Praise for Christina Dalcher

‘The book of the moment!’

MARIE CLAIRE

‘Intelligent, suspenseful, provocative, and intensely disturbing’

LEE CHILD

‘A truly compulsive novel’

STYLIST

‘A novel ripe for the era of #MeToo’

VANITY FAIR

‘A fast-paced, twisting thriller that left me speechless’

DAILY MAIL

‘Thrilling and provocative, you’ll be flipping through the pages at breakneck speed’

OK!

‘Set to dominate dinner party chats’

COSMOPOLITAN

‘This book will blow your mind’

PRIMA

‘Petrifying’

ELLE

‘A dazzling debut’

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

‘Terrifying’

RED

‘Frighteningly relatable’

WOMAN

‘Thrilling. I was left speechless!’

WOMAN & HOME

‘Extraordinary’

LOUISE O’NEILL

‘Sinister and disturbing’

THE SUN

‘Terrifying in its relevance’

GRAZIA

‘Compelling’

HEAT

‘Utterly shocking’

S MAGAZINE

‘Chillingly imagined’

SUNDAY MIRROR

‘Thought-provoking’

PSYCHOLOGIES

‘Tense and engrossing’

THE IRISH TIMES

‘Be scared. Be very scared’

FABULOUS

‘A cautionary tale for the future’

BELFAST TELEGRAPH

‘Gripping’

BELLA

CHRISTINA DALCHER is the Sunday Times bestselling author of VOX. She earned her doctorate in theoretical linguistics from Georgetown University, specializing in the phonetics of sound change in Italian and British dialects. Q is her second novel.

Also by Christina Dalcher

VOX

Q

Q

Christina Dalcher

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Christina Dalcher 2020

Christina Dalcher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008303365

Version 2020-04-13

Note to Readers

This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

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 Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008303341

In memory of

Carrie Elizabeth Buck, 1906-1983

and to the children she and so many others were denied

They done me wrong. They done us all wrong.

—CARRIE BUCK

Contents

Cover

Praise

About the Author

Also by Christina Dalcher

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Fifty-Five

Fifty-Six

Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Eight

Fifty-Nine

Sixty

Sixty-One

Sixty-Two

Sixty-Three

Sixty-Four

Sixty-Five

Sixty-Six

Sixty-Seven

Sixty-Eight

Sixty-Nine

Seventy

Seventy-One

Seventy-Two

Seventy-Three

Seventy-Four

Seventy-Five

Seventy-Six

Seventy-Seven

Seventy-Eight

Author’s Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

One

It’s impossible to know what you would do to escape a shitty marriage and give your daughters a fair shot at success. Would you pay money? Trade the comfort of house and home? Lie, cheat, or steal? I’ve asked myself these questions; I suppose many mothers do. One question I haven’t asked, mostly because I don’t like the answer. Not a bit. I have too strong a survival instinct. Always have.

Last night, I spoke to Malcolm again after the girls had gone to bed. I tried to put a light spin on things, to not turn him from phlegmatic to angry with my words.

“I’ve had enough of this, Malc,” I said. “Freddie’s had enough of it.”

He looked up from his paperwork long enough to meet my eyes. “Had enough of what?”

“Of the numbers. Of the pressure. Of all of it.”

“Noted,” he said and buried himself again in pages of reports and memos. I think I heard a relieved sigh when I left to go to bed.

Things haven’t been good here for a long time.

I almost can’t remember how it felt before we all started carrying the Q numbers around with us, like an extra and unnatural print on the tips of our fingers, a badge of honor for some, a mark of shame for others. I suppose, after more than a decade, you can get used to anything. Like cell phones. Remember not having the entire universe in your back pocket? Remember sitting on the floor, talking to your best friend about nothing, unwinding a curly cord only to watch it kink up again? Remember all that? I do and I don’t. Blockbuster two-day video rentals and bookstores the size of an airplane hangar are distant memories, faded impressions of life before streaming and same-day delivery.

It’s the same way with the Q numbers, although we’ve carried numeric strings with us in one form or another for most of our lives: our social security numbers for tax returns; our home telephone numbers in case an emergency call to Mom became necessary; our grade point averages that would fill boxes in dozens of college application forms. Men, in a clothing store, became thirty-four long or sixteen-and-a-half, thirty-three. Women became dress sizes: six, eight, fourteen. In the more upscale shops, we were our measurements. In doctors’ offices, we were our height and weight, watching one number creep down while the other number crept up.

We’ve always been our numbers. DOB. GPA. SSN. BP (systolic and diastolic). BMI. SAT and GRE and GMAT and LSAT; 35-22-35 (Marilyn, damn her); 3 (the Babe). PINs and CSCs and expiration dates. Jenny’s phone number from that old song. And, for the extreme among us, the entire sixteen-digit sequence on our Visa cards. Our ages. Our net worths. Our IQs.

I think about this in the grocery store, while I stand in one of the priority lines with close to a hundred bags and cans and boxes in my cart, enough to get my family of four through a few days. Yesterday, at Safeway, five other women glared at me from three lines over. One of them, I remembered from high school. I think she was a cheerleader. Pretty, thin, not too bright. What the hell was her name? Paulette? Paulina? Patty? Patty. That’s it. She was fifth in line at the only open nonpriority checkout, holding a carton of skim milk. Patty’s one item compared to my one hundred. I nearly let her cut in before me, but the cashier shrugged and shook his head in a hopeless no.

“Her card won’t work in this line,” the kid said. “You know.”

He scanned my card, my magic card with its magic number encoded on it. Nine-point-something. It’s the first digit that matters.

Patty didn’t say a word. She would have, once. She, or one of the other women, would have rolled her cart over and refused to move. I saw a fistfight break out at a gas station once between a short man in a suit and that guy who worked at the hardware store down on Main. No competition there. The suit checked over Mr. Ex–High School Football once, got back into his Lexus, and drove off. When his card wouldn’t work, Mr. Ex-Football punched the gas pump display until his fists were bloody and the police showed up. I don’t know what his Q number was, but it sure as shit had to be below nine.

Now we’re all used to the lines and the tiers and the different strokes for different folks.

I guess, if enough time passes, people can get used to anything.

Two

There are nine alarms in my house now. One next to my bed set for five o’clock, one that chirps an hour before Anne’s school bus arrives, three more to mark the final thirty minutes, fifteen minutes, and seven minutes. Same for Freddie’s bus, which shows up slightly later. Nine pings and pops and chimes, five days a week. I feel like I’m on a goddamned game show.

All so my daughters don’t miss their ride to school.

When I was a girl, my mother would call up the stairs. Her voice walked the fine line between gentle and firm as she spoke my name, spurring me on to get up, get dressed, get ready. I still failed to reach the bus stop on some days, only arriving just in time to watch it turn the corner, see the red taillights disappear in the morning fog. Everyone missed a bus now and then. No big deal.

There weren’t incentives to make sure you got on the bus—the right bus. Not back then.

Malcolm’s already out the door, ensconced in a bright office with some junior aide bringing him coffee and whole-grain bagels glazed with nonfat cream cheese. He never sees his daughters, two contestants in the daily Who Won’t Make It to School on Time? show, on weekday mornings. It’s too bad, really. The prizes aren’t anything to get worked up about, but the penalties bestowed on the losers make for solid motivation.

“Freddie!” I call from the kitchen, sounding less like my mother and more like a desperate lioness with a pack of hyenas circling my cubs. “Anne!”

Her thirty-minute warning pings while I’m spooning yogurt from a quart-sized tub and teetering on one leg to hitch the ankle strap on my left heel. Anne pokes her head around the corner and gives it a quick, silent shake.

Freddie’s not ready, not even close.

Shit.

On the second testing day of the school year, I’m running late, my daughter hasn’t shown up for breakfast, and all I can think about is the yellow bus idling up the street with the Child Catcher sitting behind the wheel.

When I was young, I had dreams of the Child Catcher from that old musical, the one with the flying car and Dick Van Dyke stumbling through a bad British accent. He lurked outside my house in predawn shadows, grease-slicked black hair and Pinocchio nose. Waiting.

The Child Catcher wasn’t immediately scary, not when his wagon tinkled with bells and lights, or when he danced around in a Technicolor coat, or when he promised all good things and sweets to children. After all, what child shies away from bells and colors and sweet things? And you didn’t know the first time around that the wagon was really a cell with iron bars, or that the Child Catcher wore black underneath his robes, or that he would take his prey to a dark cave.

But you knew the second time you watched the movie. And the third. And all the times after that.

You knew exactly what he was waiting for.

In my early forties, I learned there’s still such a thing as the Child Catcher.

He’s old, and his hair is a blurred froth of white through the windshield of his bus, the one with Federal Schools printed in black along the sides. Instead of colored robes, he wears a plain gray uniform with the Department of Education logo embroidered on twin shoulder patches, a peace-symbol design in three colors—silver, green, and yellow. Around it are the words Intelligentia, Perfectum, Sapientiae. Intelligence, Perfection, Wisdom. I’d know two out of three even if I didn’t speak Latin. The yellow paint on the bus—Chrome Yellow, they used to call it when it still contained lead, but it’s been National School Bus Glossy Yellow for a while now—is chipped and peeling around the fenders and the accordion door. I guess no one gives much of a shit about what the yellow buses look like. It’s not essential, given where they’re headed, or what their cargo is.

The green ones and the silver ones are always in good condition, polished to a high sheen, not a dent or scratch or mark on them. When the doors open, they slide silently and smoothly, unlike the creaking doors on the yellow bus that rumbles along our street this morning. Drivers of the green and silver buses smile as children climb aboard, dressed in uniforms advertised as Harvard Crimson and Yale Blue, even for the five-year-olds.

There’s something else about the yellow buses. You don’t see them every day, picking up their cargo in the early fog of morning, dropping off in that time that could only be called the after-school show-and-snack hour, that limbo when the kids are no longer temporary wards of the state but once again home and settled with their families.

The yellow buses come only once every month, always the Monday after testing day. And they don’t return in the afternoons.

They never return. Not with passengers, anyway. Also, they don’t roll into neighborhoods like ours.

If I’d kept newspaper headlines from the past ten years, they would tell the story better than I could.

