Zero Tolerance

by Claudia Mills

  Her mother’s confidential tone made Sierra feel that she could ask the question: “Why did you marry Daddy? You two are so different.”

  “Well, that’s what they say, that opposites attract. The short answer is that I married your father because I loved him. I still love him.”

  “But what made you start loving him in the first place?”

  Sierra’s mother continued to brush the cat, who had now rolled over onto his other side.

  “When we met, he was already in law school, and I was an undergrad. Even then I was trying to write plays, and he came to a student showcase where my first one-act play was having a reading.”

  “But Daddy doesn’t even like plays.”

  “He came with a friend, James, who did like plays, or at least liked girls who wrote plays, or at least liked me.”

  “And…?”

  “I heard someone in the audience laugh at the wrong place—well, it was the right place, it was a funny part, but he laughed a couple of seconds too late, like he didn’t get it until the moment had already passed. And then when I met him afterward, I was intrigued, because he was so confident—handsome, too, and charming, but mainly so confident. But he had laughed at the wrong time. It was sort of touching. Like he had this one little vulnerability. Like I was going to be the chink in his armor, or maybe I was going to be the one to get through the chink in his armor. Anyway, even though I was dating James, your father asked me out, and I went, and then I married him.”

  Sierra lay back against her propped-up pillows, the last bit of waffle settling into her contented stomach.

  “Do you still think of him that way? Like he has chinks in his armor?”

  Sierra couldn’t see any chinks at all.

  “Everyone has chinks in their armor.”

  “Even Daddy? What chinks in his armor does he have now?”

  Her mother stood up. “He has you. Believe me, he has no defenses where you’re concerned.”

  She lifted the tray from the bed. “The chink in his armor is loving you.”

  18

  Sierra worked on her Mayan culture report after breakfast and had the first draft finished by noon. If she wasn’t going to be expelled—and she really would like to know which it was going to be—she wanted to catch up on all her work and still earn A’s in everything for the quarter. She wished she hadn’t gotten that one B last year in earth science, even though the reporter made it sound like it was an amazing thing to have only one B for your whole time in middle school.

  After lunch—lentil soup that had smelled delicious simmering on the stove all morning—Sierra’s parents headed off for an afternoon movie date; Sierra’s dad had called ahead to make sure the theater was still open despite the weather. It would take more than a snowstorm to keep her father at home if he had an outing planned. He always did fun things with Sierra and her mother after a big case settled, overcome with jubilation at winning. Sierra knew that most of the time, for her father, “settlement” was another word for “victory.”

  Before reading through her Mayan report on her laptop to see if it still looked as worthy of an A+ as it had half an hour ago, Sierra checked her e-mail.

  She had a message from Mr. Lydgate, the teacher who directed all the Longwood choirs, including the Octave. It was flagged with a red exclamation mark and with the subject heading GOOD NEWS all in caps.

  And she had one from Colin, who had never e-mailed her before: cbeauvoir.

  She liked that he didn’t have some lame-attempt-at-being-cool e-mail address like colinthegreat or colinrocks.

  For a moment she wondered what Luke Bishop’s e-mail address would be.

  She opened Colin’s message first. It was written all in lowercase:

  hi, sierra.

  did you see us on tv? do i look that geeky in real life? choir news is great. hope you can go.

  colin

  Sierra almost felt like forwarding it to Em so that they could analyze it together.

  The absence of capitals: Did that mean that Colin was too lazy to use the shift key? Or was it sort of the e-mail equivalent of his talking in that soft voice?

  did you see us on tv? The “us” in that sentence made Sierra’s heart flap inside her chest like a caged hummingbird.

  do i look that geeky in real life? Sierra hadn’t realized that a boy could think that way. No, Colin did not look geeky in real life, or on TV, or only in an adorable way.

  choir news is great. What choir news? Oh, that other e-mail.

  hope you can go. Did this have to do with the choir news? Did “hope you can go” mean that Colin wanted her to be there, wherever “there” was?

  colin. Not love, colin. But of course he wouldn’t put love, colin. There was really no other way he could have signed it except for colin. Maybe he could have used his initials: cb. colin was better.

