by Michael Chin
The late afternoon humidity weighed down Rosaline. Combine sticky sweat with five-months-pregnant exhaustion and she seriously considered succumbing to sleep in her office chair. She leaned back, letting the desk fan blow directly in her face for a minute before she got up. No need to worry if it messed up her hair. Rosaline directed the day camp hosted at the high school, and by this point in the day, she’d surely be the last soul in the building.
Rosaline found herself disabused of that notion when she entered the south stairwell. Oh shit rang out from the unseen bottom of the stairs, a response to the clatter of Rosaline opening the door, the sound of someone getting discovered. It was a girl’s voice, but Rosaline couldn’t place it. Next, the rattling of aluminum and glass like someone had overturned the contents of a recycling bin, a flurry of footsteps, the heavy door to the outside world opening.
During the school year, the south stairs were busier. They fed out to the faculty and staff parking lot. Over the summer, it was just Rosaline, Jared the principal, and rotating nurses who used the lot. They still had the camp counselors park in the student lot at the northeast corner of school.
A surge of adrenaline trumped Rosaline’s exhaustion. She hurried down the steps, not fast enough. She heard voices, footsteps, the outer door open and close twice. The only one left at the bottom of the stairs was Steve Dantz, who’d lingered to collect empty beer cans in his backpack.
“Mrs. Reynolds—hey—”
“What’s going on, Steve?” Rosaline tried not to show that she was catching her breath and thought a beat too late to move past him, to open the door to see who had escaped outside. She flung the door open harder than she meant to, and the air was hotter, more humid outside. She didn’t see anyone at all.
“I’m sorry Mrs. Reynolds.”
When Rosaline turned back to Steve he remained frozen in his crouched position, an empty in his hand, empties in his bag, a half dozen others on the floor, one can someone hadn’t finished, tipped sideways, still spilling a foamy puddle of beer on the floor. It smelled like a bar.
“I need you to explain yourself,” Rosaline said.
“Some of the counselors wanted to hang out.” Steve studied the laces on his off-brand tennis shoes, white but crusted brown with dirt. “We didn’t know anyone was around.”
She knew it hadn’t been Steve’s idea to drink on school property. Steve had represented a space where her school-year guidance counselor and summer camp supervisor roles coalesced. He was one of those rare students at Shermantown High who frequented her office not because he was struggling, but because he was so determined to be the first person from his family to go to college. He had the grades, and his SAT scores were OK. She’d urged him that the final piece of the puzzle was extracurriculars, and he showed he was listening by applying to work at camp. She’d not only hired him, but groomed him to come back the summer after senior year in a supervisory role over the other counselors. He’d lived up to the opportunity—a good staffer in the day-to-day, a mastermind behind things like the Summer Reading Challenge where the kids who read the most books would get to lob water balloons at the principal.
“Steve, I need you to tell me who else was here.”
He didn’t say anything. There was an old bit of teacher wisdom Rosaline had gleaned in the break room. If no student volunteered to answer a question, the best thing to do was to remain silent, because as uncomfortable as the moment may be for the teacher, it was worse for the students and eventually someone would raise their hand.
Steve didn’t speak, but he did at least make eye contact with her again.
“Where’d the beer come from?” Rosaline asked.
Steve looked back down and mumbled.
“Speak up, Steve.”
“I don’t know.”
“You know this could cost you your job, right?” Rosaline asked.
He nodded.
“I need for you to give me those.” She reached out toward the backpack, which Steve slowly lifted to hand to her. “Go home, Steve. We’ll talk in the morning.”
Steve didn’t say another word as he went out the door. He’d have to walk all the way around the building—even further than the student parking lot—to get to the bike rack from there. Maybe one of the other beer drinkers was waiting to give him a ride home. She doubted it, though. The other ones were the kind of kids who were good at—experienced at—getting away with things. They’d be long gone.
The backpack was full, overflowing. Rosaline picked up the last can from the floor and put it inside too. She considered bringing the bookbag back to her office, but the task of walking all the way back up the stairs and down the corridor felt impossible. So, she emptied the contents of the bag into the dumpster, threw the bag itself in her trunk, and went home.
* * *
Rosaline agreed to manage the summer camp when she first started as a guidance counselor at Shermantown High, before she was a mom. Even then, she intuited a gendered aspect to her taking on this ancillary role in managing the school. Dr. Thibodeau, a man, oversaw the school year when twelve-hundred teenagers roamed the halls, when serious academics were at stake. Rosaline, a woman, would oversee the fifty four-to-seven-year-old kids and staff of ten counselors for field days and water fun.
Jared—Mr. Haywood—replaced Dr. Thibodeau. Younger, with fresher ideas about managing teachers and catchphrases about restorative justice when it came to student discipline. Another man, though, who left the summers at school to Rosaline.
Eight years—eight summers—deep, Rosaline had five-year-old Dolly to think about, and now a little brother on the way. She’d weathered the first trimester in the spring semester and appreciated morning sickness subsiding as the summer days grew hotter and her camp responsibilities picked up. She didn’t even have the relief of sex. Since Dolly had started sleeping through the night, Rosaline and Corey had settled into early morning intimacies, before Dolly would wake, before Corey left for the gym—not every day, but at least once or twice a week. Corey was weird about sex while she was pregnant, though, claiming he didn’t want to hurt the baby which she understood as code that he found her fat and unattractive.
In her kitchen, a film of perspiration covered Rosaline’s every move, her back ached, and her belly knocked over the platter of blueberries, dry Cheerios, and yogurt she’d prepared for Dolly. They were running late, so Rosaline settled for ripping open the foil packaging from a two-pack of strawberry Pop Tarts and deposited one in the toaster, the other out of sight in her purse, next to a paperback—a romance novel one of her college friends had recommended on social media, as if she’d ever have time to read. In the camp Summer Reading Challenge, it was her dirty little secret that she lagged behind.
Rosaline usually only let Dolly eat Pop Tarts on weekends. She squealed at the sight of one, fresh from the toaster and reached for the plate. Rosaline slid it further in from the edge of the counter.
“It has to cool off,” Rosaline said. “Remember why we wait for food to cool off?”
“Because it’s hot!” Dolly screamed, as if she only remembered because this was her half of a call-and-response game and not because too-hot macaroni and cheese had sent her into histrionics two nights before. When she’d first thought about parenting, Rosaline hadn’t reckoned with all of the small lessons a child needed to learn, and cringed when she thought about teaching them all over again to another tiny human. Corey said he’d help more with their son, but Corey still left the house by six a.m. to go to the gym and shower before he went to the office, leaving Rosaline to deal with breakfast for two, packing lunch for two, dropping Dolly off at daycare during the school year and now, in the summer, getting both of them to school—Rosaline, the camp director, Dolly a camper. She never thought Corey would be the type of father who’d shunt responsibilities on her as a mother, or that she’d be the kind of mother who’d stand for it. They’d had a talk, even, during the first pregnancy, about how she’d expect him to help out around the house more, because they were entering this new phase of life as equal partners, and he’d nodded along dutifully.
