“Get out of the way, Jordan.”
“No.”
The clock above the whiteboard clicked. Twenty students sat with their faces toward us and their bodies turned slightly away, the way people stand near something they have decided not to be part of.
Madison looked past my shoulder at Ava, and I watched her decide something.
She stepped around me and pulled the notebook out of Ava’s hands. Ava had gotten it back off the floor without me noticing. She held on for a second, which was more than she had ever done, and Madison yanked, and Ava came forward with it and went down on one knee and then all the way onto her side.
Her elbow hit first. I heard it.
“Stop,” I said.
“She let go,” Madison said. “Everyone saw. She let go.”
That was when Ava spoke.
Not in the careful, flattened voice she used for teachers and for me.
She pushed herself up on her hands and said it loud enough that a girl in the front row flinched.
“You have been doing this to me since October, and every single person in this room has watched you do it, and not one of you has ever said anything!”
Nobody breathed.
It was the loudest I ever heard her, before or after. There was a red line rising on her forearm where the desk leg had caught her.
Twenty people looked at the floor at the same time. It was almost synchronized.
The door opened.
Mr. Reyes came in with a coffee cup in one hand and his phone in the other, wearing a red baseball cap that was the twin of the one hanging on the back of his chair.
He stood in the doorway and looked at exactly what the doorway showed him.
Ava on the floor. Papers everywhere. Me standing over her with my hands out and my face hot. And Madison, two steps back, already crying.
“What is going on in here,” Mr. Reyes said. It did not come out as a question.
“Mr. Reyes,” Madison said, and her voice broke on the second syllable, perfectly, “I was trying to get them to stop.”
I turned and looked at her.
She had her arms wrapped around herself and her chin down, and she was shaking, and I could not tell you to this day how much of it was real. Some of it was real. That was what made the rest of it work.
“She’s lying,” I said.
“Jordan.” Mr. Reyes set the coffee down on the nearest desk. “Back up.”
“I didn’t touch her.”
“I said back up.”
I backed up.
Madison wiped under her eyes with two fingers. “She was reading something out of her notebook about me,” she said. “About all of us. And I asked her to stop, and Jordan got in my face and pushed me, and she fell over the chair, and I know how it looks—”
“I didn’t push you.”
“—and I’m not trying to get anybody in trouble.”
That last line was the masterpiece. She said it the way you say a thing you have already decided is generous of you.