“I know.”
“You were sitting right outside that door when she said it.”
“She said it to me too,” Ava said. “Before you got there. She asked if I had ever reported anything, and I said yes, and she said there was nothing in the system.”
“Then why didn’t you—” I stopped. “It was in your bag. It was in your bag the entire time. It was eighteen inches from her desk.”
Ava finally looked at me.
“And if I put it on the desk,” she said, “what happens?”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s a photocopy. Anybody can make a photocopy. That’s what I would have heard.” She squared the pages against her knee. “Or it goes in the tray and gets lost the same way the first one got lost, and then I don’t have anything at all. I made this copy at the library on Ninth on the fourteenth of January, before I ever handed the original in. Do you know why?”
“No.”
“Because I already knew nothing would happen.” She said it without any anger in it, which was worse. “I made a copy of the thing I was about to give to an adult, because I assumed that in three months an adult would tell me it never existed. And I was right. Being right about that is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”
The four-fifteen came into the loop on the other side of the fence and stopped and hissed.
Neither of us moved.
I looked at the page with the four names, at the top line, at the parentheses.
Danny Ruiz was in the building and would not talk to her. Priya and Kayla were in the building too, and the building was the whole problem — everybody in it had something to lose. A schedule. A season. A mother who worked the fundraiser table next to Carol Voss.
Nora Beckett was not in the building anymore. Nora Beckett had already gotten out, which made her the only one of the four with nothing left that Madison could take.
“I want to make a copy of the copy,” I said.
Ava watched me.
“And then I want to find Nora Beckett.”
Nora Beckett answered the door of a townhouse eleven minutes from Ridgeview High wearing a soccer jersey that did not belong to Ridgeview, and for the first four seconds she looked at me like I was a process server.
“I’m not from Lincoln anymore,” she said, before I had finished my sentence. “Whatever this is, I’m not from there anymore.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m not asking you to be.”
I told her about Ava. I told her about the notebook, the torn pages, the blue envelope, the report stamped and signed and buried. I watched her face while I talked, and I watched it change three times — wary, then something close to grief, then a kind of anger that looked like it had been waiting a long time for somewhere to go.
“I filed one too,” she said. “Did you know that? January of last year. I have the email I sent asking what happened to it. Nobody ever answered it. I just — I left. My parents said it wasn’t worth staying for.”
“Do you still have the email?”
She looked at me for a long moment, and then she said, “Come in. My mom’s not going to believe this.”
Danny Ruiz was harder. I found him at the batting cages behind the community center, and I said maybe six sentences before he held up a hand.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve got a scholarship conversation in the spring. My coach knows Madison’s mom. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying I can’t.”
I wanted to argue with him. I didn’t. I had stood in that classroom for longer than I liked to admit before I moved, and I understood exactly what it cost to be the one who finally does. I told him I understood, and I meant it, and I left without asking him twice.
Priya Sandhu and Kayla Whitmore said yes on the same afternoon, separately, in the same careful voice — the voice of people doing the math on what it would take from them and deciding to pay it anyway. Priya asked if her name would be in a report anyone could see before her older sister graduated. Kayla asked if she could write her account down instead of saying it out loud. I told them both yes, because both of those things were true, and because Ava had taught me, without meaning to, that the ones who kept it in writing were the ones nobody could argue with later.
Tessa came to me on a Wednesday, in the parking lot, before I had done anything to find her.
She didn’t apologize first. She held out her phone.
“There’s stuff on here,” she said. “From before the notebook thing. I never deleted it. I don’t know why I never deleted it.”