Zero Tolerance Read online

  He stopped her. “You should have called me right then. That’s what you have a cell phone for. Not to text your friends all night long, but to call us in case of an emergency.”

  Sierra felt as if she were facing her father in the courtroom, waiting to see if he was going to stop her for cross-examination after every single sentence.

  “We’re not allowed to use cell phones at school,” she explained. “That’s the rule.”

  “None of this would have happened if you’d called me first.”

  Sierra was curious now. “What would you have told me to do?”

  “I’d have told you to put the fool thing away before anyone else saw it, and I’d have sent your mother over to school to switch lunches with you immediately.”

  “I couldn’t have left work like that,” Sierra’s mother put in. “Not in the middle of lunch. It’s our busiest time of the day. As it was, I couldn’t even get away until almost three.”

  “So this is what we ended up with instead? Hell, I’d have left my meeting and hightailed it over to your school myself. Okay. Go on. What happened next?”

  “Well, I took the knife to Sandy—she’s the lunch lady—and she went with me to the office, and then we gave it to Ms. Lin—she’s the school secretary.”

  Her father interrupted her again. “And neither of those women had the sense to have you call your parents to come get the knife right away, before all this got blown out of proportion? A murderer gets to make a phone call, but a seventh grader who took the wrong lunch to school by mistake isn’t instructed about her legal rights?”

  He was typing furiously on his computer as he spoke.

  Sierra told him about Mr. Besser’s arrival in the office with the other principal and the conversation the two men had had about Longwood’s zero-tolerance policy for weapons and drugs.

  Her father stopped typing.

  “Oh, this is bad.”

  Sierra’s heart clogged her throat. “It is?”

  “I know Besser. My office did some work for his wife’s business years ago. He’s a decent enough guy. A bit in love with himself, as principals tend to be, a man surrounded all day by a bunch of women, spending most of his time bossing around short people.” Her dad gave a mirthless chuckle.

  Sierra would have expected her father to want her to have respect for school principals in general, and her school principal in particular. This was the first time she had ever heard him talk about Mr. Besser in this way. But it was also the first time Mr. Besser had ever done anything to upset him.

  Her father continued: “But, as I said, he’s decent and he means well, and I give him credit for turning the school around, reclaiming it from the druggie kids and their loser parents, and making it a place where smart kids get the education they deserve.”

  Sierra’s dad raked his hand through his thick silver hair. His hair had turned completely gray before he was forty.

  “But now he can’t back down, don’t you see? Because the other guy has heard him do all his grandstanding. Now he can’t do what any reasonable person with half a brain and half a conscience would do and forget all about this. Because he’s painted himself into a corner.”

  “The other principal seemed pretty nice,” Sierra said timidly.

  “Nice has nothing to do with it.”

  Sierra remembered that trapped look on Mr. Besser’s face. Now she saw that same look on her father’s face, too.

  “Next time…” her father said. “Next time anything like this happens, ever, you call me. I don’t care what rules there are about cell phones. You call me.”

  “Sierra,” her mother said. She had been so quiet during the last few minutes that Sierra had almost forgotten she was still there. “Why didn’t you put the knife back in the bag right away? Why did you give it to Sandy?”

  Sierra wasn’t sure she even remembered. It all seemed to have happened so long ago.

  “I just thought I was supposed to turn it in,” she said finally. “I just thought it was the right thing to do.”

  7

  The bell for the start of first period was at 8:05. Sierra and her parents were in the school office, waiting for Mr. Besser’s arrival, at 7:15.

  “We want all this crap taken care of so that you can be in your seat when your first class begins,” Sierra’s father had told her as he had backed the car, too fast, out of the driveway. Sierra hoped it would all be taken care of even sooner than that: in time for her to go to most of choir practice.

  The Longwood Middle School halls were empty at that hour except for a few teachers hurrying to their rooms to prepare their lesson plans for the day. No students were allowed in the building until 7:45 unless they were there for a before-school extracurricular activity, like the Octave. Or there, as Sierra was, with their parents.