“Can we get a Sasquatch today?”
Dolly was obsessed with the Sasquatch—a specialty sundae at the Molly Moo’s ice cream shop at the riverfront. She’d been captivated with the thing after she saw an ad for it, and on her birthday that spring they’d indulged her, buying one for her, Rosaline, and Corey. Even split three ways, it was enough to make Rosaline’s stomach hurt—scoops of chocolate, mint chocolate chip, and cookies and cream ice cream, garnished with hot fudge, chocolate sprinkles, whipped cream, and if it all that weren’t enough, a perimeter of whole Oreo cookies. Not to mention the maraschino cherry on top that Dolly had insisted on saving until the end.
“I won’t have time to take you,” Rosaline said. “But ask Daddy, OK?” Rosaline had been suggesting that would be a good father-daughter activity, because Corey ate the most anyway, and Rosaline was hyper conscious about the risks overeating and especially too much sugar after reading an article about gestational diabetes.
Dolly said it was OK, already distracted, studying the surface of her Pop Tart. “Do I have to play with Jerrick today?” She was halfway through breakfast, sprinkling crumbs all over the sofa, but Rosaline would worry about that when she got home.
Rosaline told her she didn’t know, because she’d learned not to promise anything about the activities her counselors would or would not facilitate. The best of them, like Steve, planned even games of tag meticulously with clearly defined boundaries marked off with orange cones the kids couldn’t run past, a special patch of shaded pavement where kids would get time out if they played too rough, scheduled water breaks. Others counselors were laissez-faire, setting kids loose to play and focusing their attention less on the activity than their smart phones or flirting with each other. Rosaline took care early in the summer to steer Dolly toward activities the better counselors ran but recognized herself helicopter-parenting and let it go.
Jerrick was one the few of Dolly’s playmates Rosaline knew by name. He lived next door, a year older, enjoying free rein under the lax supervision of a single dad.
“Jerrick’s weird.”
“Don’t say that, sweetheart.” Rosaline didn’t like Dolly calling any kid weird, but least of all her only black friend. How did a kid this young pick up implicit bias? Maybe preschool, or there were all of those TV shows—Corey let her stare at a screen for as long as she liked when he was in charge of watching her and there were too many cartoons with too many episodes now for Rosaline to monitor them all.
She wrested Dolly’s backpack onto her back, then wrangled her own work bag over her shoulder, the strap of her lunch cooler over her neck, Dolly’s lunch in one hand, and, finally, keys to lock the house and unlock the car in the other.
“We’ve talked about this,” Rosaline lectured Dolly in the car. “Everybody looks and talks and acts differently. We shouldn’t call anyone weird.”
Out of the driveway, on the road, Dolly elaborated. “Jerrick looked up my skirt.”
Dolly didn’t seem to know what looking up someone’s skirt implied, but nonetheless had an instinctive sense it was weird and used the word again. This time, Rosaline didn’t correct her.
Of course, after she said it, Dolly turned shy, so Rosaline had to interrogate her while she drove, paying sixty percent attention to the rearview mirror, forty percent to the road as she tried to decipher what’d happened. Dolly wore her yellow princess dress for dress-up day at camp. “I told Jerrick it’s a Belle’s dress. From Beauty and the Beast.” Dolly looked sullen in her car seat, then, reliving the moment. “Jerrick said it wasn’t. Then he chased me and looked up my skirt.”
It was a whole ordeal—the chase, Dolly surely screaming, even if she thought it was fun at first. A boy lifting a girl’s skirt and other kids probably saw it too. Where were the counselors? Oblivious? She knew some of them avoided reporting anything to avoid the hassle because Rosaline made them write a report. Documentation, documentation, documentation, she’d emphasized during their orientation. She’d watched their eyes glaze over. Someone had to have had the judgment to at least write something down when the camp director’s daughter was getting antagonized, though—unless no one wanted to take the blame for being the staff member who was around when the situation spun out of control.
Steve Dantz would have stopped it. He would have written up the report, too. He’d documented when one of the kids lost fifty cents to the candy bar machine—noting, even, the other counselor who’d let the kid use that vending machine, when the kids weren’t supposed to be in that hallway at all.
Steve was one of the good ones.
* * *
Rosaline caught Jared on his way into his office, next to hers, twenty minutes to spare before the drop-off began and they’d have to pull Steve Dantz aside to address what had happened. She’d had fleeting thoughts of trying to catch Jerrick’s father in the drop-off line to talk, but decided there wouldn’t be enough time to have a real discussion, and it was better to ask him to pull over from the pickup line at the end of the day.
“I’ve only got five, lots to do today.” Jared meant five minutes and left off minutes because it was more efficient. He was all about efficiency, which was why he never sat down when he visited someone else’s office and didn’t keep chairs for visitors in his own, because no one would want to extend a meeting when they were standing. This was all in direct contrast to his predecessor, Dr. Thibodeau, who insisted everyone—even teachers, Rosaline, his own secretary—call him doctor and was known for prolonged lectures.
Jared was much younger than Dr. Thibodeau. Tall. Fit. Olive skin, black and gray-flecked facial hair that he kept at a measured stubble such that it always looked neat, never quite a beard. He had a wife who could pass for a model, who wore tasteful dresses to end-of-the-year awards banquets. They were two of the most attractive people Rosaline had ever met.
“Make it ten for you.” Jared winked at her.
She gave him the rundown.
“We’ve got to let him go.” Jared used we as if they’d made the decision together. “We’ll give him one more chance to spill the beans about who else was involved, while he thinks that could make a difference for him.”
“We’re going to do this meeting together?” Rosaline asked.
Jared studied her, feet spread to a shoulder’s length apart, as if he were playing a sport—maybe volleyball—waiting for the action to come his way. She’d heard him talk about how good he was at reading people and she couldn’t disagree; he often sent disgruntled people—teachers, students, parents alike—out of his office either laughing or looking pensive like he’d given them new perspective on something important. “I’ll do the talking,” he said. “You should be there to confirm details in case he tries to make a debate out of it. But I’ll tell Steven he’s done here. I know you have a relationship with him as a counselor and we should separate the two.”
Steve. Not his nickname, his legal name. Rosaline knew this from hours looking over transcripts and drafts of resumes, even immunization records once to confirm everything was in order for him to graduate and transition straight to college. I can’t take time off in between, Steve had explained. That was the trap his mother had fallen into when she got pregnant, spring semester, senior year at Shermantown High. She’d told herself when Steve’s older brother was grown she’d go to college. But then she’d had Steve’s big sister, then Steve, then a little sister.
Jared had agreed to do the hardest parts of what was to come, but still sent Rosaline to bring Steve to the principal’s office. She wasn’t sure if it even registered to Jared what pulling Steve would mean. He reliably came to work early, so Rosaline had assigned him to both help with before-care in the cafeteria and drop-off duty, greeting families and offering a supervisory presence as the kids filed into school. Rosaline typically joined him in this duty by 8:30 when the trickle of early arrivals became a steady stream of less patient parents trying to get kids out of cars as quickly as they could. Someone would have to replace Steve, but no one else was as reliably present and on-the-ball as him, not to mention that she’d be leaving whatever counselor he was paired with to fend for themselves for the first activity period while they fired him.
