The Driver Delano Mills Refused To Lose

I watched Mrs. Kirsch’s face while Marisol laid those pages out, and I want to be fair to her, because this is not a story about hating anybody. She looked, for the first time since I had met her, less like an administrator reading from a printed page and more like a woman realizing the ground under her had never been as solid as she thought. She did not argue with the paperwork. She could not.

The board president, a soft spoken woman named June Alvarez who had taught fourth grade in this district for thirty years before she ever sat on that board, asked Mrs. Kirsch directly whether the district had any record of contacting me before suspending my authorization. Mrs. Kirsch said no. June asked whether the district had verified its own mail logs before issuing the suspension. Mrs. Kirsch said no. June looked out at the room, at the veterans standing along the back wall and the team in their travel jerseys and Marisol still standing at the table with the copies in her hand, and she did not need to call for a vote to know which way that room was leaning, though she called for one anyway, because that is how a school board does things right.