  There, she had done a pretty good job of analyzing it all on her own. She’d tell Em about the e-mail, of course she would, but she was glad now she hadn’t forwarded it to her. It was too personal, too precious, to share.

  She hated to close the screen, but she had to see what the great choir news was that Colin had written about.

  Mr. Lydgate had written to the eight members of the Octave, including Sierra, Celeste, and Colin. The choir had been selected before Christmas as an alternate to perform at the big music educators’ conference this coming Friday in Colorado Springs. Now Mr. Lydgate was writing to say that the winning choir had to cancel at the last minute, so the Octave would be performing in their place. Mr. Lydgate wanted them all to e-mail him ASAP to let him know if they could come.

  Yes! Of course she could go, even if it meant missing school all day on Friday.

  No.

  She couldn’t go.

  Friday was the day of her hearing.

  That’s what Colin had meant by “hope you can go.”

  Mr. Besser had to let her go, he just had to.

  She e-mailed Colin back. She used proper capitalization in her e-mail; she didn’t want him to think she was copying his style.

  Hi, Colin.

  You didn’t look geeky on TV. You looked great.

  Choir news is terrific. I hope I can go, too.

  Sierra

  She sent it before she could change her mind.

  Should she have said he looked great? She could have left it at “You didn’t look geeky.”

  She called up her message to Colin from her Sent folder and read it over again. It was probably okay.

  As she was about to close her e-mail, another message came in from Mr. Lydgate. This time it was just to Sierra. Mr. Lydgate said he was going to talk to Mr. Besser and “see what could be done.”

  Sierra wrote back a two-word answer: “Thank you.”

  And then she started praying.

  Dear God, please make Mr. Besser let me go to the concert. Dear God, please please please make it be that I can go.

  19

  Celeste called while Sierra’s parents were still at their movie.

  “Did you get Mr. Lydgate’s e-mail about the choir trip?” Celeste asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What if they don’t let you go?”

  What was Sierra supposed to say? Was this a setup for more condescending pity? “Then I guess I won’t go.”

  “It’s not that simple, Sierra! What if we can’t go if somebody is missing? If there’re just seven of us, not eight? What kind of Octave is that?”

  Sudden fury surged from Sierra’s throbbing chest into her burning face.

  “So that’s all you care about? If you get to go? I’m getting expelled for something that wasn’t even my fault, my whole life is being destroyed, and what you care about is how it affects you? If it inconveniences you?”

  “It’s not an inconvenience if the choir can’t go,” Celeste said in her most infuriating calm, patient tone, as if she were explaining something to a misbehaving toddler. “We’ve been practicing for months and months—two mornings every
single week at seven a.m. And then we got so close to being picked, but had to be the stupid alternate, and now we finally, finally, get this chance … I mean, Sierra, it does affect everyone if you can’t go and then the whole thing gets canceled.”

  Sierra was afraid she might say something so terrible to Celeste that she could never unsay it, never be able to take it back and pretend she hadn’t really meant it after all.

  “Well, I’m sorry if my getting expelled is such a huge drag for you,” she said carefully.

  “Come on, Sierra, don’t be that way.” Celeste made it sound as if Sierra was the one being selfish and unreasonable. “If it was reversed, if I was the one who got suspended, and you were the one who might not get to go on the biggest and most important choir trip ever, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t be disappointed.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “Who said anything about blaming anybody? Except—Sierra, you could have checked before you took the wrong lunch. It would have taken like two seconds to check, and then none of this would have happened.”

  “So you check your lunch every single day to make sure it’s the right one?”

  “No, but I don’t have the same lunch bag as my mom, either. Look, I didn’t mean to get you all upset,” Celeste said.

