Last week the school called me in for a meeting.
Grace sat beside me with her hands clenched in her lap and her eyes fixed on the floor.
I said, “What exactly happened?”
The teacher gave her a look.
Her teacher sighed. “Another student made an insensitive comment, and Grace reacted by shouting and knocking over her chair.”
Grace looked up then. Her face was blotchy from crying.
The vice principal cleared his throat. “The other student is being disciplined separately. Grace received detention for disrupting class.”
“That is not what she said,” Grace snapped.
The teacher gave her a look. “Grace.”
I turned to her. “Tell me.”
She swallowed hard. “She said maybe Dad just didn’t want to come back.”
No one argued with that, which told me enough.
For a second, nobody moved.
Then I said, “And she laughed?”
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