  Ms. Lin and Mrs. Saunders were already at their desks when Sierra and her parents came in.

  Mrs. Saunders gave them a worried-looking smile as Ms. Lin greeted them.

  “Good morning! There’s a coatrack over there if you want to leave your coats. And may I get you anything while you wait? Coffee? Tea?”

  Ms. Lin seemed to have had a personality transplant overnight. Sierra suspected it was occasioned by the presence of her father, Gerald Edward Shepard, Esquire, attorney-at-law.

  “Thanks, but we’re fine,” her dad said.

  Sierra had a feeling her mother might have accepted the offer of tea if her father hadn’t spoken first. Her mother loved tea, and if they were all sipping tea together, maybe it would seem more like a friendly social visit. Her father removed his coat, and Sierra’s mother shrugged off her jacket; her father hung them both up on the coatrack. Sierra kept hers on. She was cold, more from fear than from the frigid January morning.

  She wondered if her dad would yell at Ms. Lin, call her grossly incompetent to her face, demand an explanation for why Sierra hadn’t been directed to make a phone call to her parents.

  He didn’t. He just sat reading the copy of The Wall Street Journal that he had brought with him. Sierra remembered he had once said that he didn’t “waste energy on flunkies.”

  Neither Sierra nor her mother had brought anything to read. Her mother took Sierra’s hand and rubbed her thumb gently against Sierra’s wrist.

  The office door opened, and Mr. Besser came in wearing the same big coat and fur hat he had worn yesterday.

  “Hello, Gerald!” he greeted Sierra’s dad, who stood up to accept his handshake.

  Her dad was taller than Mr. Besser, but by barely an inch.

  As he shrugged off his coat and removed his hat, Mr. Besser turned toward Sierra’s mom. “Hello, Angie.”

  Neither Mr. Besser nor Sierra’s mother gave any sign of acknowledging that they had spoken unpleasant words to each other just yesterday.

  “And Sierra.” Mr. Besser hung up his coat and hat; he smiled at Sierra without meeting her eyes. “Well, come on into my office. Can Ms. Lin get you some coffee? Tea?”

  Sierra’s father shook his head, less graciously than he had before, as if to say, Let’s cut the crap.

  Mr. Besser replaced his welcoming smile with a look of sad seriousness.

  Sierra followed her parents into the inner sanctum and took one of the chairs facing Mr. Besser’s desk. He probably had three chairs for his guests because he so often met with a problem student and the student’s parents.

  Luke Bishop must have sat there with his parents. Now Sierra Shepard was sitting there with hers.

  Sierra’s father spoke first.

  “We’re here to demand an apology for the unconscionable and illegal way in which your staff treated our daughter yesterday. She is to receive a full apology from you and your secretary. She is to receive an excused absence in the three classes she was wrongly forced to miss.”

  Sierra’s father always said that the best defense was a good offense.

  “Mr. Shepard,” Mr. Besser began. Apparently they were no longer on a chummy, first-name basis. “Our school ha
s a policy—an ironclad policy, I might say—that prohibits any weapons or any drugs on school grounds for any reason. For any reason whatsoever. Indeed, the existence of that policy is one of the main reasons that parents choose to enroll their students here. All students who enroll here, and all parents who enroll their children here, know that policy and sign a form stating that they are fully aware of what that policy entails. You and Mrs. Shepard signed the policy; we have your form on file.”

  “But that policy needs to be administered with a small dose of common sense,” Sierra’s father interrupted.

  “Please let me finish.”

  Sierra’s mother took Sierra’s hand again.

  “Do I think that Sierra brought that knife to school on purpose?” Mr. Besser said, speaking slowly as if to convey to Sierra’s dad his unwillingness to be rushed. “No. Do I think she acted appropriately in turning it in? Yes. Do I think that what has happened here is unfortunate? Absolutely. But does that mean that I can make an exception in her case? No.”

  Sierra’s mother was rubbing the side of Sierra’s hand so hard that it felt as if she might wear a hole in the skin.

