"I understand," Saldana said, and I believe he meant it. "I've got a boy. I understand. But I have to do this the way it's done."
"He doesn't—" I turned. Izzy was in the doorway, a second deputy I hadn't noticed standing beside him. "Izzy. Are these yours?"
I want to be honest about that. I asked him. I didn't mean to, and I've thought a great deal since about why I did, and the best I can say is that nineteen years of watching parents in waiting rooms tell me their kid would never, absolutely never, had installed a reflex in me that went off before my heart could stop it. I asked. And my son, my careful, precise, gentle boy, looked at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before and hope never to see again, which was the expression of someone discovering that the floor he'd been standing on all his life had a trapdoor in it.
He shook his head. Hard, once, twice.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. I know. I know they're not."
But I'd asked. We both knew I'd asked.
Mr. Harrower spoke gently. "Ms. Mavrides, I want you to know I've been doing this for eighteen years, and I've seen a lot of good kids make bad choices, especially in a new environment, under pressure, trying to fit in. That doesn't make them bad kids. The district's process is going to involve an emergency removal today, a ten-day suspension pending an expulsion hearing, and a referral to the district hearing officer. There'll be paperwork. I'll walk you through all of it. I'm not your enemy here."
"He swims," I said, stupidly. "He has practice at three."
"Isidore will be ineligible for athletics during the suspension period, and depending on the outcome of the hearing, potentially the rest of the season." He slid a folder across the table. "And I'm afraid, given the nature of the charges, we're obligated to notify the Governor's STEM Scholars office. I'm so sorry."
I looked at the folder. It had my son's name typed on the tab. Someone had already printed it. It was 10:51 in the morning, and someone had already had time to print a folder.
They let me ride behind the cruiser. I wasn't allowed in it. At the juvenile intake center, a low brick building next to the county fairgrounds, a woman named Mrs. Abiola with silver cornrows and half-moon glasses took Izzy's belt and his shoelaces and the lanyard with his school ID, and asked him questions he couldn't answer because his stutter had locked up so completely that he couldn't get out his own birthday. I answered for him. She let me. She looked at him over her glasses with an expression I couldn't read, and then she said, "Take your time, baby, this isn't a test," and I nearly came apart right there on the linoleum.
The intake process took nine hours. I found a lawyer in the fourth hour, sitting on a bench in the lobby with my phone, after a nurse I work with texted me the name of the woman who'd gotten her nephew's case thrown out two years before. Ruthanne Ebbesen answered her own cell phone on the second ring. The first thing she said when I'd finished explaining was, "Did he talk to them?"
"He can't talk to anyone right now. He stutters. He's locked up."