STRANGELY, OUT OF ALL the things that should have bothered her, it was the logistics of the call from school that had floored Eliza, at least in the initial moments of trying to take in the information. Iso had been caught stealing and was suspended from school, effective immediately. This meant Eliza had to come to school to pick her up, then return for a meeting at two, but that would make her late to pick up Albie for their walk home, so she had to arrange a playdate for Albie, a situation made more difficult by the fact that she didn’t really know the mothers of Albie’s friends. Desperate, she had done something she had never dreamed she would do-withdrew Albie early and taken him to the Barnes & Noble on Rockville Pike, then parked him in the children’s section with strict instructions to sit there, read a book, and speak to no one. If asked where his mother was, he was to insist she was in the store. She gave him Iso’s cell phone just in case. Lord knows, it would be a long time before Iso was allowed to use her phone, if ever.
Then it was back to North Bethesda Middle, where she had to sit through the humiliating recital of Iso’s transgressions. Stealing, lying-
“About the lying,” she put in, wishing Peter could have gotten away for this meeting, but it had been impossible. (“Even if I could get away from work today, I’d never get there in time,” he had told Eliza.) “It’s my understanding that she lied when asked if she had stolen something.”
“Yes, but that hardly mitigates her behavior,” said Roxanne Stoddard, magnificent today in a bouclé purple suit.
“No, but-she lied to cover her ass.” She flushed for speaking so crudely in front of the exemplary principal. “Sorry. It’s just that I understand why she lied, although I don’t condone it. We’ve always told our children that lying is the least acceptable offense.” In her disordered, rattled state, she went so far as to think-And she didn’t lie to me, her mother. She lied to you! As if that mattered. “Still, it’s harder for me to understand why she’s stealing something she already owns-an iPhone. She has one. Well, not an iPhone, but a perfectly good cell phone.”
“Mrs. Benedict-based on what teachers have told me, Iso is a very angry, unhappy girl.”
“Well, she’s moody. She’s an adolescent.”
“Yes,” the principal said dryly. “I have some experience with adolescents.”
Eliza blushed, although she didn’t believe that the principal’s life among hundreds of young teens gave her any moral authority in this discussion. She may have more quantitative experience, but no one could know more about her children than Eliza did.
“I want to show you an assignment that Iso wrote for English class recently. The teacher asked students to recast a real-life experience as the plot of a well-known television show.”
Eliza decided this was probably not the best time to roll her eyes, but really? A television show? Peter would be apoplectic when she told him, probably start talking about private school again.
“This is Iso’s story.”
The principal passed three sheafs of paper across her desk to Eliza. On the first page, in Iso’s almost too-neat handwriting, was the title: Everyone Loves Albie.
Iso: Let’s get a dog.
Iso’s mother: No, they are dirty and have fleas and Albie might be allergic.
Iso’s father: I don’t have time to walk a dog.
Iso: I’ll walk the dog.
Iso’s parents: NO!
Albie: I would like to get a dog.
Iso’s parents: OKAY!
She skimmed down the page, to the next and the next. “It wasn’t anything like this,” she said. “It’s true, we didn’t choose the dog that Iso wanted, but Reba was so forlorn, so needy. But it was Peter’s idea-”
“No one assumes it’s a factually accurate portrayal of your home life, Mrs. Benedict. I don’t think even Iso would maintain that. She was clearly going for humor-in fact, you’ll see she got an A, because she fulfilled the main objective, which was working within an existing form.”
Great. North Bethesda Middle is training my daughter, thief and liar, to be a sitcom writer. I feel so much better now.
“By the end of the semester, they’ll be writing sestinas,” the principal said, as if privy to Eliza’s thoughts. “Mr. Klemm knows what he’s doing. Which is why, given all the other things going on with Iso, he knew to share her written work with me. This is an angry child.”
“I honestly don’t know what Iso has to be angry about. If she thinks we favor her brother-that’s all in her head.” The principal kept her gaze steadily on Eliza’s face, and she found she couldn’t stop talking. “But it is a vicious circle, in some ways. Albie is a sweetheart, very kind and compassionate, he’s like a little love sponge, soaking it up, giving it back. Iso has always been cooler, much more self-contained.”
“Has she ever told you how distraught she was to leave England?”
“Distraught? Far from it. She treated it as an opportunity, a chance to fashion a new identity for herself.”
“Just because she treated it as an opportunity doesn’t mean she really feels it is one. She lived in London for six years, Mrs. Benedict, almost her entire school life. She’s homesick.”
“This is home.”
“To you.”
Not really, I have fewer friends than Iso.
“Well, she’s never said a word to us.”
“No, I imagine not. And if it weren’t for this, I’m not sure I would understand how desperately she misses it.”
The principal passed the contraband iPhone toward Eliza, its screen showing the latest log of dialed calls. The numbers all began with the 011-44 prefix for England.
“But…we would have let her call from home. Peter even has Skype on his computer. She could have used that. We encouraged her to stay in touch with her friends.”
“Yes, but then she would have had to tell you who she was calling.”
“And that would have been so difficult?”
“The texts are rather explicit. Not what people call sexting-I think that’s overblown-but a little provocative. And the boy is seventeen,” the principal said. “Iso thinks you wouldn’t approve.”
