Class(47)

“Honestly, Karen, I really think you’re overreacting,” said Matt.

“Am I?” She could no longer tell.



Maybe not surprisingly, Karen and Ruby were late for school the next day. But Karen’s chronic insomnia was only partly to blame. Her head awhirl with visions of Jayyden inserting various sharp implements into her daughter’s flesh, Karen felt uneasy even entering the school building. And having finally done so, she was reluctant to let her daughter walk down the now-deserted hall. “I love you,” she said—twice.

“Mommy, you’re embarrassing me,” said Ruby.

“Sorry, sweetie—sometimes moms are really embarrassing,” said Karen.

For the rest of the day, every time the phone rang at work—before Karen picked it up and found it was a robo-call from a politician or HK’s charming but lazy truck driver Gregor calling in sick with a bad back, as he constantly did—Karen imagined it was the main office of Betts Elementary phoning to say that her daughter had been taken away in an ambulance. She even pictured herself in reaction, trembling and hyperventilating as she fled her office, the image superimposed over stock photos of slumped bodies from the latest school shooting, the latest terrorist attack. There was a new one seemingly every day. Was it any wonder she felt as if she were being thrown from the stern of a small boat to the bow and back again? Nausea was a not-unexpected by-product.

Yet Karen had always prided herself on being strong, reasonable, tolerant, and tempered—not a hysteric shivering and cowering in the corner at the very suggestion of ghosts. What was happening to her? How had she allowed her dreams to supplant reality? And what was fear, after all, but a projection into a future that no one could predict?

Only, for Karen, the future felt like right now. That Ruby apparently had a perfectly fine day at school that day did nothing to diminish her paranoia. “I need to talk to you,” she told Matt that night. “And it’s important.”

“Again?” he said.

“Can you please mute the game?” Legs splayed on the sofa, he begrudgingly hit the remote. “I want to take Ruby out of Betts,” she said.

Matt unleashed a long sigh. “Is this about that kid again?”

“Yes, it’s about that kid, who is endangering the welfare of not just Ruby but all the other kids in his class. But it’s also about the fact that Ruby is bored and coming home singing really inappropriate songs she picks up in the schoolyard.”

“You mean, songs courtesy of the black girls with their morally bankrupt hip-hop culture?” countered Matt.

“I didn’t say anything about race,” Karen shot back.

“Well, I did. Besides, since when have you been a puritan?”

“Since today.”

“Whatever you say, Miss My Favorite Song in Fourth Grade Was ‘My Sharona’ by the Knack.”

“Okay, forget about music,” said Karen, already exasperated. “There’s also the fact that Ruby’s only friend at school turned on her, and the mother turned on me. And now it’s really uncomfortable for both of us.”

“So she’ll make new friends.”

“With who?”

Matt shrugged. “I don’t know. Aren’t there twenty-four other kids in her class?”

“Twenty-two of whom she has nothing in common with.”

“So, that’s what this is about,” said Matt with a leading smile that Karen didn’t appreciate. So often, Karen felt as if her husband was trying to out her as a reactionary or—even worse—a racist. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“There aren’t enough white kids,” said Matt, spelling it out for her. “Isn’t that the real issue here?”

“I never said that. You did,” said Karen.

“But that’s what you were thinking.”

Was Matt right, and was that why Karen wanted to take Ruby out of Betts? Karen refused to believe that about herself. It went against all her ideals and, really, everything she’d spent her life working toward. “It has nothing to do with race,” she told him. “I just don’t feel comfortable leaving her there in the morning anymore.”

“Well, I do,” said Matt. “Maybe she’ll learn the meaning of compassion, something you seem to have forgotten the definition of.”

“And maybe you’ll stop being so self-righteous,” said Karen, “and admit there are serious behavioral and discipline issues over there and also that it’s basically impossible for one teacher with twenty-five students to simultaneously teach kids who’ve had every advantage, like Ruby, and kids who live in homeless shelters and housing projects and barely have parents and are almost always behind in school.”

“So you want to send her to private school?” asked Matt. “Because money is the new IQ, and all rich kids are smart and want to learn. Is that how it works?”

“It has nothing to do with money,” scoffed Karen. “It has to do with coming from a functional family where people care about their kids getting an education and encourage them. In any case, we can’t afford private. And you know I don’t believe in it anyway.”

“So you want to move to the all-white half of Cortland Hill? Is that the idea? Or—even better—to a house in the suburbs with a picket fence and a green lawn?”