She listened to the whole thing on Monday morning without interrupting, writing on a legal pad in a shorthand I couldn't read. Izzy sat beside me and, when he couldn't get words out, wrote on a second pad she'd handed him without being asked. When we were done she put her pen down and laced her fingers together on her stomach.
"Here's what I'm going to tell you," she said, "and you're not going to like it. What you've just told me is a motive. It's a pretty good motive. Kid names the assistant principal's son as the dealer who nearly killed a junior, three weeks later the kid gets caught with pills, the assistant principal's the one who finds them. I like it. A jury would like it. But a motive without proof is just a grudge, and if you walk into that hearing or that courtroom and start accusing a school administrator of framing your son with no evidence, you are going to look exactly like what they're going to say you are, which is a mother who can't accept that her boy did something stupid."
"So what do we do?"
"We do the boring part. When was the last time you, Izzy, personally, had your eyes on the inside of that front pocket?"
Izzy wrote. Turned the pad around. Tuesday night. Put my calculator in.
"And between Tuesday night and second period Thursday, where was the bag?"
He started writing, then stopped. Started again. School Wednesday. Practice after. Then
He stopped. His pen hovered.
"Then home," I said. "I picked him up at seven-thirty, we got pho at the place on Route 9, we came home."
Izzy was staring at the pad.
"Izzy?"
He wrote, slowly, and turned it around, and his hand was shaking a little.
I left it in the car. Wed night. I carried my swim bag in and forgot. Got it in the morning before the bus.