The Spelling Bee Josie Almost Missed

Why I did not just call the principal

I did call.

At ten past eight the next morning I phoned the school. Ruth Kolb, who has run the front office since before Miss Lanier was born, answered on the second ring.

“Is Dennis in?”

Her voice went small.

“Oh, honey. He left yesterday for the state principals’ conference in Des Moines. They don’t let them have their phones in the sessions. He won’t be back until Thursday night. Six forty-five, seven. He said he’d come straight to the gym.”

“Did you see the finals roster?”

“The programs went to the printer Monday. They’re already folded. Miss Lanier turned in the names on Monday. Fern, I don’t know that Dennis even saw.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“I’ll tape a note on the gym door where he’ll walk right into it.”

I hung up and watched the sleet blow sideways across the yard.

The superintendent was forty minutes away, and I was not going to start a war over a spelling bee in a county where I have to buy my groceries. My mother used to say that when there is no door to knock on, you do not kick one in. You make a different door.

Miss Lanier

I went to the school after the last bell on Wednesday, in my good gray coat, with a plate of pound cake. It was not a bribe. I just did not know how to walk into a room with a hard thing to say and empty hands.

Kayla Lanier is twenty-seven, in her second year of teaching. She is small and quick and wears her hair in a clip. I liked her then, and I like her now.

I set the cake on her desk and laid the card beside it. Her face changed.

“I know it looks bad,” she said quickly. “Please let me explain.”

“I would like that. I came to listen.”

I am going to give you her side as fairly as I can, because she deserves it.

She said that a sixth grader named Corey had frozen at the microphone in the finals the year before. He stood there for a full minute in front of the whole gym and then he cried, and he did not come back to school for two days. She had been in the audience that night. She had never forgotten his face.

“I couldn’t do that to Josie. I thought, she’s already carrying so much. I just wanted to spare her.”

“And Piper?”