IMMIGRATION RATES CLIMB—PROJECTIONS FOR 2050 DIRE

SCHOOL OVERCROWDING, TEACHER SHORTAGES: LAWMAKERS IN STANDSTILL OVER SOLUTION

GENICS INSTITUTE PARTNERS WITH DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, OFFERS EXPANDED Q SOFTWARE

FITTER FAMILY CAMPAIGN RELEASES GUIDELINES

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND MEANS ALL CHILDREN SUFFER!

INITIAL DIRECTIVES TO BE ROLLED OUT IN COMING MONTHS

It started with fear, and it ended with laws.

I pour a third cup of coffee and check the clock. “Freddie! Please.” I’m careful to keep my voice low and steady, mom-like. Anything I can do to keep her calm.

The yellow bus is idling across the street, two houses up, at the end of the Campbells’ driveway, which is strange, since Moira Campbell doesn’t have children anymore, not at home anyway, and since today is testing day. Still, across and up the street is better than in front of my own house, whether or not the bus is on schedule. The thought makes me shiver, despite the heat wave from a late Indian summer. When did something as banal as a yellow school bus become such a threat? It’s like taking a smiley face and giving it fangs. That’s so fucking wrong.

“Freddie!” I call again. “For chrissake!”

Here’s the thing about nine-year-olds: As bad as the pain in the delivery room was, as hair-raisingly chaotic as night feedings and croup and terrible twos were, as much as you now dread that first I’ve got a boyfriend, Mom! from a kid who seemed to be waddling around in diapers just yesterday, there is nothing worse than the pretween girl. Mainly where morning bathroom routines are concerned. I know I shouldn’t get my temper up, not with Freddie and the way she is.

Note to self: Change tone. Take it down two octaves and a million decibels.

“Hurry up, hon! Test today!” I say, this time with more sugar in my voice, wondering if I’m going to make it to my own job on time. I try leveraging the big sister, making her the bad cop. “Anne! Get your sister out here in two minutes. Matching barrettes or not.”

This seems to work. Anne, when she isn’t nose-to-screen on her iPad, scouring the Q rankings of every boy in town for a homecoming dance date, is the responsible one. Always ready, always on time, always coming home after testing day with that insouciant little smile on her face and beaming when the app on her phone or tablet pings its pass alert later that night. It’s Freddie who stays in the bathroom, worrying over her bangs, washing her hands five more times than necessary. Once, I found her slouched over on the toilet, head between her knees, shaking, refusing to leave.

“You have to, honey,” I said. “Everyone has to take the tests.”

“Why?”

Why? I tried to think of an answer that would calm her. “So they know where to put people.” And then, “You’ve always done fine.”

What I never said was, “You’ve squeaked by each time. You’ll squeak by again.” That wouldn’t do a bit of good.

Anne emerges from the hall, still glued to her iPad, swiping and pinching and expanding, reciting numbers. “Nine-point-one. Quel dud,” she says. “Oof. Eight-point-eight. Major dud.” And “Oh, Mom, you should see this one from that school in Arlington. He’s down to eight-point-two-six and doesn’t look like he could pass a blood test. Gag.”

“Eight-point-three used to count as a B,” I remind her.

“Not anymore, Mom.”

She’s just like her father, I think, but I don’t say it out loud. As far as Anne is concerned, the sun rises and sets on—and probably revolves around—Malcolm. There is that, at least.

“Where’s your sister?” I ask, buttoning my raincoat. Anne tells me she’s on her way.

Anne’s silver bus, the one that goes to the top-tier school with the rest of the nine-point-somethings, has turned the corner and starts to slow, its stop-sign wings unfolding as it approaches the pickup point. There’s a trail of cars behind it, students clutching shiny identification cards in the backseats, waiting to be let out. A steel gray Lexus SUV, the first in line, pulls to the curb, and the rear door swings open. I’ve seen the girl before, at one of those parent-teacher days they hold at Anne’s school every fall. Today her hair hangs in thick, uncombed ringlets around her face, but enough of her eyes show that I can see the whites of them, the look of a frightened dog, when she catches sight of the yellow bus up the street.

Anne joins me at the front window, backpack slung over one shoulder, silver passcard clutched in one hand, stretching the lanyard tight around the back of her neck. It looks something like a noose.

“That girl,” I say, “she looks nervous.”

“She shouldn’t be,” Anne says. “Sabrina’s Q is fine. Then, in a confidential whisper: “Not like Jules Winston. Jules barely passed last week’s advanced calculus test.” She takes a bite of apple, swipes again at her iPad.

I turn away from the rain-sheeted window. “I thought results were supposed to be confidential.” But, of course, I know how kids are. I was in high school once.

Anne shrugs. “They are. But the rankings aren’t. You know that.”

Yeah. I know.

“Anyway, Jules now has the lowest Q in the whole junior class, thanks to the calc test,” Anne says. “And she’s had three sick days this term. And she didn’t make the bus last Wednesday. And her mom got laid off, so the family income’s down. It all adds up.” Another bite of apple. Another swipe of her tablet. “If she doesn’t score some serious points, she’ll be on the green bus next week. Maybe that one by December.” Anne knocks her chin toward the yellow bus waiting in the rain. “A couple years in a yellow school and then it’ll be burger-flipping time for Jules.”

“Anne. Honestly.”

Another shrug. My older daughter is the queen of all things shrug these days. “Someone has to do it. At least until they finish automating all that shit. Looks like they’re picking up this morning. On our street. Weird.”

Her tone is bland, journalistic. So much like Malcolm’s when he delivers his daily report on how many new state schools will be opening next month, or on the average Qs by state and city and school district. It’s something he does every night at dinner, as if we’re all interested. Anne usually sits next to him, never taking her eyes off her father, rapt by the numbers.

Freddie’s a completely different story.

Three

Anne’s out the door, iPad in one hand, silver card dangling from the lanyard around her neck. She’s five feet, five inches of confidence as she strides down the driveway toward the waiting bus. She passes the other girl—what was her name? Sabrina?—without so much as a greeting and joins a pack of neatly turned-out sixteen-year-olds who, like Anne, see failure as contagious.

Sabrina doesn’t look fine to me, high Q rankings or not. She’s well turned out, hair glistening in the way only teenage hair can, uniform pressed to within an inch of its life. By the look of Sabrina’s ride, the girl’s got everything. But there are all kinds of handicaps, and even a bottomless pit of money doesn’t cure most of them.

I don’t know what Sabrina’s brand of problem is, but I want to run out in the rain to where she’s standing under her umbrella. Give her a banana, an oatmeal bar, hot chocolate, a hug. I want to tell her failing a test doesn’t make her a failure.

But it does. In this age, it does.

One by one, the kids approach the silver bus, hold their cards up to be scanned. There’s a ping, shrill and piercing enough to be audible from across the street and through my living room window, whenever a new card grants access to the bus. Doors swing open, the student climbs aboard, and the doors close, waiting for the next one in line. You wouldn’t think high schoolers would be so organized, but there are rules to be followed. And there are laws to enforce those rules. They’re the real Child Catchers, I think, the men and women who write the laws.

I should know. My husband is one of them.

Sabrina is last, and her lips form a weak smile at the ping and the doors and the rain-free sanctuary of the bus. She looks backward once before boarding, takes in the full length of the street, all the way up to the Greens’ house, and the smile fades. Today she’s got a silver card. Next week, who knows?

I don’t see Anne’s best friend, though, which is strange, since Judith Green is almost always the first to the bus, silver card ready to scan. It’s as if she lives and breathes for school, homework, book reports.

Davenport Silver School students, this is your final call. Davenport Silver School bus is ready to depart. Final call for Davenport Silver School.

“Call” isn’t the right word. The monotone, accentless fembot voice booming through the neighborhood should say it like it is. It should say “warning.”

When the doors slide closed, there’s still no Judith Green.

As the silver bus pulls away, a green one moves toward the empty space. Another line of cars waits in the rain, and a few of the neighborhood middle-graders tread through puddles. One jumps into a shallow pothole, spraying water everywhere, muddying up three of the kids closest to him. They only laugh—as children do.

“Freddie!” I call. “Last warning, I swear.” The second I say the word I want to take it back.

She finally comes into the living room, backpack weighing down her right shoulder, making her look more like the crippled Quasimodo than a healthy nine-year-old. Her face is old-womanly. Tired. She’s not swiping through tweets and snaps, not crunching an apple, not doing anything but staring past me, out the window, out at the waiting green bus.

“What’s the matter, hon?” I say, pulling her to me, even though I know damned well what the matter is.

“Can I be sick today?” The words come out in a shudder, staccato, a space of air between each sound. Before I can answer, Freddie’s entire body is shaking in my arms. The backpack slides to the floor with a dull thump.

“No, baby. Not today,” I tell her. “Tomorrow, maybe.” It’s a lie, of course. Illness requires verification, and even if I did manage to fake and report an elevated temperature by the six o’clock deadline tomorrow morning, a secondary check by Freddie’s school nurse wouldn’t show anything other than normal. And then Freddie would lose even more of the Q points she can’t afford to lose—the usual for the sick day, plus something extra for the failure to verify. Still, the best I can do is lie today and take it all back tomorrow. Anything to make sure she gets on the bus. “Come on, sweetie. Time to go.”

Freddie turns in the time it takes me to catch my breath. One foot kicks the backpack across the room, and it lands on Malcolm’s peace lily, the one he’s been cultivating since before we were married. She goes from sobbing to hysterical in a split second. Malcolm will not be happy when he gets home.

“I can’t go!” she says. “I can’t go. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—”

Holy shit.

All of a sudden, we’re both on the floor, Freddie pulling at her hair, me trying to stop her before she does more damage. Wisps of blond are in her fingers, floating onto the carpet. I know it’s bad when she stops as abruptly as she started, when she begins rocking slowly back and forth like one of those animals on a spring they put in playgrounds. Her eyes are just as sightless and unfocused.

I can’t touch her when she’s like this, no matter how much I want to.

There should be a word for what Freddie is, I suppose, but I don’t know what that word would look or sound like. In my mind, she’s just Freddie. Frederica Fairchild, nine years old, sweet as sugar, no problems or hang-ups aside from the problems and hang-ups of any girl her age. She spikes a mean volleyball, gives Malcolm a run for his money at chess, loves everything except Brussels sprouts. But here she is, terrified because it’s testing day.

Again.

“Freddie,” I say softly, checking the line of students standing by the green bus. Only two of them are left, waiting to scan their cards and board. “Time to go.”