  “I’m not upset.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Well, if you were getting expelled, maybe you’d be a tiny bit upset, too.”

  Sierra knew Celeste was thinking: But I would never be getting expelled.

  Only a few days ago, Sierra would have thought the same thing.

  “Well, maybe you won’t get expelled, and it will all work out okay,” Celeste said, her voice bright and chipper, as if they were back to being friends again. “And maybe on Friday we’ll be in Colorado Springs, all of us singing together.”

  “Maybe,” Sierra said.

  Maybe.

  * * *

  It was almost dinnertime before Sierra’s parents got home from their movie date.

  “I don’t know how there can be people who live in Colorado and don’t know how to drive in snow,” Sierra’s father grumbled as he came into the family room where Sierra was watching some old movie on TV.

  “Are the roads really bad?” Sierra asked, clicking off the TV.

  “The roads are bad; the other drivers are worse.”

  “Was the movie good?”

  “Your mother liked it.”

  “You liked it, too,” her mother said.

  “I didn’t like it. I liked seeing it with you.” He smiled at Sierra’s mother.

  Maybe they were still in love, different as they were, even after all these years.

  “Daddy?”

  “What happened now?”

  Sierra told him about the choir trip. “Daddy, I really, really, really want to go. I have to go. And Celeste says if one person can’t go, the whole trip might have to be canceled. I mean, the name of our choir is the Octave. You really have to have eight people to be an octave.”

  “Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if the trip got canceled. Let Tom Besser see what his policies have wrought, what opportunities his students are losing out on because of his sanctimonious, self-righteous, irrational, zero-sense, zero-decency crapola.”

  “But that wouldn’t be fair to the others,” Sierra said. “Mr. Besser shouldn’t punish the whole entire Octave, and Mr. Lydgate, too, because of one student’s mistake.”

  “There’re a lot of things Tom Besser shouldn’t be doing right now,” her father said.

  “I’m going to take some chili out of the freezer, okay?” Sierra’s mother said. “And throw together some cornbread muffins to go with it. I think that would be a good supper for a snowy night, don’t you?”

  “Sure, hon.” Then to Sierra he said, “Just give me a few more days, sweetheart. One way or another, your Mr. Besser is going to be one sorry, sorry dude.”

  20

  On Sunday Sierra turned down an invitation from Em and Lexi to go sledding on the steep hill behind the high school. She wanted to stay at home to listen for the phone, sure that Mr. Lydgate was going to call to say that he had convinced Mr. Besser to let her go to the choir concert. Or maybe Mr. Besser himself would call to lift her suspension altogether. How could he not listen to almost four hundred students and eight teachers? As well as practically half the state of Colorado?

  But every phone call was another reporter calling for another quote to enliven the continuing coverage of the story. Sierra didn’t want to talk to them anymore, but her father said it was good “to keep Tom Besser’s feet to the fire.”

  “Yes, I’m still doing all my homework so I can catch up if they let me go back to class,” she told the reporter for the Denver Post.

  “There’s a big choir trip I really don’t want to miss,” she told the Associated Press.

  A reporter from a newspaper she had never heard of asked her if she thought students should be allowed to bring weapons to school.

  “No, but no one should be expelled just for making an honest mistake.”

  She felt bored hearing herself say the same things over and over again, in the same words, in the same earnest, sincere tone of voice. This was something she had never guessed: that being famous would be so boring.

  * * *

  School was open on Monday. It took more than a foot and a half of new-fallen snow to close schools in Colorado, especially when the snow plows had all day Sunday to ready the roads for rush-hour traffic.

  Two new kids arrived in the suspension room shortly after the first bell—both eighth-grade boys. Sierra learned that the short one with the sharp, ferret-featured face had swiped a handful of candy bars on Friday when the jazz band’s snack-sale table had been left unattended; the tall, dark-complexioned one had spray-painted an obscenity on the outside wall of the gym late Sunday night and been seen by a neighbor who called the police.

