Her case notes included a sketch page, aimed at tracking Nick’s school relationships. After each conversation, she added names and arrows. The page had grown ever more complicated, with arrows running in all directions and a lot of mystifying gaps.
Suddenly she glanced at the clock and stood, shoveling laptop, papers, and voice recorder into her briefcase. She switched off the lights and strode toward the gymnasium, wondering, What am I missing?
9:59
Olivia
The school psychologist trotted by as Olivia was speaking with Tío. They broke off their conversation to exchange polite greetings with the woman, and resumed when she was out of earshot.
“Anyway, Cuomo’s a drunk and a bully, and the school’s pretty vulnerable today. Let me know if you see him. Do you want my number, so you can text me?”
“I have no telephone. I could whistle—I still have teeth enough for that.”
“I guess. And I’ll tell Mrs. Hopkins, too. Like I said, I don’t think there’s a real threat, but it’s best to be prepared.”
He gave her a polite nod, and went back to his cart. As Olivia continued down toward the office, she pulled out her phone to have Torres and Wong check on Mr. Cuomo’s blue sedan with the dealer plates.
Just in case.
10:03
Linda
The racket of feet climbing bleachers died away, although the gymnasium would never be a quiet place, not with nearly a thousand people inside. Linda McDonald stood at the podium under the folded-up basketball hoop, adjusting her notes to let the noise die down some more.
Remember, she told herself, your purpose is to show how things tie together. There were eight hundred and some separate individuals here, aged eleven to seventy-three. Eight hundred–odd stories of love and loss, fear and hate, triumph and shame—with no more real chance of pulling them together than there was of controlling her hair on a static-filled day.
Still, that was where she wanted to point them.
The guest speakers were seated behind her, the students up into the bleachers on either side. Teachers—particularly large male teachers—were strategically placed in the heights where the troublemakers tended to collect.
Gordon was in the upper row at the far end. Coach sat almost directly across the gymnasium from him.
Eight hundred souls, brought here to think about potential, and hope, and cherishing the future.
Linda raised her head and put on a smile. “A school is a tapestry of threads,” she began.
10:03
Gordon
Gordon sat in the farthest reaches of the largest space on campus, and watched his wife prepare to speak. She betrayed no sign of nerves, although he had no doubt that her hands were icy and her heart was racing.
But from the outside, she was nothing but confidence. She stood squarely behind the podium, in control of herself. And when she looked up, expecting silence, she got it. In a firm voice, not relying yet on printed notes, she started with words designed to heal the school and lead it toward the future. “A school is a tapestry of threads,” his wife began.
Threads, yes, he mused. Short and long, strong and weak, rough and fine, spun from all corners of the globe.
But even jute could be beautiful. And even silk could weave a noose.
10:03
Olivia
The doors were open to the gym, and Olivia heard Linda start her speech as she went past. The principal’s voice sounded nice and firm, considering she’d privately admitted she was terrified of public speaking. “A school is a tapestry of threads,” she stated, and who could argue with that?
Though wasn’t a school sometimes more like a sweater than a tapestry? Something with a loose end you could unravel down to a giant blob of kinky yarn? Olivia could remember the awful appeal of pulling and pulling, knowing how much trouble she was going to be in but unable to stop watching the yarn detach, one slow loop at a time, then faster in a delicious little catastrophe…
What was it with her, anyway—first taking apart a clock, then unraveling a sweater. Were all children as destructive as little Olivia?
Her phone rang, and she moved away from the open door to take the call.
“Yeah, Torres?”
“Your man’s not at home, and we called the dealership. He’s not there, either. Want me to issue a BOLO?”
“Not an official one, not yet. Just, uh, keep checking?”
“Will do. And I’ll mention it—informally, like—to a coupla CHP buddies. You’re sure you don’t want us there?”
“No, it’s fine. We’ve got it.”
Right, Olivia thought as she put away her phone. An old man, a white-haired secretary, and one cop: guardians of the galaxy.
10:03
Brendan
Why was the principal talking about tapestries? “A school is a tapestry of threads.” Oh, yeah?
He’d seen tapestries, on that England trip with his mother years and years ago. She’d been like a kid for two whole weeks, all excited over dumb stuff like stone walls and old villages and scones with cream and church bells and rooms crowded with furniture and paintings—and tapestries. With just her and Brendan, she’d actually been having fun.
Until they came home, and the fights started up, and then one day she was gone.
He’d been pretty young, so mostly what he remembered about the trip was stuff like her happiness, and the taste of scones, and the giant Ferris wheel next to the river that you saw in any movie about London. The tapestries he remembered as a kind of dingy wallpaper, not something you’d want to find yourself woven into—old-fashioned, dark, and covered with dust.
Well, yeah, come to think of it. Kind of like school, after all.
