Zero Tolerance Read online

  21

  “Whoa, Shep-turd.” Luke gave a low whistle. “I mean, Sierra. You really told her.”

  He was grinning at her now, his friendly Friday self again, but his eyes were glistening with some darker emotion.

  Julio punched her on the shoulder in playful tribute. Brad clapped his hands three times slowly in applause.

  “Well, it is unfair,” Sierra said. “She told Luke not to let her catch him again with it, but she never said she’d take it away practically forever if he did.”

  “Don’t worry,” Luke said. “I’ll get it back.”

  “How?” Sierra asked. “You can’t just go into her desk and take it.”

  “Oh, can’t I?”

  Julio joined in. “Forget it. She’s always at her desk. Or Saunders is there. Plus Besser walks by a hundred times a day.”

  “Lintbag has to go to the bathroom,” Luke pointed out. “She can’t go all day without peeing. Besides, I don’t think Saunders is here today.”

  “She isn’t,” Sierra said. She could hardly believe that she was supplying information to assist Luke in his raid. But Ms. Lin had gone too far this time. Actually, as far as Sierra was concerned, she had gone too far a long time ago.

  Sierra went on, “I heard Ms. Lin say something to Mr. Besser this morning when I was coming in, that Mrs. Saunders was taking her son to get his wisdom teeth out.”

  Brad hadn’t yet made any comment, but Sierra knew he wouldn’t tell on Luke, no matter what Luke was planning to do. She would never tell on any of them, either, whatever they did in suspension.

  “We’ll be real quiet so we can hear if she gets up and goes anywhere,” Luke said. “And then if she does, I’ll slip out and grab it from her desk, just like that.”

  “What if she comes back while you’re out there?” Sierra asked.

  “You can watch out for me,” Luke said.

  Was he challenging her? To see whose side she was on? She already knew whose side she was on.

  “Okay,” Sierra said. “I will.”

  * * *

  Even with the door to the suspension room kept open, it was hard to know exactly what was going on in the main office. Sometimes Sierra could hear Ms. Lin’s voice on the phone, but not loud enough to make out more than a phrase or two.

  “I got it at Costco…”

  “My sister-in-law told me last week…”

  Ms. Lin’s lack of concern about having her personal phone calls overheard suggested that Mr. Besser’s meeting must be over and he was no longer in his office.

  Finally, Sierra heard Ms. Lin’s heels click across the floor, not coming toward the suspension room but heading in the other direction.

  Sierra peeked out, Luke standing next to her. Ms. Lin was putting a sign on the glass window facing out into the front hallway. Maybe it said: BACK IN FIVE MINUTES. Then Ms. Lin left the office through the door into the front hall.

  “Let’s go,” Luke said.

  Sierra followed as Luke hurried over to Ms. Lin’s desk. Her heart leaped around in her chest like a Ping-Pong ball in a clothes dryer.

  Mr. Besser’s office door was ajar; Sierra glanced inside and saw to her relief that he wasn’t there.

  She watched as Luke tried Ms. Lin’s top drawer. It opened to disclose a neat tray filled with pens, paper clips, rubber bands. No Game Boy.

  The side drawers were unlocked, too. In the top right-hand drawer was a stack of Longwood Middle School letterhead and envelopes. In the middle drawer was a pair of shoes, an umbrella, and a bag of wrapped butterscotch candies. Sierra felt guilty peering into Ms. Lin’s private things. But not so guilty that she would abandon Luke now.

  In the bottom drawer there it was: a heap of cell phones and Game Boys, as if Ms. Lin were the overlord of a crime ring that specialized in robbing electronics stores.

  Luke’s was right on top. He shoved it in his pocket. “Should we take the rest?”

  Sierra shook her head. “What would we do with them? We don’t know who they belong to. I don’t think she even knows who they belong to.”

  Nothing was marked with a name or labeled in any way, though surely there were parents who came into school demanding to get back the expensive phones they were paying for. Maybe these confiscated phones belonged to kids who had lied to their parents and said that they lost them, when all the while they were in Ms. Lin’s desk.

