Chapter 47

“Hey, stay in your lane!” Zahra struck my pen with hers as I was eating a grape gummy baby.

“They’re all my lanes, and yours, that’s the point.” She stuck her tongue out at me. I looked down at the paper. I had used the lines of a legal pad to hash even spaces on a manilla envelope and then that to create vertical lines on the legal pad. The result was improvised graph paper. She was looking carefully at the grid of Xs.

“So are you and Pops really going to the movies next week?”

“Yeah, Lavi and Melissa are both doing a club thing. You’re going too right?”

“Yeah.”

“And he wanted to go see ‘Run Lola Run’ at the Nickelodeon. How could I refuse, it’s a classic.”

She looked at me. “Classic? No one has ever heard of that movie, literally.”

“It was a big movie when it came out ... uh, probably a few years before you were born.”

“Literally no one. I think the people who made that movie have forgotten they made it.”

I stuck my tongue out at her. Clarence was next to us at the table in the tiny conference room. He ignored us while looking through his papers. I looked at my watch and then Clarence, “So they wanted to move the meeting up but they can’t show up on time? Is this some passive-aggressive-alpha-display thing?”

Clarence shrugged. “Maybe. I really did need to meet here though. I have a meeting right at noon upstairs.” Upstairs was a floor of offices. The first floor, which we were on, was a mixture of meeting rooms and flex spaces. People sat at long tables using laptops just a few feet from us.

“Your office is here?”

“Yeah, I rent an office and get communal use of meeting rooms like this. I think they meant for tech startups to use it but all I need is an office so it’s great for me.”

A knock on the glass door behind me took me by surprise. I turned to see Principal Escobar and a slightly overweight fellow in a grey suit whose face looked like it smiled once and regretted it. His thick glasses declared a dual rejection of both fashion and common sense. Clarence motioned the newcomers to enter and they did, squeezing in around the small table. Zahra had to lean towards me to give them room. I saw Escobar’s eyes track Zahra as he entered.

Clarence waited until everyone was seated and made introductions. “This is Robert Oxburn, the school system’s lead counsel. This is Robert Carlo and his medical assistant Zahra Tahan.” At her name, Oxburn’s right eye twitched towards the papers he was holding as if he wanted to look at them but it was just a split-second reaction and he was back to us. Clarence was turning on the recording device. He quickly gave the date and each person present.

I held up the plastic bag from the table, “Gummy baby?”

Escobar said nothing and Oxburn seemed to be making a decision. “No, no thank you,” he said.

“You sure? They’re Tavener’s, the best.” I shook the bag.

“No.” He held out his hand to me. I put the bag down and took it. “Call me Bob.”

“Sounds good, I’m Robert.”

“Hey!” Zahra waved cheerily. “I’m Zahra. Ignore me, I’m just here to keep Robert from injuring himself doing something stupid.”

“Hey, I’m allowed to lift up to five pounds with my right arm now.”

“But you can’t drive and can’t lift for extended periods.”

“Both true but... “ I held up the bag of sweets, “an entire bag of gummy babies is less than one pound and getting lighter all the time.” I ignored Escobar and grinned at Oxburn. Bob Oxburn ignored Escobar too while Escobar kept looking at him. Clarence was right, it was Oxburn we were really dealing with.

“Sorry to hear you’re recovering from ... an injury?” He was being polite but seemed genuinely curious.

“Yeah, I got stabbed in the shoulder by muggers on a family trip. Fortunately, I didn’t aggravate it when Chris Barrington assaulted me.” No eye twitch at that. He knew that name well since Lavi’s suit centered around him.

Oxburn started looking at papers. “I’m glad you’re on the mend. Let’s get to the point.”

“Good, good.” Clarence clasped his hands together. “My goal today is to move us to a resolution that benefits everyone.”

Mr. Oxburn looked up. “Before we begin, I’d like to ask Ms. Tahan to leave.”

I started to draw another grid. “She’s my medical assistance, she stays.”

“I don’t think she’s a nurse,” Oxburn replied.

I didn’t bother looking at him, “Nor does she have to be. Just more prudent than me which as it turns out isn’t too hard.”

“She shouldn’t even be with you!” Escobar snarled. Ah, there it was. I wasn’t even going to have to needle him to get it.

I looked at him. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why shouldn’t she be with me? Her father is a friend and she is friends with my girlfriends.”

“And I’m your friend,” she said.

I nodded to her. “Thank you.” She held up her hand for a fist bump. I supplied it.

