JESSICA
This whole thing would be a lot easier if I weren’t hungover, I’ll be honest.
When Agent What’s-His-Nuts said Emily’s name, I had a cup of fresh, hot tea in my hand and had to fight the ill-advised impulse to throw it in his face, grab my kid, and head for Mexico.
Then I realized a mistake must have been made somewhere.
“I’m Jessica Burnstein,” I said. “I’m Emily’s mother. What’s going on?” I kept my tone polite, I’m a professional. I glanced at Emily and wasn’t reassured by her expression. I’ll be honest, she looked guilty. I wasn’t sure what of, though, so I smiled at the nice FBI people.
“I’m afraid we need to talk to Emily alone, Mrs. Burnstein.”
“She’s a minor,” I said, “you can’t talk to her alone.”
“Actually, we can,” he replied. “Unless she requests you be present, which she has the right to do.”
“Is she being charged with anything?”
The agent was surprised. “No, ma’am, only questions.”
Emily spoke, and her voice was pretty firm. “I have the right to an attorney, correct?”
“Yes, of course, but we’re not charging you with anything. I said that.”
Emily stood up. “Well, even so, I’ll happily answer your questions in the presence of my attorney.” She walked towards the door.
The FBI agent said, “Who’s your attorney, Ms. Burnstein?”
“She is,” my daughter replied. “Come on, Mom. Let’s do this.”
In a way it was almost a relief when the agents said my name. I mean, not really, but the whole thing had kind of been hanging over me. I wasn’t sure why the FBI was involved, but maybe it was because I was in a different state? I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. That’s what Mom’s for.
Which is another thing. Until that moment I had never considered the benefits of having a mother who was a lawyer. I hadn’t planned on ever needing a lawyer, frankly. We left the breakfast room and walked into the lobby. To my surprise, the agents headed to a coffee place outside, and Mom paused, too.
“Wait, where are we going?”
Agent Feld looked surprised. “To Starbucks.”
“You don’t want to take her somewhere private?” Mom was getting irritated because she was confused, a state she really doesn’t have a lot of experience with.
He shook his head. “Honestly, Mrs. Burnstein, for the third time, she isn’t being charged with anything, we just have a few questions.”
“It’s Ms. Burnstein, and these questions couldn’t wait till we got back to Los Angeles?”
He was mildly embarrassed. “Well, we wanted to talk to her in person, as the agents in Los Angeles had handled it up to now.”
It was a little awkward at the checkout, because they asked me if I wanted anything to eat and they had those birthday cake pops, which I freaking love, but being questioned by law enforcement while holding a pink cake pop with sprinkles seemed wrong. Such a bummer.
We sat down. I looked at Mom. “I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t want anyone to get in trouble.”
She suddenly got it. “Wait, is this about the cheating thing at school?”
I nodded.
She was silent for a moment, which I knew wasn’t a good sign. Her eyelid was twitching; she was about to go nuclear.
“Mom . . .” I tried to say.
But it was too late. She blew. “Emily Elizabeth Burnstein, why on earth would you cheat? You know I don’t care about your grades. I just want you to do your best.”
“I know, Mom . . .”
She interrupted me. “Cheating is never the answer! I thought I raised you better than that! I could have gotten you tutors! My god, what is your father going to say? Or my father? You were a Girl Scout, for crying out loud! Why would you risk your future for a stupid test? You’ll never get into college now! I mean”—her voice was loud, and the whole coffee shop was listening to her freak out; I was having zero luck getting a word in—“your record will be sealed once you’re eighteen, so I guess we could try . . .”
“Ms. Burnstein,” said Agent Feld patiently, but she ignored him.
“Thank goodness I quit,” she said suddenly. “We’ll leave the country. Or I’ll take the job with Ostergren and move to Baltimore.” She turned to the agents. “Do you need to Mirandize her? What’s the charge? Do you have witnesses?” It turns out there is a middle ground between harassed mother and polished lawyer, and it’s harassed lawyer. It was almost adorable, but not quite, on account of the incredible loudness.
“Ms. Burnstein!” Agent Feld put on his big-girl voice. “Ms. Burnstein, Emily didn’t do anything wrong. She isn’t being accused of cheating.”
Mom gazed at him. “She’s not?” She stared at me. “You didn’t cheat?”
I shook my head and may even have smiled a little bit. “No, Mom, I’m not the cheater.” I took a deep breath. “I’m the snitch.”
Well, this was unexpected.
