A knock on her window startles her. “Jesus!” She peels her forehead from the steering wheel to find Mary Beth peering in at her. She waves, her charm bracelet jangling down her forearm. “I saw your car,” Mary Beth calls through the glass. “It’s distinctive!”
“I can hear you fine.” Rhea pushes the “down” button on the window controls and Mary Beth scoots clear of the moving glass.
“We need you,” says Mary Beth.
Rhea would laugh—like, who does Mary Beth think she is, an actress on Chicago Fire?—but she’s finding it hard to find the humor in anything at the moment. “There’s a situation. I’ll fill you in.” Mary Beth beckons her to hurry, hurry, hurry.
“Okay, give us one second.”
“I am,” Mary Beth says. “Hey, is that Chick-fil-A?”
* * *
“What’s all this?” Rhea enters the hallway for the upper fours, unsure of what she’s walking into or what she’s supposed to do about it. It all looks pretty business as usual. Sneakers squeak against the tile floors. A finger-paint masterpiece comes loose from its thumbtack and the construction paper sails to the floor; someone sticks it back up on the wall. A chorus of voices in another class sings the morning “God Our Father” prayer, echoing the verses back and forth. What’s everybody freaking out about?
Bodhi hurries ahead of her, slipping through the other parents who are milling and murmuring like a herd of cows. He ducks out of his backpack and, after he greets Mrs. Tokem, Rhea watches him disappear through the pony door and into the classroom without a backward glance.
“It’s a huge problem is what it is.” Mary Beth crosses herself: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. “Look, you can’t see him from here, but.” She tugs on Rhea’s sleeve, which Rhea doesn’t love, but she allows it. She pulls Rhea to the other side of the hall and presses her closer to the wall. “That man. Right there. He’s a forensic podiatrist, apparently.”
Rhea can only make out half of this man, who is wearing a gray polo and black slacks, as he kneels down doing—well, she doesn’t know what he’s doing. “What’s he doing?” she asks, tilting her head for the angle.
One of Lincoln’s mothers, Robin, sidles over to them, hugging her chest tightly. “He’s using clear acetate sheets to take impressions of the children’s shoe-and footprints.”
Rhea sees a flash of her son as he darts across the room toward the forensic podiatrist, disappearing out of view. In the soft, fleshy part under her jawline, she has begun to feel her pulse pump. All around her, the parents talk amongst themselves—What does this mean? Are we back to those footprints again? But I thought—what about—they brought Asher in for questioning and Bex and George, who’s next? They wouldn’t be focused on the kids at all if it weren’t for this biting business, let’s just be honest. Actually, if I can be honest, maybe they should be looking at the biters.… It’s hard to hear herself think.
“I tried going to Pastor Ben, but he’s not in the office yet.” Mary Beth paces a small circle. “And I don’t think I have a leg to stand on after the Poodini sample incident.” Rhea wills herself not to react at the mention of her son. “We need to think. What can we do?” She looks at Rhea with big, hopeful eyes and way too much mascara.
“What can we do about what?” Darby shows up before Rhea can find a place to hide. Not that she would, but she might slink.
They haven’t spoken since Rhea watched Jack during Lola’s interrogation and Darby acted as though Rhea not liking Miss Ollie was the same as if she said she hated puppies, though, frankly, Rhea’s not much of a dog person either.
Mary Beth runs down the whole state of affairs once more and Rhea avoids eye contact at the same time Darby tries to make it. Static ripples over her skin.
“Why are some of the kids over there and others not?” Rhea nods at the kids playing over in the Home Living center. “Are they already done?” Less than five minutes earlier, Rhea was trying to work out how she was going to deal with the unfortunate news that her son is the Poop Bandit and now … and now what’s she supposed to be doing again?
“They’re only doing the kids with the syndrome,” Robin explains, glancing around the other worried faces.
“But that’s—that’s—” Rhea searches.
Nearby, Asher’s dad removes his cupped hand from around his cell. “Completely legit,” he says. “I’m on my phone with my criminal defense attorney buddy.” Robin nods at this, as though they’ve all been waiting for him to report back. “Apparently they can do it. The more invasive the search, the more justification the police need to have—so that’s why they’re not doing everybody, see, they’re tailoring it. But—yeah?” He waits to listen to advice from his friend before returning his focus to the moms. “It’s a big misconception. They can search backpacks, cubbies, anything. The school has no duty. The kids can even answer questions without a parent present. He says they probably already have done all of that and we’re just now hearing about it.”
To Rhea’s relief, Darby gets momentarily roped into another group’s tittering. Mary Beth hooks her hand around the back of her neck and stretches it, looking up at the ceiling. “So now we’re trying to figure out what to do. Because we don’t want to make things worse,” Mary Beth says.
Rhea’s mind feels like an object spinning so fast that it doesn’t appear to be moving at all. She’s suspended in motion, unable to break loose of her spiral. She’s made no progress by the time she feels Darby’s reentry—Get over it, Rhea tells herself silently, she knows she should get over it, but while Rhea has a lot of strengths, that isn’t one of them.
“I feel like I’m not doing the best job crisis managing right now,” Darby says diffidently. “But I’m sorry. It’s very hard to form a plan when I have no idea what the hell’s going on.” Her voice rises. “We don’t know what they already have—Robin over there swears the children did artwork in which they did footprints using finger paint and now where are those pictures? Where are they?” Darby looks like a mother who’s lost sight of her child in the mall. It’s this reaction, this appalled, panicky, how-is-this-happening-to-me knee jerk that kicks Rhea out of orbit, plummeting her back down to Earth, because in the entirety of their four-year friendship, which may, after all this, in fact be its entirety, Rhea can’t think of a time she’s seen Darby take anything so seriously.
Asher’s dad hangs up the phone. “We need to be strategic. What are our options and how will it look if we don’t cooperate?”
“So. I don’t understand,” Rhea says. “What’s this mean? This means that our kids are—our kids are officially, like, suspects? What about Griff?” The thought just springs out. It’s not premeditated, not like murder.
“What about him?” Darby spins on her.
Rhea shrugs it off. “I don’t know. He had beef with Miss Ollie, that’s all I’m saying.”