Melissa would say she was crazy. As Imani passed through St. Catherine’s surprisingly quiet halls, she could almost hear her friend admonishing her for bringing that woman into her house. It was one thing for Philip to see flashes of Tonya at work, her slender body covered by a boxy button-down, work slacks, and an apron. It was quite another for him to stumble upon a beautiful young woman in his home, bra peeking from the wide neck of a thin T-shirt, casually doing his laundry. “She’s not paying rent?” Melissa would shout, incredulous. “You’ve taken on a sister-wife, and you’re not even Mormon.”
Imani chuckled at the thought and then hiccupped as she thought about Melissa’s secrets and her giggle threatened to morph into something else. Whatever Melissa had done, she’d been a real friend to her, Imani decided. Melissa had been her confidante, the person who would break from her busy day to grab a glass of wine and listen to Imani rant about her insecurities or frustrations with a challenging patient. With all the demands of the restaurant, Philip had never had the patience to hear her go on about her issues or feelings.
Imani leaned on the hallway wall, taking a minute to compose herself before entering room 203. Typically, the space was used by the drama teacher. According to the front office, he’d temporarily moved his classroom into the auditorium to allow students to space out, leaving this tighter space for her and Barbara, a sixty-year-old theater critic, St. Catherine alumna, and head of the Parent-Teacher Organization.
The PTO lead was essentially a full-time, unpaid position. Though all committees had a chief, those positions were largely ceremonial. Nate, as head of the admissions committee, had ultimately rubber-stamped most student résumés that had come blessed by the faculty and Barbara. It was Barb who really did the work: organizing meetings, gathering applications and teacher addendums, liaising with the staff, and digitizing damn near every document.
Imani opened the door to see Barbara already seated at a desk. Unlike in many schools, St. Catherine’s workstations weren’t in a spaced line but arranged side by side, forming a horseshoe with the teacher at the center. The setup reminded Imani less of a school than a conference room.
Barbara acknowledged her with a warm, albeit mask-muffled, “hello” before lamenting the stack of financial-aid-contingent applications. “It’s bigger than I’ve ever seen it,” she said. “And it includes a bunch of students who’ve paid full freight for years.”
“The pandemic has been devastating for many families,” Imani muttered through her own face covering, thinking of her personal predicament. Had her husband not hidden the home equity loan, she would have filled out two aid applications herself. But it was too late now. The deadline had passed months ago. St. Catherine’s senior teachers had already weeded out those they’d felt undeserving. She and Barbara were providing parental input on the finalists.
Imani approached a seat that Barbara had already furnished with a stack of petitions. She unzipped her coat. As she began to remove it from her shoulders, a blast of frigid air from the room’s cracked windows changed her mind. The best part of the pandemic ending wouldn’t be removing her mask, she thought. It would be feeling warm inside public places.
Imani pulled the first packet from the stack and began reading. According to the parents of five-year-old Angelique, their daughter had “it,” an amorphous star quality that people immediately recognized. The essay went on with examples of little Angelique’s giftedness, some of which had to be exaggerations. “Making her own short films?” Kids that age couldn’t hold a camera steady.
The parents included a TikTok link to their daughter’s “comedic monologues.” Imani brought up her phone and painstakingly copied the address from the printed form.
A big-cheeked, dark-haired girl with cartoonish eyes stared at the camera as if she wanted to devour it. “What superhero do I want to be?” Angie’s face screwed in disgust. “Why would anyone want to be a superhero? Flying around with their unnecessary masks. You can’t catch a cold in the sky. Who can sneeze that high?”
Imani laughed. “This would have been one for Nate.”
The name hung in the air. Imani stiffened, hoping it might dissipate without additional commentary. It was one thing to speculate about what had happened in her own mind. Another to open the topic with Barbara. Melissa’s disappearance wasn’t simple school gossip to be whispered about with other St. Catherine’s moms.
Barbara peered at her from over a pair of red bifocals. “Oh. It’s awful.” She removed her glasses and set them down on the table. “You were good friends with his wife, right?”
