Zero Tolerance Read online

  Her mother still looked the same, slim in faded jeans and a turtleneck, with an unbuttoned floral-patterned shirt layered on top, her hair swept back from her face in a scarf.

  “There’s something in this morning’s Denver Post that might interest you,” her mother said as she set a glass of orange juice in front of Sierra.

  She pointed to the first section of the newspaper, folded open to the editorial page.

  “Read the editorial ‘Zero Tolerance Makes Zero Sense.’ Then read the first letter to the editor. It appears that your Ms. Lin has had a change of heart. A very public change of heart.”

  With her mother expectantly and eagerly looking over her shoulder, Sierra let her eyes scan the paper.

  The editors had printed it.

  They had actually printed it.

  As the head secretary of Longwood Middle School, I am shocked and dismayed by the senseless punishment of one of our most outstanding students. This is a scandal and an outrage.

  Susan Lin

  “It just goes to show that people can surprise you,” Sierra’s mother said. “That smug, supercilious smile? That ‘I’m just doing my job’ defensiveness? Then she writes this.”

  Sierra couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes. She pretended to be busy reading the editorial, which was calling for school weapons policies to be applied “with a modicum of reasonableness and a dollop of common sense.”

  Her mother filled a blue pottery bowl from a pan on the stove and brought it over to Sierra.

  “I made oatmeal today; there’s some blueberries to go with it.”

  Sierra usually liked oatmeal, but today it looked unusually thick and grayish, as if it would form itself into a hardened slab of cement in the bottom of her stomach.

  “I’m not very hungry.”

  “You will be in an hour if you don’t eat up. Are you sure you don’t want me to pack you a lunch today? I don’t see how you can stand a whole week’s worth of cafeteria food.”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  Not when a trip to the cafeteria meant a chance to see Colin.

  “Your Mr. Besser,” her mother said as she folded up the newspaper, “is not going to like this one bit.”

  No, he wasn’t.

  Ms. Lin wasn’t going to like it one bit, either.

  Sierra forced herself to swallow down a big mouthful of oatmeal, and then another one.

  * * *

  When Sierra walked into the front office, she felt as if a pulsing neon sign were lit up on her face: GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY! She expected a pulsing neon sign to be lit up on Ms. Lin’s face: RAGE, RAGE, RAGE! But Ms. Lin was calmly talking on the phone to a parent about the procedures for excusing a student for an orthodontist appointment.

  “All of our policies are explained clearly on the school Web site,” Ms. Lin said. “You need to check there.”

  As if it wouldn’t take less time to answer the question than to direct someone to the school Web site to get it answered.

  “I’d suggest you make every effort to get an after-school appointment,” Ms. Lin added. “Even with an excused absence, it can be very difficult for students to make up material.”

  Would she calmly be offering the same unhelpful help if she had seen the morning’s paper? Maybe she didn’t get the Denver Post at home.

  Sierra saw the office copy of the Post rolled up in a green plastic bag, lying on the low table in front of the faculty mailboxes.

  As she started down the short hallway to the suspension room, Sierra thought: Now I’ve actually done something that deserves suspension. Sending a forged letter to the largest newspaper in the state of Colorado was a far worse offense than using disrespectful language or fighting on school grounds.

  She thought of her father’s comment to her at the Indian restaurant last night: “I would never have done it if I hadn’t been provoked.”

  Was that an acceptable excuse?

  For him or for her?

  As always—well, always for the last five days—she was the first one in the suspension room. She couldn’t make herself sit down, she couldn’t open Anne Frank and resume reading, not when any second Mr. Besser was bound to appear. He would have read the Denver Post editorials and letters first thing upon waking, wouldn’t he? Given that he was embroiled in a firestorm of terrible publicity?

  Undigested oatmeal lay stony in her stomach.

  Brad and Julio drifted in. She wished she could tell them, have them share her apprehension of every sound in the outer office heard through the open door of the suspension room. But out of all the seven billion people on the planet, only Luke Bishop knew what she had done, and even Luke knew only that she had done something.

