No One Ever Asked

by Katie Ganshert

  Kelly rubbed his chin. “Right. Of course. It’s horrible if it’s true. It’s just hard to move forward when we don’t have any adult witnesses. It’s one girl’s word against another’s.”

  Two girls’ word against another.

  And both of those girls happened to be black.

  “There’s really not much we can do,” he said.

  “Call her parents in.”

  Kelly’s cheeks—which were almost always rosy—went strangely white. Anaya could practically see what he was thinking. Camille Gray was MVP of the PTA. She did so much for the school, for the whole district. But what about Anaya? What about Nia and Jubilee? Why was he more concerned about Camille Gray than them?

  “Why don’t you send the girls down. I’ll have a talk with each of them separately and see what I can find out. We’ll take it from there.”

  Thirty-One

  “How long will the application take to process?”

  “Not more than forty-five days.”

  Camille nodded, a feeling of triumphant accomplishment swelling in her chest. In forty-five days or less, she would have a permit to carry. Never mind pepper spray or the sharp self-defense keychain Neil got for her once upon a time when he still cared. This was the real deal. This would keep the burglars far away. Somehow this would even show Neil. She wasn’t sure how, exactly. She just felt that it would. The whole thing was a much-needed adrenaline rush.

  “Your left hand, please.”

  Camille surrendered it.

  The bulldog-faced woman in the sheriff’s office began rolling each of her fingers in the black ink, then onto the card.

  Camille’s phone started to buzz on top of her purse, which she’d set on the floor. She glanced down and saw the number of O’Hare Elementary on the screen. It was one o’clock on a Monday.

  “I’m sorry, but I really have to answer that.”

  The bulldog-faced woman stared at her with a grim expression.

  “It’s my daughter’s school. It’ll just take one second.” She took back her left hand with an apologetic grimace and used the heels of her palms to get the phone to her ear.

  “Hello, this is Camille.”

  “Hi, Camille? It’s Principal Kelly.”

  “Oh. Principal Kelly.” She hadn’t expected him. She thought it would be the nurse, calling because Paige had strep throat again. Dr. Porter said one more infection and they would most certainly remove her tonsils. “How are you?”

  “I’m doing all right.”

  Only he didn’t sound all right. He sounded a little odd.

  She smiled awkwardly at the fingerprint lady, held up her inky finger to indicate one second, and turned away—as though doing so might lend her some privacy.

  “I, uh, wanted to let you know about a situation this morning at school involving Paige.”

  “Okay.”

  “Apparently, a classmate heard Paige calling another classmate a name.” Principal Kelly paused. “A racial slur, actually.”

  “What?”

  “I called the girls into my office and talked to each of them.”

  Paige was called into the principal’s office? Paige had said a racial slur? Camille’s mind spun. Or maybe it was the room. She cupped her forehead with her hand, then quickly pulled it away. She had ink all over her hand. “I can’t imagine Paige even knows any…” She glanced over her shoulder, at the woman who was impatiently waiting. “Any of those kinds of words. She certainly hasn’t heard them in my house. Should…should I come get her?”

  “No, no. It’s fine. I spoke with Paige about it. She’s saying she didn’t say it. Jubilee and Nia are saying she did.”

  Camille could feel the heat rising. Up into the tips of her ears. All the way past her hairline. Jubilee and Nia. But…Jubilee struggled with lying. Her own mother told Camille as much at the splash pad the month before. If the girls thought Paige was leaving them out, it was very reasonable to think they would try to get Paige into trouble. That had to be it. Her daughter would never ever use a racial slur.

  “It’s become a bit of a he-said, she-said situation, only without the he. Paige and I talked a little about the word and why it’s never appropriate. I wanted you to be aware, in case she came home with any questions.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news on a Monday.”

  “Please don’t apologize. And please know, I will certainly be talking to Paige about this when she gets home. If she did say a word of that nature, it won’t happen again.”

  * * *

  “I’ve made Mrs. Gray aware of the situation.”

  “And?”

  “She was shocked, of course, and said she would be speaking with Paige.”

  “What about Jubilee and Nia? Shouldn’t their parents be made aware of the situation?”

  “By all means, you are more than welcome to call them in.”

  She was.

  He wasn’t going to do anything.

  Except stand there like he was expecting a thank-you.

  “I know this isn’t the outcome you wanted. But there’s really not much we can do. Since no adult heard it, our hands are tied.”

  Right.

  Of course.

  There’s really not much we can do.

  It was such a discouragingly familiar response.

  * * *

  Camille stared at Paige in the rearview mirror as she pulled away from the pickup line at O’Hare.

  “How long is it gonna take to watch Austin play chess?” she asked, pulling her seat belt across her lap and setting her backpack on the seat beside her.

  “I don’t have any idea. This is my first time, just like you.” Camille turned on her blinker and pulled out onto the road, waiting for Paige to say something, anything, about her trip to Mr. Kelly’s office. But Paige didn’t. She sat in the backseat in her emoji pajamas, moving her finger in the air as though counting something invisible.

