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I didn’t want her to get so detailed that she’d lose people. Using the laser pointer that I’d taken from Miranda, I traced the shortest crack. “Are you saying that something dissipated the energy of this crack? What was it? Why didn’t this crack propagate any farther?”
“Cracks don’t jump cracks,” she said, holding up both hands to form a big T, as if calling for a time-out. “The crack from the blow to the temporal bone stopped when it intersected this crack, which was already there—from the first blow, which the defendant delivered to the back of the head.” She held up an index finger to underscore a point she was about to make. “A blow he couldn’t have delivered if he was face-to-face with the victim, as he claimed.”
I nodded. “Class,” I told the group, “you’re the jury. Based on the testimony you’ve just heard, how many think this was murder, rather than self-defense?” All but two hands went up. “Good job, Dr. Faruz.” I checked my watch; as I suspected, we were at the end of our class period. “Okay, that’s all for today. Next time, we’ll talk about gunshots. Be sure to look at the cases ahead of time. I’m giving extra points for class participation next time.”
The students stood and started filing out, and I began boxing up the skulls we’d brought to class. As I closed the lid to one of the boxes, I glanced up and noticed a boy in the third row nudge his neighbor. Then, to my astonishment, he stuck his foot into the aisle just as Mona was passing him. She tripped and fell, her books and papers and purse and laptop flying, and the two boys snickered. “Oops,” said the boy who’d tripped her. He muttered something else; I couldn’t catch all of it, but I was sure I heard the word “rag.”
Before I could react, Miranda was on them like a shot. Grabbing the culprit by his shirt, she hauled him to his feet, then released him. I started toward them, half expecting her to strike him. Instead, she yanked her scarf from around her neck and wrapped it over the top of her head, like a hijab. “I’m Muslim, too, asshole,” she snarled. “You want to trip me? Go on. I dare you. I fucking dare you.”
As I started toward them to intervene, I heard a sharp popping sound from the back of the classroom, which made me stop and look up in alarm. Then I heard it again. One of the boys in the class, I saw, was slowly clapping his hands. A dozen other students had stopped on their way out, and now, one by one, they joined the first one in applauding. A girl hurried forward; she helped Mona to her feet and gave her a hug. Another gathered Mona’s scattered possessions. A third girl, who also happened to be wearing a scarf, joined the group, and—slowly and deliberately, her eyes full of challenge—she rewound her scarf to echo Miranda’s gesture of solidarity.
I admired their kindness, but I thought it best to defuse the situation. Laying a hand on Mona’s shoulder, I said, “Miss Faruz, are you all right?” She nodded, not speaking, tears streaking her face. “Do you have another class now?” She nodded again. “I don’t want to make you late for that. But come see me this afternoon, please. Will you do that?” I gave her shoulder a squeeze, and she managed a faint smile as she nodded a third time, then turned to go.
I touched Miranda’s arm lightly; even through the sleeve of her sweater, I could feel the knotted muscles. “Miranda, can you carry these skulls back by yourself?”
She drew a long breath, then let it out slowly, and the tension in her arm eased a bit. “Yes,” she said, her voice almost inaudible.
“Thank you.” I squared off facing the troublemaker—Kevin McNulty was his name—and his buddy. Pointing to his buddy, I said, “You—out” and gestured with my head toward the doorway. Without a word, he scrambled to his feet and fled, leaving me alone in the room now with my problem student. “What do you have to say for yourself, McNulty?” I saw his jaw set and his eyes flash with defiance. He wasn’t going to make this easy for me. “Start talking, son. And don’t give me any crap about it being an accident. I saw the whole sorry business. Heard it, too. So if you bullshit me, I’ll call the UT Police so fast it’ll make your head spin, and I’ll tell them how I saw you assault a woman in my classroom.”
The boy blanched. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead, and his hands began to tremble, but he remained silent. “You’re running out of time, boy,” I said. He still didn’t speak, so I took my cell phone from my belt, scrolled through my contacts until I found “UT Police,” and hit “call.” I angled the phone slightly, so he could hear that the call was genuine. “UT Police,” came a woman’s voice through the speaker. “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton, in Anthropology,” I said, looking into McNulty’s eyes. “Can you send an officer to the auditorium in McClung Hall, please?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Is this an emergency?”