Jared didn’t know all the camp mechanics, and while he worked in his office, Rosaline opted to take advantage of his ignorance and let Steve see through drop-off duty alongside her. When she arrived at the curb, Steve was informing Mrs. Capisalatro of the full slate of activities that day, while Emily Capisalatro, a first grader, played with the straps of her backpack.
“For choice period, she can either play freeze tag or read in the library,” Steve said. “A lot of kids have been choosing the library because of the Summer Reading Challenge.”
“Make sure she’s out there running around.” From the driver’s seat of her Honda Odyssey, Mrs. Capisalatro gestured with an iced coffee in her hand. She was a PTA officer, a regular presence in the offices to advocate for her older kids at the high school. “She can read all she wants at home. We send her to camp to run around, make friends.”
Steve kept his easy smile. “We always encourage the kids to make good choices.” A diplomatic response. On the first day of camp, he might have explained that the purpose of choice period was to empower the kids to make their own choices and to cater to different needs. Steve got the customer service parts of the job better than most counselors—how a lie of omission could be interpreted as a reassurance, and that a smile could go a long way in selling that he was engaged in the conversation and a good role model to the kids.
Mrs. Capisalatro put the coffee down and the car back in drive. “Have a good day, sweetie. Make sure you run your wiggles out,” she called after Emily, and then pointed toward Rosaline, her fingernail long, manicured. “Get this kid a raise, Mrs. Reynolds. He’s much better than the girl you had doing this last year.”
“Always a pleasure to see you, Mrs. Capisalatro.” Rosaline waved as she drove off.
In a lull between drop-offs, Steve said, “I’m sorry about what happened yesterday.”
Rosaline had hoped Steve would stick to small talk and act like the afternoon before hadn’t happened to encourage her to forget it. Even awkward silence would’ve been better. In that moment, she even wished he would be defensive about it, maybe say something snarky about how if the counselors didn’t have to work so early, they wouldn’t be moved to drink. Steve taking ownership was the worst option when she didn’t have any assurances to offer.
“I appreciate that, Steve. I think you’ll understand that I had to document what happened.”
Steve understood documentation.
“Principal Haywood wants to speak with you after drop-off.” She watched his back straighten, his shoulders hunch. “I’ll go with you,” she added, immediately uncertain if he’d see her as an ally or a witness against him.
Mercifully, another car arrived, and another behind it before there was a chance to talk more—the steady flow Rosaline had anticipated to offer a few minutes of reprieve from thinking or talking about what Steve had been caught doing. Finally, when the cars had thinned out and the official drop-off time had passed, they headed inside.
Walking down the hallways of school during activity periods wasn’t so different from walking them during class time, during the school year. Rosaline felt something like a specter in either case, a figure the student body was abstractly aware of, but only a portion really knew her—few enough to have a lower profile than any given teacher whom students would swap stories about like Mr. Loson being a tough grader or Mrs. Frezza bringing their left-over Halloween candy to the class or Ms. Chester’s lectures putting the class to sleep. Like a spirit, she imagined there were kids who were scared of talking to her, if only because most of the kids who did on a regular basis were outliers with IEPs or in need of individual counseling. So, students feared the day they might join that group, a more permanent mark than a boy sent to Jared’s office for fighting or cheating on a test. She also liked to think there were those kids who remembered her kindly, sitting in the back of the classroom and smiling along on a presentation day or showing them where the bathroom was when they got lost those first days of school or camp alike.
Wasn’t that the way in ghost stories? Nothing to fear—until there was.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Reynolds.” Steve stopped outside one classroom. “I was supposed to run first activity with Chelsea. Is it OK if I tell her I won’t be there? Make sure she has everything she needs?”
Chelsea was another good counselor. One who could manage kids on her own for one activity period without falling apart. “Of course, Steve,” Rosaline said. “Just make it quick.”
Steve flashed her a double thumbs up. He set off at a jog, more boyish in that moment than she thought of him. She’d seen him run a lot that summer, but usually with a cluster of kids trailing behind him, getting them excited about the activity at hand.
Rosaline tried to remember what activity they were running today. Something craftsy—Chelsea already had construction paper and pipe cleaners laid out. Steve took her by the elbow and led her to a front corner of the room, removed from students. There was an intimacy to the way he touched her.
Rosaline had suspected the two of them were interested in each other, maybe dating, which was cute. She knew Steve to be shy and school-focused. Chelsea was heavy set, perpetually rosy-cheeked, always swimming in ill-fitting tie-dye t-shirts. Rosaline had seen her freshman year for an anxiety disorder diagnosis, though she’d adjusted to high school well, to the point Rosaline didn’t meet regularly with her anymore by sophomore year. The camp job was a good setting for good kids Chelsea and Steve to get to know each other.
Chelsea tensed up a little as Steve spoke to her, and it only occurred to Rosaline then that, as close as the two of them seemed to be, Chelsea had probably been in that stairwell, too—neither of them the instigators, but if Steve had been roped in, Chelsea would’ve been too. Heck, maybe the all the counselors had scattered at the sound of Rosaline opening the stairwell door, Steve the only one who felt a responsibility to clean up empties. That’s why he’d lose his job.
Steve and Chelsea talked a little longer than Rosaline would’ve liked. Long enough she was torn between telling Steve they had to go now or stepping inside to better supervise the kids who were running around in a makeshift game of tag. It felt right to let Steve say his goodbyes, because regardless of still living in the same town, going to the same school, his relationship with Chelsea would inevitably change once they weren’t working together anymore.
Steve broke off, though. Rosaline thought she saw Chelsea glaring at her before she returned her focus to the kids; Rosaline and Steve continued onward to Jared’s office.
Jared was on the phone, not waiting on them; it was their role to wait on him as he raised a finger in the air, wrapping up a conversation with, as best Rosaline could tell, a teacher negotiating their return date for in-service against long-standing vacation plans. There were stark divides among the faculty—teachers who were as charmed by Jared as Rosaline—mostly the other women, though, but some of the younger men, too, whom she thought aspired to be like Jared. The old men seemed more confrontational with him, though, jealous perhaps, or skeptical of a younger man; maybe they felt loyal to Dr. Thibodeau, who’d run the school for fifteen years.
Finally, Jared cut the conversation short, “I assure you your contract says we need you August twenty-seventh. I’d suggest you let your travel agent know the situation—feel free to blame it on me—and see what she can do.” He hung up the phone before the teacher could respond, without saying goodbye. That might have been a choice around efficiency. Rosaline also wondered if it were a clue the whole call was a ruse—Jared performing for Steve, maybe for Rosaline, too, at how busy he was.
Jared had them close the door behind them and got right down to business, calling Steve “Steven” and asking him who else had been drinking with him in the stairwell. When Steve didn’t answer, Jared waited him out until he mumbled, “It was just me,” and Jared said he was disappointed in him for lying. He let it go, though, cutting to the crux.