  Then, inexplicably, impossibly, Luke was there. Sierra was standing by the door, watching down the hallway for a first glimpse of Mr. Besser, when she saw Luke strolling down the hall toward her, a big grin on his face. She darted inside the room before he could call out a greeting—“Hey, Shep-turd!”—and betray her lurking presence to Ms. Lin.

  She felt like hugging him.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked in a pleased whisper when he walked into the suspension room.

  “Just thought I’d drop by to check on the prisoners.”

  “I didn’t think they let us have visitors.”

  “You’re too much,” Luke said, shaking his head with mingled amusement and scorn. “You crack me up, really you do.”

  “Why? What did I say?”

  “‘I didn’t think they let us have visitors.’”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Why are you here? Why are they here?” He nodded toward Brad and Julio, hunched over their games.

  “You’re suspended again?”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “What did you do this time?”

  “Stole a car.”

  Sierra stared at him.

  “Give me a break. I dropped the f-bomb in front of a teacher.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I felt like it. Why are you standing by the door like you’re a spy or something?”

  “Do you read the Denver Post?” Sierra asked him in an even lower whisper.

  “Every word,” Luke said. “I memorize the Denver Post in case there’s a current events quiz in social studies class, so I can be sure to ace it every time.”

  “There’s a letter to the editor today. About me.”

  “Well, aren’t you the little celebrity. First a TV star, now the star of the Denver Post.”

  Sierra glared at him. She hoped he wasn’t going to start that stuff again.

  “It says how unfair Mr. Besser is being. It says my suspension is a scandal and an outrage.”

  Luke gave his trademark sneer. “Big f-bomb deal.”

  “Luke, the letter was signed by Ms. Lin.”

  “Get out. That Ms. Lin?”

  “Susan Lin, secretary of Longwood Middle School.”

  Now it was Luke’s turn to stare. Now it was Luke’s turn not to get it.

  Then comprehension broke over his face.

  “You,” he said. “That day on her computer.”

  “Yes,” Sierra said. “Me.”

  28

  “I don’t think she knows yet,” Sierra said. “I don’t think she’s seen the paper. But I bet he has. Mr. Besser. And when he comes in—”

  “It’s going to hit the fan,” Luke finished the sentence for her.

  Julio finally looked up from his game hidden beneath the table. “What are you two whispering about?” Like Sierra previously, he did a double take when he realized that Luke was back so soon after his last suspension had ended.

  When neither Luke nor Sierra answered right away, Julio said, “Fine. Whatever,” and stared back at his lap again, his hands obviously busy working the controls of his game.

  Brad gave them one indifferent glance and said nothing.

  “You rock, Sierra Shep-turd,” Luke whispered to her.

  But what if she di
d get caught?

  HONOR STUDENT FACES CRIMINAL CHARGES FOR FORGERY.

  HONOR STUDENT DESERVES EXPULSION AFTER ALL. NOT TO MENTION JAIL.

  What would her parents say? Her father might react with his own version of Luke’s “Go get ’em” response, but her mother would be shocked and disappointed. Maybe her mother would blame her father, and they’d have another huge blowup, and this time her father would tell her mother that he didn’t think her plays were even funny, and then they would get divorced.

  Would Beautiful Mountain take a convicted criminal as a student?

  But how could Mr. Besser catch her? How could anybody ever prove it? Her fingerprints wouldn’t still be on Ms. Lin’s keyboard after a couple of days of steady typing.

  Luke would never give her away. She was as sure of that as she was of anything in the universe, even if she was a good deal less certain about a lot of things than she had been a week ago.

  So the only thing that could give her away was her own guilty face, which always showed everything.

  Sierra heard the door to the outer office open. Footsteps.

