“What happened?” Amie asked.
“It’s Susan Ford,” a colleague answered. “Apparently she made this whole presentation about the strings yesterday, totally off-book, telling the seniors that they shouldn’t be afraid of getting a short string . . . and that they shouldn’t be afraid of short-stringers.”
“That’s not exactly a bad message,” Amie said.
“Yeah, but . . . some parents were pissed. This is pretty touchy stuff.”
When Mrs. Ford somberly exited the office, tossing a box of posters unceremoniously into the trash, the crowd turned irate.
“This is ridiculous!” shouted one of the parents. “We don’t pay to send our children to school in a dictatorship! We should be encouraging discussion, not silencing it.”
“The board and the PTA have already made their decision,” said the principal. “We can reopen the conversation at our meeting next month.”
The clock struck eight a.m., and the first streams of pupils started to enter the building, forcing the group to begrudgingly disperse rather than alarm the students. Two of the protesting moms took Mrs. Ford by the arm, comforting her as if she were one of their children, rather than a fully grown woman.
And Amie stared sadly at the trash can outside of the principal’s office, the corners of Mrs. Ford’s crinkled posters poking out of the bin, trying in vain to escape.
Maura
On Sunday night, Maura made her way to the school, scrolling mindlessly through Facebook on her phone, skimming post after post of bad news. She could barely tolerate one more story about Anthony Rollins’s booming campaign, or the reasons why so-and-so billionaire believed we should relocate to Mars and leave the strings here on Earth, but she paused at an unfamiliar headline: “Fake String Website Busted, Owner Arrested.” Some man in Nevada had apparently been making replica short strings in his garage and selling them online. Before he could be stopped, hundreds of people had purchased the fabricated strings to pull off obscenely cruel pranks, swapping out someone’s real string with a counterfeit short one. As if that were the worst fate imaginable. The butt of the world’s best joke.
She nearly smashed her phone on the sidewalk.
A few members of the group were discussing the news as Maura entered the classroom.
“Did anyone else see that story about the fake strings?” Nihal asked. “The guy really had nothing better to do?”
“First we get that fucked-up Google doc collecting people’s string lengths, and now this?” Carl complained.
“Don’t forget the new gun law,” added Terrell. “This country used to let anybody walk around with an assault rifle and nobody cared who got killed, but now, after years of debate, they’re suddenly drawing the line with short-stringers?”
“Honestly, it pales compared to what my dad told me,” said Chelsea. “A woman in his office is trying to sue for full custody of her kids on the grounds that her ex-husband is a short-stringer. I guess she’s made up some bogus claims about his emotional stability, or protecting the kids from unnecessary trauma.”
“Oh god,” Terrell grumbled.
“Well, I hope the dad fights for them,” said Ben. “Even if they have to lose him, at least they’ll know he didn’t want to let them go.”
“And I’m sure there’ll be more protests if this custody battle turns into a bigger issue,” Nihal added.
“Aren’t you all getting sick of this?” Maura suddenly shouted. “It’s not fair that we have to do everything.”
“What do you mean?” asked Sean.
“It just feels like we’re caught in this cycle of proving ourselves. Proving that we’re not dangerous or crazy. Proving that we’re exactly the same people that we’ve always been, before the strings got here and everyone started looking at us like pariahs,” Maura said, her voice cracking with frustration. “We’ve all been to the protests. We know what it’s like. Why do we have to be responsible for making a change? Don’t short-stringers have enough to deal with already? How can we be the only ones fighting?”
When Maura returned to her apartment that night, she could instantly sense Nina’s concern.
“Everything go okay?” Nina asked.
“Yeah, I’m just . . . tired,” Maura said. “It’s been a long six months.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Maura sighed. “You already know that I was feeling like all these doors were closing in front of me . . . and feeling stuck at work . . . and now the news just keeps getting worse, and people keep doing really shitty things, and I wonder if maybe I should be spending all my time fighting that, instead of sitting in an office,” Maura said. “But even being forced to keep fighting for myself, over and over again, feels like its own form of being . . . trapped.”