It turned out Emily overheard some girls in class talking about a guy who’d approached them online and offered to sell them the exam paper for the upcoming AP Statistics test. One of them was a friend of hers, and when she asked Emily for her opinion, Em said it was a terrible idea. Which of course it was. Em pointed out that (a) they had no way of knowing if the paper was real, the College Board (who administers the APs) is pretty freaking uptight about exam papers; and (b) they were jeopardizing their futures by cheating.
“The thing is,” Emily said, leaning across to the FBI agents, one of whom had lemon cake crumbs on his chin, “they were all pretty decent at stats anyway, it wasn’t like they were going to fail the AP. But they wanted to do better.”
“So you called the cops?” I was sitting there pretty stunned, I’ll admit it. After the embarrassment of accusing my innocent child of cheating, I’d kind of kept my mouth shut.
Emily shook her head. “No, I wanted to stop them from cheating, but I didn’t want them to get into trouble and have it ruin their transcript or whatever.” She shrugged. “All they’d done was talk and think about it, they hadn’t even agreed to meet the guy.”
“So you told the principal?”
“I wrote a note,” said Emily. “I didn’t want to get caught snitching, either, although that doesn’t seem to have worked out very well.” She blushed suddenly. “I had Anna write it, I’m sorry. I knew they would recognize my writing.” She tried a small smile. “I told you penmanship wasn’t going to pay off.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She frowned at me. “You’re a lawyer. You’re a mandated reporter, right? You would have to tell the authorities.”
“I guess. But aren’t teachers?”
“Yes,” said Agent Feld. “The principal dealt with her students as she saw fit, then she contacted the LA field office and told them what the girls had told her about the man offering to sell them the papers. One of the girls agreed to wear a wire for us and meet the guy, and the LA office managed to catch him and get him to turn on his coconspirators. It’s a much bigger problem than Los Angeles.”
“Well, how did you know I wrote the note?” Emily looked worried.
“Your principal made an educated guess, she said. It could only have been someone who knew all the girls, it was reasonable to assume she was also in the Statistics class, and someone who had—her phrase—a strong moral compass.”
We all regarded Emily, who was clearly torn between being pleased her principal thought she was a good person and being pissed off she was perceived as a Goody Two-shoes. No teenager wants to be told they have a strong moral compass; they might as well wear a hat with a propeller on it.
Feld continued. “The agents in LA told us they’d heard one of the kids on this tour was going to pick up exam papers from someone in New York, where the College Board is headquartered.” He smiled. “You’d think they’d email, but apparently they don’t trust the internet.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Are you suggesting someone at the College Board is selling papers?”
He shook his head. “It’s unlikely to be someone who actually works for the College Board, but plenty of people have access.”
There was a pause. Then Emily said, “So, why do you need me?”
The agents looked at each other. “We don’t, really,” said Feld. “We just wanted to ask you if you knew anything useful.”
“Useful? No,” said my daughter firmly.
“No?” said Agent Feld, crestfallen. “We thought maybe you’d overheard kids chatting about it . . . like you did before?”
Emily raised her eyebrows at him. “Do you think I just creep around, listening in to conversations? Look, it’s bad enough you guys just outed me to the entire tour group. So much for confidentiality. There is no way I’m going to do anything else to help you.”
“Oh,” said Agent Feld, clearly taken aback.
Emily sighed. “Because, no offense, snitching on my friends to the principal was bad enough. The kids in the room you just burst in on basically represent every private high school in Los Angeles, and you can bet they’ve already texted their friends that Emily Burnstein got arrested by the FBI.” She put up her hand. “I know I wasn’t arrested, but truth doesn’t matter online, you know that.”
She turned to me. “Can we go now?”
“Back to the tour?”
“Back to the hotel at least.”
“Of course.” I stood up. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, my daughter is unable to assist your investigation further.”
“Are you sure?” asked Feld. “You handled this whole thing really well, maybe one day you’ll work in law enforcement. What are you going to study in college?”
I raised my finger. “My client is done answering questions, Mr. Feld. And besides, she doesn’t even know if she wants to go to college.”
“Everyone goes to college,” protested the other agent, who up until then had said little. “It’s fun.”
“Goodbye, gentlemen.” I turned and took Emily’s hand, leading her out of the Starbucks. For once she didn’t let go.
Once we got outside, though, she dropped my hand and stopped.
“You quit?”
Ah.
I think Mom was hoping I hadn’t noticed the casual hand grenade she threw out in the coffee shop, but I completely did. Once we left the agents behind I demanded an explanation.
