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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2017 by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  Cover design by Ploy Siripant

  Cover photograph © Danita Delimont / Alamy Stock Photo

  Author photograph by Nina Subin

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: January 2017

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  ISBN 978-0-316-26542-3

  E3-20161206-DA-NF

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Begin Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  Newsletters

  To public schools everywhere

  White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.

  James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  The poor are despised even by their neighbors, while the rich have many friends.

  Proverbs 14:20

  Karen Kipple had always been an early riser. She relished the quiet, the calm, the way the light filtered through the sycamore tree in front of her south-facing kitchen window, and the sensation of having the house to herself, if only for an hour or two. Was it terrible to admit that she never loved her daughter and husband so much as when they were asleep? She also liked studying the forecast while she drank her first cup of coffee of the day—checking projected temperatures against monthly averages and feeling appropriately blessed or outraged. As a child, Karen had made fun of grown-ups who were always going on about the weather; what could be duller? But as she’d gotten older, she’d found herself endlessly diverted by the seeming randomness and unpredictability of the sky overhead.

  Karen had been married for ten years and, for the last five of them, had been the director of development for a small nonprofit devoted to tackling childhood hunger in the United States. For the past two years, she’d also been trying to write an op-ed, which she hoped one day to publish in a major newspaper, about the relationship between nutrition and school readiness. Like many women, she struggled to balance the demands of motherhood and career, always convinced that she was shortchanging one or the other. But it was also true that, insofar as she’d long conflated leisure with laziness, her eight-year-old daughter, Ruby, provided her with a permanent alibi in the criminal case of Karen Kipple versus herself. Thanks to Ruby, Karen always felt busy and needed even when she wasn’t officially working. And the permanent sense of obligation came by and large as a relief.

  The only part of Karen’s domestic routine that she consistently dreaded was getting her daughter up for school. Not only was Ruby a heavy sleeper who was almost always comatose when her alarm went off, but Constance C. Betts Elementary had recently moved up its start time to eight a.m. to accommodate the schedules of the teachers who lived in faraway suburbs and wanted to beat the traffic. Never mind that Betts was only three blocks away from the family’s spacious two-bedroom condo in a converted nineteenth-century macaroni factory. Or that plenty of the students seemed to have no trouble arriving an hour early for the free breakfast, having commuted from parts of the city that, in some cases, Karen had never been to. Although Betts was a neighborhood school, it welcomed those from outside Cortland Hill as well, if only because it struggled to fill its seats with families who lived in zone. To Karen’s shame and chagrin, Ruby often arrived late.

  The morning in question, an unseasonably cold one in mid-March, began typically. Karen walked into Ruby’s bedroom at 7:20 and found her daughter stock-still with her goldfish-motif quilt pulled over her head. Karen placed her hand on the lump below the quilt and gently rotated her from left to right. “Sweetie, it’s time to get up.”

  There was no answer. Karen jostled and cajoled some more. Another three minutes went by, then four. Finally, there was movement, then a voice: “Leave me alone.”

  Karen had learned not to take Ruby’s morning grumpiness personally. “I wish I could,” she said. “But school is starting in exactly thirty-five minutes. And I’ve already given you an extra five. Plus, I made you eggs, and they’re getting cold.”

  “Eggs are gross” came the reply. “They come out of chickens’ butts.”

  “Well, then, you can just eat the toast,” said Karen. There was more silence. Losing patience, Karen yanked the quilt off her daughter and said, “Get. Up. Now.”

  Finally, with a deep groan, Ruby rolled over, rubbed her eyes, and said, “What day is it?” Her flyaway brown hair looked like a bird’s nest.

  “Friday.”

  “I have gym today. I need to wear sneakers.”

  “Do you want me to get your sparkly ones?”

  “Mr. Ronald is so strict,” said Ruby, ignoring Karen’s question. “He’s always yelling at everyone, and he blows this whistle in your ear if you don’t do what he says.”

  Karen sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned toward her daughter. “Don’t tell anyone I told you this,” she said, tucking a section of tangled hair around Ruby’s ear. “But all the mean kids in school become gym teachers when they grow up.”

  Ruby seemed confused by the pronouncement. “All of them?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

  Karen considered the idea that, just maybe, she should have qualified her comments. What if Ruby repeated them to Mr. Ronald? Or—God forbid—what if Ruby became a gym teacher when she grew up? “Well, not all of them, but many of them,” she said. “Now, come on! It’s the community-unit celebration this morning, so Mommy is actually coming to school with you.”

  This piece of news seemed instantly to alter Ruby’s exhaustion level. “Yay!” she cried, bolting upright and throwing her legs over the side of her twin bed. In fact, Ruby’s third-grade teacher had invited all the parents into the classroom that morning to view the breakfast-cereal boxes that, in keeping with a study unit on community, her students had decorated to look like civic buildings and storefronts.

