"I know. That's what I mean." Jasmine frowned at the dashboard. "You had on the uniform. You had the stripes. You did everything he said. I watched. And he still did it." She looked up. "So what's the point of the stripes?"
It was the question Naomi had been asking herself for three weeks, and she was ashamed to find she did not have a clean answer for it. She thought about it for a long time, long enough that Odette, in the kitchen doorway, shifted her weight.
"The stripes don't protect me," Naomi said finally. "I used to think maybe they would, if I got enough of them. They don't. What they do is, they mean I know how to do something hard and do it right when everybody's watching. And that's what I'm going to do about this. I'm going to do it right while everybody's watching." She paused. "Your notebook helped. The times you wrote down match the camera to the minute. Do you know how rare that is? Grown-ups are terrible witnesses. We remember what we think happened."
Jasmine looked down at her hands on the wheel. "There's a hearing, right? Mama said."
"In February, probably."
"Can I say something? At it?"
Naomi looked at Odette. Odette looked back, and Naomi saw her decide.
"If you want to write it down," Odette said, "and I read it. You don't have to get up there yourself. You're twelve."
"I'll write it," Jasmine said. "I'm good at writing things down."
* * *
Naomi filed her complaint with the Calder Police Accountability Board on the first of December. It ran fourteen pages, with forty-one numbered exhibits. Her union rep called it the best-organized complaint he had seen in twenty years; her Guard commander told her to take out two adjectives, which she did.
It asked the Board for three findings.