“You’re no longer going to work for camp,” Jared said. “I hope you recognize I’m being lenient. You got caught in possession of alcohol—underage and on school grounds—which means we could take this up with the police or suspend you for the school year, too. You know that would go on your permanent record, right?”
Steve’s face was frozen in a grimace. Rosaline imagined he was doing his best not to cry. He nodded.
“Do you have any questions for me or Mrs. Reynolds?”
“No, sir.”
Jared leaned back slightly in his chair, which Rosaline read as an indication the meeting was over. Steve must have understood it that way, too, because he started to turn to the door before Jared went on. “We’ll call your parents this afternoon to let them know what happened, of course. But after that, you’re done. Don’t let yourself be seen on school grounds again until school starts in September, all right?”
Steve opened his mouth. Rosaline had never met Steve’s parents but got the impression it was a big deal and if it had been just him and Rosaline in the room, he would have begged her not to make that call, and she’d have felt conflicted. They had to call, of course, over a student caught with beer. For all the time they’d spent together, Rosaline intuited disappointing his mother would hurt far more than losing his job.
Rosaline’s stomach growled when she got back to her office, starving. She reached for the Pop Tart at the bottom of her purse.
* * *
Rosaline hadn’t dealt with Jerrick looking up Dolly’s skirt. She was embarrassed to have forgotten about it until she saw Jerrick’s father, fleetingly, grabbing his son in the pickup line. She hadn’t mentally prepared herself for a second confrontation, still preoccupied with Steve, and she let it go. Corey was late to pick up Dolly, leaving the two of them standing there outside—Rosaline waiting to go back to her office, Dolly waiting to go home.
Rosaline thought about telling Dolly to read. Rosaline was a little embarrassed she didn’t have a sense of how her own daughter was doing in the Summer Reading Challenge. But she left Dolly to her devices, leaping between sidewalk squares and then pulling strands of grass to knot together in a chain.
At last, Corey arrived.
Hours later, back home, Rosaline switched gears. She came in the house to find Corey and Dolly on the couch. His thumb engaged in the tell-tale slide of doom scrolling through Facebook. Dolly face was alight, watching one cartoon or another on the PBS Kids app. It might have been cute, finding the two of them together like that, if the sink weren’t full of dishes if there weren’t a new dinner to make.
“Did you make it to Molly Moo’s today?” Rosaline asked.
Corey looked up, a hint of annoyance at distracting him from whatever he was reading, or else because he didn’t want Dolly reminded of the ice cream shop. He shook his head, silent, as if to not draw any more attention to the question.
Rosaline decided on spaghetti and salad for all three of them. She’d use the jar of Prego from the pantry. It was a simple enough dinner that she could divide her focus, distract herself with a scheme she’d first conceived of back in grad school, about becoming a life coach.
Thinking about this alternate life path was, itself, a strategy she’d brainstormed—selective preoccupation. When someone was overwhelmed or anxious or exhausted, the idea was to lean into the state of distraction but to focus on something positive. I want you to visualize something for me, she’d prompt her mentees. She’d challenge them to think about an ambition, channeling nervous energy in a constructive direction to accomplish something.
She’d be a good life coach. Use her grad school diploma and years at working at the school to establish credibility. Generate business. Use her professional training at coaxing people into vulnerability to offer sessions that felt genuinely useful. Talking people through what they wanted and why, developing finite, attainable goals. Charge by the session, no pressure to have another session until they really needed it. The kind of person who sought a life coach in the first place would always feel they needed it. Her working title for the business was Our Dreams Come True. Emphasis on the first-person plural of Our, because her clients’ wins would be her wins—she was that invested in them—and maybe she’d build to group-coaching sessions where clients could work together toward achieving their dreams.
Rosaline needed to sit down with a professional to work out numbers like how much to charge and how many clients she could manage. A professional website was a must. She could probably get away without a physical office space—in-home visits or framing meetings at coffee shops as a technique to talk in a comfortable environment, anything but institutional.
There was so much to do. She still didn’t know how to get started. But she could envision what it would all look like if she could put the pieces together. Enough for now. The water boiled.
* * *
Rosaline was better prepared for Jerrick’s dad the next afternoon, Friday. In a situation like this, she ordinarily would have called the boy into her office for a disciplinary conversation and a call home. She was conscious enough of not wanting to look like she was taking this personally, though, because the boy had looked up her daughter’s skirt. So, she decided it would be best to handle things less officially. A simpler conversation with the boy’s father might be both more neighborly and more efficient.
He pulled up in the same red pickup truck he’d had since they moved into Rosaline’s neighborhood—a rusty old beast that’s engine roared and used to cut short Dolly’s afternoon naps when he fired it up.
Jerrick’s father—she couldn’t remember his name—helped Jerrick into his car seat. He was wearing a crisp white collared shirt, a striped tie, black slacks that all bespoke him cutting out of work to pick up Jerrick just like Corey did for Dolly in the summer. She directed him to pull over to the edge of the student parking lot so they could talk.
Jerrick’s father did as he was told and Rosaline followed after him on foot. Once she was there, he disarmed her a little by knowing her name. “Rosaline, how can I help you?” He looked down on her out his window. “I hope my boy hasn’t been causing trouble.” He spoke easily, an implication, she thought, that of course a five-year-old couldn’t get into any trouble. “I know he’s been keeping up on that Summer Reading Challenge.”
A glare shone off his rearview mirror, blinding Rosaline for a half-second. She decided it would be disingenuous to make small talk. “Dolly told me Jerrick looked up her skirt.”
Inside the truck, the air conditioner worked overtime to keep pace with late afternoon heat wafting through the open window. Jerrick’s father looked to the backseat. “Is that true?”
If Jerrick felt any shame about it, he didn’t betray it in that moment—not defensive, not apologetic. If anything, bewildered. It was possible a child really not knowing he’d done anything wrong, like the other boy Rosaline had confronted about hogging a water fountain that very morning, oblivious to everyone lined up behind him after a game of kickball.
“We’re neighbors,” Rosaline said. “I didn’t want to treat this as a disciplinary matter. But maybe you can talk at home, to make sure Jerrick understands why that’s unacceptable and make sure it doesn’t happen again?”
“Absolutely,” Jerrick’s father said. “We’re very sorry. Please pass along my apologies to Dolly and to your husband.”
Something about the apology to Corey felt wrong—performative maybe, or at least beside the point. Rosaline was hyper-conscious of the racial component of a white woman reprimanding a black man about something his black son had done to her white daughter. Her stomach hurt.
“Thank you,” she said, and she wasn’t sure how else to end the conversation. “Have a good evening. And let us know if you’d like to talk more.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you. You have a good day, too, and take care of yourself.” Jerrick’s father pointed to her belly and winked, leaving the window down as he put the truck back in gear.
* * *
At last, it was Saturday. Weekends weren’t a total reprieve in the summer, but she could answer parent emails from home and breathe easy without the weight of feeling ultimately responsible for a hundred children, but rather just Dolly and the little boy in her belly.