10:03
Mina
“A school is a tapestry of threads,” Ms. McDonald began.
Mina used to have a poster of a unicorn tapestry on her bedroom wall. She’d bought it after seeing the actual tapestry in a museum that looked just like a Medieval castle. When she first saw it hanging there—she’d been in fifth grade when they went to New York—she didn’t really like it, since the poor unicorn was not only tied up, it was fenced in. Plus, it had what looked like blood running down its sides. But then Mâmân talked to her about symbols, and pointed out how the “captivity” really wasn’t, like the red wasn’t blood but juice from the pomegranates overhead—a fruit her mother used a lot.
So she bought the poster.
She liked the principal’s idea of a tapestry of lives, how everyone’s histories wove together to create a thing of beauty. Or ugliness, sometimes. There was a lot of darkness in the background of that unicorn tapestry, just like there was ugliness all around her. Sofia, losing her sister to a bullet. That sixth-grader Nick over there, risking trouble as he tried to help his friend who’d disappeared. Chaco sometimes came to school with bruises on his face. Brendan, sitting way up high in the bleachers, had a temper that had to come from somewhere.
Mr. Kendrick: well. And even Mrs. Hopkins had a son who died of leukemia last year.
Mâmân, haunted by a homeland she’d left when she was tiny.
10:03
Nick
“A school is a tapestry of threads,” Mrs. McDonald began.
Nick knew a little about weaving. One of the places his mother had moved them to, three or four years ago, was a kind of commune. There were a million chickens. (Who knew that roosters had these huge claws and would attack if you weren’t careful? He still had the scar.) And everybody there was into growing and making things.
Anyway, one of the women was a weaver. She’d cut the wool off the commune’s mangy-looking sheep (and washed it in the bathtub, which was disgusting and smelled awful) and spun it into lumpy yarn and then wove it on this clanky loom into rugs that when they were new smelled bad, and when they were old skidded across the floor. One of the men fell down one day on a rug and swore at her that she should stop making the things because they could buy better ones at the Kmart for next to noth
ing, and she’d cried and the whole place had shouted at each other.
Nick and his mom had moved a few days later. And that was all he knew about weaving.
10:03
Tío
“A school is a tapiz,” the lady principal told the gymnasium.
Tío’s wife had been too modern to weave, but his abuela did. In the winter, she produced brilliantly colored shawls on a small hand loom that she strung between a ceiling hook on one end and a belt around her waist on the other. In the summers, she worked on larger, more muted pieces on the big wooden frame that her sons set up under the roof behind the house. Many houses in the village had one of his abuela’s rugs to warm the floor. Some of them were even sold in the city, for good money.
That was before, of course. She was dead now, along with the rest of the village. The only weaving done under her roof was by the spiders.
10:03
Chaco
“A school is a tapestry,” the principal said. If you’d asked Chaco, he’d have guessed tapestry was some kind of pastry, but unless threads meant something else, too, it had to do with weaving. And warp didn’t mean spaceships, and there was something called a web, or maybe it was weft, but all in all, he was just as glad when Old McDonald moved on to something he understood, about how the guest speakers came from all kinds of places and did all kinds of things, some of them cool although others sounded like crap jobs a judge would sentence you to, that community service stuff.
Anyway, it was funny to try and guess what all those people sitting behind her did for a living, and then hear what she said. Some of them had uniforms, so those didn’t count—the fireman and the airline pilot and the nurse, even though this nurse was a man. And the woman in the white lab coat could’ve been the sports doctor or the pharmacist, except she looked pretty much like every CSI on television. But who’d have thought that chubby black kid designed houses? And the big blond woman who taught about Japanese history—but why were people clapping for her?
Chaco leaned over to see if Javi knew who she was.
“I think that’s Bee Cuomo’s tía,” Javi answered.
Busy-Bee’s auntie? Didn’t look much like her. And she didn’t look all sad and stuff, like Chaco thought she should.
He wondered if the auntie knew about Nick Clarkson’s hashtag against Bee’s dad.
10:03
Eleven minutes away from Guadalupe Middle School, a car pulled into a driveway. The driver did not get out, but sat staring at nothing, or perhaps at the house. Several minutes passed before the tightly gripping hands came off the steering wheel, but the car door did not open. Instead, a flash of reflection came off a cellphone as the fingers moved through the rituals of password, text function, then email. Anyone close enough to see through the windshield would have noticed the state of the hands: how they fumbled, then clenched tight, before deliberately unfurling. As if the driver’s body was host to some furious internal battle for control.
After a time, the fingers closed down the email. Put away the phone. Pulled out the keys. Opened the car door.
When the driver got out, anyone close enough to see would have been unsurprised to learn that the driver’s thoughts were of death.
Not that anyone was close enough to see.