Sanger Green School students, this is your final call. Sanger Green School bus is ready to depart. Final call for Sanger Green School.

I could kill the fucking fembot.

While Freddie collects herself, I gather up the kicked backpack, snatch a handful of Kleenex tissues from the box in the kitchen, and put the green ID card into Freddie’s hand. “You’ll do fine. I know it.”

All I get is a silent nod. And not much of one. Christ, I hate the first Friday of the month.

She’s out the door by the time the next-to-last kid boards the bus. Again, I tell her not to worry, but I don’t think she hears me. My coffee’s gone cold, and Malcolm’s stupid peace lily looks like a meteor hit it. I turn the planter so the really ugly part faces the wall and decide what lie I’ll tell my husband tonight. Not that it matters. Most of what I’ve told Malcolm for the past few years has been a lie, starting with the daily “I love yous,” and ending with whispered words on the rare occasions we have sex, always with a condom from the stash he keeps in his bedside table, always with a slathering of spermicidal jelly to ensure we won’t be making any more little ones.

I haven’t lied to Freddie, though. I know she’ll do fine. After all, it’s supposed to be in her genes. The prenatal Q report I showed Malcolm confirmed that nine years ago.

But that was another lie.

I never went in for the test.

Four

I go into the kitchen to microwave my stale coffee. I can’t think about genetics anymore without remembering a conversation with my grandmother, not long after finding out I was pregnant with Freddie.

It’s not a happy memory.

“I don’t like this Q.” Oma poured herself a petite glass of schnapps, examined the level, and poured out another half inch. I unscrewed the cap on a water from the fridge before sitting down in the den with a belly that felt like a small tuna had decided to start growing in it. “I don’t like to say ‘hate,’ because a little bit of hate someday turns into a great amount of hate, but I hate this Q.”

A month before, even a whiff of alcohol had sent me on a bathroom run. Now, it looked tempting.

“Sure you don’t want a drop?” she asked. “It won’t kill you. Or the baby.” One hand reached out and gave me three quick taps on my sweater, which had already begun to stretch—a constant reminder that time was running out. “She’ll be fine. Like your father was, and like you were.”

I hated when she patted my stomach like that. Besides, Oma was drowning out Petra Peller’s voice on the television.

What’s your Q? Petra asked. She seemed to be looking straight at me.

The bottle beckoned. Malcolm wouldn’t know—I could always use Oma as the scapegoat when he asked about the level of dark liquid. But someone would know. Someone in a sterile white room stuffed with urine samples from my doctor’s office. Someone with a yellow school education who got paid to sift through the effluvia of pregnant women and tick boxes. Someone who hated her job so much she wanted to take out that hate on another someone, especially the wife of the man who’d invented the tier system and the Q rankings and pushed the importance of both at every opportunity.

And more important, what’s your baby’s Q? Petra continued.

“What a lot of silliness,” Oma said. “A baby’s a baby. Who cares about its Q?”

I wanted to say Malcolm gave a shit. Two or three, maybe.

“Do we even know what this Q is?”

I try to answer her as best I can, cobbling together pieces I’ve heard from Malcolm and the news. The algorithms have become so much more complicated than the initial grade-point-average equivalents they used to be. “It’s a quantifier, Oma. A quotient.”

“Explain to me what is being quantified,” she says.

“Oh—grades, of course. Attendance records and participation. The same things we’ve always calculated.”

“And that is all?” There’s doubt in her voice.

I continue ticking off the components I remember. “Parents’ education and income. Siblings’ performance. All the other Qs in the nuclear family.”

“You also have this Q?”

“Everyone of school or working age does. And each month it’s recalculated.” The fact is, I don’t even keep track anymore. My numbers have been in the high nine-point-somethings since the Q rankings rolled out a few years back. This is partly thanks to my own degrees, partly because I keep acing my teacher assessments. But I’m stupid to think the numbers are all my own—Malcolm’s position undoubtedly adds a few tenths of a point, maybe more. As deputy secretary in the Department of Education, he’s only one degree of separation removed from the president, for chrissake.

Oma fiddled with her earpiece and then turned up Petra’s television pitch. Phrases came out from the screen like sharp little darts, piercing.

… especially for those of us over thirty-five …

… earlier is better …

… a prenatal quotient gives women the information they need to make that all-important decision …

… before it’s too late …

A number flashed in red on the bottom of the screen, along with a website address of the Genics Institute, while Petra advised all mothers-to-be to sign up for a free consultation with one of the institute’s experts.

“Here is something true,” Oma said, turning away from the television and facing me, “you really can’t tell what they are going to be. So you take a test, and the test tells you your baby will be ‘average.’ What does that mean? There is only one measure?” She tipped her glass with a gnarled hand and went on. “When I taught art—oh, too many years ago—I had a student who could not make the change from a dollar. But she had different talents. Do you know where that girl is today?”

I knew where the girl was. Fabiana Roman was in every gallery from coast to coast, or at least her paintings were. Malcolm once looked at the splattered canvases that were half–Jackson Pollock and half–Edvard Munch, with a sprinkling of Kandinsky thrown on top for good measure. He called them “degenerate.”

“Maybe I should go in and have the test. Just to see,” I said, scribbling the number and URL on one of the parenting magazines from the coffee table.

Oma reached over and snatched it from me.

“What?”

“Elena, tell me you are not seriously considering this,” she said. “The amniocentesis I understand.” She pronounced “amniocentesis” carefully, the unfamiliar concatenation of sounds tripping up her tongue. “But a prenatal intelligence test? Was this maybe Malcolm’s idea?”

“No,” I lied.

Of course we’d discussed the testing—several times. Each argument ended with Malcolm telling me it was my decision, whatever I thought best was fine, no pressure. I knew better, though. I knew exactly what Malcolm thought was best. I took a stab at justifying the Q business.

“You know how it is, Oma,” I said. “Schools aren’t like they used to be.”

She poured herself another glass of schnapps. “What do you Americans like to say? ‘Say me about it’?”

I corrected her German-to-English translation. “‘Tell me about it.’ That’s how you say it.”

“Say. Tell.”

“I mean, would you want your kid in a third-tier school?” I said.

Oma went on, talking about tiers and classes. I tuned her out and listened to Petra’s television interview. She’d been joined by another woman who I recognized immediately as Malcolm’s boss at the Department of Education.

Madeleine Sinclair is hard to miss. Tall, with blond—so blond it’s nearly white—hair swept up into a classic French twist, she seems to wear nothing but electric blue suits, fitted to her curves in the way only custom-made clothing does. On her right lapel, there’s always that same pin, the yellow emblem of the Fitter Family Campaign. Today was no different, but her features seemed sharper, more hawkish than ever.

“It was going to happen sooner or later,” Petra said to the reporter. “We reached a point where the public school system couldn’t handle the disparity anymore, couldn’t supply an across-the-board education. When the Department of Ed started the voucher program, I guess I saw it as an opportunity. When they needed hard science to strengthen the Q algorithm, I knew the Genics Institute would be the first of its kind.”

Oma stopped talking and froze with the schnapps glass halfway to her lips.

The on-screen reporter nodded and spoke to the other woman. “Dr. Sinclair, there’s been some backlash about your policies. Can you tell us about that?”

Madeleine Sinclair turned her blue eyes toward the camera, as if she were addressing not the interviewer but someone on the other side. Perhaps she was speaking to me; perhaps to the old woman at my side. When she spoke, her voice was patient, an experienced teacher talking to a confused child, straightening things out. “There’s always going to be backlash,” she said. “It’s natural. Most of the criticism comes from”—she smiled, and in the smile there was a mix of sweetness and condescension—“certain factions. Certain factions who desperately want to believe we’re all the same.”

Oma drew in a shallow breath.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing. Let me listen.”

“The thing of it is,” Madeleine continued, “the crux of the matter, and the point people need to understand, is that we are not all the same.” She paused, and when the reporter opened his mouth to interrupt, Madeleine put up a hand. “I’ll repeat that. We are not all the same.” Once again, she looked out from the screen. “Tell me, parents, do you want your child in a classroom with students who are two standard deviations out? With children who don’t have the capacity to understand the kinds of struggles and challenges your five-year-old faces? With teachers whose time is pulled in so many directions that everyone—everyone—ends up falling through the cracks?”

“I don’t think she is telling the truth,” Oma said. “What she is asking is if you want your baby Einstein in a room with twenty normal children. They might hold your little genius back, or they might interrupt his progress.” She stabbed at the remote control, missing the buttons, only increasing the volume as Petra and Madeleine nodded and provided each other with verbal reinforcements. “These women are evil, Liebchen. Ah, here is my taxi. At least I can still hear.”

A second blast of a horn announced Oma’s ride back to my parents’ house, and I went to the door with her. Our parting hug felt different—her hand on my back, ordinarily firm and warm, was light, and even in the hug there was empty space between us. A half-drunk glass sat on the coffee table, forgotten. I ignored its siren call and dumped the schnapps into the kitchen sink, then returned to the television.

Petra was talking again, telling us how she owed her success to the Fitter Family Campaign. “What started as a grassroots movement snowballed,” she said.

Avalanched was more like it. Somewhere in the middle of the country, in that expanse of former dust bowls and farmland that no one pays attention to, it started. Somewhere in the champagne-communism salons of Boston and San Francisco, it started. Somewhere in suburban living rooms where upper-middle-class mothers gather to share stories of sore nipples and sleepless nights, it started. And spread. And mutated like a virus, weaving into itself, reduplicating. A few voices turned into a chorus of voices, all calling for education reform. What we needed, they claimed, wasn’t more special programs in the schools; we needed more buckling down, more effort, more recognition that throwing money at a problem wasn’t going to solve it.

We needed to move on from the one-size-fits-all mentality.

“But,” Petra said, “change in a system doesn’t happen without change in the people who make up that system. That’s where the Genics Institute comes in.”

She was right. By the time the Fitter Family Campaign turned ten years old, they were holding Best Baby Contests in every single state. The motives were different, but each of them united together in a sickening solidarity. Middle America was tired of what they called underprivileged overbreeders; the Boston Brahmins wanted schools that focused resources on their own child prodigies (although even the champagne communists voiced their concerns about overpopulation—they just voiced them in their penthouse salons); the baby brigade worried over allergies, autism, a growing list of syndromes. Everyone wanted something new, some solution, a reason to feel safe about their little wedge of the human race pie in a country that would see skyrocketing population numbers in another generation.