She took Saturday off, a luxury she and Corey afforded one another every now and again when they really needed it. It meant the other one took point on Dolly from early morning to mid-afternoon, while the one who needed the day typically got up early and left the house before Dolly could ask where they were going or if she could come along.
The premise stemmed from another central tenet of Our Dreams Come True, in addition to selective preoccupation: Take a you day.
She stayed in bed, ate the blueberry cereal bars she’d kept in her nightstand throughout the pregnancy, and fought the urge to pee. She held it as long as she could, then was careful to tiptoe to the bathroom and not to flush so Dolly wouldn’t hear her. Rosaline wished Corey would take her out to Molly Moo’s. Who cared if she spoiled her appetite for lunch one day? Wasn’t that what summertime was for when you were five years old?
Her phone informed her of eight new emails on her work account. A modest number, but there was no telling the depth or severity of what she had to deal with until she started going through them. There was no waiting until Monday, because modern parents would take their concerns up the chain if they felt they weren’t getting a response soon enough. Jared answered emails seven days a week and he had Rosaline’s cell number.
The second time Rosaline got up to pee, before she got back to bed, she heard laughter outside the bedroom window. She parted the blinds and saw Dolly running. Jerrick was running, too. They swooped in clumsy ellipses; it was difficult to tell who was chasing whom.
Rosaline wouldn’t get back to sleep, she knew, but she watched Dolly and Jerrick for a while. Corey and Jerrick’s father stood side by side.
Rosaline’s work email revealed a message from Steve Dantz, asking if he could meet with her Monday morning. Requests like that were a trap, because not only would she be bound to talk to him if she said yes, but if she didn’t respond soon he could claim he’d told her he was coming and didn’t see her response saying he shouldn’t. And if she didn’t respond at all, she offered fodder for further complaints—the complaints every student, parent, teacher, and administrator alike made that everyone else was terrible about answering emails.
She took a deep breath. She got back to her you day.
It helped, knowing Dolly was outside playing, though Rosaline also knew the peace in the house might shatter at any moment if Dolly fell and scraped her knee, if she had to use the bathroom, or, worst of all, if Jerrick looked over or under some article of her clothing again. But Rosaline got through making decaf coffee and making herself oatmeal. She wound up eating the gnawed remains of a strawberry Pop Tart from a plate on the kitchen table while her own breakfast cooled, wondering if Dolly hadn’t finished her first Pop Tart or if Corey had given her a second.
Corey and Dolly came in a few minutes later. Dolly shouted, “Mom!” but went about the business of playing with a stuffed octopus on the couch while Corey headed to the coffee maker.
Rosaline asked how things had gone with the neighbors.
“Cedric’s a nice guy,” Corey said. Cedric, of course. Why couldn’t she remember his name? “He and Jerrick had a good talk about—” Corey peaked behind at Dolly, spreading and contracting stuffed tentacles so the octopus swam through the air like water. “They talked about the issue with the dress. It turns out Jerrick was looking for mouse ears.” Corey glanced back at Dolly and went on, softer, “I guess Dolly and Jerrick got into it about whether the princess dress were real or a knockoff.”
A knockoff. Rosaline never would have thought to apply that language to clothes for a five-year-old, but there was the undeniable truth Disney’s princess dresses cost twice as much as the one she’d found for Dolly on Amazon. “He was looking for the Disney logo?”
Corey shook his head. “Kids, right?”
Rosaline’s back ached. She shifted in her chair to try find a more comfortable position, but somehow everything hurt more when she did. It hadn’t been this bad when she was pregnant with Dolly, at least until those last couple weeks.
Rosaline felt a kick. It was the first time she could recall such strong, definitive movement from the baby. Corey gave her shoulder an affectionate squeeze. When she was pregnant with Dolly, the squeeze might’ve given way to rubbing her shoulders for an hour while Rosaline teetered on the verge of sleep, watching HGTV. Saturdays were always for rest then. But Corey left her behind now on his way back to Dolly in the living room.
It had always seemed to Rosaline that boys were louder than girls. They took up more space, always shouting or physically imposing their significance. Maybe she’d had that all wrong, though. Dolly had been more active, earlier inside Rosaline, as if there might be some biological instinct, even then, that a girl had to make her presence known while a boy might rest easy, knowing someone—his mother—would fulfill his needs.
In the meantime, Dolly took care placing mismatched plastic houses and figurines from different playsets along the carpet. It was easy for a child to preoccupy herself, building whole worlds. Corey accidentally kicked over a castle with a clatter. It was easy for men to grow preoccupied, too, and not see what was right in front of them. Dolly howled, red-faced and tearful even after he had set it right again. Rosaline got up to hug her close. She’d kiss away her daughter’s salty tears until she was giggling again.
* * *
Rosaline’s father sat on the couch, feet propped up on the big leather ottoman that, in the day to day, Dolly had adopted as a play surface. Rosaline had observed a hint of disappointment in her daughter when Dad dragged it to his side of the couch and brushed away a cast of Snow White dwarf figurines.
The figurines wound up on the floor, and Rosaline couldn’t really blame her father for not recognizing any importance in them, casting them down amongst a slinky, a stuffed caterpillar, a piece of yellow construction paper with a star half cut from it before Dolly abandoned the project. The living room was a mess, and Rosaline had given up trying to straighten up when her parents visited. Her mother would make some offhand comment about the clutter or squalor regardless. It stung less if Rosaline hadn’t put in the effort to clean first.
Still, as Dad leaned back and Dolly looked from the dwarves to her grandfather to her mother, Rosaline knew she wasn’t showing up for Dolly. There was a lesson in not advocating her daughter, but instead, tacitly teaching her let the old man do what he wants with your things.
Dad didn’t give it a second thought, flipping through television stations. The TV was always on at Mom and Dad’s these days, background noise, usually cable news. Dad called for Rosaline’s mother to fetch him a beer and she said he should drink water, and they negotiated their way to the two of them sharing a beer and a glass of water.
Corey was laid out on his recliner. “Try the pilsner. It’s brewed over in Floboro.”
“I don’t like pilsners,” Dad said.
Mom searched the fridge while Rosaline stirred the chili in the crockpot. “I like Pilsners.”
“Look on the bottom shelf, Mom,” Rosaline said. “Right side, back corner.” They always kept the beer in the same place, but Mom always struggled to find it.
The chili smelled good—the beans and crushed tomato and ground turkey and onions coagulating. It was one of her favorite dishes to make when they had company, but in her first trimester the smell alone had nauseated her. It had been one of the earliest cues this second pregnancy wouldn’t be like the first, when smells had never gotten to her much. She was grateful for the second trimester, the eye of the storm.
“You all been following the news with that Black Lives Matter thing?” Dad asked. “I understand black lives matter, just like white lives matter and yellow lives matter and red lives matter. But these people block roadways—stop people from getting to work or home to their families—and they think that’s going to convince people to join their cause?”
Mom offered him the beer and water, each in a pint glasses. He took the beer.
