The Valedictorian Spot They Gave Away
On Tuesday after the last bell, the hallway outside the counseling office was empty and bright with May. Maddie had put her gown on again over her jeans, without anyone asking, I think because she could not stand to be in the building without it. She came down the hall with her cap in her hand. Ms. Larkin opened the door before we knocked.
She had a folder on the blotter, a manila one with Maddie’s name on the tab in her own square handwriting, and beside it a sheet of green-bar paper folded in half, the kind the school’s old printer still spits out.
“This is the change log,” she said. “Go ahead and look.”
It was three pages. Maddie read it first, with her finger under the lines, the way she had read everything since she was four. Ms. Larkin had laid an index card across every row that was not Maddie’s, so that only her own lines showed.
Row after row of grades posted. Then, near the bottom, a line that stood out on its own.
May 6. 7:48 a.m. Course: College Composition, fall. Weight changed from 1.0 to 0.0. Reason entered: credit posting incomplete. User: M. Hobbs.
Two lines under it, the same for College Composition, spring.
“That’s Mrs. Hobbs,” Maddie said. “The school secretary.”
“Marsha has done the data entry here longer than this building has had a fax machine,” Ms. Larkin said. “She is also the kindest person in this building and the worst liar I ever met. Hold that thought for a few days.”
I pointed at the reason. “Credit posting incomplete.”
“The college has to report the grades for those classes before the extra weight applies,” Ms. Larkin said. “It reports them every December and every June. Those were reported, Anne. Maddie’s college transcript is in this folder. The composition grades posted in December of her junior year and again in June. Nothing was incomplete. Nothing at all.”
Maddie looked at me. I put my hand flat on the desk.
“There’s more,” Ms. Larkin said. “I am not allowed to show you anyone’s record but hers. So I’m going to say something about my own work, and you may do what you like with it.” She bent and opened the bottom drawer of her desk, slowly, the way you would open a drawer in a house where someone had died.
I had spent three days preparing to be turned away. I had not been ready for a woman of sixty with a jar of butterscotch candies who had decided somewhere between Monday and Tuesday that she was tired of keeping her mouth shut.
She took out a sheet of paper. It was the same green-bar stock, with a date across the top in her handwriting, April 14, and her initials, and underneath, in a column, the top ten seniors in order. The top ten is public. It goes in the glass case. The rest of the page she covered with her palm.