It didn’t take long for people to “climb aboard the commonsense train,” as my husband is fond of saying. Of course, in exchange for major changes in the education sphere, the public had to make a few concessions: Administrators, not parents, knew best. And the federal government had the last say when it came to testing students and placing them in an appropriate school. As long as the moms- and dads-to-be took prenatal precautions, everything would run smoothly.

If they didn’t, there was the tiered school system: best, better, and somewhere around mediocre.

Madeleine came back on the screen, as if I’d just asked her a question and she decided to answer me personally. “… As I was saying, the state schools are there for the young people in this country who need—and deserve—extra attention. Please don’t think of us as taking your children away. Think of us as giving them the chance to blossom.” She did one of her classic nods, to the audience. “You want flowers in the spring? Give them the best soil money can buy. That’s what the state schools are about.”

I turned the television off, thinking about Oma, her reaction, her quick departure, the empty hug. Maybe she was right. Maybe these people were evil.

Evil or not, they won. They yelled and voted and screamed for stricter anti-immigration policies. They voted down No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Not that people didn’t want to give a leg up to the disadvantaged or the differently abled. They did. They just didn’t want them in the same classrooms with their own kids.

What they didn’t know then, but I know now, is that you can get rid of the old fish at the barrel’s bottom, but that just means there’s a fresh layer of rottenness waiting to be dug up and tossed out. By the time the Sarah Greens of the world figured out what was happening, tier systems and Q rankings were the laws of the land.

Back at the window, I watch Freddie’s green bus pull away through a veil of rain and wonder if I would have done things differently ten years ago if I knew then what I know now.

Five

THEN:

I was somewhere between four and five months pregnant with Freddie, only just beginning to feel that uncomfortable pinch whenever I buttoned my jeans, but happily well past the morning sickness that made me unable to eat anything other than dry toast without running to the hall bathroom. Even so, the husband-wife talk that had been sitting between Malcolm and me like unwanted leftovers was about to happen. Again.

“You know what we discussed, El,” Malcolm said when I came back from tucking Anne into bed. We were alone now, free to talk as married couples and life partners do, even though I hadn’t felt like a partner for some time. “El?”

“I heard you,” I said.

“So? When are you going to do it?”

It.

This single word covers all kinds of sins, from backseat gropes after a high school dance, to putting the dog down when he’s too old and too needy, to taking a fetus from a woman’s belly. Sex, euthanasia, abortion. All conveniently collected under the umbrella of It.

Our conversation took turns, doubling back on itself, coming full circle. An hour later, Malcolm hadn’t budged from his original position, or really said anything other than reminding me of what we discussed, of how utterly selfish it would be to bring a baby into the world only to watch her struggle and suffer while she tried to claw her way to a level she couldn’t possibly attain. He showed me pictures of the future, reminding me of Q scores and college admissions boards, of how no one would want a girl with a lower-than-average quotient.

“She’ll end up with nothing,” Malcolm said. “Or she’ll get someone like that kid who used to follow you around in school. Jack something.”

“Joe,” I corrected. “He was a nice guy, you know.”

“Nice doesn’t cut it anymore, El. Q matters. You know that.”

I did, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to think about Joe, or what happened afterward. I didn’t want to think about more tests and more Q numbers and the possibility of ever doing that again.

Malcolm rose from the table, taking the rest of the plates into the kitchen. Our conversation was over, and I sat alone reading through a long list of pregnancy management services on the back of the Q testing literature while Malcolm, who was supposed to be my partner in all things, presterilized dinner dishes with his back to me.

And there were no more postdinner talks. The next morning, I drove into town for my appointment at one of the Genics Institute’s prenatal clinics. It was well before they rolled out WomanHealth, before Petra Peller took things to a new level. Behind a dozen or so women, walls of green and yellow, verdant and sunshiny colors, set off posters of perfect families—perfect hair, perfect bleached teeth, perfect skin. Nowhere in the room were photographs of babies, only of grown children, and the usual stacks of pamphlets advertising formula or offering free samples of diapers were noticeably absent.

Everything from the decor to the reading material was targeted at women who would never see the inside of a delivery room.

And then there was the chatter:

“If they tell me its Q is one-hundredth of a point lower than nine-point-five, I’m getting rid of it,” said a pale woman behind her mask of painstakingly applied cosmetics. “Just like I did the last time.”

“Thank God it’s so quick now,” said the twenty-something next to her. “Wouldn’t it be great if manicures were that fast?” They both laughed.

As they traded phone numbers and emails, insisting their five-year-old whiz kids really must get together for a playdate one of these days, the door behind the receptionist’s cubicle swung open. A woman walked out, clutching an envelope close to her rather ample mid-pregnancy bosom. She had wisps of gray curling around her temples and faint feather lines at the edges of her lips. Easily forty, I thought. Maybe older. Ms. Perfect Makeup and Ms. Manicure looked her up and down, following the woman as she crossed the waiting room and exited hurriedly through the street door.

“What was she thinking?” Ms. Makeup said. “At her age.”

“I wouldn’t even try it after thirty-five,” the other one came back. “No way.”

“They’re saying now that even thirty is too late. I was reading this article the other day, and—”

“Saw it. Way too much science for me.”

I’d read the article, too, because Malcolm had left the magazine open on my pillow one night. A subtle hint and convenient timing, given we’d had yet another postdinner talk about the geometric decline of a baby’s Q score as the mother’s age increased.

The women stopped their conversation long enough to look across the room at me. Glances were exchanged; lips pursed. I could practically hear their thoughts: Bad luck for her. Wonder if she’ll keep it. Has to be pushing the envelope on the big three-five. And there could be other problems. No need to mention the D word.

Not many issues outranked a low Q score, but trisomies were on the top of the list of lousy outcomes. Down syndrome, in particular.

When the receptionist called my name, a thing happened. My baby, my little-person-to-be who I had already named and loved, already sung to sleep with old lullabies my grandmother had taught me, stirred somewhere deep inside my swollen body. I thought: Screw nature. Nurture counts more. And I knew I had a hell of a lot to give in the nurturing camp.

So I walked out the way I’d come in, eighteen weeks full of baby-to-be, no envelope with a magic number inside it, no fodder for a decision that would end up being more Malcolm’s than my own. I spent two hours that afternoon looking up Google images of prenatal Q reports and forging the one I’d later show my husband. It would say, I decided, 9.3 in large, silver-toned ink. A good number. A fine number. And it was the first time I made the right kind of choice after a series of poor ones.

Six

I’m halfway down my driveway, fiddling with the Acura’s windshield wiper controls and cursing the defogger that’s been on the fritz for months now, when the yellow bus honks. It’s a different sound than the light but piercing ping of the silver and green buses. This is a sound that shakes you, like when you’re rolling steadily down a highway, humming along to top forty or classic vinyl, and out of nowhere a tractor-trailer driver yanks hard on his cord, blasting its horn at you. Most of the time, I think they do it for no reason at all.

The yellow bus, though, seems to have a reason.

It’s moved one house farther along and isn’t parked in front of the Campbells’ house anymore but in front of the blue and white colonial where Judith Green lives. It honks again.

I’m already late, so I tap in the school secretary’s number and hit send.

“Davenport Silver School,” the secretary chirps. “This is Rita. How can I help you?”

I tell Rita a lie about my car’s battery and ask if she’ll send a substitute to my morning biology class. “They can work on their chromosome mutation essays,” I say, thinking that first-year high school students in my day were still memorizing phases of the Krebs cycle, not working out advanced genetic theory. “I’ll be there as soon as I can get the car jumped.”

“No problem, Dr. Fairchild. Your freshman class is performing way above the benchmarks this semester.” A tapping of keys as she checks numbers; a pause as she seems to be considering the kindest way to remind me of the cost of tardiness. “And your Teacher Q can handle a few tenths of a point. Nasty weather to have car trouble in, though.”

“Yeah,” I say. Then I end the call and wipe fog from the driver-side window with my sleeve as the front door of the Greens’ house inches open. Judith’s mother comes out first, arms wrapped around her body so tightly her hands almost meet at the back of her waist. She’s got a terry-cloth robe on—not nearly enough protection from the rain—and her face moves in small, chipmunk-like motions, like she’s chattering from the cold.

Except it isn’t cold today. Only pissing rain.

Now Judith steps out. She’s dressed in jeans and a windbreaker, not her usual Harvard Crimson uniform with the knife-pleated skirt and vest, ivory blouse freshly pressed. Her mother hands her a flat yellow card, then steps back inside for a few seconds. When she returns to the porch, she’s carrying a single suitcase, which she sets down so she can fold Judith in her arms. The terry-cloth robe sags open and slips off a little, but Sarah Green doesn’t seem to notice.

Then the bus honks again.

I want to put the Acura in gear and race toward it, scream at the driver. Give them five more fucking minutes, will you? Just five minutes! It wouldn’t do any good, just like it wouldn’t do any good to go running after the Child Catcher, begging for more time. So I sit here with a drenched raincoat sleeve from wiping down the condensation on my window. Helpless.

Judith breaks the hug first, picks up her suitcase, and walks down the brick path, the same brick path she’s walked down since she and Anne started school, the same brick path Sarah Green lines with begonias in the summer and chrysanthemums in the fall. She presses her yellow card up to the bus door, and it folds open. A few blurred shapes through the front windows tell me Judith isn’t the only pickup this morning—I can’t make any details out through the rain. But I don’t imagine there are many smiles in that bus today.

As the bus pulls away, I throw the car into reverse, back out onto the street, and pause. Even after the time change, darkness lies over our neighborhood like a dreary blanket, mostly thanks to the rain. My phone tells me it’s seven forty-five, enough time for me to make it to school before first period ends and my Q rating goes down another tenth of a point.

Fuck it, I think, and I drive in the opposite direction toward Sarah Green’s house, past the empty playground with its perfect layer of shredded tire rubber, undisturbed by the scuffs of Keds and Reeboks. Even in the wind and rain, the swings are as still as broken pendulums, and the metal slide is a dull gray, never having been polished by the bottoms of children. I don’t remember ever seeing a child inside the enclosure’s fence. Kids appear in the morning when the buses come, then in the late afternoon when the buses return. They hurry inside and bend over books until dinner. If they’re anything like Anne and Freddie, they eat like hungry soldiers in a mess hall, and bend over their books until bedtime. Most of them are bleached pale, even in the summer months.

