Page 19 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

Breakfast for dinner. Gus makes the pancakes, burnt.

“The octopus touched the glass,” Teddy tells me, for the third time, “and I was touching the glass, so it counts as him touching me.”

“It doesn’t count,” Margot says, without looking up from her book.

“It counts a little.”

“Did you thank him for his time?” Gus asks, flipping a pancake he’s already lost. Teddy has to think about whether you thank an octopus, which buys the table thirty seconds of quiet.

Nobody stops Margot from reading at the table. I sit in the middle of all of it with my decision quiet inside me like a swallowed stone.

He was FOURTEEN. I’m JUNO. Nobody in this kitchen knows both of those things but me, and it’s going to stay that way. This — the burnt pancakes, the volcano on the windowsill, the octopus story getting bigger every time — is what everybody gets to keep if I keep my mouth shut.

Upstairs, later, Teddy yells down asking if I’ll do the voices tonight.

I go up and do the voices.

Gus

The school calls at one-forty on a Tuesday. I’ll remember that, because I’m standing in a conference room at the practice facility, half watching a sponsorship deck, when my phone lights up with the school’s name. No school in history has ever called a parent at one-forty with good news.

“Mr. Vaughn? This is Ms. Fisher, the principal at Lakewood. Margot’s fine — everyone’s fine — but there’s been an incident, and we need you to come in.”

“What kind of incident?”

A pause with wording in it. “Margot hit another student.”

I’m forty minutes out with traffic. June is nine. I call her from the parking lot, and she doesn’t waste any of my time. “I’m leaving now. I’ll sit with her till you get there. Don’t drive like an idiot.”

By the time I walk into the front office, June is on the bench outside the principal’s door with Margot beside her. From thirty feet away: they aren’t talking. June isn’t rubbing her back or whispering to her or doing any of the things the counselor does. They’re just sitting, shoulder to shoulder, and Margot’s spine — which has been a fence post for a year — is tipped maybe two degrees toward the woman next to her.

Two degrees. I almost have to stop walking.

Ms. Fisher’s office has motivational posters and a bowl of pencils. In the middle of it sits a version of my daughter I’ve never met: skinned knuckle, chin up, done crying but recently, daring anyone in the room to mention it.

The other kid is a fourth-grader named Brayden. Margot got him once, in the mouth, in front of the whole lunchroom. Nobody disputes any of this, including Margot.

“We take physical violence very seriously,” Ms. Fisher says, and walks me through it: two-day suspension, standard, a meeting with the counselor before she returns. Then, more carefully: “There was, apparently, a provocation. Margot won’t repeat it, and Brayden’s version keeps changing, which tells me something. A few students heard it.”

“What did they hear?”

Ms. Fisher looks at Margot, offering her the chance. Margot looks at the pencils. So Ms. Fisher says, quietly, “He told her she uses her dead mom to get out of things. There was more. That was the center of it.”

The room goes somewhere else for a second. I keep my hands still on my knees and my voice in the shape it’s supposed to be in. Whatever I do in the next ten seconds, my daughter is watching me do it.

“Okay,” I say. “Margot. Did you warn him first?”

Margot looks up for the first time. “I told him to take it back.”

“And he didn’t.”

“Correct.”

“Then we’ll take the suspension,” I tell Ms. Fisher, “and we’ll talk at home about better options than hitting. And I’d like to know what the school plans to do about what he said, because she’ll serve her two days, and I want to know what his are.”

Ms. Fisher says the school takes that very seriously too. Maybe they do. I sign what needs signing, and I shake her hand, because I shake everyone’s hand. We walk out together — me, my suspended nine-year-old, and the nanny carrying the backpack nobody asked her to carry.

In the parking lot, June says, “She can ride with me,” like it’s a traffic matter, and Margot is already walking to June’s side of the lot. So I follow them home doing the speed limit, watching the backs of two heads in the car ahead of me. Neither head is talking. Neither seems to mind.