She closes the link to the Today show website and checks the time, then stands and smooths her skirt, pretending not to notice the thoughts that keep circling in her head about how many faculty members might have found the PR email in their inboxes and, seeing her name, thought, Oh, God, her again. How many of them think of her the way Tabatha does? How many can see right through her? She picks up her phone off her desk and, leaving the office, closing the door behind her, she swipes at the screen as she begins to walk, looking for an email to answer, a post to like, something—anything—to distract her.
Her class becomes the day’s bright spot. Though they are hurtling toward the end of the semester and the students are typically restless, ready to head into summer, today was different. They spent the ninety minutes sharing the results of one of her recent assignments, where she’d had her students write letters of gratitude to people who’d made an impact on their lives: coaches, parents, grandparents. At one point, Josiah, a prep school kid hailing from the Upper East Side of Manhattan (whom Charlotte had, until today, always thought was a bit of an asshole) silenced the room with his story of the oncologist who’d helped him beat his childhood leukemia. It was one of those special, unexpected moments in the classroom that reminded Charlotte why she loved teaching. Not speaking, not writing. Teaching.
She walks back to her office, checking her phone to see whether any of the eighty students whom she’s just left have tweeted anything interesting during class. The university generally doesn’t allow students to use their phones in the classroom, but because her course has become such a press win for the school (with a photo of her lecturing, arms raised enthusiastically, on the cover of this year’s alumni-giving mass mailing to prove it), her students are allowed to comment on her lessons online, often even live-tweeting statements as they come out of her mouth.
At first, when the class was taking off in popularity, this was great. It was instant validation and feedback when a student tweeted out a point she’d made in class, especially on days when it didn’t seem the kids were engaged and she’d leave the room feeling frustrated, like she’d just spent an entire lecture throwing pebbles into a dark canyon, wondering whether anything she’d said resonated. Now, it sometimes feels a little too public, especially since she knows that a lot of her students’ parents are monitoring her every move.
There are just a couple of tweets today: a Bart Simpson GIF from Marcus Gromley, a Hurricane Katrina survivor who is one of her best students, showing the cartoon character cartwheeling with a caption about the surprising benefits of generosity, and a tweet from Susan Thompkins, a mild-mannered premed student whose parents are a nightmare, with a link to a study Charlotte had referenced about the correlation between doing good deeds and overall life satisfaction. Back when she started teaching, she might get one or two overinvolved parents each year. “Helicopter parents,” they called them then. Now, the term is snowplow parents. She gets emails from them every single week, wanting her input on how their kids are doing in class, complaining about something she’s taught them (“How is meditation going to get my kid into law school?”), asking her for deadline extensions on their children’s behalf. It amazes her that these adults—often high-achieving ones with busy schedules; diplomats and doctors, bankers and attorneys—find the time to email their kids’ college professors, but they do. And Jason has the gall to tell me I’m overinvolved, she thinks to herself, sitting down at her desk. She feels a chill run through her, thinking again of Birdie sneaking out, what she could have been doing, and how deceiving them so blatantly didn’t seem to faze her at all. She keeps getting images of her worst possible fears. Birdie in some dark corner, on a squeaky metal swing, Tucker pressing himself against her, pressuring her, whispering insistently in her ear. She also knows she’s catastrophizing—the very thing she tells her anxious grad students not to do when they tremble in the chair facing her desk, certain they’re going to fuck up and flub their dissertations—but she just can’t help it. How can any mother?
Birdie’s probably just finishing lunch. Charlotte feels the urge to drive back to Arlington and pull her daughter out of school and talk to her now, filled with something she’s never really felt before as a parent, a weird mix of anger over the way Birdie flat-out lied to them and an underlying yearning to hold her close, to protect her from the things that might have transpired on the playground the other night. Tons of families they knew, including Stephanie’s, were members at that pool, and they had spent a lot of time there as a family when Birdie was younger, often for Friday night cookouts on the lawn that separated the pool from the playground, the kids climbing all over the swings and the monkey bars, their hands sticky and their faces Popsicle-stained. She picks up her phone and shoots Stephanie a text: Did you decide on a punishment for Hannah yet? We should probably conference on this.
