"Colby," Izzy said finally, "was blue. When I found him. His lips. And his fingernails. Under the nails." He took another breath. "I did compressions for four minutes. You have to push hard. You break ribs sometimes. I felt one go." He swallowed. "I think about it every night. And you put those same pills in my bag." He stopped, and blocked again, shorter. "And you were going to let everyone think I was the one who did that to him."
Bobbie closed her eyes.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."
Izzy looked at her for a long time. Then he turned to Mr. Lyall.
"Can I go back to swim practice now?" he said.
He did, actually. Not that day; that day Mr. Lyall dismissed the district's case in a two-sentence ruling he wrote out longhand on his yellow pad, ordered Izzy's immediate reinstatement with full athletic eligibility, and directed the district to expunge every reference to the incident from his educational record. Then he capped his longest pen, looked at Lyndon Harrower over his glasses, and said, in the courteous voice he'd used all morning, "Mr. Harrower, I was on the bench for twenty-six years, and I want you to know that what I just watched is the most shameful thing I have seen an educator do," and left the room with his legal pad under his arm.
Lyndon was arrested in the parking lot forty minutes later, without handcuffs, at Detective Okonjo's discretion, because, she told me afterward, "there's no reason to make a show of it, and I want him to keep talking to me." He didn't keep talking to her. He hired a lawyer from Columbus by dinnertime. Bobbie went with the detective voluntarily, in her navy dress and pearls, in the back seat of an unmarked car, and I watched her through the second-floor window of the administration building as she got in, and she didn't look up.
Cade Harrower was picked up at his grandmother's house that evening. The search warrant turned up, in the back of a closet in the room he slept in, a shoebox with the rest of what Bobbie had called his things: more of the blue tablets, more cartridges, a digital scale, and a cheap prepaid phone with a contact list that, Detective Okonjo told Ruthanne some weeks later, led to a twenty-six-year-old in Mansfield who'd been supplying half a dozen high school kids across three counties and had a prior conviction for exactly this. That man is in federal custody now. Colby Kuchar's parents were in the courtroom for his detention hearing. So, I'm told, was Colby.
The rest took months, the way these things do.
The juvenile charges against Izzy were dismissed with prejudice nine days after the hearing. Ruthanne filed for expungement the same afternoon, and in December a magistrate signed an order sealing and destroying every record of the arrest, and I watched Izzy read that order at the kitchen table with his lip between his teeth, and then fold it in thirds and put it in the drawer where we keep the passports. The Governor's STEM Scholars office received a letter from Dr. Pemberton and another from the district superintendent, both on letterhead, both apologizing, and in early November Izzy got an email reinstating his acceptance "without condition or notation." He didn't say anything when he read it. He just got up and moved the lighthouse magnet two inches to the left so it no longer covered the word clean.
Lyndon Harrower resigned from the district a week after his arrest, before they could fire him. In February he pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence, complicity to making a false report, and falsification for the answer he'd given under oath at the hearing, the one where he'd said not to my knowledge. He surrendered his teaching and administrative licenses as part of the deal. The judge gave him eighteen months, suspended after ninety days, with five years of probation. I haven't seen him since that conference room.
Cade's case stayed in juvenile court, in the end. He was seventeen when he was arrested, and the prosecutor, after a great deal of back-and-forth that Ruthanne followed with professional interest and I tried not to follow at all, agreed not to seek a bindover in exchange for his full cooperation in the case against the man from Mansfield. He was adjudicated delinquent in January and committed to a secure residential program for adolescents with substance use disorders near Toledo. It came out, in the course of all that, that he'd been using his own supply since the summer. That his grandmother had found it and hidden it because she couldn't bear to think about what it meant. That his father had known for longer than anybody.