The Valedictorian Spot They Gave Away
I sat at the kitchen table until eleven with a legal pad. I have kept the books at the Marlow Farmers Co-op for nineteen years. I have learned that you do not argue with a number. You ask for the ledger.
On Monday morning at 7:40 I was in Georgia Larkin’s office with a typed page.
Ms. Larkin has been counselor at Marlow for twenty-seven years. She is sixty, with short gray hair and reading glasses on a cord, and she keeps a jar of butterscotch candies on her desk that nobody has ever seen her eat from. She looked up and saw my face and said, “Oh, Anne,” before I had said a word.
I handed her the page. I had typed it at the Co-op on Sunday afternoon. It was dated. It was one paragraph.
It said that under the student handbook, a parent may request a review of her child’s educational records, and that I was requesting, for Madeline Kessler, her complete cumulative file and every document, worksheet, and change record associated with the class rank recalculation of May 6. And it said that I was also requesting a copy of every transcript the recalculation had touched.
She read it twice. She took her glasses off and put them back on.
“Anne, I can only release Maddie’s. Anyone else’s, I can’t. You know that.”
“I know. I put the whole sentence in on purpose.”
“On purpose?”
“If the answer is no, I want it written down that I asked.”
She almost smiled at that. “Then I’ll start with hers,” I said. “All four years. And the change log.”
That made her stop. She set her pen down on the blotter very carefully, as if it might roll.
“The change log,” she said.
“Every time someone changes a number in a student record, the system writes down who did it and when. The Co-op’s bookkeeping program does it. A school’s must too.”
“It does.” She looked at the door, which was closed. She looked at the butterscotch jar. “Anne, in twenty-seven years I have printed more transcripts than I can count. Nobody has ever asked me for the change log.”
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
She did not answer that. What she said instead was, “How is Maddie?”
I told her about the supper, and about that morning, when Maddie had stepped off the bus without her usual goodbye to Clarence Moss, the driver, who is seventy-four and has driven her since she was six. Clarence had said, “Hey there, Maddie girl,” and she had not been able to say it back.
Ms. Larkin pressed her lips together for a moment. “Give me until tomorrow,” she said. “Come back after the last bell. Bring her.”
“Why bring her?”
“Because it’s hers,” she said. “It’s her file. She should hold it herself.”