  My new friends, thought Sierra.

  “What did you do?” Shoplifter Brad asked Luke and Sierra.

  “I got in a fight,” Luke said.

  “I brought a knife to school,” Sierra said.

  She didn’t add any explanations. There was a bizarre delight in representing herself as so openly, brazenly bad.

  Brad looked at her with new respect, but Graffiti Artist Julio said, “She’s the one who was on TV.”

  Brad didn’t look any less impressed. Televised coverage didn’t make a crime any less sensational.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty cool to be suspended with a big celebrity,” Luke sneered. “The perfect honor student who never did anything wrong in her life, and look how unfair it is that someone like her should get in trouble.”

  Last Friday, when it had been just the two of them, Sierra had felt that she was starting to get to know Luke a little bit and even like him a little bit. Why was he being so hateful now?

  “What got into you?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Look, if you want to give Brad and Julio your autograph, go right ahead. I don’t need one, though, so you can spare the muscles in your hand.”

  Sitting where Luke couldn’t see him, Julio gave Sierra a friendly shrug: What’s up with him?

  Luke flipped on his Game Boy and made a great pretense of not even noticing that the rest of them were there.

  “Why did you steal the candy bars?” Sierra asked Brad. “Didn’t you figure you’d get caught?”

  “I didn’t get caught the other times,” Brad said.

  She decided to ask Julio a question, too, to keep the conversation going in the face of Luke’s silence. “Are you going to have to wash off your graffiti?”

  “It doesn’t wash off. But, yeah, I’m going to have to paint the whole side of the gym. And pay for the paint. It sucks big-time.”

  “Was it worth it? I mean, was it fun doing it?”

  She tried to imagine what it would feel like—to be out alone at night, slipping between the pools of ligh
t beneath the lampposts, a can of spray paint hidden under her jacket, and then to write something with it for anybody driving by Longwood Middle School to see.

  Luke looked up from his game. “What’s it to you?” he asked Sierra.

  “It’s called making polite conversation.”

  “Ooh, ooh, tell me more about the bad things you did!” Luke squealed in a falsetto voice.

  It was almost as if Luke was jealous, not of her, but of Brad and Julio.

  “Your three-day fighting suspension ends today,” she said to Luke. “Can’t you be nice to me for a few more hours?”

  “Yeah,” Julio said, taking her side.

  “Shut the frick up,” Luke told him.

  “You shut the frick up,” Julio fired back.

  She didn’t have a chance to see what Luke was going to say or do next. Apparently having heard the commotion in the suspension room, Ms. Lin was there so suddenly that Luke didn’t have time to whisk his Game Boy out of sight.

  “Mr. Bishop.” She made the title sound like an insult. “You can be heard all the way in the front office where Mr. Besser is having a very important meeting.”

  Sierra couldn’t help wondering: A very important meeting about me?

  “And Mr. Bishop. I believe I told you that the use of electronic devices in this room is strictly forbidden. I am going to confiscate that toy of yours and keep it locked up in my desk until school gets out in May.”

  Luke said nothing.

  “Give that to me.”

  Would Luke refuse? What would Ms. Lin do if he did?

  Luke hesitated. Then he threw his Game Boy down the conference table toward Ms. Lin.

  “That’s not fair!” Sierra burst out. “You can’t keep it for months and months like that.”

  Ms. Lin’s eyes, as they fell on Sierra, were black slits of fury.

  “Ms. Shepard, I don’t need you of all people to tell me what I should and should not be doing. And don’t think for a minute that a petition signed by your little friends is going to make any difference whatsoever to me or Mr. Besser.”

  Ms. Lin snatched up Luke’s Game Boy like a bird of prey pouncing on a helpless small animal. As if to punctuate her departure, the tattered poster with the words RULES RESPECT RESPONSIBILITY RELIABILITY came loose from its tape and fluttered onto the scuffed linoleum floor.