth. This was Geoff’s second wife; she was twenty years younger than him, than all of them.
And then Martha caught up to Jonathan, and they walked out of the library together, rehashing the laptop details. Geoff and Dan were already on their cell phones. Sylvie lingered behind, gazing after them. All of her colleagues walked with such assured entitlement. But my grandfather told me all this was mine, she wanted to tell them. I’m the rightful owner of this place, not you.
And she wanted to say something else, too. She wanted to yell out to them to be careful – their good fortunes might be more precarious than they thought. It could blow away in an eye blink, especially when they weren’t paying attention.
The first time Joanna heard about the Bates-McAllister family, she had been a few weeks shy of eleven years old. She and her mother, Catherine, were waiting at the orthodontist’s office for an appointment to see whether or not Joanna would need braces – unfortunately, she would – when Catherine noticed a Main Line newspaper that was wedged between a Highlights for Children and Woman’s Day. It was the kind of paper that announced community activities, openings of new local restaurants, and road construction. In the back, it featured a society page.
Catherine folded back the page and passed it to Joanna. She pointed at a picture of a woman wearing a long velvet gown and sporting a nest of diamonds on her head. Two young boys stood next to the woman, both of them about Joanna’s age, both of them wearing suit jackets and ties. Sylvie Bates-McAllister and family, attending the annual gala for The Swithin School, said the caption.
The waiting room was empty, Joanna remembered, save for the team of receptionists behind the desk, women who were made to wear matching purple jumpers and floral-print turtlenecks. Joanna’s mother had specifically chosen this orthodontist because he was the best, because all the women in the grocery store or at the PTA meetings or at Catherine’s exercise club said that he was the only reputable guy to send one’s children to, and because the hygienists and receptionists were featured in a local newspaper not