I think it could be the one. " She said it carefully, testing the words before committing to them. "It feels different. I don't know why yet, but it does. " Boon looked at his daughter across the table. Half her mother's particular brand of hope. Half something she'd built entirely herself out of four towns and every first day and all the boxes she'd lived out of when unpacking hadn't seemed worth the effort.
"Yeah," he said. "It does. " The following Monday, it went online. An account with a scrambled username. A photograph of Ren, the new Black girl at Mil Haven High, taken from behind in the school hallway without her knowledge with a caption. Boon looked at once and then put the phone face down on the table and kept it there.
Ren showed him that evening, set the phone down between them, let him look at what he needed to look at. He kept his hands still on either side of the phone. He'd learned over a long and not entirely admirable life. How to keep his body still when everything else wasn't. It was a skill that came from discipline or experience or both.
And he'd gotten it the hard way. Already reported it, Ren said. Screenshot report documented. Good. School has a policy.
They're supposed to investigate, will they? She looked at him without flinching. I don't know. That depends on things outside my control. He pushed the phone back across the table, looked at his daughter.
You're not going to let this stop you, he said. Not a question. No. She met his eyes. But I'm also not going to pretend it doesn't hurt.
That was Ren. The toughness and the honesty about what the toughness cost both at once, neither caning the other. Boon had spent years trying to hold both himself and hadn't always managed it. It should hurt, he said. It's wrong.
It should hurt. He paused. You still going to practice Thursday? Yes. Okay.
They ordered pizza that night and ate it in the living room with a nature documentary running on television that neither of them had picked and neither of them turned off. Normal was something you built deliberately in the margins of hard things. Boon had known that for years from circumstances considerably uglier than this one. Tuesday morning, Boon went to see Coach Foster before school started. He found her in the small office off the gym.
Coffee on the desk, a schedule on the wall covered in notations. The organized chaos of a person running several things simultaneously and managing all of them. He knocked. She looked up Mr. Ashford, no surprise in it, which told him something.