Part Five: 2:18

I was on my lunch break in the dispatch center’s break room, eating a turkey sandwich at the little table by the vending machines, when my cell phone rang.

It was a number I recognized. Whitman Elementary. My stomach tightened. When you work at 911, a phone call from your kid’s school at two in the afternoon is never good news. It’s always a fall from the monkey bars or a fever or a fight.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Khloe?”

It was Mrs. Quinn, Morgan’s fifth-grade teacher. Bernadette Quinn had been teaching at Whitman for twenty-six years. She was sixty, round and gray-haired, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a voice like a librarian’s. Firm, but kind. Morgan adored her. She called all the parents by their first names, with Ms. or Mr. in front, as though we were all her students too.

But her voice was different today. Tight. Shaky.

It made me sit up straighter.

“Yes,” I said. “Is Morgan okay?”

“He’s fine,” Mrs. Quinn said quickly. “He’s fine. He’s not hurt.”

Then she started crying.

Anxiety hit me like a wave. I’ve heard a thousand people cry on the phone in my job. I know the difference between scared crying and sad crying. This wasn’t either one. It was something else, something I couldn’t place.

“Mrs. Quinn,” I said. “What happened?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. I could hear her trying to pull herself together. “I’m so sorry. I just… I didn’t expect this. Twenty-six years, and I didn’t expect this.”

She took a shaky breath.

“Morgan had fifty dollars with him today,” she said. “Right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I gave it to him. For the fair.”

Another pause. I could hear noise in the background. The fair. Kids shouting, music playing, the hum of a bounce house blower.

“Ms. Khloe,” Mrs. Quinn said. “Please get here as fast as you can.” Her voice cracked. “You should see what he did with the money.”

Part Six: The Gym

I told my supervisor it was a family emergency. I drove from the dispatch center to Whitman in nineteen minutes, a drive that usually takes twenty-five, imagining every possible disaster.

That someone had taken the money from him. That he’d lost it and was devastated. That he’d spent it on something terrible, something forbidden. That he’d gotten in a fight over it. My mind went to the worst places, the way it does after nine years of answering 911 calls.

I parked crooked in the visitor lot and ran to the front doors.

Mrs. Quinn was waiting for me by the gym doors, in a cardigan with little orange pumpkins on it, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. Her reading glasses were pushed up on her head. Her face was blotchy.

“Where’s Morgan?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away. She just nodded toward the double doors of the gym.

“Inside,” she said.

I pushed open the doors.

The gym was loud and bright and full. Orange and black streamers hung from the basketball hoops. The bounce house was wobbling in the far corner, full of shrieking kindergartners. There were booths along the walls, painted cardboard signs on folding tables: DUCK POND, RING TOSS, FISHING GAME, BEANBAG TOSS, FACE PAINTING. The smell of pizza and popcorn was everywhere.

I scanned the room for my son.

And then I saw him, and my stomach dropped.

Part Seven: The Bleachers

Morgan was sitting on the bottom row of the bleachers on the far side of the gym.

He wasn’t playing any games. He wasn’t in line for pizza or the bounce house. He wasn’t holding a giant cookie.

He was sitting on the bottom bleacher with his hands empty in his lap, surrounded by kids.

There were maybe fourteen of them. Little kids and big kids, from first grade up to fifth. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. They were sitting on the bleachers around him and on the floor in front of him, and every one of them was holding something. A slice of pizza on a paper plate. A giant cookie in plastic with a curly ribbon. A strip of orange tickets. A plastic spider ring from the duck pond. A little boy in the front had his face painted like a tiger and was holding a goldfish in a plastic bag, staring at it like it was the most precious thing he’d ever seen.

And in the middle of them all sat my son, with nothing.

My first thought, God forgive me, was that they’d taken it from him. That a group of kids had cornered him and made him buy them things. That’s what nine years of 911 calls does to you. You always think of the worst thing first.

Then I saw his face.

He was smiling. Not his normal goofy grin. A quiet smile. The one I’d only seen a few times in six years. The one he had on the night of his adoption hearing, when the judge banged the gavel and said, Congratulations, Morgan Reyes.

Beside him, on the bleacher, sat a small boy I didn’t recognize. Maybe ten. Thin, with sandy blond hair that hadn’t been cut in a while and a jacket a size too small, the cuffs ending above his wrists. He was holding a giant cookie in both hands, still wrapped in its plastic and curly red ribbon. He wasn’t eating it. He was just holding it, looking at it, the way you’d hold something you were afraid someone might take away.

He had big serious eyes.

I felt something turn over in my chest.