“I will.”
As she walked to the car, she pondered the strange small-town dynamics of elementary and middle school.
Even if you had only one child, you could be tied to a particular school foryears. Especially if it was a K–8 school. And if you had twoor three or four kids, you could be trapped at a school for a decade or more as your children slowly worked their way up from kindergarten.
Every decision became a calculation. If you had three or five or eight years left at a school, did you really want to get on the administration’s bad side by fighting this particular battlenow? Or did you keep your powder dry and save your complaints for some really big issue that may or may not crop up down the road?
As she drove home, she couldn’t ditch the feeling that she hadn’t fought hard enough. That she’d pulled her punches because she still had years ahead of her at Hollin Terrace with Mr. Vex at the helm. Because even though Caitlin was in seventh grade, she had younger siblings coming up behind her, with Olivia in fifth grade and Bella in second.
Piper pulled into the driveway and sat in her car, trying to identify the uneasy feeling lodged in the center of her gut. There was a dynamic at play here, an undercurrent she could sense but didn’t understand.
She just wanted to keep her girls safe. Was that so much to ask?
Chapter Five
Kiersten
While the good, civic-minded mothers of Hollin Terrace Elementary and Middle attended the PTA meeting, Kiersten ran errands and felt guilty.
Growing up in a small town had given her a deeply ingrained sense of community responsibility. There was a special circle of hell reserved for freeloaders who didn’t sign up for a shift with the volunteer fire department, take their turn mowing the Lutheran church cemetery, or serve on the Bergen farmers’ elevator board.
She tried to push these thoughts away as she dashed to Costco and the grocery store to lay in supplies for the impending road trip to Pennsylvania for Matt’s baseball tournament.
Then she girded her loins for one final chore before picking the boys up from school and hitting the road.
She’d been dreading this all week. She’d even cleaned the toothpaste-encrusted hellhole the boys called a bathroom as a procrastination tactic to avoid this task. But now, after her conversation with Matt, she couldn’t delay it any longer.
She took a deep breath, ate four Ghirardelli chocolate squares to fortify herself, and logged into PowerSchool to check her children’s grades.
Kiersten was always telling her sons not to use the wordhate. But she hated the student grade portal with the white-hot fury of a thousand burning suns.
In the olden days when she was a kid, report cards provided moments of pride mixed with terror and disappointment four times a year when her parents opened the white envelope that came in the mail from school and learned that she had an A-plus in English, but also a C-minus in Algebra.
But now, thanks to technology, PowerSchool allowed her to have these terrifying and disappointing momentsmultiple times each week.
Taking a deep breath, she opened her laptop and eased into things by starting with Matt, who personified all the oldest child stereotypes. Diligent. Hardworking. Responsible. Her shoulders relaxed as she looked at a short column of grades in the nineties. No tests yet. Just graded homework assignments, all completed and turned in on time. She moved on to James, then Johnny.
And finally Luke.
Squinting through one eye, she scanned the columns as her stomach clenched. A string of zeroes denoted missing homework assignments. After only a few weeks of school, he’d already managed an F in math. A D in science. A C-minus in English and social studies.
She slammed the laptop shut and tried to identify the emotion that ravaged her body every time she checked the portal.
Not disappointment. Or even anger.
No. It was fear. Flat-out, heart-pounding, adrenaline-pumping fear.
Fear of a future she couldn’t predict and didn’t fully understand. A place where the old occupations had fallen away and new ones had yet to materialize.
A future where only those kids who turned in their homework on time and did well on standardized tests would survive. A future where kids who got B’s and C’s lived in shipping containers in aBlade Runner–style dystopian hellhole where they served AI Robot Overlordsin plutonium mines on Mars and ate dehydrated bread pellets and Soylent Green.
She suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to down a bottle of whiskey or smoke a pack of cigarettes, even though she rarely drank and never smoked.
Instead, she opened the pantry, hunching her shoulders as she prepared for a soup can or a cereal box to fall on her head from the crammed shelves above.
She stepped on a stool and reached for the top shelf, where she found the box of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies she’d hidden from her husband and the boys in case of an emergency such as this. She ripped it open and popped a cookie into her mouth.
It wasn’t fair that Luke, who was just as smart as his brothers, had to work twice as hard to get half as far. It wasn’t fair that his brain was wired in a way that made every moment he spent in school miserable and difficult.
