When Women Were Dragons(48)

“Nope!” Beatrice said cheerfully.

“Well, then. I think we can rule out any maliciousness, if Beatrice has no recollection of what this is even about. What a relief!” I tapped my pen on my notebook a few times, to show how very settled the matter was.

Another siren joined the first. And a third. Mrs. Magin, in the other room, gasped loudly, and there was an abrupt clatter, like a chair being knocked to the ground. “Sister Claire. Sister Claire! Not today! Breathe deeply and calm yourself, please.” We heard running footsteps and the sharp slam of a door.

I looked at Mr. Alphonse and raised my eyebrows.

“It isn’t any of your concern,” he said, his jaw muscles clenching noticeably. He took another deep breath, as though straining to maintain his composure. Finally, he reached into his desk and pulled out a file. It was thick and overstuffed with slightly crinkled papers. He let it fall onto the desk with a slap.

“Do you know what this is?” he demanded. One of the sirens came to a stop nearby. I could hear the sound of men shouting.

“No idea,” I said.

“Your sister has been making inappropriate images during the school day. These inappropriate images have been made on school-owned paper, and using school-owned materials. She has upset her teachers, upset the other students, and worst of all, she has both demeaned and depraved herself by allowing the brain to linger in places where it clearly should not.” He glowered down at us. I looked at Beatrice, my eyebrows raised. Beatrice raised her own in return—in confusion, though, and not with any insubordination. Beatrice, for all of her out-of-boundsness, didn’t have a sassy bone in her body.

I turned back to Mr. Alphonse. “Maybe it would help if you said exactly what she’s been drawing. I confess we are both a little bit at a loss.” I expected him to open the file. He did not.

Mr. Alphonse folded his arms. “Well,” he said primly. “I’m not sure I want to say. In mixed company.” His cheeks flushed pink.

Interesting, I thought. “Was it . . . bad words?” I prompted.

“I don’t write bad words,” Beatrice protested. “I don’t even know how to spell most of them.”

Something crashed in the hallway. Two carts colliding, I thought. Several voices spoke rapidly, all twisting on top of one another. I could hear a woman’s voice speaking indistinctly, but in a tone that sounded something like pleading. Mr. Alphonse’s cheeks began to color again.

“Look,” I said. “It sounds like there is something that you need to take care of. Perhaps you should step out for a moment. It might be a good idea if Beatrice and I have a private chat. That way we can go through the problematic content on our own.”

Mr. Alphonse nodded and strode across the room, leaving without another word. I looked at Beatrice, who shrugged. I shrugged in response. From outside the room and down the hall, Mr. Alphonse’s voice boomed—at what, I had no idea. I lifted the file onto my lap. And I opened it.

There are moments, I think, in a person’s life, when everything changes. Relationships. Futures. Communities. Maybe even the whole world.

Time, in our experience, is linear, but in truth time is also looped. It is like a piece of yarn, in which each section of the strand twists and winds around every other—a complicated and complex knot, in which one part cannot be viewed out of context from the others. Everything touches everything else. Everything affects everything else. Each loop, each bend, each twist interacts with every other. It is all connected, and it is all one.

But every once in a while, there are experiences that slice all other moments apart—stark, singular things that mark the difference between Before and After. These moments are singular, separate from the knot. Separate even from the thread. They can’t be tugged at or loosened. They cannot be wound into something lovely or intricate or decorative. They do not interact seamlessly with the fabric of a life. They are of another substance entirely. Unstuck in time, and out of sync with a life’s patterns and processes. I’ve had many such experiences. The moment I first saw the dragon in the old lady’s garden, for example. The moment my mother’s knots unmade themselves. The moment when Beatrice became my sister. The moment my father took Sonja away. The moment my mother released that one, last breath, and then went terribly still.

And then there was that meeting in Mr. Alphonse’s office.

Prior to this moment, it had always been me and Beatrice, together in the world. We were one mind, one purpose, one heart. It was the two of us, together, in all things. Beatrice was my sister. Beatrice is my sister. Beatrice would always be my sister.

But in this moment . . .

she was something . . .

else.

I began flipping through the file. The first page was a picture of a house. The house was divided into four rooms. A kitchen on the main floor, and what appeared to be a living room. And upstairs was a room with a man and a woman standing next to each other, staring in opposite directions, and a room with a smaller person and an even smaller-than-that person sitting on the floor between a bed and a baby’s crib on either side of them. And on top of the roof was a dragon.

“Oh yeah,” Beatrice said. She wasn’t embarrassed. She looked at the picture of the dragon as though it was a picture of any old thing—a shoe, maybe. Or a tree. The dragon was large and red. Its eyes seemed to shine a bit. She drew it with precision and care. She spent time working on that dragon.