“Somebody tell me what happened,” Mr. Reyes said.
Nobody said anything.
He waited. He actually waited, which I will give him, and I remember thinking, this is it, this is the second where somebody says it.
A boy near the window said, “It happened really fast.”
A girl behind him said, “I didn’t really see.”
Somebody else said, “They were both kind of yelling.”
Both. That word did more damage than anything Madison said all day.
“Ava. Are you hurt?”
Ava was standing by then. She had gotten up on her own while nobody was looking, which was a thing she had a lot of practice at. Her sleeve was pulled down over the mark on her arm and her face was completely empty.
“No,” she said. “I’m fine.”
She had said the loudest true thing anyone said in that room all year, and thirty seconds later she was back to the voice, because the voice was the only thing that had ever kept a day from getting worse.
The girl who had been filming from under the desk — Hana, two rows back — had her phone up in front of her now, both thumbs going.
Madison saw it.
“Hana,” she said. Not sharp. Warm, almost. “You probably shouldn’t have that.”
Hana looked at her, then at Mr. Reyes. Then she turned the screen out toward the room so everybody could see it, and she pressed delete, and she pressed the confirmation, and held it up another second so we all understood that it was gone.
“It was like four seconds,” she said. “It didn’t show anything.”
Nobody stopped her. I did not stop her. I was standing there with Ava’s torn page folded in my back pocket, and I let it happen because I was still shaking and could not make my mouth work.
Mr. Reyes picked his coffee back up.
“Ava. Jordan. Office.”
“Mr. Reyes—”
“Office, Jordan.”
Madison was still crying by the whiteboard, two girls beside her now. Tessa handed her a tissue. It looked like an accident and it looked like grief and it was neither.
In the hallway, on floors waxed over the weekend, Ava said, “You should have stayed out of it.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know. It was already going to end. It always ends.” She was walking fast, half a step ahead of me. “Now it doesn’t end.”
The assistant principal’s office had two chairs outside it and a window in the door with wire mesh in the glass. Ava sat in the far one with her bag in her lap and did not look at me for twenty-five minutes.
Her name was Ms. Harlan. Grades ten and eleven. Small office, a window onto the bus loop, a coffee maker she had brought from home, and nine inches of paper in a wire tray on the desk.
She was tired. I want to be fair to her, at least here.
“Sit down. Jordan first. Ava, wait outside a minute.”
“Why does she have to wait outside?”
“Because I talk to people one at a time.”
So Ava waited outside.