  “Paige?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How was your day?”

  “Good.” Her eyes—wide and innocent—met Camille’s in the mirror. “How was your day, Mom?”

  “Well, Paige, my day wasn’t so great. I got a phone call from your principal today, saying he had to call you into his office. He said you called someone a mean name.”

  “I would never do that.”

  “Two of your classmates said that you did.”

  “Nia and Jubilee are lying.”

  And just like that, Camille knew.

  Nia and Jubilee weren’t lying.

  Paige was.

  She was lying now just like she lied four years ago, when Miss Patty caught her stealing Faith’s midmorning snack at Our Redeemer Preschool. Camille had a very stern, very serious conversation with her about the wrongness of stealing and how that was no way to treat a friend. Paige sat there looking so utterly confused and perplexed by the accusation that if not for Camille’s sixth sense about lying, she might have fallen for it.

  “I would never take Faith’s fruit snacks, Mommy. I love Faith.”

  “Miss Patty saw you do it, Paige.”

  “Well, Miss Patty must be lying.”

  She’d said it with such a straight face. Such an alarmingly straight face that Camille had been struck with a disconcerting thought. Her daughter was a pathological liar.

  She had the same feeling now.

  And for one terrifying moment, as Paige stared openly, almost defiantly back at her from the rearview mirror, Camille was certain that if not for Principal Kelly’s phone call, she never would have caught the omission. They would have driven to Austin’s chess match, Camille completely in the dark. And if she was this in the dark about her youngest, how could she possibly know any of them?

  “You don’t believe me
,” Paige pouted.

  “Why would Nia and Jubilee lie?”

  “Because they hate me.”

  A honk sounded behind her.

  Camille had slowed to a stop at a light that wasn’t red.

  She punched the gas, the muscles in her shoulders knotting. Stress accumulating on top of stress. Neil leaving. The South Fork kids coming. The public meeting that had gotten out of hand. The way the media attacked her afterward, like she was some kind of evil villain. Pamela’s vindictive words on Saturday. And her husband this morning, walking out of the gym with that gorgeous woman.

  Now this.

  Her daughter used a racial a slur.

  She used a racial slur, Jubilee Covington was involved, and Anaya Jones probably believed that Camille was indoctrinating her daughter with racist ideology at home.

  “We’re not done talking about this, Paige,” Camille said, pulling into the middle school parking lot. They were not done talking about this in the slightest. Now, however, wasn’t the time. She was not going to be late to Austin’s chess match. She was not going to be late when this was the first time in his life that he’d ever asked—without any prompting on her behalf—to join something.

  Thirty-Two

  “She’s insisting she didn’t say it, but I thought you deserved to know.”

  Jen Covington sat in front of Anaya at the short bean-shaped table in an undersized second grade chair, her face as white as chalk. “How does a kid that age even know a word like that?”

  “How does a kid that age know any bad word? They hear it from someone.”

  Jen’s eyes met Anaya’s. Maybe they were thinking the same thing: Where exactly had Paige Gray heard it?

  “Mrs. Covington?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry for being blunt, but do you know how to talk to Jubilee about these things?”

  The chalky-white of her cheeks tinged with pink. Anaya wondered if she would get defensive. She wondered if her feathers were going to get ruffled. My goodness, white people and their easily ruffled feathers. Well, she was tired of tiptoeing. She was tired of handling their egos with care when they hardly thought twice about her heart.

  Jen looked down into her lap, where her fingers wrestled. “When we first moved to town, my husband and I talked about enrolling Jubilee in a South Fork school—at Lincoln Elementary.”

  “Lincoln?”

  Abeo went to Lincoln.

  Anaya had gone there too. And already the rumors were flying that by year’s end, it was going to be shut down. Everyone was talking about it after church yesterday. Only two tuition payments in, and the district was already beginning to topple.

  “Maybe we should have stuck with our gut. If we would have sent Jubilee to Lincoln, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation with her.”

  “She would have heard it at Lincoln.”

  Jen’s brow furrowed.

  Anaya shifted in the small chair. “I was barely six years old the first time my father sat me down and talked to me about that word.”

  “That young?”

  “My best friend and I were playing hopscotch outside her mama’s salon. A Middle Eastern man who owned the liquor store next door got angry at us for marking up his sidewalk with chalk. He told us to clean up the mess, and then he spat that word at our feet. He added a few choice adjectives before the noun, dirty little being two I remember most vividly.”

  Jen flinched. “That’s awful.”

  “We told my Auntie Trill, and she told my mother, and my mother told my father, and my father sat me down and we had a talk.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He explained what the word meant and its long, sordid history in this country.”

  Anaya could remember it like it was this morning. Sitting in that hot box of a kitchen while Mama fried chicken over the stove. Daddy in his ribbed, white cotton undershirt, revealing a tattooed bicep that made Anaya proud—her name and Mama’s, strung together in the shape of an infinity symbol. A year and a half later, he would have Darius’s added.