Immediately, a message comes back: Probably should, she says. What do you think? Draw and quarter them? Public stoning at Starbucks in front of all their friends? Charlotte laughs. Seriously, though, Stephanie texts again. I feel terrible that it was my house they snuck out of.
Stop, Charlotte types. She pictures Stephanie, who’s retired from the Army but works part-time doing marketing for a veterans’ charity, sitting at her kitchen table in comfy clothes. Next time, though, it’s totally fine with me if you feel the need to punish them with whatever hell you went through during Basic Training, she types.
Got it, Stephanie replies. But hopefully, there’s no next time. Gotta go. Conference call.
Charlotte puts down her phone and digs a granola bar out of her desk drawer, then looks up at her computer monitor. There are forty new messages since she left for class less than two hours ago, including one from the university PR office, telling her that the reporter from U.S. News & World Report who was going to sit in on her class next week has to cancel, but that another one, this one from Good Day L.A., would like to do a segment with her at the end of the month. Again, like the tweets, it’s the kind of thing that would have thrilled her a few years ago, but now it’s just one more item on a long list of things to handle. She thinks of Tabatha, ribbing her this morning for her media attention, and closes out the program and grabs her phone instead.
She hasn’t Instagrammed anything since the bunnies on Saturday, and she tries to post something at least every couple of days. Maybe a quote, she thinks, scrolling through the cache she keeps bookmarked. She finds one from To Kill a Mockingbird: “People generally see what they look for and hear what they listen for.” She types out a caption that she knows is too cheesy—So focus on the good!—and tags it #MondayMotivation. She’s about to close out the program when she notices a little red icon at the top of the screen, indicating that she has a new direct message. She gets several a day, most from readers simply thanking her for the book that are easy enough to answer with a quick “Thanks!” and a smiley face emoji. This one is from somebody named @KGpartyof5. She squints at the little photo on the woman’s account, trying to see if she’s one of the people who regularly message her, but this woman—big glasses, a denim shirt, living in Muncie, Indiana—has never contacted her before. And that’s a good thing, she realizes, her pulse rising as she reads the message, which is essentially a long catalog of insults.
Who the fuck do you think you are, it reads. I am raising four kids on minimum wage, one of them with severe special needs that our public school doesn’t have the capacity to deal with. My husband runs his father’s dry-cleaning business but every day it’s like we might have to close up shop because with so many people out of work around here, nobody needs their work clothes cleaned anymore. My main babysitter, my sister-in-law, has a severe opioid addiction after getting prescribed painkillers for knee surgery a couple of years ago, so she can’t help anymore. And you want me to sit down every day and write about what I’m grateful for? You want me to go breathe in fresh air when I don’t have an extra minute in my day? You want me to “consider generosity”—Charlotte smarts, rememberin
g the drawing of two hands clasped together that she’d posted last week—when every fucking thing I do all day long is for somebody else? I watched your TED talk after one of the waitresses I work with sent it to me and I thought it was bullshit. I wasn’t impressed. “Action first, feelings later”? Try that when you meet with your kid’s teacher and find out there isn’t any funding for the special ed services you’re supposed to be entitled to by law. ANYWAY. Just thought you should know that I see you and you’re completely out of touch. Have a nice day!
Charlotte drops the phone. It’s hardly the first negative message she’s ever received, but this one’s a little harsher than usual, or maybe it burns because of where her head is today. She turns in her chair and looks out the window, feeling tempted to write back, though she knows better, when she hears her phone start buzzing behind her.