Escobar seemed to sense that the water might be getting deeper the further he walked away from shore but he headed out anyway. “She is a young woman with an older man.”

I feigned complete ignorance of his implication. “Is driving together really an issue?”

Zahra replied with sugary innocence. “I drive an automatic. If I was wearing a skirt maybe and using a clutch I could imagine something immodest but I don’t wear skirts, not without leggings, and I drive an automatic.”

I nodded in agreement. “Exactly. So, that doesn’t make sense.” Escobar’s face was scrunching up.

Oxburn seemed to know when to not let his client respond and cut in. “Let’s return to the topic at hand please, I know that Clarence has a meeting promptly after ours.”

“Absolutely, thank you, Bob.” Clarence was all smiles. “There is just one matter to clarify. I understand there was a meeting between Mr. Tahan and Principal Escobar recently and that it was pertinent to this case. That might be causing some of Principal Escobar’s confusion.” Oxburn did not look at his papers. He swung his eyes towards Escobar who coughed before awkwardly starting. Clearly he hadn’t briefed Oxburn on this.

Clarence began handing out the signed statements from June and Yussef to Oxburn. He didn’t bother giving copies to Escobar. And so it began. There was a lot of talking. I started the new game of Tic-Tac-Tower with Zahra. I had designed it in middle school with a buddy as something we could play silently in the back of classes. I had realized we could play it today when I discovered we had one black, one blue, and one red pen with us. The grid and Xs were in black, her towers in blue and mine in red.

As we started a new game I listened to the lawyers talk. I learned that the school resource officer had confirmed for Escobar that I was a person of interest in an investigation, which surprised me. So, Escobar hadn’t been as reckless as I had thought. Clarence skipped the fake smile and grinned as he looked at Oxburn now, “You may want to have your resource officer re-check. Robert was a person of interest but definitely isn’t any longer.”

Escobar leaned in, “What happened?”

Clarence spread his hands. “Ask the police or the district attorney’s office. I understand they are putting charges together. I for one am not going to spread around things that should come from them. But ... I do know my client is not part of it.”

Escobar scowled. “How do we know this isn’t claptrap?”

I was ready to stand up and have it out with this fuck wit but silently dug my toes into my shoes since I couldn’t ball my fists without them seeing. I returned to my game. I was close to capturing six markers in a row but Zahra wasn’t giving me an inch.

Clarence said, “Melissa Milton has cooperated with the police and supplied them information that has helped them, information that she had been unaware would be of use to them or she would have taken it to them sooner. Unfortunately, some parties may have delayed the police’s investigation by providing spurious information that delayed their investigation.”

I tuned it out and stared at the grid. Zahra was catching on quickly. Maybe we should just jump to an 11 x 11 grid next. It was a few minutes later when Clarence tapped the table next to me to get my attention. “Robert?”

“Sorry, yes?”

“How would you feel about a letter written to explain the school’s position making it clear”

“No.”

Oxburn, “No?”

“No. I want an apology from the coach at a game, just like where it started.”

Oxburn focused his puffy face at me. “That is an extraordinary request from someone who doesn’t seem all that interested in proceedings.”

“I’m not interested in the proceedings, only the results.” I put my pen down. “You know, I feel like you’re not understanding what is happening here.”

He folded his arms. “Educate me.”

“I win. That’s it. Either I win now or later.”

“You seem very sure of yourself.” I laughed. He looked like he considered me in the same zoological category as animals you routinely found run over on the road. “I don’t see what is funny.”

I let the laughter carry into my voice. “You think this is somehow about Melissa and Lavi’s life at the school. No, no,” I waved my hands around, “this is a slander case, this is about the harm a school employee is doing to me and I can wait. Heck, maybe it would be best to let everyone testify after they’ve graduated and they don’t have to deal with Richardson or each other anymore. Yeah, that sounds good to me.”

“You have to prove harm for slander Mr. Carlo and by then the young women will have graduated. There certainly won’t be any ongoing argument for your position.”

“I hope that’s not your ace card. Plenty of things can happen off school grounds, say by creating a perception in a young man that he should act out violently.”

“You’re stretching.”

Oxburn stopped talking when Clarence held up his hand. “Actually, Bob, I have a deposition here from Mrs. Barrington. She is asking the DA to not pursue charges against her son, Chris, in exchange for getting her son some anger management therapy. She has said that he fixated on comments from school staff and that gave his anger a direction.”

Escobar sneered at Clarence, “I’ll bet you helped her out with that.”

“I have the meeting recorded, Vincent, I asked about influences in his environment and she supplied everything without prompting. And she signed the transcript.”