  Hatred of Ms. Lin beat an erratic jungle tom-tom in Sierra’s chest.

  Luke idly touched a key on Ms. Lin’s computer, and the screen-saver image—a safari scene—disappeared. Ms. Lin’s school e-mail account was open.

  Suddenly Sierra had an idea so daring she could hardly believe what she was contemplating. It would serve Ms. Lin right to find out what it was like to get in trouble when you were innocent.

  “Go stand by the window and watch the hallway,” Sierra told Luke, whispering even though there was no one else there to hear them.

  “Let’s go,” Luke urged. “She’s going to be back any second.”

  “I’m going to send an e-mail from her account.”

  Luke gave one harsh, hard laugh.

  As Luke stood guard, Sierra began typing.

  Luckily, she had been the fastest keyboarder in the computer skills class in sixth grade.

  Luckily, she remembered the e-mail address by heart for the letters column for the Denver Post; she had sent the paper half a dozen letters in the past year.

  Luckiest of all, she no longer cared very much about Longwood Middle School’s supposed core values of rules, respect, responsibility, or reliability. In fact, right this minute she no longer cared about them at all.

  22

  “She’s coming!”

  Sierra had just finished deleting the new e-mail from Ms. Lin’s Sent folder, so Ms. Lin would have no way of finding it on her computer.

  She and Luke reached the suspension room as Ms. Lin was unlocking the office door. Sierra dropped down into the chair next to Julio’s and took a few long, deep breaths to force herself to calm down.

  Now that it was all over, she felt overwhelmed with her own daring, and even more with the coolness with which she had executed her revenge. She could have been a master criminal.

  She was a master criminal!

  She, Sierra Grace Shepard, had just done the most illegal and subversive act of her life, an act that even Luke Bishop hadn’t thought to do.

  She was crazy to have done it.

  She was wrong to have done it.

  But it was already done.

  “Did you get your Game Boy?” Julio asked.

  For answer, Luke flashed the device before hiding it back in his pocket.

  Then he looked over at Sierra. She knew he wanted to ask her what e-mail she had sent from Ms. Lin’s account but didn’t want to talk about it in front of the others. She’d tell him when they were alone, if they were ever alone. Maybe she’d call or text him that evening.

  It would feel very strange to be calling or texting Luke Bishop.

  Sierra opened her library book, The Diary of Anne Frank. Anne Frank had also known something about being confined in a very small space with people who got on your nerves after a while. Sierra stared down at the page, but it was hard to quiet her racing heart and her scolding conscience.

  So she was relieved when Luke broke the silence. “Here’s a question for everybody. In your whole life, which teacher did you hate the most, and why?”

  Sierra didn’t hate any teachers. The only adult she had ever hated was Ms. Lin, and she had only hated her since last Wednesday. She couldn’t even make herself hate Mr. Besser, remembering the tears she had seen in his eyes after the horrible meeting with her parents.

  Julio took his turn first.

  “Mrs. Fletcher in second grade. She could never pronounce my name right. She kept calling me Jule-ee-o, like Julius, or Julia. Like, how hard is it to say Hoo-lee-o?”

  “Did you correct her?” Sierra asked.

  “I tried, but she was r
eally mean about it, like she knew better how to pronounce things than some little second grader, because she was the teacher, not me.”

  “Mrs. Nolan,” Brad said, going next.

  Sierra knew who Mrs. Nolan was: one of the math teachers who taught the lowest-level math classes, not the accelerated math sequence that Sierra was taking.

  “She made me go to the board for some dumb-ass problem. A whole bunch of us were up there, writing problems on the board. I got the answer wrong. Two girls did, too, and she didn’t make fun of them, but to me she said, ‘Do you want to repeat sixth-grade math, Bradley? I didn’t realize you liked my math class so much that you’d want to stay with me next year.’”

  “What did you say?” Sierra asked, appalled.

