Then Lyndon presented the district's case, and he was good at it.
He was calm and organized and regretful. He put the tip-line message up on the projector: a screenshot from the district's anonymous reporting app, timestamped 7:14 a.m. Thursday, reading in full, Isidore Mavrides 10th grade has pills in his backpack front pocket and is going to sell them at lunch. Please do something before someone else gets hurt. He walked the hearing officer through the district's search policy, reasonable suspicion, the standard from the Supreme Court case every administrator memorizes. He put up photographs of the backpack, the pocket, the pouch, the cartridges, the bag of blue tablets laid out on a sheet of white paper next to a ruler. He put up the county crime lab's preliminary report, which had come back the Friday before and which Ruthanne had warned me about so that I'd keep my face still when I saw it: the tablets were counterfeit, pressed to look like a prescription painkiller, and contained fentanyl.
"I want to be very clear," Lyndon said, turning to Izzy with an expression of deep, sad sympathy, "that nobody in this room thinks Isidore is a bad young man. I've reviewed his record. He's a fine student. He's a gifted athlete. He did something heroic three weeks ago, which I think everyone here knows about. But that's exactly what concerns me. Isidore has seen with his own eyes what these pills can do. He held a boy's life in his hands. And he still—" he paused, and looked down at his binder, and shook his head slightly, "—the district has a responsibility to every other student in that building. Given the quantity, the tip indicating intent to distribute, the presence of fentanyl, and the very recent overdose on our campus, the district is recommending expulsion for the remainder of the academic year."
Mr. Lyall wrote something on his yellow pad with his longest pen.
Then Lyndon called Bobbie, and Bobbie read her statement, in a clear, even voice, with her reading glasses on, about the two nights she'd observed a teenage boy she believed to be Isidore at the mailbox kiosk after eleven o'clock, approaching vehicles, leaning in their windows. She said she did a compliance walk around the neighborhood most evenings. She said she'd been president of the association for eleven years and had never had to make a statement like this before and took no pleasure in it. She said, at the end, looking up from the paper, "I believe in second chances. I'm only here because I believe that the way you help a child is by stopping things early." And she looked across the table at me as she said it, with something in her face that might have been apology.
"Ms. Ebbesen," said Mr. Lyall. "Questions?"
"A few," said Ruthanne, and stood up.
She started with Lyndon. She asked him how long he'd been at Halverton East. Eighteen years. She asked him whether he was the administrator responsible for receiving information from the counseling office about drug activity on campus. He was. She asked whether, in the three weeks since Colby Kuchar's overdose, the counseling office had passed him any information regarding the source of the pills that nearly killed that boy.
"Some," Lyndon said carefully. "It's an ongoing investigation. I'm not sure it's appropriate to discuss in this—"
"Did any of that information come from Isidore Mavrides?"
There was a very small pause.
"Not to my knowledge," Lyndon said.