The Neighbor's Secret(5)

No! Dutton was the enemy. A curse on him: dandruff in perpetuity.

“Without any real witnesses, how do we even know that Abe stabbed this kid,” Paul said. “You just said the teacher—”

“Mr. Marley,” Jen said quietly.

“Mr. Marley.” Paul spat out the name, which Mr. Marley deserved. Another enemy, he was lazy and tired and, according to Abe, completely oblivious of the cruel middle school shenanigans occurring on the daily under his watch. Art period was like Lord of the Flies at peak pig-killing hour. “Mr. Marley admitted he didn’t see any of it, so we’re relying on the word of that girl, who is essentially Harper French’s henchman—”

“Veronica,” Jen added.

She always got a jealous thrill when Paul went on the attack in these Abe meetings. Jen either dissolved in tears, which was of no help to Abe, or slipped into Girl Friday mode, like now, helpfully supplying the details.

At two in the morning, however, Jen would jolt awake with righteous anger and imagine doing a series of roundhouse kicks straight to Dutton’s solar plexus until he begged for mercy.

(No wonder Abe had stabbed someone. So much repressed anger in his DNA.)

“Veronica and Harper have been taunting Abe for months,” Paul said, “so don’t give me this bullshit about your zero-tolerance policy.”

Jen folded her arms over her chest. Yeah: what he said.

There was a reason Paul had climbed so high up the corporate ladder: the man knew how to brawl, facts be damned.

Dutton was no match. He was pasty and crumbly, and his gaze skipped and dipped across the room.

“You seem to be stuck on the issue of if the stabbing happened,” Dutton said.

Jen had misjudged. His voice was not crumbly at all. It was firm and calm.

“Abe admitted it. His report was nearly identical to Harper’s: they were both at the art-supply table and Harper took the beads that Abe was reaching for—well, Abe says he already had them in hand, but even taking him at his word, I think we can all agree that stabbing a classmate with an X-Acto knife is hardly an acceptable reaction.”

He looked between Jen and Paul with gentle disappointment. “And I’m sure you’re not suggesting that Foothill’s zero-tolerance policy—which your entire family signed—is inapplicable to a stabbing?”

Paul’s left shoulder jerked in a half shrug.

Last fall, when the three of them had sat around this same table and talked, harmoniously, about the importance of safe spaces, Jen and Paul had been thrilled to hear about the zero-tolerance policy.

(Why had she been thrilled? Although many emotions had coursed through Jen this morning, shock was not one.)

Right now, she felt above emotion, weightless and drifty and almost bored by Dutton’s enumeration of Abe’s struggles during his short tenure at Foothills: running out of class, his lack of social engagement, ditto academic engagement, such a shame for a boy who tested so high, not to mention the destruction of the trash can in the boys’ bathroom last spring.

Any of those, and certainly the trash can incident, Dutton pointed out, would have been enough to trigger the zero-tolerance policy.

Jen’s floating feeling intensified into a case of the spins. She gripped Paul’s knee and he placed his hand over hers, which helped to ground her for a moment.

If she shut off a part of her brain and listened to Dutton, it did seem logical that stabbing a child with an X-Acto knife would be grounds for expulsion, didn’t it?

Yes!

No!

Jen had lost the ability to judge.

What was this dizziness? Was Jen having a stroke? And if she were, would the school rescind Abe’s expulsion? Jen pictured Dutton standing over her, grave-faced and apologizing.

A stroke might be worth it if it shut up Dutton, who was still going: Abe’s lack of affect, the volatile moods. The quicksilver friendships (such poetry, Dutton!). We don’t know, Dutton was saying, what will set Abe off and his reactions to things are so—he paused to access the right word.

Violent, Jen thought, but Dutton settled on out-of-proportion.

Abe was growing into the type of person Dr. Scofield had warned her about.

(Dr. Scofield? Where had that come from?)

Jen and Paul had spent an hour tops with the man, nearly a decade before. They’d cycled through so many experts that year: neuropsychologists and developmental pediatricians and therapists. Every single one had slapped on a different diagnosis.

Scofield had been the worst. He had been a child himself, barely out of grad school, with slicked-back hair and sockless loafers and no bedside manner. Jen had spent half of the meeting mesmerized by the thick caterpillar hairs around his ankles. Something (masochism?) had made Jen keep his business card, though, place it in the top drawer of her bureau, slipped within the socks.

She’d purged so many papers before they’d moved from California last year but not Scofield’s card, so don’t go playing all coy, Jen, about why the name “Scofield” might pop into your head after Abe has stabbed a classmate.

Not just any classmate, perfect little Harper French, who had once left a Popsicle on Jen’s white chenille couch. It had melted, orange and sticky, into the middle of a cushion, and Jen had pretended she didn’t care. “It’s just a thing, sweetie,” she’d said with a laugh. “An object. My fault for buying white.”