The bowls were still on the island. In all the rushing that morning nobody had cleared them, and the cereal in the second bowl had softened into a yellow paste, and the napkin Mr. Pryor had laid over the spill had dried stiff and stuck to the granite. She peeled it off. She washed both bowls by hand, though there was a dishwasher, because she wanted something to do with her hands that took a while.
The score sheet was on the dish towel where Dante had left it, pressed as flat as it would go. The corner was stained a pale, permanent yellow-grey. The district seal had blurred into a soft blue cloud, but the number was perfectly clear. Ninety-eighth percentile. Her son's name, typed in capitals. EMMETT LEON CARTER.
She looked at the middle name for a long time.
Then she took the score sheet and put it on the refrigerator, square in the center, under the magnet shaped like a lemon, right over the pink-highlighted team schedule, so that the schedule was covered.
In the morning, the score sheet was gone. The lemon magnet sat on the schedule by itself.
She found it later that day, when she went to put laundry on Emmett's bed. It was inside the top drawer of his desk, lying flat, with a heavy dictionary set carefully on top of it to keep the corner from curling.
He had put it somewhere safe. Exactly as he'd been told.
*
The thing about a polite child is that you can't fight with him.
All weekend Emmett said *yes ma'am* and *no thank you* and *it's fine*. He ate what she put in front of him. He did his chores before she asked. When she said, Saturday afternoon, standing in his doorway with a basket of towels, "I'd love to hear about your project sometime, whenever you want to tell me," he said, "It's at the lab. The notebook's a copy. Mr. Pryor has the real stuff," and went back to his book, and there was nothing in it she could take hold of.
She wanted, badly, to do something large. She wanted to take him to the science museum in Brennerton, the expensive one with the planetarium. She wanted to buy him the microscope she'd seen him looking at online and never asking for. She wanted to sit on the edge of his bed and cry and tell him she was sorry until he put a hand on her shoulder and said, *It's okay, Mom.*
She heard her mother's voice. *Don't give him one more job.*
So she did small things, and she did them without announcing them. Sunday she made his breakfast and sat down across from him while he ate it, and she left her phone upstairs on the charger, and they did not talk much, and it was terrible, and she did it again on Monday. Monday night she went through the drawer under the microwave and pulled out every piece of paper in it, and in among the hospital statements and the coupon mailers and a birthday card from Leon's cousin she'd never answered, she found both copies of the finals permission form, the yellow tabs bright as yolks. The first was dated January ninth. She sat on the kitchen floor with the forms in her lap for a while and then she put them in a folder and wrote EMMETT on the tab, and put the folder on the counter where she would have to see it every day.
Tuesday she took a half day.
It cost her. Not a fortune, but she was hourly on Tuesdays and Thursdays since the reorganization, and four hours was a light bill, and she did that math on the drive over the way she did all math, automatically, and then she made herself stop doing it.
The district science center lived in the old Garfield Elementary building on Pruitt Avenue, which had closed as a school when Yolanda was in her twenties. A handwritten sign on a classroom door said FINALISTS — TUES 3:30 — KNOCK LOUD, MR. P IS DEAF IN ONE EAR.