Rhonda Brewer did not raise her voice in the middle school gym. That was the worst part. She stood in front of my daughter’s table with a clipboard against her hip and a lanyard around her neck, and she spoke in the pleasant, reasonable tone she uses to hand back a failing quiz.
“A thirteen-year-old didn’t do this,” she said. “Her mother did.”
The gym smelled of floor wax and hot dogs from the booster club table. Emmy’s table was by the bleachers, between a solar oven and a poster about owl pellets, and it was the only one with a county map covered in pins.
“Rhonda,” I said, “I work the counter at the feed co-op. I ring up fence staples and mineral tubs. I don’t run a laboratory.”
“Then someone helped her.” She tapped the clipboard. “Nitrate testing across thirty-one private wells. Duplicate strips. A blank control. That is not a seventh-grade project, Janice. That is a graduate student’s project, and if a parent or a friend did the work, the project is disqualified. It’s in the rules.”
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My daughter was standing three feet away. She is thirteen and small for it, with a brown braid down her back and her father’s stubborn chin, and she was holding her composition notebook against her chest the way you would hold a baby you were afraid someone would take.
“I did every one myself,” Emmy said. Her voice came out thin, but it came out. “It’s all in my notebook. The dates, the times, the strip colors. You can look.”
Rhonda looked at the notebook the way you look at a dish you did not order. She did not take it. She did not open it. She turned and said something quiet to Mr. Everly, the retired ag teacher who was judging the junior division with her, and he glanced at me and then at the floor.
I should tell you what a blue ribbon was doing on that board at ten o’clock that morning, because an hour earlier two other judges had walked the junior row and Emmy’s project had won first. Mr.
Everly had pinned it himself. He had shaken her hand. He had said, “Young lady, I taught farm kids for thirty-four years and I never had one who thought to ask what was in the water.”
Then the judges broke for lunch, and Rhonda came back from lunch, and by two o’clock the ribbon was gone.
Nobody took it down in front of us. That would have been a kind of honesty. Instead I walked to the restroom, and when I came back there was a strip of white paper across the top of the tri-fold with one word typed on it. Withdrawn.
Emmy read it standing very still. Then she started to pack up her pins.
I want to explain something, because I know what you are thinking. You are thinking I should have made a scene. A woman in the crowd would have. My husband’s mother would have, and she would have enjoyed it.
But there were two hundred people in that gym, most of them people Emmy goes to school with, and every one was watching a thirteen-year-old stand next to a word on a strip of paper. If I turned that into a shouting match between two grown women, the story in every pickup in Delmar that night would be that Janice Underhill made a scene.