“Seventeen? I don’t approve.” She realized her voice was too loud, but she couldn’t help herself. Her mind was racing, trying to figure out who the boy was, when the connection had been made. Iso must have been sly about it, because Albie would have spilled whatever he knew, no matter how keenly he yearned for Iso’s approval. What had Eliza told Peter, not so long ago? Iso was good at keeping her secrets, no one else’s.
“They’ve been communicating via Facebook, on the school’s computer,” the principal said. “Iso was sophisticated enough to know how to get around the school’s block-you just add an s to the http address-but didn’t realize that she was still leaving a trail despite cleaning out the cache. She was lectured on this earlier in the semester and she begged the media center director not to turn her in. At the time, the messages and postings were pretty innocuous, so we let it go.”
“I actually asked Iso if she wanted to set up a Facebook account when we moved. She said Facebook was queer.”
“Clever of her, you have to admit. Because then it never occurred to you to look for her there.”
“It never occurred to me to look for anyone there. I’m not much for social networking.”
The principal’s smile was sympathetic. “Look, we had to suspend Iso. We have a zero-tolerance policy on theft. But I think the things happening at school are just a sideshow to the anger she’s bottled up. Iso’s having a very good time playing Romeo and Juliet, in her mind. My hunch is that this boy didn’t become a big thing to her until there was an ocean between them. Iso’s not interested in sex. Like most of my girl students, she’s fascinated by love. If a flesh-and-blood boy-if this boy-showed up on her doorstep, she wouldn’t have a clue what to do. Who were the teen idols of your youth?”
“I listened to Madonna.”
“No, I mean who were the safe boys, the ones you felt free to fantasize about when you were Iso’s age?”
“Seriously?” Eliza was laughing even before she could get the answer out. “George Michael, in his Wham! incarnation. Can’t get much safer than that.”
“Yes, and I liked Tito Jackson. All very safe, like these Twilight books. In my experience, most girls, smart girls like Iso, are pretty savvy about their limits. They find a way to explore sex and love without putting themselves in harm’s way. I’m just sorry that Iso has taken it to this level.”
“Me, too,” Eliza said.
“Not to pry-but do you talk to your daughter about such things?”
“Sex, you mean?”
“No, sex, the birds-and-bees part, is easy. I was thinking about love.”
“Love? Romantic love? I don’t know. I suppose it came up sometimes when we read fairy tales together. I actually did my undergrad and some grad work in children’s literature. I didn’t want Iso to be overly invested in prince charmings. In fact, we read a lot of the Oz books together because the heroines are strong and completely indifferent to romance. But then Albie came along, and I couldn’t help noticing how hapless the boys were. The one good boy character turned out to be a fairy princess in disguise. The other one is Button-Bright, and all he does is get lost…”
Her voice trailed off as her words reached her own consciousness. The principal was nodding, not unkindly. Eliza added on a feeble note: “Iso had moved beyond bedtime stories by then, anyway.”
“I don’t doubt it. And I don’t think there’s anything the least bit unusual about Iso. It’s natural for girls her age to be secretive and sly. Healthy, even. But she crossed a boundary when she stole this phone, and it was important to intervene now. After all, it’s not only the phone, but the cost of these calls, which were outside the family’s plan. Unfortunately, the girl who owned the phone thought she had lost it and was scared to tell her parents, so this has been going on for two weeks.”
“Well, Iso will make restitution. That’s easy.”
“Yes, but it’s not enough. My suggestion and it’s just a suggestion? Take her out of the soccer league for the rest of the fall.”
“She’ll die. She’ll hate me.”
“She won’t die. But, yes, she will hate you for a while. Still, she needs to understand how serious this was.”
ELIZA TRIED TO CALL PETER on the way home, but his assistant said he was in the kind of meeting that could be interrupted only in a life-or-death emergency. Eliza was tempted to say, “Well, this is it,” but thought better of it. She would have liked to speak to Peter before she confronted Iso back home, but Albie was in the car, and that little pitcher really did have enormous ears. It would be unfair to Iso to discuss her situation in front of her brother. Eliza would go home, invoke the sitcom line, “Wait until your father gets home.” (It was quite the day for sitcoms. Eliza felt a laugh track should have been bubbling beneath the scene in the principal’s office.) She wouldn’t use the phrase ominously, simply make it clear to Iso that this was such a serious matter that it required two parents, united.
“Iso?” she said, coming in through the garage.
“I’m in here, Mom.” Her voice showed not a hint of apprehension, which was maddening. She should be a little afraid to face Eliza after a meeting at school.
“Here?” she echoed.
“In the dining room, with your old teacher. We made tea.”
Oh, so that’s why you’re calm. You have a witness. You know I can’t bitch you out. Then: Old teacher?
She and Albie entered the formal dining room, which the family seldom used. The table had been set for a small but proper tea, the fish-shaped teakettle sitting on a trivet, cookies spread fanlike on a plate. They were Eliza’s secret cookies. More stealing? Was Iso trying to impress her mother, or the visitor, an incongruously well-dressed woman who was instantly, tantalizingly familiar to Eliza, her name just on the tip of her tongue, but the context made no sense. Teacher? She didn’t remember ever having such an elegant teacher.
“Trudy Tackett,” the woman said, standing up and holding out her hand. “I’ve been enjoying getting to know your daughter. She reminds me so much of my daughter at the same age.”