Class(97)

“I just wanted to let you know that Ruby is coming back to Betts,” Karen said quickly. “It’s a long story, but the short version is that I realized I made a mistake.”

“So, it’s both long and short?” said Lou, still sounding the tiniest bit prickly. But at least the channels had been reopened.

“Something like that,” said Karen, who hoped that, over time, they could rebuild their friendship.

She sent an e-mail along the same lines to April Fishbach.

Welcome back to the front lines, Comrade Kipple, April responded.

An involuntary giggle escaped from Karen, who realized it was the first time she’d laughed in a week.



To Karen’s joy and relief, Ruby hadn’t been back at Betts for two days before she had a new best friend—Fatima, the Egyptian girl who’d arrived the same week that Maeve left. To Karen’s further joy, although she would never have admitted it out loud, Fatima’s parents turned out to be educated professionals. Fatima’s mother was a sociologist who had a fellowship at a state university branch nearby. Her father was some kind of engineer.

Meanwhile, it emerged in the subsequent weeks that Winners Circle hadn’t received as many applications as they’d expected. The result was that two projected kindergarten classrooms had been consolidated into one. After all that, it seemed that Betts’s school library would be left as is. What’s more, thanks to several anonymous donations made to the PTA, there was suddenly enough cash to purchase new books and even beanbag chairs. But there was still no money in the budget for a librarian, which seemed like a terrible shame to Karen, since the school couldn’t keep the library open without one.

Over the next month, Karen and her own NBF, April, hatched a plan to reopen the space with parent volunteers. April did the scheduling, and Karen wrote the e-mails asking for help—and was pleasantly surprised by the number of parents of all colors and creeds (though nearly all of them were female) who came forward to offer their time. A local construction company promised to do a free paint job over the summer. For once, Karen felt as if she was really making a difference. Though she continued to believe there was a place for the kind of fund-raising work she did at Hungry Kids. Maybe it wasn’t a pure form of philanthropy, but really, was there a pure form of anything?

The very last Friday in June, Karen was walking down the hall en route to the library, where she planned to help unpack and then shelve some of the new titles that had come in—she’d decided to donate her Friday mornings to Betts, after all—when she ran into Principal Chambers. In Karen’s nearly four years at the school, she’d never spoken to the woman directly. In fact, until that moment, Karen very much doubted that Regina Chambers even knew who she was or that her daughter had left and come back. “It’s Karen, isn’t it?” she said, stopping and pivoting.

Karen could have fallen over. “Yes, it is!” she said, stopping too.

“We’re happy to have you and your daughter back at the school,” said Principal Chambers.

“Oh, thank you!” said Karen. “We’re really happy to be here.”

“I understand you ran into a little trouble over at Mather Elementary?”

Karen blanched with embarrassment. Was it possible that Regina Chambers knew her secret? “Well, yes, a little,” Karen mumbled, then chuckled.

“Well, on behalf of the Constance C. Betts School, let me just say thank you for your generous donation. It was very much appreciated.” Principal Chambers offered Karen a toothy grin.

“Oh!” said Karen, both gratified and horrified. “Well, it was my pleasure. But how do you—”

“My daughter babysits for a family you might know—the mother’s name is Liz Chang. Just had her third kid. She said you were a genius of subterfuge.” She laughed lightly.

“Oh, right—I do know her,” said Karen, dying on the inside.

“Apparently some of the PTA ladies pushed hard to go to the police, but Liz told me she was the one who advocated letting it drop. Got to hand it to her there!”

“I didn’t know—wow—that was so…nice of her.”

“Not to worry—it’s all between us.” Principal Chambers smiled again.

Karen smiled back even as her stomach was busy twisting itself into a poison pretzel. “I appreciate you keeping it that way. Some people might not—understand.”

“Well, I get it,” she replied.

And that was how Karen Kipple and Regina Chambers became, if not friends, then friendly enough that, by the following fall, Karen felt justified in calling her Regina, just as Lou did.

On occasion, it still made Karen uncomfortable over how few white kids there were in Ruby’s fourth-grade class—at last count, just six. When it came time to apply to middle school, Karen found herself worrying, would it hurt or hinder Ruby to be graduating from such a “marginal” school? But an informal survey of the parents of the new kindergartners suggested that more families from the community were beginning to use the school. And on most days that Karen walked into Betts, she felt proud to be doing her part in pursuit of a more perfect, more unified world. She never felt it more than on the evening of the fourth-grade choral concert. Karen had always considered Whitney Houston’s songs to be saccharine and overwrought. But that evening, at the sight and sound of her daughter and her mostly brown-and black-skinned classmates belting out “‘Who knows what miracles you can achieve / When you believe,’” Karen felt her eyes tearing up and her lower lip beginning to quiver. Whitney suddenly emerged in her mind as a veritable goddess of all things righteous and inspiring. After nearly five years at Betts, it seemed, Karen was finally getting used to being in the minority. She was also starting to see that race was really just a fantasy, like any other.