“Well,” she said, “my boss was being a dick about promoting a couple of female associates, so I threatened to quit unless he did the right thing.”
I gazed at her. “You blackmailed your boss?”
She shook her head and frowned at me. “No, I stood up for something that matters.”
“Like I did with the cheating.”
“Exactly.” She smiled a little bit. “I guess we’re more alike than I thought.”
I said, “I think we’re both just more like Grandma, who was a bit of an ass kicker, in the ways she could be.”
“I miss her,” Mom said. “I wish I’d spent more time with her.”
“She was awesome.”
We were walking back to the hotel, and as we drew closer we spotted the group heading out to the bus to go to Bard, the first college of the day. They looked very subdued, but as I was about to call out to Will, Mom tugged me behind a tree.
“Let’s play hooky,” she said. “I had a massive rush of adrenaline on top of a fairly rocky chemical state, and I’m not sure I can do much more than stare into space.”
I was surprised. Mom rarely shows weakness of any kind. “Are you getting sick? Do you want to go back to bed? Are we supposed to check out?”
She peeped around the tree. The group had boarded the bus and it was pulling away. She watched it turn the corner, then headed into the hotel.
“I need a shower, more coffee, and ten minutes to check my email,” she said. “Then I suggest we take part in a time-honored cleansing ritual to reset our emotional equilibrium, reconnect our energies, and center ourselves in the spirit of the Feminine Divine.”
I hurried to catch up with her. “I’m sorry, are you still drunk? What are we doing?”
Mom’s voice floated back. “We’re getting our nails done.”
Neither Mom nor I are big nail people, which sounds weird. I don’t mean we have giant nails; I mean we don’t care about the nails we have. I don’t seem to have mastered whatever it is you do to stop nail polish from chipping immediately, and Mom once told me that painted nails are a sign of weakness in a male-dominated field. I’m not sure that’s true, and I suspect she said it because she has the same polish-retention issues I do. I imagine imperfect nail polish is definitely a liability when you’re trying to seem invulnerable.
But there was a period in middle school when I’d been trying to fit in, and she’d taken me to get my nails done half a dozen times or so. I remember being petrified the whole time, because I wasn’t sure what to do. Worrying about what to do was a big feature of middle school for me; why does everyone else walk about with complete confidence? Then I met Ruby, and Sienna, and everyone else in my friend group and discovered that (a) no one knows what they’re doing, and that (b) girls are awesome.
We got our nails done because I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do less than face the rest of the tour group. Besides, who doesn’t appreciate a hand massage?
I was struggling with the revelation that Emily had taken care of a pretty serious situation without any input from me. I’m not sure why it was surprising me; she’s been doing her laundry, her homework, and her private life without me for a couple of years. But still, this was a whole different level of independence, and I was a little disappointed to discover I felt left out. I would have helped her.
I also felt bad that I hadn’t told her about my work situation right away. She could clearly handle more than I’d given her credit for, and I had that “missed a step in the dark” feeling I really didn’t want to get used to.
The nail salon was the best Rhinebeck had to offer, which was actually pretty fancy, and as we sat side by side with our feet in bowls of water with marbles (who came up with the marbles? I mean, yes, I get it, it’s fun and distracting, but still, yet another unsung hero), we started chatting like we used to when side by side in the car.
“Do you think you’ll actually have to quit?” Emily didn’t seem all that fazed by this idea.
“I really hope not.”
“Do you like your job that much?”
I played with the marbles. “I like it a lot, actually. I like my clients, the cases are interesting.”
“But you’d have clients wherever you went.”
“True. But I need a reliable job at least until you’re done with college.” I sneaked a glance at her, but she was flipping through a magazine. She shrugged.
“I can always not go to college.” She looked at me suddenly and caught me staring at her. “I could get a job.”
I grinned. “Flipping burgers?”
“Working the stripper pole. Less grease, more tips.”
“Good plan,” I said, picking up a magazine. “I myself have aged out of that job market.”
“Your old boyfriend didn’t think so.”
I snorted. “He was lonely. In the same way hunger makes food taste better, loneliness makes old girlfriends look younger.”
“You’re still very attractive.”
I looked at my beautiful daughter. “Thanks, babe. Not really something I think about all that much.”
She grinned. “I think Will’s dad thinks so, too.”
“That’s just weird,” I said, and avoided the subject from then on.
I got bright red nails, by the way. They won’t last more than a day, but they’re gorgeous.