Rodney did not look at it. He would think about that later, too, that he did not look. He was looking at the girl.
The girl stepped out of line.
She did it without any hurry at first, one step to the side, and the teacher with the clipboard did not notice. And then she was running, across the blacktop, not toward the gate where the walkers were supposed to go but straight at the fence, straight at the corner, her backpack bouncing, her purple jacket open and flapping, and she hit the gate where it stood open and went through it between the grandfather and the young mother with the stroller like a dart through a hoop, and the teacher had turned now, the clipboard was falling, the teacher was shouting her name—"Juno! Juno, stop!"—and the girl did not stop. She came down the sidewalk at a dead run with her mouth open, and Rodney straightened up out of the car, and the girl's eyes were not on her mother. They were on him. They were on him the whole way, enormous and dark and furious and terrified all at once, and she was not running to her mother so much as she was running at him, and fifteen feet away she opened her mouth wider and out of it came a sound that went up the hill and bounced off the brick and stopped every adult on that block where they stood.
"MOM!"
She did not stop when she reached them. She did not throw herself into her mother's arms. She ran right past her mother's outstretched hands, so close that Brooke's fingertips brushed the purple nylon of her sleeve, and she planted herself on the sidewalk between her mother and the police officer with her sneakers wide apart and her backpack still on and her two arms flung straight out from her sides like a crossing guard's, and she stood there, panting, her chin up, looking at Officer Rodney Prentice with an expression he had seen on the faces of grown men about to swing at him.
She came up to his belt buckle. Maybe.
Nobody moved. Down at the gate the walker parents stood frozen in a ragged knot, and the teachers with their lines had stopped where they were on the blacktop, and the children in the lines had all turned around to look, a hundred small faces pointed the same way like sunflowers. In the car line the honking had stopped. The woman in the white Tahoe had lowered her phone to her lap. Somewhere a dog was barking, two or three streets over, and the wind moved in the maples, and that was all.
Brooke went down on her knees on the sidewalk behind her daughter. She did not think about it; her legs simply went. She put her arms around Juno from behind, around her waist and her backpack, and pressed her face into the back of that dark head that smelled of school, of pencil shavings and the strawberry shampoo from the Dollar General, and Juno let her do it and did not turn around. Juno kept her arms out. Juno kept her eyes on the policeman.
"Baby," Brooke said into her hair. "Baby. It's okay. It's okay. I'm okay."
Juno said nothing. She was breathing hard through her mouth. Brooke could feel her heart going under the jacket like a bird in a box.