“Imagine if the two of you were trying to get to the hospital so Rosaline could have the baby, and these people had you trapped at a major intersection.” Dad paused long enough to sip the pilsner. “Car horns blaring, contractions coming in waves. Maybe people start getting angry, throwing stuff from their cars. And what are you going to do? Get out and try to reason with these people? You think they’re going to let a car through for a pregnant woman, then stop the rest of the traffic? And what gives them the right to play judge and jury?
Rosaline picked up a platter of Havarti, brie, sharp cheddar, and Ritz crackers to bring to the living room. She got three-quarters of the way there before Mom took it and told her to rest.
Corey drank his pilsner straight from the bottle and scratched the bottom of his left foot with the big toe of his right. “One of the benefits of small town living, Jack. Small enough community and you can get out of your car and talk to somebody. Besides, I don’t exactly think Black Lives Matter is going to stage a major happening in Shermantown.”
“Not enough colored folks, you mean,” Dad said.
“People of color,” Rosaline said.
It wasn’t clear if Dad had heard Rosaline. “You’ve got to have a little empathy, don’t you? Maybe these people don’t give you and Rosaline a hard time, but there are expectant mothers in New York City, too, and San Francisco.”
“This cheese is so good, Rosaline,” Mom tried. “What do you call it again?”
“It’s cheddar, Mom.” Mom only ate hard cheeses.
There were times when Corey could be adept at changing the subject. He’d ask Dad if he could remind him about a story he’d told a million times from his career as a high school linebacker or else bring up some pointedly wrong idea about an NBA trade rumor so Dad would argue against him until Corey conceded he was wrong. In either case, it wasn’t just a switch in topics but something to make Dad feel good—better—about what they’d transitioned to. He could also enable Dad too, though. “I hear you, Jack. You’re right. It reminds me, actually—Rosaline—of that kid at school. The Hispanic kid.”
Rosaline swallowed hard, her throat dry. She thought of excusing herself to the bathroom, but edged into the conversation instead. “Steve,” she said. “He identifies as Latino.”
“Steve, right.” Corey leaned forward in his chair, the way Rosaline imagined he might when he was getting real with a client. “Rosaline catches this kid drinking some cervezas at school.”
“One of the children?” Mom asked. “The five-year-olds?”
“Na, one of the, what do you call them? Babysitters.”
“Counselors,” Rosaline said.
“So, Steve, he takes a real all-for-one, one-for-all attitude about it and won’t say a peep about who else was with him,” Corey said. “Just takes responsibility for the whole little party.”
“And he thinks he’ll get away with it because he’s a minority,” Dad said.
“Exactly.” Corey looked over to Rosaline. “And trust me, I have the utmost respect the for the struggle for equality every minority has had in this country. But it can’t be an excuse for poor choices or a shield for other people.”
Rosaline had intended to let it all go, conscious she’d only extend a conversation she didn’t want to have in the first place. “What are you talking about?”
“He figures he won’t get in trouble,” Corey explained, as if it were all perfectly obvious. “And if he doesn’t get in trouble, no one else can either.”
“Checks out.” Dad was somehow already almost done with the beer. Rosaline didn’t remember Mom taking a sip from it.
“But you called his bluff. Fired the kid,” Corey said. “That was the right choice, even if the other kids got away with it this time. They know there’s no hiding.”
Rosaline had considered the optics of Steve being the only counselor fired—the lone person of color on staff in a school that, as of the last demographic survey last fall, was ninety-eight percent white. Should they have done more to figure out who else was involved? Interrogate them? But who would confess? It was a dead end. But here she was, the camp director—the one left for Chelsea to glare at. The rest of the counselors, too, and the families, because wouldn’t Cedric and Jerrick—the only black family involved in camp—be especially keen to notice the absence of the only minority counselor? If pressed, she thought she’d explain it was all Jared’s decision. If it were up to her, she’d have let Steve off with a warning. But she knew how these scenarios played out. Explanations, under duress, sounded like excuses. A white woman equivocating, the lady doth protest too much. No, I’m not racist.
“You’re doing good, kid,” Dad said. Mom handed him the water, and he took an obligatory sip. “That school’s lucky to have you.”
* * *
Steve was waiting for Rosaline outside her office Monday morning. She wished Jared had been there to intercept him.
She unlocked her office door and told him she had things to do—offering he could wait for her if he wanted to talk. He nodded and mumbled, “Yes, Mrs. Reynolds.”
Rosaline wasn’t certain how many students she’d have trusted alone in her office. She did trust, Steve, though. It was maddening to know there had been other counselors less worthy of their jobs who’d gotten away. Part of why she had to hurry off was the sheer fact that she didn’t trust the other counselor she’d assigned to drop-off duty to even show up, let alone do a good job of greeting parents and keeping an eye on students on the walk from the curb through the school’s front doors.
Chelsea was on drop-off duty, offering a big smile to Mrs. Samson as her twin boys climbed out of the minivan. Once the mother pulled away from the curb, Chelsea’s smile melted into a withering look.
“How are you today, Chelsea?”
“Good.” Chelsea wouldn’t look at Rosaline, wouldn’t extend the single syllable longer than necessary, less good than gud, because she clearly wasn’t good. Maybe she’d intuited Steve was fired when he wasn’t around the rest of the day, or maybe the two of them had had a long talk after work about the injustice of it all, brainstorming if they might be able to organize the rest of the counselors to go on strike until Rosaline exonerated Steve or resigned herself.
Jerrick and his father pulled up. Another conversation that demanded follow up. Another situation Rosaline lacked the bandwidth to engage with. She watched Jerrick bound out onto the sidewalk.
Jerrick’s father rolled down the passenger side window. “Jerrick! Lunch!” He unfastened his seat belt to lean over the console, out the window and handed his son a green cooler bag. He gave Rosaline a smile. “Good morning, Mrs. Reynolds. Good to see you!”
He was gone before Rosaline responded, and Jerrick jogged toward the school, red t-shirt too big, hanging unevenly over his little frame. She imagined Steve might have looked like him a few short years ago, another happy little boy. She forgot if Steve had gone to camp as a kid—she usually asked about that during interviews, wary of that handful of high schoolers who were too attached to their nostalgia around the experience and out to relive it.
Drop off over, Chelsea off at her first activity, Rosaline returned to Steve at her office. She found him, still standing precisely where he’d stood when she left him, back straight, and she momentarily felt poorly about not explicitly inviting him to sit. He’d sat in her office dozens of times, but maybe felt he’d lost the privilege since getting fired from his camp counselor job.
“Please sit down, Steve,” she gestured to the loveseat, a piece of furniture she’d requested to make her office homier years ago. “What brings you to my office?”
Steve did sit, but only on the edge of the cushion. “I sent an email over the weekend.” He rubbed his hands against thighs. “I’m sorry about what happened.”
Rosaline took a deep breath. She’d run through this conversation in her mind in which he pleaded for her job back and she explained that the decision to terminate a counselor wasn’t easy to reverse and would have to go through Jared and even in the unlikely case he were to agree, it would all take time, and there were only two weeks left of camp.