Sometimes I think all of childhood has disappeared.

I stop the car in front of the Greens’ colonial. Sarah is on her knees, robe fallen open to expose a thin nightgown. She’s pulling out the mums she planted only a few weeks ago, fists digging into the earth, flinging mud and roots in every direction. A few clumps of dirt stick in her hair, and a smudge of brown mars her face when she tries to wipe away tears.

“Sarah?” I say, stepping out of my car. “What’s going on?”

She doesn’t raise her head, and she doesn’t answer me directly, only claws at the ground, shredding mums until the brick path is coated with a blanket of yellow petals, leaves, and dirt. “I hate this fucking color. I hate it.”

I’ve always liked yellow. It’s a happy color; neither tranquil nor overwhelming. Not in your face, like red, which only reminds me of danger and pain and evil. I think of the butter yellow curtains Malcolm and I hung in the nursery before Freddie was born, the gold of fresh straw they used to feed horses before the farms turned to housing developments, sunshiny yolks smiling up from a frying pan on lazy Sunday mornings.

All of a sudden, yellow is the ugliest color on Earth.

Sarah finally stops her garden destruction and looks up at me. “She couldn’t have slid all the way down to seven-point-nine, El. There’s no way. You have her in two classes this year, right? Advanced bio and anatomy. She’s on time, she’s never sick, and she aces everything.”

I nod. Judy Green has been at the top of her class since I’ve known her. “She outranks Anne,” I say. “And Anne’s good.” I’m not bragging, only stating a fact, although if Judy lost more than two points, I suppose I’ve got my tense wrong.

Now Sarah stands up, pulling her robe around her, belting it with mud-caked hands. She doesn’t seem to care that she looks as if she’s been wallowing around in a pigsty. Her voice, normally soft, hardens. “Then how did she lose the Q points? Tell me that, El. Did you know something? Did you hold anything back from me?”

“No. Of course not.” This is one hundred percent true. I spend half my time at school on weekly reports, prepping for the test, compiling results, and contacting parents of what we call “borderliners”—any student who scores below an A on the previous week’s practice tests or who might be in danger of sinking below a Q of nine for other reasons. I’ve heard of teachers in the green schools, like the one Freddie attends, who lose sleep over the numbers. One-tenth of a point makes all the difference.

Freddie’s geometry teacher explained it all to me at our last meeting.

“It gives them a chance, at least,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “And if they don’t have a chance, it gives everyone in the family time to deal with it. They can spend their last weekends together going on picnics, taking a final trip to see the grandparents, riding a roller coaster at the Six Flags park. All that shit they haven’t been doing for the past few years. That way, when the Q sinks below eight and the yellow bus comes, they’ve had some quality experiences. Memories.”

It wasn’t always this way.

In the first wave of the tier system, the yellow schools weren’t much different from the green and silver schools. They were farther out of town, of course, and they weren’t equipped with state-of-the-art science labs or staffed with teachers who had strings of letters after their names. Still, the kids came back home every afternoon.

Until last month, when Madeleine Sinclair made the decision to move the yellow schools. To change the system.

“It’ll be better this way,” Malcolm said after the girls had gone to bed. We sat on the sofa like bookends, a bowl of popcorn keeping us at a distance. The remote was balanced on my lap, and Malcolm reached over to turn up the volume so we could hear Madeleine’s press conference.

“You really think that’s a good idea?” I said between handfuls of popcorn. It was the unbuttered kind, the no-salt, no-fat “light” version, because Malcolm liked that better. Me, I wanted the extra grease and salt, but you pick your battles.

“Sure it is, El. You have any idea how crowded those schools have gotten? Not enough teachers, either.”

“They’re only crowded because the pass rates have dropped,” I said. I didn’t know whether the tests had gotten harder or what, but I’d suddenly been losing a student every few months at the silver school, and I’d heard the same from my colleagues.

Madeleine, dressed in her usual blue power suit, paused before answering another question. “The fact is,” she said, smiling at the press audience, “we’re facing overcrowding at our third-tier institutions.”

Institutions, I thought. What a fucking word.

That voice, that smooth educator’s voice, continued, louder now that Malcolm had upped the volume again. “We’re running out of real estate in the urban areas.” Madeleine shook her blond bob. “No. That’s not entirely true. We’ve run out of room.” She silenced an interruption from the audience with a flat palm. “Our cities are overpopulated. Our suburbs are overpopulated. But”—now a smile unfolded on her face—“there’s a bright side to everything. A solution.”

One of the younger reporters asked what that might be.

“Farmland,” Malcolm said, nodding next to me.

“Our farmland,” Madeleine answered.

Malcolm tossed another handful of popcorn into his mouth. “That was my idea, actually.”

I looked at him. “What was your idea?”

He shushed me with a wave of his hand. “Listen. She’s about to explain it.”

A close-up of Madeleine Sinclair, now the secretary of education, filled the screen. “We’ve decided the best route forward is to give our children—all of our children—the room they need to grow.”

I let her drone on, talking about how the new yellow schools would have more space, more amenities, more activities, more teachers, more everything. The way Madeleine put it, they sounded more like vacation-lands than schools.

The only downside was that they wouldn’t be close to home.

“Families will adjust,” Madeleine said, fielding another question from the press room.

I moved the bowl of popcorn to the table and stood up, blocking the television from Malcolm’s view. “They’re boarding these kids? Where? In Iowa?”

Malcolm stared at me. “Well, yeah, El. And other places around the country. Wherever there’s room. Think of it as a kind of Outward Bound. Get the kids out of the crowded city and into the fresh air. They’ll thrive.”

“More like Downward Bound,” I said, not holding back my sarcasm. “Anyway, what you mean is wherever land is cheap, right? And you’re telling me this was your idea?”

I went to bed early that night, hoping I’d be asleep before Malcolm came in.

Seven

I put Malcolm and Madeleine and the whole stinking Department of Education behind me, and now I’m back on what used to be Sarah Green’s neat brick path. It looks like a land mine went off.

“You said she was doing fine,” Sarah screams. “Fine! Every single report we got said her Q was almost perfect.”

“It was perfect, actually,” I said.

“Well, it isn’t now. For some reason. Now she’s on her way to fucking Kansas?” She laughs, but it’s not a funny laugh. “Kansas. To a state school with a year-round schedule.” Every one of her words is the verbal equivalent of screaming caps. I don’t even try to interrupt.

“Oh, right, they tell us we can come visit once a quarter. Do you have any idea how much leave David and I have to take to fly to Kansas four times a year? And that’s if we can get the extra time off work. That’s if we want to see our own Qs take a nosedive, which means Jonathan’s Q gets hit, and he’s already in a green school. For a day, Elena. One single day with our daughter. They used to send the kids home for Christmas. Thanksgiving every other year. Summer.”

“You were on the board when the new schedules were approved,” I say.

Sarah stutters and goes silent. Then, she turns and makes for her front door. Her hair is in wet ropes down her back, and the terry-cloth robe is as sodden as a drowned cat. She spins fast and looks at me, hard. “I guess you’ll have more time for your top two percent now, El. Good luck with them.”

Her words hit me like a slap in the face, but it’s a reactionary slap, a quid pro quo return on the slap I’d just served her.

I remember when the schedule changes happened. Another night on the sofa with Malcolm, another press conference with Madeleine Sinclair in her blue power suit and blond bob and that saccharine smile that makes you feel like you’re in kindergarten all over again and need shit explained to you in small words. I remember the reduction in vacation time being another one of Malcolm’s brainchildren.

I also remember parents like Sarah and David Green supporting it.

As little as five years ago, participation in the tier system wasn’t compulsory, not exactly. Instead, a guideline came from Washington. A suggestion that parents pay close attention to their children’s individual needs. This was followed by another, and then by another dozen, all of them coldly clinical and mathematical.

Parents of children with Q scores below eight points are encouraged to consider yellow schools.

Top-tier systems may not be in your offspring’s best interest. Don’t push them!

A panel of two dozen experts has concluded that tier separation benefits everyone.

Of course, there was pushback—PTA meetings where infuriated parents stood up and interrupted the barrage of suggestions, threatening to homeschool their seventh-graders rather than subject them to the constant pressure of tests. The opt-out culture of parents storming from assemblies and plucking their kids from school had started to take a tenuous foothold.

But only in some neighborhoods. Not in ours. Not in Sarah Green’s.

And then the PTA meetings were supplanted by board meetings. The guidelines became directives; the directives included fines for truancy, taxes disguised as penalties, trickle-down effects on siblings’ Q scores. Homeschooling requirements became more restrictive than gun laws, and the forms were ever-changing. A line left blank or a code entered incorrectly meant a red Declined—not subject to appeal stamp from the school superintendent’s office. I wonder sometimes where they found all that red ink.

Women like Sarah Green had their own way, campaigning for a different type of pressure, pressure that came in the form of leaflets with Do not hire this unfit parent! and No benefits for the antisocial! With enough Sarah Greens on your side, who needs laws?

I stand in the rain under my umbrella and watch Sarah, shoulders slumped under the weight of grief and confusion and hatred, go into her house. She turns back once to hiss at me, “Those yellow buses? They’re not supposed to come here, Elena. Not here.” The front door slams shut, and the lock clicks, telling me I needn’t bother taking those few steps onto the porch and knocking, so I walk back to my car, curse at the defogger for the tenth time this morning, and curse at everyone for taking all of this super-child garbage too far.

As I drive away, I look back one more time at the house. Somehow I don’t think there will be much of a garden in the Greens’ yard next year.

But then I think, Maybe she deserves it.

Eight

No one asks what happens to the kids who fall through the cracks—there isn’t a reason to. Yellow school graduates manage the local supermarket; they work at costume jewelry kiosks in the few brick-and-mortar malls that are left. They run 7-Elevens and flip burgers now that immigration quotas have been cut again. They do all those jobs no college graduate wants but that still need to get done.

Let’s face it. Sarah Green is a snob. She’s no different from the Callahans and the Delacroix and the Morrises living down the street. These are families who have self-sealed themselves into a bubble of privilege, whose favorite pronouns are We and They and Us and Them, whose theme song is “Not in My Neighborhood,” whose idea of school choice is best translated as I’ll make the choice for you because I know better. So what if some kid from the city gets shipped off to the equivalent of a vocational school, if a country boy from Nebraska doesn’t make the cut to his state university? These are things that happen to Them, never to Us. If I didn’t share a house and a bed with Malcolm, and if I didn’t worry constantly over Freddie, I’m not sure I’d even know they were happening. After all, how many people watch Madeleine Sinclair’s State of Education addresses? The president barely draws fifteen percent of the population for those big talks he gives, so I’m guessing Queen Madeleine gets next to nothing.