“I am friends with her,” Imani said, correcting the past tense even though she had her doubts. Even if Melissa was alive, Imani wasn’t sure what she should call herself. She’d loved Melissa like family. Perhaps the feeling had never been mutual.
“They gave so much to this school.” Barbara rapped her knuckles against her six-inch application stack. “Nate in particular—volunteering for committees, teaching a virtual class during the shutdown. He even endowed a scholarship. It pays for a kid’s entire tuition from kindergarten to graduation—half a million dollars, all in.”
Imani had figured Nate and Melissa as the kind of people to give back, but the extent of their generosity was impressive. It was the kind of thing that should be mentioned in a New York Times obituary or an In Memoriam on behalf of the school. “Do we know which child? Maybe we could reach out to the press or Nate’s family with the information. The child might even want to record something nice that the family could play at the funeral.”
Though she hadn’t heard anything about a service, Imani assumed Nate’s parents were having one. Likely they were keeping it small and local because of the pandemic. Immediate family. Real friends.
“That’s a great idea.” Barbara rose from her seat and moved toward the blackboard at the head of the room. A laptop sat on the teacher’s desk. She lifted the screen and then leaned over the keyboard, standing to put in her administrator password to access the school records. “I remember him mentioning a candidate when he’d endowed the scholarship—years ago. He wrote this long letter about the need to consider not only ethnic diversity but also economic diversity and experience.”
The clatter of computer keys echoed in the room, overpowering the street sounds slipping through the cracked window. Imani turned her attention back to Angelique’s application. If she hoped to make a dent in the pile before her kids came home, she’d have to read an application every fifteen minutes.
“I found his letter!”
Barbara’s victory took ten years off her face. She looked like the girl she’d once been, brandishing an A-paper.
“Who is it?”
“Looks like”—Barbara scrolled down a page—“Layla Sayre.”
She’d said something else, Imani thought. The brain often substituted familiar names for others. “Layla Sayre?”
“This is what I was talking about,” Barbara said, reading: “‘While ethnic and religious diversity is key to developing the world that we want to live in and create via St. Catherine’s, so too is economic and occupational diversity. Layla is a smart, hardworking, dedicated little lady with considerable academic promise being raised by a single mother with Appalachian roots. Layla’s grandparents are farmers, and her mother has mentioned to me that she grew up working the land. Our city-dwelling students could learn a thing or two about America from Layla’s upbringing and her mother’s experience. Imagine reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and gaining the perspective of a kid who visits grandparents and works on a farm? Full disclosure, mom is an aspiring actress who has auditioned for me multiple times and spoken at length about how her background developed her work ethic. I have witnessed how Tonya’s experience rounds out the characters that she portrays. Surely, her daughter will enrich her classmates’ experience as well.’”
Barbara kept reading, but Imani had heard all she’d needed. Nate had clearly met Tonya multiple times. Yet the woman sleeping upstairs in her house had claimed not to know him. In Imani’s experience, such lies meant only one thing: an affair.
“Nate’s scholarship pays for Layla to go to school,” Imani said, confirming the news to herself.
“Yes.” Barbara sat back, impressed. “She’ll be in the middle school now. We can reach out to her mother and—” Barbara looked up at her, brow furrowed. “Is something wrong?”
Imani could only imagine the expression visible on the top half of her face. She tried to picture a blank wall, but the only image her brain would serve up was Tonya from earlier, her head cocked toward an exposed shoulder, denying that she ever knew Nate.
“I…I just remembered that I have a patient.” Imani gathered her purse from the table. “I’m so sorry. I’ll read these later. Okay? I’ll find time to come in—”
“Don’t worry,” Barbara said. “I don’t know how you juggle everything. I’ll send you the files via email.”
Imani thanked her as she rushed out the door, her feet fueled by a bad feeling. Tonya was a liar and a cheat. And she’d left her alone, in her house, with her husband.