She picks it up and, seeing the caller ID, puts it back down on her desk. It’s Wendy, her agent. Fuck, she thinks. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. When the hell am I supposed to find the time to write a follow-up? she wants to scream. And about what? Her mind zips back to @KGpartyof5. I see you, her message said. She swallows, a lump forming in her throat, and hears a ding signaling that Wendy’s left a voicemail.
Reluctantly, she picks up the phone to check the message.
“Jesus, you’re hard to pin down these days!” Wendy says. “Listen, I know it’s the end of the semester, but we really need to talk strategy for the second book, okay? I’m coming down to DC for lunch. Next week. Wednesday? Call me back or at least shoot me a message to confirm. Thanks, love.”
Charlotte swipes back to Instagram, where there are forty-six comments on her post. Heart emojis, heart-eye emojis, rainbows, and smiley faces. Thanks! they say. Just what I needed! OMG, exactly! Somehow, it doesn’t make her feel any better.
Five
Jason is lifting a paper take-out container from a plastic bag on the kitchen counter when he hears the garage door opening.
“Thanks for getting that,” Charlotte says, turning in to the kitchen, and he feels his shoulders drop. She sounds like she’s in a pleasant enough mood, or at least a better one than this morning.
“Sure,” he says, opening one of the containers. She throws her bag down and reaches across the counter for one of the yucca fries he picked up along with Peruvian chicken and salad and plantains. “Crisp & Juicy?” she says, referencing the place around the corner. There are dozens of Peruvian chicken places all over the DC area but this is their favorite, in rotation since Birdie was still in diapers.
“What else? How was your day?” he asks.
“Long,” she says, walking to the refrigerator. “I need a glass of wine.”
“Actually, grab me one,” he says.
“Really?”
“Why not?” he says, shrugging, trying to keep the mood light.
“You almost never drink with me anymore.”
He purses his lips, telling himself it’s not a dig. Don’t react, he thinks to himself, though what he wants to say is that she just drinks all the time now, with or without him.
She places the glass of white wine next to him. “How was your day?”
“Fine,” he says. “Good, actually. We put the hammock we built in the sloth bears’ enclosure and they really seemed to take to it. Niko even ate his meal in it.”
“Niko?” She squints, trying to place the name.
“The sloth bear,” he says, certain he told her about him.
She shrugs. Of course she doesn’t remember, he thinks. Her job stuff crowds everything else out. “So where is she?” she says.
He nudges his chin toward the ceiling. “In her room.”
She sits at the counter, watching as he pulls plates from the cabinet. “How’d she seem?”
“Normal as always,” he says. “She was walking up to the house from practice just as I was getting home. Had her head in her phone, as usual.”
“Texting Tucker?”
“Yup,” he says.
“So what did you say to her?”
He looks at her, blank-faced. “Say to her? I didn’t say anything yet. I wanted to wait until you got home.”
Her eyes widen, and any optimism he had about the evening fades. Just when he thought they might be able to do this without arguing . . . “So, what?” she says. “You just pretended like everything was normal?”
He grabs three forks from the drawer, telling himself not to react. “No, Charlotte,” he says. “Like we talked about this morning, I thought we were doing this together. I thought we’d wait until you got home.” And you would have totally lost your mind if I did this without you, he thinks.
She sighs and takes another drink, her face settling into its familiar scowl.
“What?” he says.
“Just don’t make me be the bad guy,” she says. “I don’t want you to just sit off to the side like you usually do, letting me do the dirty work.”
“Seriously?” he says. “That’s what you think I do?”
She rubs an invisible little circle into the space between her eyes with her fingers, and for a moment, he’s reminded that there was a time when this was his signal. She’d be worn out from a long week or an argument with her department head, or despondent after taking another pregnancy test, and he would see her do this and walk up behind her, pull her hair off her neck, and rub her shoulders. He wonders if she remembers this now and if she misses it. Unlikely, he thinks.
They sit there in silence, the tension building. He can hear the faintest thrum of Birdie’s music on her iPad upstairs. “Why don’t I go get her?” Charlotte finally says, lifting herself from the kitchen stool, like it’s a herculean effort.