As I wind my car down the GW Parkway and cross the bridge into the city, I wonder if we’ve all been playing the old out of sight, out of mind game. I wonder if we’ll keep playing it until the game pieces start coming into view, shifting from Their playing boards to Our playing boards. Like they did this morning, when Sarah Green’s perfect teenager was demoted to a pawn.

I’m late anyway, so I pull over in Georgetown, hold my phone up to the meter, and pay for fifteen minutes’ rental of prime real estate parking. Ch-ching! All done. Somewhere in the radio waves above my head or the fiber-optic lines below my feet, fifty cents move from a bank account in one state to another account in a different state. No one even needs to empty the coins.

At Starbucks, my caffe latte is waiting at the mobile order pickup counter. Two-percent milk, half decaf, light foam, one sugar. Grande sized, whatever that means. The barista-robot chirps an automated Have a great day, Elena! Hope your drink is perfect! as I pick up the coffee. See you tomorrow morning! she says. Sometimes, the barista-robot is a he. They like to mix things up.

There’s a girl at the window, tucked up on one of those deep sofa things with lots of pillows, legs folded under her, reading. She’s almost young enough to be in high school, but she’s here in Starbucks, and she doesn’t look like a dropout or a truant. One of those career-guide bibles that’s supposed to tell you what you want to be when you grow up is open on the table, pages facing down, next to a pile of college guides and SAT prep manuals teetering by her coffee, partially obscuring her face. She has a brightness in her eyes, the kind I see in my best students, but I know she doesn’t stand a chance in the college admissions game.

She’s using a yellow ID card as a bookmark, and no college has admitted a third-tier student for at least a few years, according to Malcolm’s latest dinnertime report.

“Hi,” she says, catching my eye when I reach the door.

“Hi.”

“I was top in my class two years ago,” she says. “Numero uno. Gave a valedictorian speech and everything. I mean, it wasn’t the best school. Kids from my neighborhood don’t go to the best schools. But still. I figured being first would count for something.”

I’m so late. But I let the door swing shut and stay. “It’s hard now.”

She closes the Barron’s bible with its lists of statistics for everything—admissions, average SAT scores, demographics, nearby bars, number of athletic fields, all that quantifiable shit. “What do you do?”

“I teach.”

“Oh, yeah? Where?”

“Davenport.”

The girl sweeps her eyes over me, taking it all in. The suit, the strappy heels, the calfskin purse slung over my shoulder. “Figures. You look like one of them.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

She laughs. “White. Rich. Perfect. Bet you have a super-high Q.”

“It’s okay.” Actually, it’s 9.73, but I don’t want to tell her this.

“Anyway. I’m trying one more time for college. After that, I don’t know what. Used to have a job here, but, well, you know.” Her hand moves in a game-show-hostess gesture. “Lost it a few months ago. I still hang out, though.” She points at the books. “Reading’s not a real popular hobby in my hood.”

There’s a lull while I wait for the right words to come to me, and another lull when I realize there are no right words for this girl or this situation. I blurt out a lame “What do you want to major in?”

“Math,” she says, closing the book. “I’m wicked at math. Go ahead, ask me anything.”

My phone pings. It’s Rita from school. “I’m sorry—I’m really late this morning.”

She looks at the coffee in my hand. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it in all the ways, knowing she doesn’t believe me, and I open the door.

Outside, the automated street sweepers suck leaves and twigs and debris from Thursday-night college kids off the pavement on the other side of Wisconsin Avenue. The two cars whose owners forgot about street-cleaning day get tickets. Not paper tickets, but in a few minutes one hundred dollars will move between bank accounts for the green Jeep, and another hundred for the yellow Mini Cooper with racing stripes. The parking enforcement drones and meter maid trons move on, up Wisconsin, in search of their prey.

All this automation makes me wonder where they’ll put the yellow school kids in another few years when the last of the grocery stores switch to self-checkout and the little Amazon delivery drones buzz up to front doors, plopping their parcels on the porches. Click, buzz, plop. It’s supposed to be progress, and I guess we’ll be seeing more of it. Who knows? Before I retire, they might even automate teaching.

“Competition,” Malcolm says during his dinner-hour updates, almost always for Anne’s benefit. “You work hard, you study, you succeed, you get a job.”

The problem here is childishly simplistic: The jobs are disappearing and the people aren’t. When I pull into the underground parking garage and let another machine scan my car’s decal, greeting me with a sunny, if electronic, Good morning, Dr. Fairchild, I wonder where all the yellow school kids will be in another ten years. I wonder what we’ll do with the people who aren’t necessary anymore.

Nine

The high school where I teach isn’t very different from the high school I attended almost a quarter of a century ago. There are rooms, teachers, books, and students. It’s the students, I think, as I set up books and attendance sheets on the desk in my classroom and pull the blinds up to give us a view of something green, who are too similar. Far too similar to each other and to what they were in my day.

Back then, the autism spectrum wasn’t so much a spectrum as a what the fuck is autism? question—as bright a blip on the high school radar as peanut allergies, celiac disease, transsexual restroom rights, and out-of-the-closet teenagers were in 1990-something. Changes trickled along, a drop or so at a time. I figured by the time my girls were teens, everyone would have joined in on the diversity dance.

I was wrong. Diversity never made it past a slow, awkward shuffle. As my students come in for one last period of pretest cramming—what we’re supposed to call a final review, but what everyone knows is an umpteenth-hour cram session—they’re all the same. Straight, mostly white, athletic. And I’ve never seen such a thing as a trans-friendly bathroom.

Testing days are both rushed and slow. This morning, we rush. I take my classes through their review, getting them ready for the SOLs. The acronym is supposed to stand for Standards of Learning, an updated version of its former self, but I’ve been calling it the Shit Out of Luck test for a year now.

Never out loud, of course. And never to Malcolm.

It’s the Shit Out of Luck test because two months ago I stood in front of thirty faces. Today I stand in front of twenty-seven. The three empty desks are still here, though, scattered about. No one bothers to remove them, or consolidate them in the back of the classroom. Or maybe that’s the plan—to leave the empty desks, the ones that used to be occupied by Judy Green and Sue Tyler and a ghost-pale boy named Antonio who kicked ass at chemistry but couldn’t hack it in number theory. Maybe the empty desks are here as a carrot.

Or a stick.

Some teachers have it worse than I do. Nancy Rodriguez, for instance, who teaches advanced programming, lost two students after last month’s tests. I’ve heard Dr. Chen’s chemistry class has dwindled from two dozen to a scant fifteen. Talk in the teachers’ lounge happens in whispers around them. Nancy’s kids better pass the lab module or she’ll find herself teaching in a green school. Chen is pulling her hair out because of the failures. And so on. As the students advance, the sieve gets finer.

It isn’t that the green schools are lousy—Freddie says her teachers are great, even if Malcolm frowns at the idea of faculty with master’s degrees instead of doctorates. And I’ve seen the homework Freddie brings back every afternoon: stacks of heavy hardcover textbooks, instructions for the quarterly science fair projects, annotated bibliography assignments that would have made a college freshman back in my day start filling out course-drop requests. The faculty is good enough that every once in a while a green school student scores out of the ballpark, ends up with a silver card, and transfers to a first-tier school.

Most of the time, though, there’s only one way for a kid to go once she’s in a green school. Down.

We aren’t supposed to look at it as “down,” per Madeleine Sinclair’s crowd. We’re supposed to view it in euphemisms: helpful, appropriate, child focused.

“Money saving” never gets a mention.

So I take my students through their Mendelian genetics; I hurl words ending in -osis and -isis at them until their eyes glaze over, until I’m confident they know the material backward and forward and upside down, until, when I say “Who’s ready for the test?” twenty hands go up. Mercedes Lopez, sitting three rows away and glancing nervously at the newly empty desk every few minutes, is first. She’s my only remaining European student. The rest fled while they could.

All the while, Judy Green’s desk sits vacant in the front row, pencils and pens and highlighters cleared from the trough on the left side, books gone from the shelf underneath it. Last month, when I asked who was ready for the test, Judy’s hand was the first one raised.

And yet her Q fell more than two full points, low enough to send her off on a yellow bus.

This isn’t what bothers me, though. What’s been eating at me since this morning, since I stood in the rain listening to Sarah scream accusations at me and punch me with words that she should have thought about first, is that even if Judy didn’t pass—even if she blanked out during transcription of genetic codes or screwed up the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic musculature—every single one of Judy’s tests would have had to be completely blank to bring her down so far.

My students file out and a new batch comes in, the chemistry crowd from Dr. Chen’s class in a building across the street. A few of them are like Anne—confident, even haughty. They know they’ll pass. Others squint nervously, as if they’re trying to visualize the entire periodic table on the backs of their eyelids. One girl—I think her name is Alice—chews on a fingernail. When she takes it away from her mouth, there’s a raw, red crescent of blood where she’s nibbled down to the quick.

I’m proctoring today, and that means I’m not permitted to speak to the students except for reciting the test rules, which I know by heart.

You have one hour.

You may not speak to any student.

You may not leave the room for any reason.

When time is called, put down any and all writing implements. If you do not, ten points will be automatically deducted from your score.

Once, I added an extra line about cheating. It’s not necessary anymore.

It used to be that cheating was an art form. We knew all the tricks: the sticks of chewing gum with chemical formulas written on them, dissolved by teeth and spit if a teacher should pass by; inked thighs under pleated skirts bearing presidents and dates; some genius kid’s famous “Inviso-Method,” which involved writing your notes on a disposable top layer of paper, hard enough to impress the bottom layer. There were folded-up crib sheets tucked into knee socks, last year’s exam copies bought with pooled lunch money, calculators pre-programmed to solve the deadly quadratic equation. If there was a way to cheat, someone invented it.

So maybe competition isn’t all that new, but there’s no cheating these days, not since that incident a few years back.