  Ms. Lin’s voice: “Tom, good morning. It’s crazy here already. There’s a leak in the gym roof—all that melting snow from the storm last week—and two parents have called about the choir trip, very upset that it might be canceled. Do you want me to—”

  Mr. Besser’s voice: “Susan.”

  It was coming now.

  “Have you seen the Denver Post this morning?”

  “No, I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. I don’t get the print edition anymore; I just read it online.”

  “They printed your letter.”

  “My letter?”

  “If you had issues with any of my policies, if you had problems with how I’m handling the Shepard girl’s case, I wish you would have come to talk to me directly before sharing your thoughts with the Denver Post’s hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Don’t you think I’m going through enough right now, attacked on all sides, and now this?”

  “But I—”

  “Let me finish. Do you know how bad this makes me look? When a member of my staff publicly criticizes my policies?”

  Sierra had never heard Mr. Besser sound so angry. During the confrontation with her father, her dad had seemed a lot closer to losing his temper than Mr. Besser had.

  “I didn’t write any letter!”

  “Susan, it’s in the paper.”

  “But—”

  “It’s in the paper,” he repeated.

  Sierra heard the door to his inner office slam so hard that both Julio and Brad finally looked up from their video games.

  “What was that about?” Brad asked.

  Luke’s shoulders were shaking with laughter.

  Don’t give me away! Sierra begged him with her eyes.

  “Buttster and Lintbag just had a fight. A brawl, you might call it.”

  Sierra glared at him. “Stop it! It’s not funny!”

  Luke’s face registered bewilderment. “What do you mean, it’s not funny?”

  “It’s just—not.” Not when she had done the terrible thing that caused it. “Stay here,” she told Luke.

  Soundlessly, she edged her way down the hallway until she was in position to see Ms. Lin at her desk. The green plastic bag from the Denver Post lay discarded on the floor.

  Mrs. Saunders, who had apparently been in the copy room, returned to the front office.

  “Susan, what’s wrong?”

  “That man!”

  “Who?”

  “Him. There’s an anti-Besser letter in the paper today. Signed by me. But I didn’t write it.”

  Mrs. Saunders walked over to Ms. Lin’s desk and read the letter on the open page of the newspaper.

  “Oh, no,” Mrs. Saunders said. “So that’s what he was raising his voice about. But if you didn’t write it, who did?”

  “Does it matter? How can he have possibly thought I could have written this? Why isn’t he on the phone to the Denver Post right now reading them the riot act for publishing such a thing without checking first to see if it was a fake?”

  Ms. Lin got up from her desk, not even bothering to fold the newspaper but leaving it lying open with “her” letter on display for all to see.

  “You know what, Alice? It doesn’t matter what he thinks. It doesn’t matter one bit. Because as of this minute, I no longer work for him, or for Longwood Middle School. I know he’s under a lot of stress these days, we all are, but nobody has ever spoken to me that way—that tone of voice! You can tell him that I’ve resigned. Or that my tolerance for him is precisely zero.”

  “Susan. Susan. Listen to me. This is all just a hideous misunderstanding. It can be cleared up. The letter was probably written by one of Sierra’s supporters, maybe the kid who made the petition and organized the choir trip boycott. And the paper should have checked unless … Was the letter sent by e-mail from a district computer? But I don’t see how it could have been; nobody on the faculty or staff would do such a thing. But, Susan, my point is, this will blow over. It isn’t worth giving up your job. Not in this economy.”

  “I will never,” Ms. Lin said, “work for that man again. My personal items—will you put them in a box and send them to me?”

  Ms. Lin was halfway to the door when she happened to glance down the hallway leading to the suspension room.

  “You!” she said to Sierra. “What are you doing?”

  “I was—I had to—go to the bathroom. And then—I didn’t want to walk past you while you were—”

  Should she confess? Go to Mr. Besser and tell him who had actually written the letter?

  It wouldn’t do any good, not now. Ms. Lin would never forgive Mr. Besser.

  “If you’re going to the bathroom, then go!” Ms. Lin spat at her.