  “I said her class sucked, and math sucked, and she sucked.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “That was my first suspension. She did fail me for that quarter, but I passed for the year, so I never had to be in class with her again.”

  Sierra still didn’t know what she was going to say when it was her turn, so she was glad when Luke spoke.

  “I hated them all except for Miss Boyle in kindergarten; she was cool. But the worst was Mrs. Bieber in third grade. She wanted to help the rest of the class understand why I was so difficult, so they’d have compassion for me instead of being pissed off at me all the time.

  “So she told them all, ‘Luke has a condition called ADD.’ She wrote it up on the board. ‘Does anyone know what these letters stand for? A-D-D? Attention deficit disorder. That’s what Luke has, so his behavior problems are not his fault.’”

  Luke paused. “There are still some losers who call me that, ADD Boy.”

  Sierra made a sudden guess.

  “Mitch. When you were fighting last week. That’s what he called you.”

  Luke didn’t answer, but Sierra knew she had guessed right.

  “I hate your third-grade teacher, too,” Sierra whispered. “I hate all of them. Her, and Mrs. Nolan, and the one who couldn’t pronounce Julio’s name.”

  “But which of your teachers do you hate the most?” Luke asked.

  “I hate Ms. Lin,” she offered.

  “Doesn’t count. Everybody hates Lintbag. Probably her own parents hate her.”

  She might as well confess. “Okay, I lose. I never hated any of them.”

  “Suck-up. Ass kisser,” Luke said, but not in a mean way, more in a friendly, almost flirty way.

  If Em had been here in suspension—but how far away Sierra’s former friends seemed right now—Em would have said, “Luke Bishop likes you.”

  23

  At lunchtime, with Mrs. Saunders out for the day and Ms. Lin alone in the office, the four suspendees were allowed to walk to the cafeteria to buy lunch unescorted.

  “I told Sandy to keep an eye on you,” Ms. Lin told them. “So I don’t want to hear about any funny business.”

  Little did Ms. Lin know that all the funny business had already happened during the five minutes that she was out of the office a few hours ago. The Denver Post might very well not print Ms. Lin’s letter to the editor—the only one of Sierra’s that had been published was about the importance of bike safety. But then again, it very well might.

  If only Sierra hadn’t sent it!

  But Ms. Lin deserved it, Sierra kept telling herself.

  And either way, it couldn’t be unsent.

  As the four of them entered the cafeteria, Sierra wondered if Colin would come over to talk to her again. It might be awkward without Mrs. Saunders there to monitor the conversation so that Luke didn’t say anything inappropriate, like Coming to talk to your girlfriend?

  On the one hand, if Luke said that and Colin heard it, it might give Colin the appealing idea that Sierra should be his girlfriend. On the other hand, it might scare him off instead. Was it better if a boy gradually became your boyfriend without even realizing it, so that by the time he did realize what was going on, it was already too late? Her mother had made it sound that way with her father: he came to her play with a friend, laughed at the wrong time, and then the next thing he knew they were married.

  Colin looked up from his seat by the window. He didn’t give her a full-fledged wave, but he held his hand up in greeting and gave her a big smile.

  Back in the suspension room, eating her hot dog, crinkle fries, and iceberg lettuce with Thousand Island dressing, Sierra thought about Colin’s smile. And she thought about it some more as she turned the pages of Anne Frank’s diary.

  She had expected the book to be mainly about how terrible the Holocaust was, how horrible it was to be Jewish in a country under Nazi occupation. But it wasn’t that way at all. It was mainly about Anne’s intense feelings as a teenager—her quarrels with her mother, her crush on Peter, who was living in hiding with her. If Anne Frank were alive and going to Longwood Middle School, Sierra could have talked to her about Colin, and Anne would have understood completely.

  Sierra was lost so deeply in Anne’s life that it was a few seconds before she realized that she could hear Mr. Besser’s voice, talking to Ms. Lin. Even in one-on-one conversations, his voice projected as if the only style of speech he had was addressing the entire student body at an assembly.