“I could really use my book bag back,” Steve said.
Rosaline waited for more. She spent a beat thinking, even, she’d misheard him or the book bag was a metaphor for all of the weight he carried. But then she remembered the backpack she’d emptied of beer cans and thrown in her trunk. It was still in her trunk now.
“We don’t really have the money for another bag.” He studied his dirty sneakers. “I understand if you have to keep it for now—as evidence, or something—but can I get it back before school starts?”
She’d promised herself she wasn’t going to say she was sorry to Steve. “I’m sorry, I forgot about the bag.”
So, Rosaline found herself walking down the hall with Steve, down the stairwell where she’d caught the counselors. She hadn’t been able to walk those stairs without thinking of them since, wondering what other situation she might walk into, even though logic told her the stairwell was the last place counselors would get caught with contraband again.
They reached the Dodge Charger Corey drove during the school year; they traded off, Corey taking the minivan for the summer on the premise he’d drive Dolly more, though things had broken about even. She popped the trunk. The empty backpack hung loose like snakeskin, anticlimactically hollow as she held it out, so light that it might have been nothing at all.
“Thanks, Mrs. Reynolds,” he said. “That means a lot.”
It was a part of her job to help kids like Steve grow up. She didn’t imagine he’d return to her office in the fall, though, to ask for help preparing for standardized tests or for her to proofread his college admissions essays. They wouldn’t high five when he got his first letter of acceptance or hug at commencement. In returning the bag she probably shouldn’t have confiscated in the first place, she understood they were saying goodbye.
* * *
A hot spell had settled over Shermantown, the air sticky, every inch of the school reeking of kid sweat. Thinking back, Rosaline would remember that Monday she gave Steve back his backpack as the hottest day of the summer.
It was the culmination of the Summer Reading Challenge. Steve’s brainchild. One of the counselors was supposed to generate a comprehensive rules sheet but had dropped the ball and all that went home were sheets of paper with twenty ClipArt images of books and instructions to cross off books as they read them. Rosaline didn’t bother to correct the lackluster handout—held her tongue when, as she would have predicted, plenty of kids read more than twenty books, still at the stage of parents reading picture books to them. Families drew extra Xs in blank spaces; some of the more industrious kids drew their own little books in the margins to cross out.
The prize for the top ten performers—those kids with the most extra Xs, those kids who’d remembered to bring back their worksheets and thought to write their names on the page legibly enough for Rosaline to read them—was the opportunity to throw water balloons at Jared an hour before pickup, out on the football field.
They assembled after lunch for the second-to-last activity period, a rare all-camp event. To her credit, Chelsea proved herself the responsible counselor smearing little faces with sunscreen and passing out extra tubes of the stuff to other counselors to help.
Jared came outside in flip-flops and gym shorts. He wore a sleeveless workout shirt, too, and when he straightened his arms the cut of his triceps was sharp, well-defined. He flashed Rosaline a grin before he addressed all the kids.
“I hear you’ve all been reading.”
Some kids clapped. Most didn’t seem sure how to respond.
“I said, I hear you’ve all been doing some reading.” Jared cupped his ear.
Enough kids pick up on the cue to give Jared the wall of applause he was after. He knew how to work a crowd. Once a critical mass cheered, the others joined them, recognizing they should participate, recognizing an opportunity to make noise.
“Hard work deserves a reward, so I’m here to let the hardest workers throw some water balloons!”
Alex, one of the more popular counselors—a good-hearted jock, whom Rosaline didn’t find very dependable—picked up a water balloon in each hand from a plastic tote full of them. More cheers.
Rosaline spotted Dolly covering her ears. She’d always been sensitive to loud noises. Rosaline made a point of it not to single her out for maternal comfort at camp. She hoped Dolly might remember selective preoccupation in this moment. Think of princess dresses. Think of a Sasquatch at Molly Moo’s.
Jared set foot on a big blue tarp at the fifty-yard line. It was a contrivance the football coach had insisted on to protect the grass after he learned of their plans. Rosaline thought having that kind of staging took away from the spectacle of an administrator getting soaked. Between the tarp and Jared’s choice of attire, not to mention the pep-rally-style speech he delivered, it was clear he was fine getting soaked. He should’ve played the heel—angry, scared, humiliated to the delight of the kids.
The kids didn’t seem bothered, though, more engaged than Rosaline expected, because so few of them knew Jared. It was the counselors—high schoolers—who’d be excited to see their principal endure some punishment. Rosaline probably should have volunteered herself for the spectacle. The kids all saw her each day at least. They knew her. She momentarily entertained the idea of stepping forward, impromptu. She didn’t want to get wet, though.
Jared spread his arms wide, sacrificing himself to the masses.
The first water balloons came up short from bookworm kids who didn’t know how to throw very far, least of all with the unfamiliar weight of a water balloon in hand. The counselors nudged them closer. Finally, a throw made contact, the balloon exploding over Jared’s foot. Alex took the initiative then, grabbing a water balloon and chucking it right at the principal’s face.
The counselors’ joy grew contagious as they cheered each direct hit and groaned at the misses, but not in a mean-spirited way. The counselors who’d pitched the water balloon idea may’ve been right that this was the sort of freewheeling fun their camp was missing. The memory of this afternoon might stick with the children.
Chelsea ushered a little girl who hadn’t had a single throw connect yet straight up onto the tarp, not three feet from Jared. From that distance, her aquamarine water balloon exploding right beneath Jared’s stomach, over his shorts.
Water dripped from his face. Like sweat from a long Saturday working on his house in the summer sun. Like the shower afterward. Like when he toweled off and his wife came in the bathroom. Water dripping like sweat. The humid sort of day when a shower hardly mattered because the clean water intermingled with the hot, salty stuff, a body in need of cooling.
It was only as the last water balloons flew—that Rosaline noticed Jared’s wife. She stood off to the side, behind a group of kids, wearing a paisley sundress and open-toed shoes, hair down and flowing with the breeze, bare shoulders sun-freckled. She was taller than Rosaline remembered. They didn’t have kids, but would eventually, children as perfect as their mother and father. Wasn’t that the way of the world? Rosaline would sweat through evening jogs and sit ups and try to get her figure back after her son was born, always playing catch up, chasing a past version of herself Jared’s wife would bounce back effortlessly.
Jared’s wife put her hands over her face, too elegant to let out an open-mouthed laugh at her husband, even when he left the tarp and headed toward her. She shrieked, knowing her sopping wet husband would get her wet too. They were the kind of couple that probably played at chasing one another on long weekend runs, all flirty teases.
When Jared passed Rosaline—it wasn’t clear he even noticed she was there—another water balloon flew right behind his head, only to splatter across Rosaline’s chest. The cool water inside felt good, before she registered she should cover up.
Chelsea’d thrown it. She fought back a self-satisfied smirk. “Sorry, Mrs. Reynolds.”