  Sierra went. Inside the girls’ room she locked herself into an empty stall. Kneeling on the cold floor, she threw up oatmeal and blueberries until all that was left was dry retching.

  She wouldn’t be able to eat oatmeal ever again.

  29

  With Ms. Lin gone and Mrs. Saunders left to preside over the office all by herself, there was no one to escort Sierra and Luke to the cafeteria; the other two had brought lunches from home.

  “I think you two can be trusted to go alone,” Mrs. Saunders said, her eyes meeting Sierra’s with a look of kind confidence.

  Even though Ms. Lin had let them go by themselves the other day, when she had no choice, it was hard to imagine her ever uttering such a sentence.

  But Ms. Lin would have been correct in her belief that Sierra and Luke couldn’t be trusted.

  It was one of those warm end-of-January days. Last week’s snow was already melting off the lawns, and kids were outdoors for lunch recess without bothering with jackets.

  “We could go outside for a while,” Luke said. “She’s not going to notice when we come back.”

  “We’d better not,” Sierra said. “She’s been so nice.” She wasn’t going to betray Mrs. Saunders, especially now, after what she had done to Ms. Lin and how it had turned out.

  Colin waved to her but didn’t come over to give her any boycott bulletins. Then, as she was about to head out with her tray, he appeared in front of her, his face a bit wary. Probably he didn’t want to be drawn into conversation with Luke.

  “Jolene joined us, too. So the trip’s definitely off unless Besser can talk the rest of them out of it at rehearsal tomorrow morning. Lydgate would go with seven, but he can’t possibly go with fewer than that.”

  “La-la-la-la-la-la!” Luke sang in a loud, rude falsetto. “Sounds to me like you’ll all be doing the world a big fat favor not to inflict your singing on it.”

  “Just ignore him,” Sierra said to Colin. Was Luke making fun of Colin for being a boy in choir, as if choir were more of a girl thing? Luke shouldn’t talk: he didn’t do anything except get in fights and cuss in front of teachers.

  She tried to give Colin a smile that was more
than just a thank-you-for-being-my-hero smile; she wanted it to be a please-like-me-as-much-as-I-like-you smile. But she wasn’t able to give him her best smile in front of Luke.

  * * *

  “Why are you so mean to everybody?” she asked Luke as they carried their trays down the hall to the office.

  “I’m not mean to everybody. Just to almost everybody.”

  “Who aren’t you mean to?”

  “I’m not mean to you.”

  “Anymore. Except you still call me Shep-turd. You said you wouldn’t, but you still do.”

  “Aw, it’s kind of a—what do you call it?—a pet name. Like Snookums.”

  “Snookums?”

  “Yeah. Sierra Snookums Shep-turd. I like it.”

  She was giggling as they entered the office but stopped when she saw Mr. Besser deep in conversation with Mrs. Saunders. He shot Sierra a piercing look that made her sure that he knew. He might not be ready to confront her yet, but he knew.

  Or maybe that was just her guilt speaking?

  It didn’t help that she felt a blush rising up from her chest to her neck to her face.

  That afternoon, she finished reading the last pages of Anne Frank’s diary. When she read the afterword, telling how Anne had died at Auschwitz, her eyes stung with tears. She would never complain about anything in her life ever again, not even if she was expelled or sentenced to a juvenile detention center for forgery. Nothing that happened to her could be as wrong and terrible as what had happened to Anne Frank.

  “You’re crying over a book?” Luke asked her.

  Sierra nodded. She held it up so he could see the cover. “Didn’t you ever cry over a book? Or a movie?”

  “Nope. It makes me mad when people try to make me cry. I won’t give them the satisfaction. Never would.”

  “Even when you were little?”

  “Even when I was little. All right, no. I did cry when Bambi’s mother died. But my dad said big boys don’t cry, so I stopped.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Three? Or four?”

  Sierra felt a pang of sadness for little boy Luke, not even allowed to cry over Bambi’s mother.