10:50
Olivia
When the bell signaled the official end of the assembly, Olivia let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. Cuomo hadn’t shown up and made a scene in front of the entire school. Linda’s day hadn’t been knocked off its rails, nor would Guadalupe’s shaky reputation be confirmed by an unfortunate headline in tomorrow’s Clarion.
On with Career Day!
10:50
Linda
Linda, anticipating a string of minor catastrophes for the first of the Career Day sessions, let the students go a few minutes early, so when the 10:50 bell rang, the gym was already half-empty. But she’d given the guest speakers a five-minute head start, for fear they might be trampled by a stampede of adolescents.
One of the last down from the bleachers was Gordon, looking pleased. “Well done, you.”
She flushed. “It seemed to go okay.”
“More than okay, it was spot-on. Even the jocks and troublemakers in the top row were paying attention.”
“That’s almost worrying. Oh, before I forget, could you help out in the cafeteria after lunch? My volunteer for that slot had to go home with a sick kid.”
“Sure. I hope the speaker isn’t talking about gynecology.”
She laughed. “Sports medicine. You should be safe enough.”
He nodded solemnly. “I can testify to the evils of shin splints,” he said, and they went their separate ways.
11:18
Linda
Linda leaned against the outside wall of room A12, grateful for its solidity. She felt as if she’d spent all morning sprinting circles around the school. Before the last student left the gym, chaos had descended: one speaker neglected to mention that she’d need a television set; another texted his host teacher during the assembly to say he had broken down on the freeway; at least thirty kids claimed that they hadn’t received their assigned rooms and where were they supposed to go?
One TV fetched from the equipment shed and generating images; one abandoned teacher delivering a talk about an aunt’s job as a UN translator; thirty lost students led to the main notice board, shown their names, and handed late slips—and one principal slumped against the wall, trying not to think how much she wanted a long shower, a strong drink, and a toilet. Not necessarily in that order.
Across A Quad, the Japanese professor seemed to be reciting poetry.
On Linda’s left, the visiting nurse, who had started off talking about the importance of immunizations, seemed to have gotten a bit sidetracked into the science of the matter, and how each antibody links up to its specific target and neutralizes it before it spreads. Which was fascinating, but Linda was glad to hear her catch her enthusiasm and come back to earth.
To Linda’s right, the blind weaver’s raspy voice (from all that pot?) spun an allegory of warp and weft before going on to the texture of sight, the competing scents of raw silk and fresh wool—and then she, too, began to veer aside, into politics, of all things: nineteenth-century Scottish weavers going out on strike over the tiny threads used to bind the main strands together, which mill owners refused to supply since they could not be seen in the final product. Linda found herself turning over the idea of invisible yet essential; holding it all together—and then caught herself. The speech was over. Also, the weaver’s class seemed ominously quiet. She stuck her head around the side of the window, but all the backs were upright rather than slumped or head-down on their desks. Linda peeled herself off the wall and moved on.
This was the first time in weeks—months?—that she didn’t have a hundred urgent tasks yammering in her ear. Though she was sure to be ambushed by some disaster the minute she set foot in her office—so instead, she crossed the breezeway to stand in the school entrance and admire its mosaic walls.
They’d have to install a gate around this, Linda thought uneasily. These walls were going to be too tempting for the local vandals—a problem she hadn’t anticipated when the restorer began. They’d all assumed he would uncover a well-intended but amateurish effort, of historical and possibly symbolic importance to the school community, but hardly a treasure.
Instead, what came into view was a piece that, in the words of the old hippie they’d hired to restore it, blew him away. He had yet to identify this remarkably talented artist, who had worked in a medium of jagged bits and mismatched pieces, but he swore he would.
She’d kept up with the progress of the restoration, but this was her first opportunity to simply stand and look at it. And she had to agree: it was amazing. The oldest bits were some pieces of Chinese porcelain dinnerware that the restorer thought were from the early 1900s. The newest were the 1970s orange of the tile Linda had seen one day when a towel dispenser fell off th
e wall in one of the girls’ restrooms. There were pebbles, similar to those embedded in the school’s front walk, and flowers chipped out of the Mexican tiles that used to surround the sink in the art lab. Up at the top, tiny fragments of mirror tossed the light around. An apple tree, under close examination, bore fruit made from a dozen mismatched red buttons; the school’s entrance arch was the broken-off handle of a coffee mug. Up in the blue sky flew a tiny jeweled bird—attached, he’d discovered, to a girl’s hairpin.
Linda ran her hand over the textures, the smooth and the rough—some of them very rough indeed—and reflected that the mural was like a stone tapestry…
At the thought, Linda’s hand stopped moving.
The school is a tapestry, yes—but not one woven from malleable fibers. There was nothing soft or fraying about Guadalupe’s kids. Her kids. And what brought them together had nothing of a loom’s deliberation about it.
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