  Daddy didn’t shy away from hard things. He shot straight with her. How the word started as a noun that meant black person and quickly turned into something derogatory. It was the word slave masters used when they cracked the whip against the backs of black slaves. The word an angry white mob yelled at a six-year-old girl just because she dared to walk into a school building with white kids. The word a group of white boys used against Daddy when he was eight as they pulled him behind a dumpster and took turns punching him until he spit blood.

  “But, Daddy,” Anaya had said, “how come Uncle Jemar says that word?”

  Of course, Uncle Jemar pronounced it a little differently, and never as meanly as that man said it to her and ReShawn. But he still said it. Sometimes he even said it to Daddy.

  “Your Uncle Jemar says it in solidarity—a nod to the shared experience of our blackness.”

  This was how Daddy talked to her, even when she was six. He didn’t shy away from the hard, and he didn’t shy away from using big words like solidarity either.

  “I don’t judge him for it. But, Anaya,” Daddy said, getting real, real serious. More serious than she’d ever seen. “That word is intricately tied to the oppression of our people, and because of that, you won’t ever hear me use it.”

  He didn’t either.

  Neither did she.

  “You’re gonna have to get used to talking about hard truths with Jubilee,” Anaya said. “It’s the burden of being a black parent.”

  Jen Covington sat there looking lost, like she didn’t have any clue what she’d signed up for. “I’m not black.”

  “But you have a black daughter, and this won’t be the last time she hears that word.” Just like it hadn’t been Anaya’s when she was six. By the time she was ten, she started to lose track. A white boy on her soccer team who laughed afterward, then covered his mouth with his hand. A car full of teenagers shouting the obscenity out the window as she rode her bike to ReShawn’s house. Once it happened when she and Mama were at the park together. A man muttered it under his breath as he pulled his two-year-old daughter away.

  Anaya’s heart howled in pain, and Mama grabbed her hand. She started rubbing it. She massaged it with her two thumbs like the man’s words had been a physical wound.

  “It’s a scratch, baby. Just a scratch. You rub it. You rub it real good until the pain goes away.”

  “I feel so ill equipped,” Jen said, bringing her hands up to her temples. “I mean, what kind of mother doesn’t even know how to do her daughter’s hair?”

  It felt like an olive branch. A humble confession. An admittance that she had no clue what she was doing. Maybe that was where progress began. Anaya stood up and went to her desk. She unpeeled a sticky note from the top of her pad and wrote down a number she’d known by heart since she was four.

  She set it in front of Jen.

  “What’s this?”

  “The number to my auntie Trill’s salon. She’ll help you with your daughter’s hair.”

  Thirty-Three

  “You did such a great job,” Camille said, pulling her son into a side hug. She didn’t actually have a clue how great or not great he did. She barely understood the way the chess pieces moved. She only knew that he said “checkmate” in two of his three matches, and when he walked over to her, there was a buoyancy to his step she hadn’t seen in a long time.

  “I’m not as good as Edison. He can beat Mr. Faulkner without his queen.”

  The name was vaguely familiar, but only because Austin had mentioned it in passing a time or two last week. This made three, which was more than Austin mentioned anyone. “Why have I never heard of this Edison before chess club?”

  “He transferred from South Fork.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s right over th
ere with his mom. C’mon.” Before Camille could object, Austin—her shy, socially awkward Austin—was dragging her over for an introduction. If only she could change her face really quickly. Put on some sort of disguise. Dye her hair. Anything to keep Edison and his mother from recognizing her as Camille Gray—the outspoken lady in the news.

  Hello, Foot. Let me introduce you to Mouth.

  As it turned out, Edison and his mother didn’t appear to recognize her. Maybe they didn’t watch the news. Or maybe it was her chopped hair. Or maybe they did recognize her and they didn’t care. Whatever the case, Edison was wonderful. A short, scrawny kid with a gap between his front teeth, an endearing smile, and a barely-there lisp that came with each of his s’s. It was apparent almost immediately that he enjoyed Austin’s company as much as Austin enjoyed his, which made Camille inclined to like him.

  His mother’s name was Tamika Harris. She was a petite woman with a gap-toothed smile like her son’s.

  “How’s Edison adjusting to school?” Camille asked.

  “Oh, he loves it here. It helped a heap when he learned they had a chess club. Edison’s been playing chess with his granddaddy from the time he could walk. It’s been a great way for him to make new friends like your son. Edison just loves Austin.”

  Camille’s heart melted into a puddle of mush.

  Edison loved her son.

  Which meant she now loved Edison.

  “They have gym and health class together. Edison said Austin made him feel very welcome the first day of school.”

  “Did he really?” she asked, swelling with motherly pride.

  “Invited him to eat lunch. You should be proud of your boy.”

  “Thank you. I am.”

  “We weren’t sure we should come, after all the fuss. I won’t lie. It was hurtful what people were saying. But people like your family have made the transition as good as it could be.”

  Heat rose into Camille’s cheeks. It was safe to assume that Tamika Harris didn’t know who she was talking to.