  “… Attorney for the district,” he was saying. “Tomorrow morning at ten.”

  “Stephen was in this morning while you were out,” Ms. Lin said.

  Mr. Lydgate’s first name was Stephen.

  “He’s worried that there may be a problem with the choir trip to the Springs.”

  “What kind of problem?” Mr. Besser asked.

  Sierra crept out of her seat and flattened herself against the hallway just beyond the rear entrance to the main office so that she could hear better. From where she had positioned herself she could see Mr. Besser but not Ms. Lin.

  “If the Shepard girl isn’t allowed to go on the trip,” Ms. Lin said, “it’s going to spoil the balance of the voices. Something like that.”

  “She can’t go. I told him that already. First, she’s suspended, and that’s what suspension means: no participation in any school activities during the suspension period—sports, theater, choir, anything. Second, Friday is the day of the hearing.”

  “Well, he said he’s coming to talk with you once school is dismissed.”

  Mr. Besser turned to leave. His jaw was twitching in an irritated way.

  “Oh, and he said that one of the choir members is trying to get the others to refuse to go if Sierra can’t go,” Ms. Lin continued. “Organizing some kind of a boycott.”

  Was it Colin? Please, please, please let it be Colin. One thing Sierra knew for sure: it wasn’t Celeste.

  Mr. Besser stopped and whirled around.

  “Which member? When do they rehearse? I’ll go talk to them myself and put a stop to this nonsense.”

  Sierra jumped as his office door shut, too loudly, but she managed not to give herself away. She slipped back to the suspension room undetected just as the closing bell sounded for the day.

  24

  There were no reporters waiting in the parking lot. Even though Sierra was relieved not to have to see her sad self on TV again, she felt a pang of disappointment, almost irritation. So that was it for her fifteen minutes of fame. She could be expelled without anybody knowing or caring, supplanted by the story of how the city hadn’t sent out enough snow plows because of budget cuts.

  She saw their Volvo and slid into the front seat. Her mother’s face was lit with the same kind of excitement as when she was in the middle of writing a play.

  “What?” Sierra asked.

  “Don’t tell your father.” Her mother backed out of her parking space into the long line of cars waiting to crawl into the exit lane. “We’re just going to stop by Beautiful Mountain so you can meet the principal and see what you think.”

  “But I already said I don’t want to change schools, and Daddy doesn’t want me to change, either.”

  “That’s why we’re no
t going to mention this to him just yet. Honey, I visited there this morning, did a school tour, sat in on an art class. I think you’re going to love it.”

  “I don’t want to change schools,” Sierra repeated.

  “Honey?” Her mother was so intent on their conversation that she cut off another car as she finally pushed her way out of the parking lot. “Honey, you may have to change schools whether you want to or not.”

  Hearing her mother say that, her own mother, in such a matter-of-fact tone, scared Sierra more than anything that had happened yet.

  “But Daddy—”

  “Your father doesn’t win every case. No lawyer does. I’m just saying that you have options. That’s all. And, I might add, very attractive options.”

  Beautiful Mountain was on the edge of town, in a strikingly pretty setting, situated against protected mountain open space, with its network of inviting hiking trails. Instead of one large building, like Longwood Middle School, there was a cluster of smaller buildings, like cozy cottages tucked in the woods. The littleness of the buildings made it look like an elementary school, or even a preschool, in Sierra’s opinion.

  “How many grades go here?” she asked.

  “There’s an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school, all on one campus.”

  “Campus” sounded like a college, but it was hardly a college.

  “That’s one of the things I find most appealing about it,” her mother said as she parked the car in the empty visitor lot. “If you’re ready for more advanced classes in any subject area, which I’m sure you are, you can just step into the next building.”

  “Where is everybody?” Sierra asked.

  “Well, school is out for the day, of course. But there are only a hundred and thirty students in all twelve grades.”

  “So they can’t have very many classes to pick from,” Sierra pointed out. “I bet they don’t have any advanced classes at all. Do they have calculus? Or…” She tried to think of some other hard, impressive course.