McNulty finally broke. “Wait,” he said. “Please. I’m sorry. Really. Please don’t.”
My eyes still locked on his, I told the dispatcher, “Officer, hang on. I think we’ve got this resolved.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “I can have somebody there in two minutes.”
“Thank you, but I think we’re okay here.”
“All right, Dr. Brockton. You take care, and call back if you need us.”
“I will,” I told her. “I appreciate it.” I hung up, reholstered my phone, and motioned to a chair. McNulty sat, and I did too, leaving a seat between us as a buffer. “Now you tell me, what on earth made you think that was an acceptable way to treat another student? Was it because she’s a girl who’s smart? Do you treat all intelligent women that way?” He shrugged and shook his head. “That’s not good enough. I need you to explain. What were you thinking about her that gave you permission to demean her like that?”
He heaved a heavy sigh. “I guess . . . I guess I just snapped. I see all these Muslim immigrants everywhere, and it . . . it feels like they’re taking over our country. I think they’re bad for our country . . .” He trailed off and shrugged again.
“These Muslim immigrants? Like Mona?” He nodded tentatively. “Mona was born and raised here in Knoxville,” I told him. “She’s every bit as American as you are. Her father’s a professor here. Did you know that?” He shook his head. “He’s one of the best electrical engineers in the world. So you didn’t know that, either, did you?”
His cheeks flushed again. “No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Therefore, you also don’t know that her father’s specialty is the U.S. electric power grid—specifically, ways to make it less vulnerable to blackouts and terrorist attacks. You think that’s bad for our country?”
“No, sir, I guess not.”
“I don’t have to guess,” I said. “I know it’s not bad for our country. It’s damned important for our country. But you looked at Mona, saw a head scarf, and decided she was beneath you—just another raghead immigrant, right?”
“Yes, sir, I guess I did. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not the one you need to say that to, am I?”
“No, sir, probably not.”
“Probably not?”
He sighed. “I should apologize to her.”
“Well, I’ll give you a chance to do so. At the beginning of class next time.”
He looked pained. “In class? In front of class?”
I nodded. “If you want to stay in the class. And avoid a misconduct hearing and a police report.”
Another sigh. “Yes, sir. Can I go now?”
“No, you can’t,” I said. “We’re not quite through here. It sounds like maybe you’re willing to see Mona a little differently, now that you know she’s not just some pushy immigrant?” McNulty’s eyes darted back and forth, and I could see him parsing my words, searching for subtext—seeking a snare—so I laid it on the table. “But what if she were? What if she were an Afghan immigrant, or a Syrian refugee? What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, maybe nothing, individually. But . . . there’s so many of them, and a lot of them are terrorists.”
“Really? A lot? How many?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But any is too many. Don’t you think so?
Or do you want terrorists coming to America?”
“McNulty, if you condescend to me one more time, you’ll be out of here so fast your privileged little head will spin,” I snapped. “Of course I don’t want terrorists here. But I also don’t want to live in a country that’s got a wall around it. I still believe in the Statue of Liberty—‘send me your poor’; ‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door’; all that land-of-opportunity stuff. Maybe it’s corny, but I still believe it’s part of what made this country great.”
I scrutinized the boy’s face: pale skin, dark hair. “McNulty. Is that a Native American name?” He blinked, startled. “I’m kidding. Irish, right?” He nodded warily. “You know when your ancestors came to America?”
“Not exactly. A long time ago. Early eighteen hundreds?”
“Ask your parents or grandparents. Chances are, they came in the late 1840s or early 1850s. You know why?”
He shrugged. “Looking for a better life, I suppose.”
I nodded. “Sure, if by ‘a better life’ you mean not starving to death. They probably came during the Great Famine. Also called the Irish Potato Famine. A million people in Ireland starved to death between 1845 and 1852. A million more came to the United States. You know what they found when they got here?” He shrugged again; he was a shrugger, McNulty. “Bigotry. Prejudice. Abuse by people who thought that these scrawny, dirty Irish immigrants were second class. ‘Irish need not apply,’ a lot of help-wanted ads specified. People said there were too many Irish, that they were dangerous and drunkards, that they were bad for America. Sound familiar?”
“Yes, sir.”