She’d put Rosaline in an impossible situation. Rosaline never reprimanded counselors in front of the kids, but more to the point, if Rosaline let it go, Chelsea would go on smirking, maybe laugh when she told Steve what she’d done. And if Rosaline did give her a talking to? Why further alienate one of the best counselors? Morale was more important than ever when everyone was tired in that final stretch of camp.
Jared wasn’t concerned. He’d caught up to his wife and lifted her in a spinning embrace that was intimate and got her dress wet, but still suitably chaste for the school setting. The kids distracted themselves anyway talking to each other, a few immersed in their own impromptu games of tag. Rosaline played the villain, the mean old schoolmaster who hollered to come back until they were dismissed for their final activity period.
* * *
Rosaline didn’t have a change of clothes. She sat with her door closed, desk fan trained directly on her chest to dry off until was time for pickup. She refocused on Jerrick. Corey had been so ready to forgive the boy and his father after the mouse ears excuse for looking up Dolly’s skirt.
Kids did inappropriate things. Dolly herself had gone through a phase not long before of wanting to photograph everyone and everything when she got a hold of Rosaline’s phone. Rosaline had talked to her about consent in that context of needing to ask before she took pictures. She’d thought of it as a foundational conversation for later ones about Dolly’s body and about boys—conversations she didn’t expect she’d return to for a decade. But there was Jerrick, not asking for consent, and there was Dolly unable to put a finger on what was wrong, but certain something was. And here were Corey and Cedric, making excuses, accepting excuses, brushing things under the rug. Rosaline had to assume Corey hadn’t processed it all with Dolly, and Rosaline hadn’t had the headspace to. If she asked Corey now, he’d probably say she’d already forgotten the ordeal, but that was how girls learned their place in the world—not to question when boys touched them and gaslit them and moved on with their happy-go-lucky lives.
Rosaline was distracted as she greeted the first cars to pull up, the first groups of kids to file outside. This wasn’t selective preoccupation, because this wasn’t a good time for selective preoccupation. This was life, and the weight of it pressing in from too many directions. There was only so much one person could hold.
Cedric pulled up. Jerrick came to him.
“Could you please pull over again?”
Cedric smiled a belittling smile. “We’re actually in a hurry today.” He leaned in, conspiratorially. “Jerrick helped me around the house this weekend, so I promised him an hour at the arcade before dinner.”
The baby shifted in Rosaline’s stomach. She’d read, one late night Googling what was normal in a second pregnancy, about how a baby might feel the mother’s stress. She’d read about how all this thought, this research, was the unseen weight of motherhood, because men never conceived of caring as much as women. “This is important.”
Cedric did pull around to the same spot where Rosaline had told him about Jerrick looking up Dolly’s skirt. When Rosaline first became camp director, Dr. Thibodeau had framed confrontation and discipline management as components of the professional development she might enjoy from directing camp. She’d thought he might be grooming her for an administrative role one day—assuming that was her career aspiration—before coming to recognize, instead, that he was pawning off a summer’s worth of playing the heavy on her, giving himself a rest.
But Rosaline wasn’t a camp director outside Cedric’s truck. She was a mother.
“I don’t believe Jerrick’s explanation about mouse ears.”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Reynolds?”
It occurred to her he might genuinely not be able to hear her—air conditioner blowing, radio turned down but still audible, Whitesnake singing “Here I Go Again.”
“Could you turn off the truck, please?”
Cedric rolled down all four windows, turned off the truck and climbed outside. He was a bigger than Rosaline had realized—taller, thicker. Most of the time she saw him he was in his truck or she was in her car, or she spotted through a window out in his yard. She wasn’t sure they’d ever stood this close to one another.
“I don’t believe the excuse Jerrick gave you,” she said. “If he were looking for a Disney logo, he’d have looked down the back of the dress, not up her skirt.”
Cedric’s eyes shifted between her and Jerrick, then past them. She was certain a black man in Shermantown would be conscious of how any confrontation with a white woman looked—the power dynamics in play if he, for an instant, looked like the aggressor.
“Rosaline,” he said, “you know kids are curious. You can’t tell me Dolly hasn’t walked in on one of you in the shower or asked an inappropriate question—”
“She hasn’t forced her way into looking at another child’s underwear.” Rosaline felt a bead of sweat roll down her forehead.
“What do you want from us?”
“I want a fucking apology,” she said. “I want Jerrick to apologize for what he did, and I want you to apologize for insulting my intelligence.”
“Rosaline.”
Rosaline hadn’t heard the minivan pull up, wasn’t sure how much Corey had heard, or how much Dolly might have heard strapped into the backseat. Corey must have seen her and Cedric standing there, and maybe thought he was coming to her defense when he climbed out. Or maybe he came ready to apologize. Ready to take Cedric’s side again, at this of all times, when Rosaline needed his support.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Reynolds.” Cedric was stone faced now, no performance of the harmless father, raising his kid the best he knew how. “Jerrick, you see Dolly there.”
Rosaline wasn’t sure Jerrick or Dolly could see one another from where they were strapped into their respective backseats. The minivan was still running.
“Jerrick, go ahead and tell Dolly you’re sorry.”
“You don’t have to.” Corey put a hand on Rosaline’s shoulder. “We’re sorry, really.”
Chelsea appeared, weaving from around the far side of the minivan. No telling how much she’d heard. “Everyone’s nervous about what’s going on over here. What should I tell them?”
Chelsea was smug—that was the first word Rosaline could think of to describe her. Sensing some sort of karmic justice given how unfairly Rosaline had treated her boyfriend, and here she was, caught in a public, uncomfortable situation.
“Shut up, Chelsea,” Rosaline heard herself say.
Corey looked at Rosaline like he was gravely embarrassed. Cedric, too—less aggrieved Rosaline had called him out, more unsettled in the presence of a woman suffering from a mental breakdown.
The minivan was still running, and Rosaline climbed in the driver’s seat. She hit the power locks and shifted it into drive as the dashboard dinged at her, reminding her to buckle up. She was aware of Corey behind her, calling after her. He probably had the keys to the Charger on him. If he didn’t, his friend Cedric could give him a ride home.
“Where are we going, Mom?”
Rosaline had conceptualized a corollary to selective preoccupation. She called it conscious actualization—not only achieving a goal but taking a moment to savor it. In direct contrast to selective preoccupation, conscious actualization was about being in the moment, sitting down at your new desk, drinking a glass of celebratory champagne, or simply letting the cool breeze of a minivan’s air conditioner blow through your hair in a moment of peace. “I want you to visualize something,” Rosaline said.
“OK.”
“I want you to picture three great big scoops of ice cream. Mint chocolate chip, cookies and cream, and—”
“Chocolate!”
“Oreos on the side.”
“Chocolate sprinkles.”
“Hot fudge.”
“Whipped cream.”
“All the whipped cream you want, sweetheart.”
The traffic light ahead—leaving the school, leading them out into the world—was yellow. Rosaline turned on her signal and pressed the accelerator, taking the turn faster than she ordinarily would.
They were on their own, Rosaline and Dolly, if only for a moment.
“All the whipped cream you want,” Rosaline repeated. “And a cherry on top.”
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