“Shouldn’t we talk about this first?” he says. “Decide on a punishment?”
“Well, she’s grounded,” she says.
“But what are the specifics?” he asks, thinking back to this afternoon at work. He’d gone over to the ape house to see the baby orangutan, and he and Jamie and Ian, one of their other coworkers, got talking about Birdie, which led to a funny conversation about the various punishments they received as kids. Ian had literally had to stand in a corner with his nose touching the wall. Jamie’s dad made her take an actual bite out of a bar of Irish Spring when he overheard her call her brother an asshole. Jason hadn’t had much to add to the conversation. His parents were so mild-mannered, and his older brother, Tate, was really the one who had been the troublemaker, getting caught with a bag of weed under his mattress, skipping class constantly. Jason was in his sophomore year of high school when Tate finally came out to them, and his parents, both lifelong Catholics, were so caught up in getting used to the idea that Jason had managed to stay under the radar and out of the way.
“We could take her phone,” Charlotte says.
“But she needs it in the afternoons,” he says, thinking through the logistics. “If she needs to reach us after school, or if a practice runs long or is canceled.”
“Right,” she says. “Well, it needs to be harsh. We need to scare her straight so that this is a onetime offense. If she ever does anything like this again, she’s toast.”
A slight smile appears on Jason’s lips. He can’t help it. There was something about the conversation at work today that made him feel like this isn’t such a big deal. Charlotte’s intensity, in comparison, is kind of funny.
“What, Jason?” she says.
“More than likely, she’s going to do stuff like this again, Charlotte. Maybe she won’t sneak out, but maybe she will.”
“So, what?” she snips. “We just let it go?” She shakes her head, looking at him like he’s a moron.
“Of course not!” he says. “Listen, I’m as pissed as you are.” He thinks of Tucker, the little prick, and heat rises up the back of his neck. “But we both know that if we really lay down the law, she might not hear that we also don’t want her doing this stuff because it’s not safe. I don’t want her to think we’re just punishing her for the sake of it, you know
?”
She nods and he finds himself doing the same. Okay, he thinks. Getting somewhere.
“Maybe we shouldn’t let her see Tucker anymore,” she says.
“Charlotte, you know what that will do.”
“I’m just saying,” she says. “If we really want her to learn her lesson.” She gets up to pour herself more wine. “You want?” she starts, nudging the bottle toward his glass on the counter before she realizes he’s barely drank any. “Never mind.” She leans against the refrigerator after she’s closed it, her arms crossed over her chest. “Well,” she says. “You don’t seem to like any of my ideas, so you come up with something. I’ll follow your lead.”
“Fine,” he says, saying it not so much because it’s what he wants but because he just doesn’t want to deal with this conversation anymore. Honestly, a part of him feels like dealing with Birdie will be easier.
“So you said nothing to her?” she repeats again. “She has no idea what’s—”
“Charlotte,” he says, his annoyance finally building to the point where he can no longer hide it. “I saw her for like thirty seconds before she ran upstairs to shower and start her homework.”
“Okay, okay,” she says, raising her palm to him as she leaves the room. “Got it.”
When Birdie walks in for dinner, she’s wearing last year’s Christmas pajamas, which Jason’s mother had left on their front stoop on the morning of the twenty-fourth in a handmade drawstring bag, a felt Santa sewn onto the front. After two boys, she’s always gone a little overboard with the girlie stuff for Birdie, and the gifts in general, but Jason never minded it. Nancy, his mother-in-law, has been such a lackluster grandparent, visiting them only once in the past several years (and complaining the whole time about the weather, the traffic, the people), that he was happy to have his mother take up the slack. The pajamas are hot pink flannel with a Frosty the Snowman print, the pants too short now, exposing Birdie’s ankles. She’s fresh from her postpractice shower, running a brush through her long hair.
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