  “A zero-tolerance policy has risks that some innocent student, like your daughter, will be an unintended victim of the policy. I would be the first to say how distressing this is, for all of us. But it’s even more distressing when a student gets stabbed with a knife, or slashed with a switchblade, or shot with a handgun. Zero-tolerance policies exist to make sure that these far worse tragedies don’t happen.”

  Mr. Besser seemed to have finished his speech. Now it was Sierra’s father’s turn.

  “You cannot sit there with a straight face and tell me that you could possibly believe that you have made this school safer in any way whatsoever by taking action against an honor student who brought the wrong lunch to school by mistake and took immediate steps to address the situation.”

  Mr. Besser raised his hands, palms up, as if to signify his helplessness in the face of what had to be. “We have a zero-tolerance policy regarding weapons and drugs here at Longwood Middle School. And, let me remind you, we weren’t the ones who made this regrettable mistake. It was your daughter’s mistake.”

  “It was my mistake,” Sierra’s mother inserted. “I’m the one who took the wrong lunch and left mine on the table.”

  “It was your family’s mistake,” Mr. Besser corrected.

  The two men locked gazes. It seemed to Sierra that her fate would be decided by which man looked away first. She knew it wouldn’t be her father. Never in his life had he looked away first.

  Sure enough, Mr. Besser glanced down at his desk, as if some important paper there demanded his sudden attention.

  “But—” Sierra’s mother spoke, her voice shaking, not with yesterday’s anger but with audible agitation. “What does this mean for Sierra?”

  “Of course, the school district will observe all due-process requirements,” Mr. Besser said smoothly. “There will be a hearing next Friday, a week from tomorrow, with the superintendent present, and myself as well. Your family is entitled to hire legal representation to accompany you to that meeting if you choose to do so.”

  “But what’s going to happen to Sierra?” her mother persisted, despite her father’s hand laid warningly on her arm.

  “The hearing will be for expulsion,” Mr. Besser said.

  Sierra’s heart swelled up in her chest, blocking her throat, blocking the supply of air to her lungs.

  “And in the meantime?” Sierra’s mother continued. “Can she still go to her classes? And to her other activities, like Leadership Club and the Octave?”

  “I regret, no. She’ll report to school each day for in-school suspension.”

  “And if someone is expelled, what happens then? Where do they—”

  “Angie.” Sierra’s father cut her off, obviously unwilling to allow any speculation whatsoever about what would happen if Mr. Besser really succeeded in having Sierra expelled.

  “Students who have been expelled continue to have a right to a free public education,” Mr. Besser replied, as if Sierra’s father hadn’t spoken. “The district maintains an alternative-school option for such students.”

  Sierra’s dad stood up. Mr. Besser stood up, too.

  “That is ridiculous,” Sierra’s father said, his voice holding steady despite the vein popping in his jaw. “Sierra is not going to be expelled, and she is not going to serve an in-school suspension. Until this matter is resolved, Sierra is coming home with us. She isn’t going to sit here for more than a week like a juvenile delinquent—like a common criminal.”

  “I’m afraid that under state truancy law, parents do not have the option to refuse to let their children serve an in-school suspension,” Mr. Besser replied. “I’d advise you and your wife to comply with the law on this matter.”

  Sierra wasn’t sure exactly what Mr. Besser meant. But she could read on her father’s face that the principal had scored a point.

  “I have some advice for you, too, Tom,” her father said. “I’d suggest that you hire yourself a very, very good lawyer.”

  He turned and walked out of Mr. Besser’s office.

  “Oh, honey,” her mother said, pulling Sierra into another fierce hug.

  “So I have to stay here?” Sierra asked in a choked whisper.

  “Just until your father can get this sorted out. But he will. You know he will.”

  “Mrs. Shepard, Sierra, I truly am sorry,” Mr. Besser said. He came around from his side of the desk to escort them to the door.

  “I truly am sorry,” he repeated.

