But I need you to stay steady, she said. Because if you go up there and do something, she didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. He knew what the end of it looked like. He'd lived most of it.
It gets worse, not better. It gives them a story about me and the story becomes the thing, not what they did. He looked at her. She was right. She was absolutely right.
And the fact that she was right that she'd thought it through this clearly, was both something to be proud of and something that made him quietly furious at the world for requiring her to think that clearly at 17. I hear you, he said. Good, she said, and drank her coffee. The following Monday, it went online. An account with a scrambled username, a photograph of Mia in the school hallway taken from behind with a caption that Ry could not bring himself to repeat even in his own mind.
Comments from other accounts. Some clearly the same person, some real students who should have known better. Maya showed him Monday evening. Set the phone on the kitchen table. Let him look.
He looked at it for a long time. His hands hand on the was able to the phone were very still. He had learned in a long and not entirely admirable life. How to keep his body still when his mind was not. It was a skill you acquired either through discipline or through experience.
He'd acquired it through both. I've already reported it," Mia said. Screenshot report document. "Good. School has a policy.
They're supposed to investigate, will they? " Mia looked at him steadily. "I don't know. That depends on things I can't control. " He pushed the phone back across the table, looked at his daughter. You're not going to let this stop you. He said it was not a question.
No, she said. But I'm also not going to pretend it doesn't hurt. That was the thing about Mia. She had both at the same time. The toughness and the honesty about what the toughness cost.
He hadn't always been able to hold both things himself. He was still learning. It should hurt. He said, "It's wrong. It should hurt. " He paused.
"And you're still going to practice Thursday? " "Yes," she said. "Okay. " They ordered pizza that night. Aided in the living room with the television on some nature documentary neither of them chose to watch but didn't change either. Normaly was deliberate and necessary. Normal was something you constructed in the margins of hard things.
Ry had learned that too. Tuesday morning Ray went to see Coach Burch. He went before school started. Found her in her office off the gym. Coffee on the desk, schedule on the wall, the particular organized chaos of an educator who ran several things at once.