children. There were two dozen kids or so in after-school, and all but the most timid were involved: they’d formed teams, and built a fort, and I, kept from my studio by an appointment with Chastity and Ebullience’s mother and Lisa, the reading specialist, to discuss strategies for dealing with Ebullience’s gloating about Chastity’s dyslexia, or rather, about her own ebullient lack thereof—anyway, I conducted my meeting with the shouts and laughter a joyful tympani through the windows, and it sounded like childhood should sound.
But in among them like an evil spore lurked Owen, the angry fifth grader who’d attacked Reza before, just smart enough and just dumb enough to think of packing his snowball with rocks; and the misfortune that he chose a sharp one, and the greater shame that his aim was good (hard for it not to be: he was, it was later established, only a few feet from his target), and the greatest shame that Reza didn’t see it coming.
Reza, one girl said, fell at once to his knees, and she could see blood through his fingers—his fists over his eyes—before she knew what it was. And she said she heard the fat boy mutter “Oh, shit,” before he turned and ran away.
Inside, we registered the blow as silence falling, as if outside the world in chorus took a breath, as if a curtain fell upon the scene. Then Bethany started to blow the whistle, three sharp toots, the emergency kids-line-up-NOW whistle, and I had to say “Excuse me” to the twins’ mother and step to the window. I remember the sky glowed that dull illuminated gray of incipient snow, and when I placed my fingertips upon the glass, it was cold. And looking down I could see first Bethany’s panic, her flailing pseudomilitary gestures as she herded everyone toward the big double doors. Only then did I glimpse Margot bundling someone to the side entrance, someone hunched, who’d dripped blood in a magic trail upon the battered snow—even in the gray light, or perhaps the more because of it, the blood gleamed scarlet—and I had only to look and not to think to know I knew that coat. I knew that hat—black and white with a pom-pom on the top—I knew it.
“Excuse me,” I shouted, “an accident!”—more loudly than was necessary, and was out of the classroom to the bafflement of the mother and my colleague Lisa.
I reached Shauna’s office at the same time as Margot and Reza. Velma Snively, Shauna’s secretary (and a veteran of thirty-seven years at Appleton—some people called her Shauna’s boss), had emerged from behind her desk and called for compresses: “Don’t stand there,” she snapped at Margot, who was crying, even as she drew Reza to her significant bosom. “Get the gauze from the first-aid cupboard. Get the sterile water. Over there! Over there!”
“It’s Miss Eldridge, Reza,” I announced, in case he couldn’t see me. “You’re going to be fine.” I tried to reach him, but Velma’s arm interceded. “Was it in the eye? Is it in the eye?” I tried to wiggle around her, but there was no “around.” Her flowery top emitted a snakey sound when touched.
“Don’t you think we’d better have a look at it, Velma?”
“I’m going to, Nora, if you’ll stop crowding the poor boy.” She reached out for the wad of gauze that Margot had found, and waved it in the air. “Cold sterile water! Cold water here! We need to clean this boy up!”
The gauze was removed, moistened, returned to her palm; she gave no quarter in the meantime and held him to her with her other arm. He was very still, but for the shudder of his sobs, like a stunned animal.
When Velma had daubed the blood away—and there was a goodly flow of it, although it had begun blackly to coagulate around the edges of the wound—it was clear that Reza’s eyeball itself had been spared, but that the gash, an inch long, was so close to the corner of his eye that it looked as though, like a late fruit, it might split the skin there and open the socket.
“A Band-Aid’s not going to patch this up,” Velma observed grimly. “The boy needs stitches.”
At this point, Reza whimpered slightly, his first sound, and looked at me in terror.
“Don’t be afraid, sweetie. I’ll take you.”
“Maman,” he said.
“I know. I’ll call her straight away. She can meet us at the hospital.” I could picture her, content in our studio in her not-knowing, carefully