Picture Us In The Light(75)
If I were to paint what it feels like right now to have him stand in front of me and say that, it would be this: dark splatters shoved aside by some kind of glowing center. “That, ah, means more to me than you know.”
“It’s just what I thought when I saw your picture. I’m going to hang on to it.” He offers me a smile, his eyes crinkling. I always thought he had a great smile. “I’ll save it for when you’re rich and famous. I’ll say I knew you when.”
I’m still replaying that smile walking into first period, keeping it close by to make myself feel like today’s going to be okay after all. When I walk in, Mrs. Sachdeva comes toward me like she’s been waiting for me.
“Danny,” she says, her expression sympathetic. She puts her hand on my arm. “Mr. Denton would like to see you in his office. Why don’t you take your things with you? He’s waiting for you, so go ahead and go.”
Regina’s mother is there in the AP’s office, her face pinched with anger, Regina sitting rigid and silent next to her. Mr. Denton, the assistant principal, stands when I come in, his hands splayed across his hips.
Mr. Denton went here for high school back when it was a different place entirely. He’s probably my favorite of the APs—he’s always seemed the most human—but he’s also always seemed baffled by us and all the ways we aren’t the white jocks and cheerleaders in his old yearbook photos, always casting himself as wearily, benignly bewildered by us and by our parents who come to argue with varying amounts of English about our grades and complain about our teachers.
“Danny, thank you for joining us,” he says. “We’ve called your folks, so we’re just waiting on them.”
The room spirals in front of me, a whirlpool that sucks in everything in my field of vision. “They can’t come, they’re both working, but I can just have them call you, or—”
“They’re on their way. We’ll just go ahead and hang tight until they can be here too.”
“I told him that was unnecessary,” Regina says sharply. “I told him the drawing was anonymous and it wasn’t you, and that—”
“Regina.” Mr. Denton gives her a tired smile. They know each other; she was one of the National Merit Semifinalists and he wrote all their letters of rec for college, and she’s in his office a lot doing interviews for stories, too. “We’ve been over this. Let’s just—” He holds out his hands in a whoa-there gesture. Regina folds her arms across her chest and sits back against the chair, her lips pressed together. Her mother glares at her and snaps something in Taiwanese. And her tone—it’s that panicked anger everyone who’s ever had a parent recognizes from the way you get yelled at when you cross a street without looking or reach toward a hot burner, and it makes me think I misjudged her when I first came in.
My throat is slowly closing. I thought maybe we’d get in trouble, but I figured it would involve a slap on the wrist and that since my name wasn’t on it I’d be fine. It didn’t occur to me that without any warning my parents would be called here. My worst-case scenario was how I’d intercept a call home.
When they burst in they look frantic. My dad’s wearing his security uniform and he’s clutching his phone, and both of them are out of breath like they ran from the car. Next to Mrs. Chan they look disheveled and whole magnitudes more panicked.
“Thanks for joining us,” Mr. Denton says, sticking out his hand for them to shake.
“We’re very sorry,” my mom says. “We can work out whatever—”
He gives them the same hands-out gesture. “Let’s just sit down and have a conversation together here. I think that’s the best course of action.”
They sit. My mom presses two fingers against her wrist, checking her pulse. And I realize, seeing them next to Mrs. Chan that way, that their fear is aimed differently: Mrs. Chan’s, it’s clear, is about Regina and probably, I think, about Sandra. My parents’ is about Mr. Denton.
“First off,” Mr. Denton says, “just want to cover all our bases here and check in and make sure you two are doing all right. I know it’s a tough day. You feeling okay?”
Regina says, flatly, “Oh, I’m great.”
“Danny?”
“I’m fine.”
“All right. If at any point you feel like this is too much or you need to talk to someone, you stop me, okay? We’ve got our counselors right here in the office. Deal?”
Regina glares at him. Mr. Denton says, “I’ll take that as a yes. All right. Let’s just take a look here—” He reaches across his desk for a copy of the paper and shakes it open, and then launches into an explanation for our parents’ benefit of how we went behind our teacher’s back to print it/how hard the school’s working to protect all its students and be sensitive to everyone’s needs/why it’s supposedly necessary to have such clearly defined guidelines in place/how said guidelines have been made abundantly clear. And how we must have understood that, which is why we did this covertly instead of asking permission, right? He looks between us, his eyebrows raised.
I don’t answer that one. But I have to fight to keep the anger off my face. Someone you grew up with dies, someone whose history is inextricable from your own, and you’re supposed to what, exactly—talk to random counselors about grief and acceptance, feel proud that you’ve gotten over something you really should never get over? Regina says, “Talking about suicide isn’t the same thing as glorifying it,” and there’s a crack in her resolve—her voice is shaking.