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down once, like an exaggeration. I can fish out of her whatever secret she’s holding.
“All right, baby girl. There, there.” I’m stroking her curls, trying to get some calm into her while all I want to do is scream. “Did someone say something to you?”
The tiniest of moans escapes her lips.
“One of the other girls?”
Now her head moves right, then left, under my hand. So not one of the students.
“Teacher?” I catch her eye—just a flicker from me to Steven. And I know. “Steven, your turn to clean up, okay?” I say.
He gives me the Look.
“Please,” I say.
I don’t expect it to work, but a softness comes into my son’s eyes, and he picks up the plates, careful not to stack them before they’re rinsed. He makes this little bow, an insignificant thing, but I can’t help seeing Reverend Carl Corbin and the way he swept out his hand this afternoon, offering me a place to sit down in my very own living room.
Offering, I think, and words tumble around in my head like Scrabble tiles. Officious. Official. Offensive. Off. Off with her fucking head.
The twins join Steven’s cleanup parade without too much objection, and Sonia and I are left at the table.
“You all right, darling?” I say. Then I place a hand to her forehead. A moment ago, my girl was sweating like a gin and tonic forgotten on a porch in July; now she’s settled down a bit. Not sweating, but far from a cool cucumber.
This is the worst of all of it. This, right now, watching Sonia track Steven, watching her grow more calm with every step he takes toward the kitchen. It’s the worst, because now I know what Sonia is really afraid of.
I don’t speak, only cock my head toward the place where Steven is rinsing bits of ground beef and potato off plates, humming some old tune.
And she nods.
Steven was eleven when his only sister arrived—almost old enough to be a father himself, if only in the biological sense. He had a way with her, kept her distracted and happy, changed the crappy diapers without more than a “Hey, Mom, this is some crappy nappy!” Few tweens learn baby sign language, but my eldest son was one of them. By barely older than a year, Sonia had the signs for her entire world down: eat, drink, sleep, dolly, and—her all-time favorite—go poo. Steven dubbed this particular gesture, often accompanied by the spoken words, a translation of some primitive language, a system so arcane that no one, not even Dr. Jean McClellan, would be able to piece it together.
He launched into a tune so grotesquely bastardized I didn’t know what to think. Patrick nearly spilled his morning coffee at the sound of Steven singing.
There were the Police and their doo-doo-doo-da-da-da—or however it goes; there was that Lou Reed piece about how the “colored girls” sing “do-do-do”—ultra-racist now, but it was Lou Reed and he could get away with all kinds of shit back then; there were those Motown bands and those white people who wanted to sound like they were a Motown band and there was every other songwriter in the modern world who stumbled over a lyric and ended up filling the space with something that rhymed with the kiddie word for defecation. And, finally, there was my own son crooning along to the entire musical canon from Brahms to Beyoncé, replacing each and every word with “poo.”
The memories make the present doubly hard, but, finally, I say it.
“Did Steven come to your school today?”
A nod.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
No. She does not.
“Story, then?” I say.
I let her go off to her bedroom, my lackluster reminder to brush her teeth following her from the dining table, down the hall, to the bathroom she has for herself now that the twins are of that age when separate peeing quarters become important. Patrick’s door doesn’t so much as squeak on its hinges when Sonia runs by it.
I take everything out on Steven. Maybe this isn’t the best parenting tactic, but I’m furious.
“What happened at Sonia’s school today, Steven?” I say after sending Sam and Leo off to the TV room. They’re eager to go, mostly because, without their older brother, they get a few minutes alone with the remote.
Steven shrugs but doesn’t turn from the sink.
“I’d like an answer, kiddo,” I say, and I press his shoulder, forcing him to turn.
It’s only now that I see the small pin on his collar, about a pinkie’s worth wide. Inside the silver circle, on a white field, is the single letter P in bright blue. I’ve seen this before.
The first time, it was on television during that ridiculous segment where three Bible-thumping women in twinsets tore Jackie Juarez to shreds. Not a week later, I saw it decorating one of Olivia King’s church dresses when she knocked on my door asking if I had an egg to spare.
It’s supposed to be a symbol of solidarity, I guess, this quiet blue P worn by both men and women now. Olivia’s daughter, Julia, has one, and sometimes I’ve seen it when I’ve been at the grocery store or at the dry cleaners picking up Patrick’s shirts. I ran into Dr. Claudia, my former gynecologist, in the post office, and even she had one, although I suspected her husband had more to do with Claudia’s choice of accessories than she herself did. I know the P stands for “Pure”—Pure Man, Pure Woman, Pure Child.
What I don’t know is why my own son is wearing this pin.
“When did you start this?” I say, fingering his collar.
Steven brushes my hand off as if it’s an annoying fly and returns to rinsing plates and loading the dishwasher. “Got it the other day. No big deal.”
“Got it? As in, what? It fell from the sky? You found it in a storm drain?”
No answer.
“You don’t just get these, Steven.”
He shoulders past me, pours himself a glass of milk from the fridge, and downs it. “Of course you don’t just get them, Mom. You have to earn them.”
“I see. And how does that happen?”
Another glass of milk disappears down Steven’s gullet.
“Save some for cereal tomorrow,” I say. “You’re not the only human in this house.”
“Maybe you should go out and get another carton, then. It’s your job, right?”
My hand flies with a will of its own, makes contact; and a bright palm print blooms on the right side of Steven’s face.
He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t raise his own hand, doesn’t react at all, except to say, “Nice, Mom. Real nice. One day, that’s gonna be a crime.”
“You little shit.”
He’s smug now, which makes everything worse. “I’ll tell you how I earned the pin. I got recruited. Recruited, Mom. They needed volunteers from the boys’ school to make the rounds to the girls’ schools and explain a few things. I accepted. And for the past three days, I’ve been going out in the field and demonstrating how the bracelets work. Look.” He pushes up one sleeve and brandishes the burn mark around his wrist. “We go in pairs, and we take turns. All so girls like Sonia know what will happen.” As if to defy me once more, he drains his glass of milk and licks his lips. “By the way, I wouldn’t encourage her to pick the sign language back up.”
“Why the hell not?” I’m still trying to absorb the fact that my son has purposefully shocked himself “so girls like Sonia know what will happen.”
“Mom. Honestly. You of all people should get it.” His voice has taken on the timbre of someone much older, someone tired of explaining how things are. “Signing