Aristide was making breathless noises of alarm; and then I distinctly saw Reza punch Noah in the jaw.
“STOP!” I shouted—and when rarely Miss Eldridge of Appleton School shouts, the world knows about it. “STOP right now!” I thundered down to where they were, wiping my gluey hands on the seat of my pants. I grabbed both boys by their shirt collars—it’s something teachers used to do a lot, but aren’t supposed to anymore—and I lost it. I felt personally disappointed by Reza—I don’t know how else to put it. He’d let me down. “What in God’s name is going on here? Reza Shahid, you have some serious explaining to do. I saw what happened, with my own eyes. What has gotten into you?”
Reza glowered, shrugged.
“Noah: you tell me. I can’t believe Reza would hit you without being provoked.”
He, too, shrugged. Then I saw clasped in his fist several aspirin flowers, dangling on their wire stalks.
“You picked the flowers?”
“Nobody said we couldn’t.” This was true: nobody had said they couldn’t. Noah went on, “And then Reza jumped on me. Like some kind of crazy guy.”
“Is that what happened, Reza?”
Reza looked angrier than I’d ever seen him, but he didn’t say anything. He scuffed his feet against the Astroturf. I had the feeling that wasn’t the whole story.
“Did Noah say something that upset you?”
Reza looked up: he looked for his mother, and found her, and some wordless exchange passed between them, to which I was not privy. He still didn’t say anything.
It was only at this point that I realized everyone had gathered round in a circle, and that Sirena was standing behind the children, watching. It wasn’t clear what she was thinking. I hadn’t considered it in the heat of the moment, but now everything seemed hideously weird: I’d been extra-angry because I felt betrayed by my own kid, my special boy, the boy who wanted to make the world better; but here, like a slap, was the reminder that he wasn’t mine. Here was his mother, and the look on her face was the look not of my friend but of his parent, if you see what I mean: whatever she was thinking, it was a mother’s reaction to seeing her son disciplined by a teacher. I was his teacher, an outsider; that’s what I was.
It was one of those moments when life’s disguises are stripped away, when you see clearly what is real, and all you can say to yourself is “useful to get that learned.” The only thing I could think to do was fully to take on my teacher role, and play it to the hilt. I got bossy with the kids: “Don’t stand there staring,” I said to everyone else. “This doesn’t concern all of you. Go back to your games, or your masks. Noah and Reza, you’re both going to sit over there against the wall and I don’t want to hear anything more out of either of you.”
For a moment, nobody moved. I saw some of the kids, including Reza, look at Sirena. She closed her eyes and nodded slightly. And then he went, and Noah went after him, both of them hanging their heads like convicts.
I took Aristide aside and asked him what had actually occurred. He said that Noah had said mean things about Wonderland, had called it “crappy.” He’d said, “Your mom’s idea is really dumb. Does she think we’re, like, two years old?” And then he’d quoted something from television or somewhere: Noah, obsessed with flatulence, had said, “I fart in her general direction.” He was trying to be funny, Aristide explained, but Reza couldn’t see it.
Sirena didn’t come over to talk to me straight away. Maybe she didn’t want to seem to make a big deal of it. I never told her what Noah said to Reza. I don’t imagine her son did, either. She did go over to speak to Reza for a second, as he huddled against the wall, and she looked stern, but mostly she was in a hurry to get back up her ladder and monkey with her cameras, to try to pull a decent video out of the fiasco. The kids weren’t playing so freely after that, though; it didn’t feel natural anymore. Even after their snack, after the groups switched over, there was a slight pall over the afternoon. It wasn’t the same.
As we were lining the kids up to leave, Sirena appeared at my elbow.