  It was 7:50 when Ruby and Karen finally put on their coats to leave. “Let’s go wake up your lazybones father and say good-bye,” said Karen, who never missed an opportunity to guilt her husband about his own struggles to remove himself from their bed. An incorrigible night owl, Matt often stayed up until two a.m. watching sports and reading left-wing political blogs. He could also sleep through a fire alarm. “Daddddddy, we’re leaving,” cried Ruby, half running down the hall, her knapsack flapping against her back.

  “Rise and shine!” said Karen, followi
ng Ruby into the room and yanking on the shade cord to reveal a sharp-taloned sun.

  “What time is it?” Matt muttered into his pillow.

  “Time to get up,” said Karen.

  “Mommy says you’re a lazybones!” said Ruby.

  “Come here, you little whippersnapper,” said Matt, reaching for Ruby’s arm with his own impressively muscled one and pulling her into the bed, where he began to tickle and kiss her.

  Ruby laughed and squealed. “Help! Daddy’s keeping me captive.”

  “You actually have to let her go,” said Karen. “Ruby’s class is having its community-unit celebration this morning, and it’s literally starting in six minutes.”

  “Shoot—why didn’t you wake me up?” he said, reluctantly releasing Ruby and squinting at Karen. “I would have come.”

  “Oh, please,” said Karen, making a superior face. “You were out cold.”

  The truth was that, although Matt’s failure to help get Ruby up and out in the morning annoyed Karen in theory, in practice she found it easier to do it herself, without another tired and hungry body in the way—and doing everything the wrong way. The few times that school year that Matt had made lunch for Ruby, he’d put her sandwich loose in her lunch box and it had fallen apart. And then, according to Ruby, and even more traumatically, it had gotten soiled by an also-unwrapped pear.

  Karen and Ruby arrived in the classroom with one minute to spare. There were just over a dozen parents in attendance, most but not all of them women. The majority of them were in jeans or sweats. A couple of them sported office attire. One mother, a smiley Yemeni woman whom Karen always exchanged warm hellos with, was wearing a long skirt and hijab. Karen had tried and failed to retain the woman’s hard-to-pronounce name in her memory, and now it seemed too late, too insensitive, and too embarrassing to ask what it was again. Of course, what qualified as embarrassing was all a matter of perspective. At Ruby’s eighth birthday party the year before, the woman’s out-of-control daughter, Chahrazad, had gratuitously flashed her Hello Kitty underpants at a male classmate while belting out the pop-song lyric “‘Heeeeeeyyyy, sexy lady,’” an awkward incident that Karen had still found less mortifying than the fact that, after the party, Chahrazad’s mother had stood in front of Karen’s building, forbidden, Karen had concluded, from entering another man’s home.

  While Ruby went to the closet to put away her coat and backpack, Karen made her way over to her best mom-friend in the class, Louise Bailey, who went by Lou. A freelance publicist and semi-stay-at-home mother of two—she had a daughter in fifth grade named DuBois and a son in Ruby’s third-grade class named Zeke—Lou was also, hands down, the most stylish mother at Betts, if not the only stylish mother at Betts. “It’s ridiculous how amazing you look,” said Karen, who that morning, like every morning, was wearing nondescript basics in black and gray. Although she’d given up trying to be fashionable more than a decade ago, she still appreciated others who hadn’t.

  “Oh, please,” said Lou, who was six years younger, three inches taller, ten pounds thinner, and wearing leather stovepipe jeans and a nubbly poncho she’d knit herself.

  “Meanwhile, the excitement builds,” said Karen.

  “Can’t you see me holding my breath?”

  “I need more caffeine.”

  “Hands off, girl.” Lou clutched her travel mug to her chest.

  “No fair.”

  “I bet you slept more than me last night.”

  “I bet you I didn’t,” said Karen, a chronic insomniac who had grown accustomed to getting by on five or six broken hours of sleep.

  “Don’t waste your money,” said Lou. “DuBois threw up six times between midnight and five.”

  “Oh no. And okay, you win—”

  “Welcome, parents of Room Three-oh-three!” Ruby’s teacher, Tammy Hunt, shouted to be heard over the buzz of collected parents. A broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced triathlete of twenty-six, Miss Tammy had been an Outward Bound leader along the Canadian border before getting her master’s in education. Her energy, dedication, and enthusiasm were still in evidence. So was her ability to command large groups of white-water rafters spread out across a quarter mile. “Over the past several weeks,” she went on in a shockingly loud voice, “your awesome kids have been busy creating their own amazing community!”

  “Ow,” muttered Karen.

  “And today we’re inviting you to come explore it and to be the people in our neighborhood,” Miss Tammy continued to trumpet.

  “Where’s Mr. Rogers?” Lou muttered back.

  In suppressing a giggle—as a child, she’d belonged precisely to the Mister Rogers–watching public-television demographic—Karen accidentally released a noise that fell between a grunt and a snort. At the same moment, Ruby returned from the coat closet. “Mommy, come see!” she said, taking her mother by the wrist and leading her to the back of the classroom.