  His eyes, as they fell on Sierra, glistened with something suspiciously like tears.

  8

  Ms. Lin led Sierra down a short hallway off the back of the front office to a small room that contained only a conference table surrounded by half a dozen chairs. Sierra had never known this room existed.

  No one else was there yet. It was still ten minutes before the first bell, and bad kids weren’t the kind to show up bright and early for their in-school suspension.

  “You may study or read,” Ms. Lin told Sierra. “When the others arrive, you may talk quietly among yourselves. No electronic devices are permitted—no iPods, cell phones, Game Boys.”

  As if Sierra had ever played a video game in her life.

  “If you need to use the restroom, come tell me and I’ll give you a pass.”

  Ms. Lin avoided making eye contact with Sierra as she spoke. Sierra hoped it was because, down deep, Ms. Lin was ashamed of herself for treating her this way.

  After Ms. Lin left, Sierra pressed her forehead down on the table, feeling the coolness of the wood veneer surface against her face.

  She couldn’t sit here all day, every day, for a whole week.

  But after a few minutes she made herself take the books out of her backpack and set them neatly on the table in front of her. At least she could work on her Mayan culture report for social studies. Her father wasn’t going to let her be expelled. It would be silly to sit paralyzed, doing nothing, and fall even further behind in everything.

  Another girl appeared, someone Sierra had never seen before—an eighth grader? Then five minutes after the bell, the boy who had been fighting with Luke; and then five minutes later, Luke himself.

  Sierra Shepard was now officially serving an in-school suspension with Luke Bishop.

  The first two had taken no notice of Sierra, which was fine with her. She had barely glanced up as they entered. But Luke did a double take when he saw her.

  “Whoa,” he said. “What is Little Miss Shep-turd doing here?”

  Sierra didn’t answer, pretending to be too absorbed in copying notes from her library book onto index cards.

  “Don’t tell me. You’re doing research for your new school project that is going to help kids like me, so you can write it up for your application for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  He plopped himself down in the chair next to her and, from his pocket, prod
uced his Game Boy.

  “I thought we weren’t allowed to use electronic devices,” Sierra said before she could stop herself.

  “Ooh!” Luke said. “And if I got caught with a Game Boy, I might get in trouble.”

  “They could extend your suspension,” Sierra pointed out, even though she had no intention of being drawn into a prolonged conversation with Luke.

  “Ooh!” he said again. “That would be awful! I’d miss class!”

  Sierra copied another fact about the Mayans onto a note card. Luke leaned over to see what she had written.

  “You’re kidding!” He mimed surprise. “There is a Mayan temple called Chichén Itzá? What kind of name is that for a temple? Chicken?” He gave some loud chicken clucks while making chicken motions with his arms.

  “I can’t take notes if you keep talking,” Sierra told him.

  Not to mention clucking.

  Luke gestured toward the clock that hung on the far wall, a wall otherwise bare of decoration except for a hand-lettered poster with the school values: RULES RESPECT RESPONSIBILITY RELIABILITY. The poster was nowhere near as attractive as the banner in the front office, which seemed sort of backward to Sierra. The kids in the suspension room were the ones who really needed to learn to appreciate that message.

  “We’re here until three-ten. Seven hours. I don’t think you’re exactly in a big time crunch. So, really, why are you here?” Luke pressed.

  “It’s none of your business.” Sierra wondered how Luke would react if she did tell him. Would he be indignant on her behalf? Or gleeful to see the tables turned for once?

  “Tiff, Mitch, what do you think she did? Tiffany used inappropriate language to Lintbag when Lintbag told her to take off her baseball cap. Mitch and I were fighting, but we’ve made it up now, right, Mitch?”

  Mitch scowled at Luke and said nothing.

  “Tiff, you guess first. What did Little Miss Shep-turd do that got her put in here with us?”

  Tiffany studied Sierra. Tiffany’s hair was black—dyed? And she had not only a pierced eyebrow but a pierced nose, too. It was strange that the school rules prohibited baseball caps but permitted nose rings.