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I would also hate to see the student body of Betts—which includes children who come halfway across the city every morning to get there—begin to feel bad about themselves because the new charter kids get to sit in freshly painted classrooms with new computers while the regular public-school kids don’t, since the governor never stops cutting funding.

In case you couldn’t guess, I’m not a fan of the discipline-and-test-prep model of WC either. That’s not my idea of a well-rounded education, and I suspect it’s not yours either.

Thank you, Clay. I appreciate anything you can do. I wouldn’t be bothering you about this, but it affects my family directly.

Yours,

Karen



Karen knew she should probably sleep on the e-mail before she sent it. What if it antagonized Clay, and he withdrew his support from HK? Then what would she have accomplished? Here, she’d recently roped in an important new source of funds for the organization. And there were children who would eat a hot meal that very night because of his contribution from the week before. But unable to turn off the blasting radio in her brain—and half convinced that every second counted—Karen clicked Send.

To her surprise, Clay wrote back almost immediately:

Ah, the leftist firebrand I remember from college returns with an even sharper set of claws! Nice to hear from you again, Karen Kipple. But back to your question…If I wheedle WC’s CEO into finding another location, will you dance with me at the benefit next week? I can rumba and fox-trot, courtesy of the National League of Junior Cotillions of Charleston, circa 1986. But seriously, if the computers are going to be that much nicer across the hall, why don’t you just transfer your daughter?



Was he kidding about Karen transferring Ruby? Had he not read her e-mail, registered her objections? Or was everything a joke to him? The jocular tone of Clay’s e-mail infuriated Karen in its apparent refusal to take her argument seriously. Nonetheless, she found herself tickled by his invitation to dance. She was also pleased and relieved by his quick response and seemingly genuine offer to help thwart the co-location and wrote back:

CP, Many thanks for offering to help—and also for the “helpful” suggestion to have Ruby change schools. One more question: Would you send your children to a Winners Circle school? Bet not. Your friend the firebrand, KK



As Karen waited for a reply, she opened Facebook. The first item in her newsfeed was a picture of a scraggly cockapoo with its tongue out standing in a field of grass. Karen’s elementary-school friend Sue Borneo had posted it. Karen hadn’t seen Sue in nearly thirty years and it seemed unlikely that she would see her in the next thirty either. Their lives had taken completely different paths. Sue had never left the town they’d grown up in, had three teenage children, and worked at her family’s jewelry store. If she and Karen were put in the same room, it was doubtful they’d have found anything to say to each other after they’d finished reminiscing about their fourth-grade classmate who’d later gone to jail for pederasty. But through the arguably pointless alchemy of social media, they were back in touch—at least in a fashion. Beneath the photograph, Sue had written, RIP, Meatball. And now Karen felt like she had to comment, mostly because not to do so seemed thoughtless. But how? She didn’t feel right about clicking Like, since wouldn’t that imply she liked Meatball’s death? So she wrote, Very sorry for your loss, Sue, then felt like a fraud, since, in truth, she wasn’t all that sorry.

The next post came courtesy of Laura Collier. It was a photo of Maeve holding up a skateboard covered with tiny skulls. Her long hair was poking out of a straw fedora, and her upper body was encased in a tiny black leather motorcycle jacket. First board, read the caption. The comments below ranged from Amaaazzzing to Such a hipster! to So beautiful and chic, like her mama. Even though the whole setup seemed staged to induce envy and made Karen feel vaguely like throwing up, she felt somehow compelled to click on the thumbs-up icon, if only to be a good sport. In doing so, she elevated the number of Likes from 203 to 204, then wished she hadn’t. But unLiking the photo seemed even more pathetic. So she moved on.

Maeve’s father, Evan, was responsible for the third post in Karen’s newsfeed. He’d linked to a news story about Trayvon Martin, the seventeen-year-old African American boy who was gunned down by a citizen vigilante in Florida. According to the article, the perpetrator was apparently never going to be charged with anything, not even a civil rights violation. Evan had added his own caption beneath the story: Disgusting—#blacklivesmatter. Karen felt disgusted as well—not just at the obvious injustice of Trayvon’s killer going free but also just as viscerally at Laura and Evan. It seemed to Karen that they pretended to care about the fate of African Americans yet had taken their daughter out of a school precisely because of the existence of one of them, if not all of them. And wasn’t that the real reason the Collier-Shaws had left Betts—that there were too many of them for Evan and Laura’s taste? It was easy to get worked up about racism when you didn’t have to engage with any actual black people. Not that Karen, aside from her friendship with Lou, led an integrated life. But at least she tried.

For a brief moment, Karen imagined commenting beneath Evan’s caption, Disgusting—so long as there aren’t too many boys with his shade of skin in your daughter’s classroom? But she knew she was a hypocrite too and that if she’d been walking down a quiet street after sundown, and Trayvon Martin had come up it in a hoodie with the hood pulled tight, she might well have let her imagination run wild with pictures and incidents culled from tabloid newspapers and late-night cop shows, and, if it was possible to do so without causing offense, she would have crossed the street. (College-educated white liberals were nearly as terrified of being seen as racists as they were of encountering black male teenagers on an empty street after dark.)