I’m not sure of the details. There were whispers, naturally, about the two women from the Fitter Family Campaign, about how they spent a solid hour behind closed doors with the kid who stashed microscopic notes inside the barrel of an automatic pencil. Nancy Rodriguez said he bit one of the women. Dr. Chen told me she heard crying behind the door. What I do know, and what I’d rather forget, is that before the kid’s parents made it across town to the school, his Q was recalculated and a machine spat out a flat yellow card.

We didn’t see him again. And, of course, there haven’t been any further cheating incidents.

One by one, the students take their seats. I hand pristine sheets of lined paper to them and supply each desk with a pencil and a pen. Then I recite my lines and start the slow march up and down the aisles. I hate this part, because it reminds me of touring a museum, shuffling along and shifting my weight, getting a good case of museum-foot. I’ll proctor four more tests before the day ends, and by the time I’m home my ankles will be swollen.

By the time I’m home, I’ll find out how Freddie’s day went. I can’t say I’m in a rush to know.

Ten

Dinner is a disaster.

We always get Chinese takeout on testing days because the idea of standing over a stove long enough to boil even a pot of water for spaghetti makes me cringe. The dining table is littered with those white boxes. Rice, spicy eggplant, rice, General Tso’s chicken, rice, egg rolls, something called Happy Family Delight, and rice. After Malcolm mentions his broken peace lily for the third time, the only words Freddie says are “Pass the soy sauce, please.”

“So,” Malcolm says. “How’s school going?” He scoops more of General Tso’s famous and ubiquitous chicken from the paper container onto his plate, setting the rest between himself and Anne at the exact moment Freddie reaches for it. “Oh. Sorry. Did you want some, too?”

Freddie just looks at me, defeated. On nights like this, it’s as if Malcolm has only one child.

Anne stops revisiting every single minute of the five tests she sat for this afternoon and pushes the chicken toward her sister. It’s a small act of defiance, but my heart skips all the same. “Go on, Freddie. You first.”

“I have a project for government class due next week, Dad,” Freddie says.

Malcolm says nothing until I kick him under the table. Then, “Need any help?”

“Maybe. Just for brainstorming. We’re supposed to design some kind of social system.”

As if we haven’t already, I think.

“I need a bit more specificity,” Malcolm says drily. If Anne had been as vague as Freddie, she would have gotten a teasing smile.

I ignore my husband and coax my daughter. “Go on, sweetie.”

But she doesn’t go on. Instead, Anne comes to her rescue. “I have the same project. It’s about social institutions. You know, trying to come up with a place to put everyone based on their Q scores. The Fitter Family Campaign’s sponsoring it, and there’s a prize for best project.” She smirks. “Actually, there are two prizes this year. The winner gets a summer internship at the FFC headquarters in her home state.”

“What if a guy wins?” I say with one eyebrow raised. It’s as if Anne hasn’t contemplated the possibility of her coming in anything but first.

“Then it’s his home state. But only if he wins.” She throws me a wink.

“That’s my best girl,” Malcolm says.

Freddie sinks a few inches lower in her chair.

I kick his foot under the table, harder this time, and he turns to give me a what was that for? look. Christ, he’s oblivious. Or maybe not. Maybe he really doesn’t care that Anne gets ninety percent of his attention while Freddie stares at her plate, pushing rice grains into abstract patterns with chopsticks, one at a time. She makes a feeble attempt to interrupt, gets a “Hush up a minute, hon, I’m listening to Anne,” and gives up.

“Malcolm,” I say. “How about we let Freddie tell us how her day went?”

Freddie blanches, shakes her head, and goes back to decorating her plate with rice mandalas. Malcolm looks grateful.

“I bet her day went just fine,” he says, passing another wrapped egg roll to Anne. “If she’s anything like her sister, she sailed through.” He isn’t actually speaking to Freddie, only about her. So I give him a third under-the-table kick. “Right, Frederica?”

Malcolm’s never taken to Freddie’s nickname, something he points out each time he addresses her.

“Sure, Dad,” Freddie says in a clockwork voice. Then, “Can I be excused?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before pushing out her chair and going down the hall to her bedroom. No. “Going” isn’t the right word. She skulks or slinks or scuttles. Some onomatopoetic thing. Something a primitive nocturnal animal would do.

Anne gets up and follows her. “Be right back, Dad.”

When she’s out of earshot, I shake my head at him. “Anyone would think you were the one who had the umbilical cord sixteen years ago. Anyway, the yellow bus came today,” I say, peeling the wrapper from an egg roll.

“Huh.”

“That’s it? ‘Huh’?”

He shrugs. “I thought I told you, El. There were some schedule changes. Memo went out a few weeks ago.” He takes the egg roll from my hand. “You don’t really want another one of these. They’re all grease.”

What I want to say is, Get your paws off my fucking egg roll. Instead, I go back to the real subject. “Do you even care who it picked up?”

“Who?”

“Judith Green from up the street.”

Malcolm’s eyes widen a few millimeters, but otherwise his expression doesn’t change.

“You know. Judy? Anne’s best friend since she was five?”

“Oh. Right,” he says. “I think I remember her.”

Okay. I take the egg roll back and forget about peeling off the oily outer layers before sinking my teeth into it, just to show him I don’t give a crap. “You think you remember her. For chrissake, Malcolm, she was here last weekend for a sleepover. We made chocolate chip pancakes on Sunday morning, and the girls asked you for help with their homework. So don’t fucking tell me you think you remember.”

Anne’s back. “Remember what?”

“Language, El. Language.” Malcolm slides his eyes in my direction.

“Don’t lecture me.” I’m hot now, hotter than I’ve been in a while, but I pause, take a few of those deep yoga breaths, and cool myself down before speaking. “There’s no way Judy failed her test last month. No way.”

“Wait a sec,” Anne says. “Judy failed? That’s impossible. Judy’s a fucking rock star. Oh. Sorry, Mom. Freaking rock star.” There’s no tutting or reprobation from her father. “Anyway, no way Judy bombed.” She leaves the room, iPhone in hand, fingers working madly at the keys.

When we’re alone again, I glare at my husband. “Like I said.”

So what does Malcolm do? He shrugs. That’s it. Shoulders up, shoulders down. And he pinches another piece of eggplant with his chopsticks.

I used to love the man sitting across from me. I loved his wit and his smarts and his I’ll always take care of you attitude, and I looked up to him. I traded something for this man, something I thought I wanted, and still do.

In hindsight, it was a shitty trade.

Eleven

THEN:

I was in my studio apartment at Yale on the last Saturday of September, finished with classes and ready for the weekend. New England had started turning pretty with its annual leaf-mosaic show, and I’d planned on taking the car out of shitty New Haven and driving farther north for the weekend. I had not been planning to wake up and lurch to the tiny subway-tiled bathroom.

An hour later, after a quick trip to the Rite Aid down the street, I was still in that bathroom, sitting on the icy porcelain of the toilet, shaking the pee stick, as if by shaking it I could knock one of those blue lines out of the little window and turn a plus into a minus, change a baby into a nothing.

I’d split up with Malcolm in early summer, partly because my mother persuaded me that a break might be a good thing, partly because I didn’t want my first boyfriend to be my only-and-forever boyfriend. And partly because of Joe.

We grew up together, played kickball in the street and made mud pies in a ditch behind my parents’ house. Joe was normal, except for a fanaticism about anything with an internal combustion engine. When we got our licenses, he fixed up an old Mustang, a wreck of a thing he rescued from Mr. Cooper’s junkyard. When he turned seventeen, Joe had the hottest car in town. He also had the lowest grade point average in our high school, and SAT scores a hedgehog could have beaten.

He wasn’t exactly Joe College, but he was a good guy, taking me to movies he swore weren’t dates, buying me gallon-sized tubs of fake-buttered popcorn while some teen-scream villain with razors for fingernails flashed in the on-screen shadows. At sixteen, I was more interested in museums than movies, but I still let Joe talk me into a Friday-night replay of a decades-old film that he once again swore was Not. A. Date. Until he tried to turn it into one. He shivered once next to me when Freddy Krueger danced murderously into the dreams of unsuspecting Elm Street teenagers, and I realized Joe didn’t like the flick, either. But I knew then why he had picked it.

So we sat, shrinking back in our seats, tucked against each other, giggling at the absurd bits and gasping at the cheesy horror.

I told Malcolm about the movie the next day, deliberately leaving out the awkward almost-romance. He rolled his eyes and asked why I was wasting my time with that type, with someone who could never amount to anything more than a subpar grease monkey, with someone who would only make me miserable. He drove the point home by always stopping for gas at the station where Joe worked, and the subject never came up again. I saw the black grease under Joe’s fingernails, the tattooed dragon coiling around his biceps, the future of him undefined and not very desirable.

Joe still called, sent emails, caught up when I came down from Connecticut on school breaks. He got me through a bad patch of depression, spent hours on the phone with me when exam anxiety wouldn’t let me sleep, told me stupid jokes on the nights I didn’t think I’d ever smile again.

That summer, everything changed.

I’d just gotten home from Connecticut, temporarily back in my childhood bedroom. Maryland was already sticky with humidity, and my parents’ house felt close with it after spring in New England. Winston, our dog, seemed also to feel it, so I fetched his lead and went out the front door, starting down the street toward the wooded path heading west.

I heard the Mustang’s eight cylinders before I saw it. It was a cool sound, a leonine purr I remembered well.

“Hey! Fischer!” the voice called. I remembered it well, too.

“Hey, yourself!” I called back, raising a hand in a wave.

Joe pulled over and parked, killing the purr, letting the beast rest, and we walked along with Winston. Then he did the strangest thing.

He kissed me.

What I did next was even stranger—I kissed him back. And I didn’t kiss him the way I kissed Malcolm, lips slightly apart, tongue withdrawn, eyes open. No, I went in deep and hungry, tasting him. Swapping spit, as kids would say. As Malcolm would never permit.

“What was that for?” I said, twisting, trying to get some space between us so I could talk.

“Just wanted to know what it felt like to kiss you,” he said.

“Why?”

“No good reason.” Joe leaned in closer. “Maybe I like you.”

“What do you like about me?”

“Well, you’re beautiful,” he said, his lips a breath away from my own.

“That’s not enough.” He was still leaning, and I was inching back now, keeping my distance. Physical beauty wasn’t supposed to drive decisions. Malcolm had shoveled that line in one word at a time through high school.

Joe laughed. “It’s not the only reason, El. And I don’t mean you’re only beautiful on the outside.”

