When we get back to school on Monday morning, Mr. Wright’s secretary comes into first period English and hands me a note, written on heavy beige paper with The Morgan School in embossed purple letters at the top.
Please see me after class.
The adrenaline pours out so hard I feel like I could levitate. I pass the note down to Clive. He reads it and looks up, and we stare at each other in a deep, meaningful way for a total of ten seconds.
I look at the clock and there’s another twenty minutes until the end of class, which seems like a century, so I start to doodle, nervously writing words like retribution, pay back, and fraud in the back of my notebook, pressing down so hard that I break the point and rip through the page, and in some small way, violating the paper helps.
When class ends, I walk to Mr. Wright’s office, but he’s on the phone with a parent who’s ranting about something stupid because I hear him say, “I understand, I understand,” about fifty times and, “yes, we take those things seriously,” and then another dozen or so “I understands,” and some other stuff about “social conscience,” and I can only imagine how many of those calls he juggles every day.
Finally he comes out for me and I follow him into his office. It’s kind of prep-school cozy, filled with dark brown wooden furniture and a green velvet couch and some comfortable looking green-and-blue plaid armchairs on navy carpet. Lots of bookshelves with boring kinds of academic books and the ginormous Oxford English Dictionary that no one ever looks at because it’s so heavy and the writing is teensy, and really, TMI, right?
He points to the chairs and I sit down. He sits behind his desk and removes his round tortoise shell glasses and rubs his eyes, which are bloodshot, as if he didn’t sleep much last night.
“Since impropriety is not tolerated in any form and I’m willing to go the distance to prove that, I’ve decided to have an outside agency recount the ballots.”
I’m about to say thank you and then stop. I nod.
Mr. Wright stares at me, as if he’s expecting to find some kind of higher truth on my face. I meet his gaze and wait.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he says.