  There, lined up atop a row of paint-splattered base cabinets, converted breakfast-cereal boxes formed a miniature skyline. A box of Frosted Flakes had been turned into a firehouse. A Life Cinnamon cereal had become a police station. A Nature’s Path Organic Heritage Flakes box was now a grocery store. And a jumbo-size Cheerios, donated by Karen—Cheerios being the one mass-market cereal she was currently willing to buy—was a bank.

  Or, at least, Karen assumed it was a bank, given the fact that her daughter had covered the box with royal-blue dollar signs. Unless it was supposed to be a pawnshop? Did her daughter know what a pawnshop was? Karen was contemplating the likely answer—to her knowledge, there was only one pawnshop still left in her actual neighborhood, no doubt soon to be shuttered and reborn as another luxury town-house development featuring oil-rubbed-bronze bath fixtures and radiant flooring—when Ruby lifted her gray-green eyes to her mother and said, “Do you like my Citibank?”

  “Sweetie, Citibank is just the name of one particular bank,” Karen said quickly. She was alarmed to think that her daughter had so thoroughly internalized a corporate brand that it had become interchangeable in her mind with the thing itself. Never mind the brand’s contribution to the financial crisis of 2008. Though from what Karen had read, all the big banks were to blame. And besides, as a fund-raising professional, she relied on the largesse of financial-industry executives. “I think you just mean bank,” she went on.

  “Bank—whatever,” said Ruby, clearly annoyed.

  “I know that was all you meant,” said Karen. “Anyway, you did a great job with the decorations!”

  The sound of metal legs skidding across linoleum refocused her attention. It was followed by a piercing yowl. Karen turned toward the commotion and found Ruby’s best-friend-of-the-moment, Maeve, cupping her face and wailing. Two feet away, Jayyden, a boy who had been in Ruby’s class two years in a row, stood motionless, his arms crossed and his lower lip and jaw extended. Within seconds, it became clear that there was blood rushing out of Maeve’s nose. Miss Tammy, who had no doubt honed her emergency management skills leading a dogsled team across the frozen tundra of Boundary Waters, Minnesota, rushed to the scene. After expertly wrangling the girl into a chair and instructing her to tilt her head back, she turned to the parents and began issuing rapid-fire instructions: “Someone grab me a paper towel,” “Call the school nurse,” “Call the principal,” “Have the main office contact Maeve’s parents.”

  Wanting to be useful and feeling vaguely proprietary of Maeve, Karen offered herself up for the last task. But another parent had beat her to it. So Karen found herself standing helplessly with the others in a circle that had formed around the child and her immediate caretakers. This group soon included the school nurse, a squat-legged woman of indeterminate age, who quickly succeeded in stanching the blood flow.

  Only then did Miss Tammy turn to the culprit. “Jayyden,” she said. “Would you like to tell me what you had to do with this?”

  It was several seconds before he spoke. “She told me my firehouse looked stupid,” he mumbled plaintively. “Like me.”
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  Tammy grimaced; cooperation and respect were her two big classroom themes. “That was not respectful of Maeve to say,” she said. “But it also does not give you the right to punch her!” At that very moment, Karen could have sworn she heard Maeve ramp up the sniveling. “You’re in seriously big trouble now, buddy,” Miss Tammy went on with a quick laugh, her head waggling.

  “Oooooh” went the more vocal members of the class, intuiting that this could only mean one thing for Jayyden: a visit to the office of Betts’s longtime principal, Regina Chambers. An elegant African American woman in her midfifties, Principal Chambers had exceptionally good posture and a life-size cardboard cutout of President Obama next to her desk. Nearly everyone at the school was intimidated by her, Karen included, with the possible exception of a bunch of well-meaning Caucasian kindergarten mothers, new to the school and likely soon to depart it, who were constantly complaining about how the milk served in the cafeteria came from hormone-treated cows.

  Of course, none of the same mothers would be caught dead letting little Henry or Tessa anywhere near the school lunch, instead packing aseptic eight-ounce cartons of organic vanilla milk in their children’s bento lunch boxes, next to BPA-free Tupperware filled with fresh berries. Indeed, the only children at Betts who partook of Taco Tuesdays and Fish Finger Fridays were the ones getting it for free. But that was another matter…

  In response to Miss Tammy’s warning, Jayyden hung his head—so low that his chin was nearly touching his neck. All the better to hide his own tears, Karen suspected. As she stood watching the unfolding scene, her brain swirled with conflicting emotions. She couldn’t help but feel that, to a certain extent, Maeve deserved it. In that moment, Maeve may have been the victim. But Karen hadn’t forgotten how the child had come to her house for a playdate recently and peed in the bathroom trash can, or the time that Karen had taken her and Ruby out for overpriced whoopee pies at the “old-fashioned” bakeshop up the street, and Maeve had spit at the waitress.