A runner rushed up the path toward us, and we did that thing people do when they’re caught, instinctively separating ourselves, adopting some ridiculously unnatural pose that told the whole story. The woman, who I’d seen before in the woods, ran on, but not before shooting a smile my way.

And, like magnets, Joe and I closed in on each other.

“Do you like it up there?” he said. “At Yale?”

My parents and grandmother had asked the same question only a few hours before. The answer I gave Joe now was the same. “It’s okay.”

“Then why stay?”

We were side by side, shoulders and thighs touching as we leaned against a fence rail, watching Winston burrow his way into the dirt. Joe’s pinky finger wrapped itself around mine and squeezed. I wanted to tell him about the pressure, about the nights I spent alone in the library, wishing I had someone to take me to the movies. But I didn’t have to.

“Don’t go back, El,” he said quietly. Whether he meant to Yale or to Malcolm, I wasn’t sure.

Joe might not have made the grades in high school, and he had as much use for standardized college entrance tests as a cat does for a set of roller skates, but he wasn’t stupid. “This whole country’s getting crazy,” he said. “And it’ll get worse before anyone figures it out. Come down to the islands with me. We’ll get a boat. Maybe two. Maybe a couple of kids to go along with the boat.”

I didn’t make any decisions about quitting school and escaping to St. Thomas, but I did quit Malcolm for a time. The next time I saw Joe’s Mustang, curvy and red and smooth from the kind of waxing only young men have time for, I was in its backseat. And kissing wasn’t the only thing we did. It was a heavy car, but not as heavy as Joe’s body on top of mine, not as heavy as the even breaths I drew in and pushed out, not as heavy as the rain that pounded the soft top or the thunder that clapped along to our rhythm. We went slow and fast, and then faster and slower. After two times, we rolled, and I lay with my head on Joe’s bare chest, listening to his heart like it was the only sound in a still and quiet universe.

And then we did it all over again because when you’re young and crazy in love, the body has a way of resetting itself as many times as it wants to or needs.

In September, I went back north, driving my little VW Rabbit, missing the hardness of the Mustang and the hardness of Joe’s body. And now I was here, in a subway-tiled bathroom holding a pee stick with its accusing blue cross. If I turned it, the cross became an X, and I imagined it was my entire life that was being crossed out.

I threw the testing stick into the trash bin, pulled up my pajamas, and climbed back into bed, thinking I’d call my mother. As I reached for the phone, it rang. The caller ID announced Malcolm. I let it go to voice mail and fell asleep.

Three hours later, I played the message.

He was driving up for the weekend.

He was taking me to the Cape.

He wanted to ask me a question.

On the first Saturday of October, I’d taken care of things. It was easier than I thought, allowing myself to stretch out on that gurney in the student clinic, watching the anesthesiologist as she gazed into my eyes and said something that sounded vaguely like She’s nearly under. Not worrying anymore about what kind of child a mechanic and a college dropout could possibly raise.

Joe never knew about any of it. He knew only what I wrote him in my letter, the one he never answered.

I’ve decided to marry Malcolm. I’m so sorry. I love you, Joe.

I love you crazy. But I don’t think we have a future.

I tore the sheet up and rewrote it, leaving out everything after “sorry.”

Twelve

“Freddie kicked me out,” Anne says when I meet her in the hallway, halfway between her room and her sister’s. “What’s up with that?”

I want to tell her what’s up with that is her father’s empathy deficit, but instead I tell her to help Malcolm with the dishes and go down the hall myself. The sight in my daughter’s bedroom stops me short.

Freddie is packing a suitcase.

It’s the old green one, the hard-shell Samsonite that O.J. used to kick around on television, the one Malcolm and I took on our honeymoon to Bermuda. I don’t know where Freddie even found it.

Her room, usually arranged with the help of a T square, has morphed into a disaster zone. Think New Orleans after Katrina. A few patches of shag carpet peek out through gaps in underwear, jeans, hair scrunchies, winter socks, and almost everything else that used to live in a drawer or a closet or a hamper. I’m ready to call in FEMA.

“Freddie?” I say, careful to keep my voice steady. “What are you doing?”

As if I need to ask.

She sits on the floor and starts a process of unfolding and refolding, getting the creases in pants’ legs exactly right, measuring the distance between T-shirt sleeves until she’s satisfied they’re symmetrical. All the while, she’s rocking to some inaudible rhythm. It isn’t really inaudible; there’s music going on inside Freddie’s head, in a dark space I can’t quite reach. The best thing when she’s like this is to sit down across from her.

So I do that. And I start rocking, matching her time, being a mirror image metronome of Freddie. After a few minutes, she’s back with me, back in the now.

“I bombed,” she says in a flat monotone.

“You can’t know that, honey.”

Someone knows it, though. While we gorged on Chinese food in our dining room, a machine, or a bank of machines, in the Department of Education tallied thousands of scores. Qs are being adjusted at this very moment, matched with student ID numbers. Soon, phones and tablets will start pinging. Some families will celebrate. Others will be shopping for new uniforms over the weekend. Still others will make last-minute plans to visit relatives, pack favorite items of clothing in old suitcases, spend their last Sunday together in tears.

This is all supposed to be good for the children. Good for the families. Good for society.

I lean over and wrap her in my arms. She’s wooden. I feel like I’m holding a doll.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go have some ice cream.”

This elicits a crack of a smile, and Freddie’s eyes shine. Good. Somewhere underneath that stiff exterior, there’s still my little girl.

“Chocolate?” she says.

“Sure. And vanilla and strawberry and cookie dough. Anything you want, honey.”

The thing I love best in the world happens next: Freddie’s crack of a smile turns into a grin.

Then all the phones start pinging.

Thirteen

I’m okay.

I’m okay I’m okay I’m okay I’m okay.

If I say it enough, it’ll be true, right?

Malcolm and Anne are in the den, eating ice cream. Well, Malcolm is eating nonfat organic frozen yogurt sweetened with Splenda while Anne devours celebratory spoonful after spoonful of rocky road mixed with strawberry. Neither of them knows what I know.

The problem, I think, is that I’ve got a husband who’s so intensely wrapped in his überintelligence bubble that imagining any world outside that cocoon is impossible. The idea of failure in our family doesn’t enter into Malcolm’s equations of reality, and Anne lives in the kind of blissful oblivion that only teenagers can live in.

This is about to change.

“Malcolm,” I say quietly.

He looks up, and I don’t need to say another word.

I want to, though. I want to say a million words, all beginning with F and ending with UCK.

“Impossible,” says Malcolm.

Possibilities are only measurable before an outcome, I think, but I don’t say anything, only hand him my phone with the message from the Department of Education and wait while he reads. It doesn’t take long—the department is ruthlessly parsimonious in its alerts. Child’s name, child’s ID number, child’s current tier, and a single, life-altering number: 7.9.

“It’s a mistake,” he says, getting up from the sofa. “I’ll sort it out.”

“You do that,” I say.

He’s on the phone in five seconds, talks for another half minute. Toward the end, the only words he says are monosyllables like “Oh,” “Right,” “Okay.”

My glance shifts from him, to the hallway leading toward Freddie’s room, and back to Malcolm. He’s the same as when I met him over twenty-five years ago. Same angular, often emotionless face; same square-set shoulders, as if he’s preparing for a wrecking ball to hit him and plans to hit back just as hard; same dark blond waves of hair framing his face, although there’s gray curling around his temples and at the nape of his neck. The glasses he wears have gone through a few more thicknesses over this past quarter century, but otherwise, Malcolm’s the same.

It must be me who’s changed, because when I see him now, I don’t see anything to love.

“We need to fix this,” I say. “Now.”

His call has ended, and I corner him in the kitchen. He’s turned his back to me and pretends to be fiddling with a grease spot on the counter. “Malcolm? Did you hear me? We need to fix this.”

I grew up in a family of quiet men and women, people who didn’t shout over one another at Sunday dinners, didn’t try to shut one another up to get their point heard. Mostly, tense situations called for calm voices and steady nerves.

Malcolm’s absolute silence, on the other hand, isn’t a calming force. It’s jarring and violent, this stone wall. There’s too much room for wonder and speculation.

When he finally answers me, he’s almost inaudible.

“We’re not fixing anything, Elena.”

My full first name is supposed to be a signal that the conversation is over. I don’t agree.

“What if it were the president’s kid? Or a senator’s? Are you telling me they’d sit back and watch their child board a yellow bus on two days’ notice?”

This gets to him, and his eyes narrow. “Sometimes the rules are bent.”

“Broken, you mean.”

“Bent, Elena. Everyone’s treated equally.”

I pour a glass of wine, all the way up to the rim, and drink it down an inch. Maybe I’m building up some Dutch courage. Maybe I want to piss off Malcolm. “Bullshit. Don’t give me that ‘everyone is equal’ crap.”

Anne comes into the kitchen with a bowl of ice cream that’s melted into soup. “What’s going on?” she says. “You guys having another husband and wife fight?”

She gets a sour smile from her father and an exasperated sigh from me.

“We’re leaving,” I tell her, changing the subject. Let Malcolm deal with that hardball. Let him figure out who the “we” is.

“What?” Anne spits the word. “Leaving for where?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “But I’ve got homecoming in a couple of weeks. And the math club. And the forensics team finals. And—”

I cut her off. “And your sister isn’t going to a federal boarding school. Period. The end.”

Her mouth opens, the jaw working up and down, up and down, while not a sound comes out of it.

“Go to your room, Anne,” Malcolm says, then he turns to face me, placing a hand on my arm. It’s not a gentle touch but a restraining weight. “Do you have any idea how much jeopardy my job would be in if we took off? I’m supposed to set an example, not be a poster boy for rule dodging. I work in the goddamned Department of Education.”

“I meant the girls and me.”

What emerges from his throat is a bark of a laugh, an explosive negation of my statement.

And then, less explosive and more sinister: “You’re not taking my daughter from me.”

Daughter. Singular.

“You don’t want Freddie here anymore, do you?” I say. “You don’t want her here at all.”

Malcolm says nothing, which really means he says it all.

I pull my hand away and drain my glass of wine. Malcolm gives me the eye, and I pour more until the bottle is nearly empty and the glass is brimming again. “Do you know how much jeopardy our family will be in if you don’t work this out, Malcolm?”

But my words have no force in them, and Malcolm only smiles.

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