21. Oliver

TWENTY-ONE

Oliver

It’s the afternoon of the Fall Festival, and it couldn’t be a more perfect day. It’s one of those early November days in Brooklyn, where the sun is bright in the sky and warm on your face, but the breeze is a cool bite, a day that practically begs you to be outside. The leaves are turned and tumbling through the air in a mosaic of red and orange, and the air smells crisp and tight, like the crunch of an autumn apple.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of students and their families here, a far larger turnout than the planning committee expected. After a few last-minute phone calls, we found enough parent and teacher volunteers to handle the larger than expected load.

At my last check with the ticket booth, we had already raised over ten grand, and my mind whirs with the possibilities of what to use it towards. Lobby air conditioning for poor Ethel? A new playground structure? Basketball hoops? A freshly painted track? I look around the yard, and I’m distracted from my thoughts with sounds of screaming and laughing children, faces flushed red from exertion and the bite of the chill.

My job now is ‘working the room’, or ‘the schoolyard’ in this case, I suppose, greeting and moving through and among parents, community members, district employees, and local elected officials there for the photo op. Engaging in conversation, “so nice to see you” and “how’s the baby” and “how’s business” and “thank you for coming” and “thank you, really, for your generous donation”. It’s exhausting, yet a necessary evil, and I find myself gravitating towards a generous mass of wavy, chestnut brown hair.

“Georgia, hey,” I say, tapping her on the shoulder. When she turns, it’s as if the sun moves out from behind a cloud, and I’m blasted by the force of her radiance. I blink. “Georgia, I’d love to for you to meet our Council Member, Yasmin Khan. Yasmin, this is Georgia Baker, one of our 3 rd grade teachers.”

Georgia directs her smile to the council member, and the two immediately fall into an animated conversation about the upcoming Participatory Budget projects for District 35. I feel my body release its tension as Georgia unknowingly lifts some of the weight off my shoulders. She’s good at this, a social butterfly to my… earthworm. I find a good few minutes to just relax and enjoy myself and this wonderful community gathering that we created together.

I wander over to one of the game booths we have over at the edge of the yard, next to the massive bounce house. I’m playing ring toss with a few of our fourth graders when I hear a “PSSSSST” coming from behind the bounce house. Confused, I hand my ring to a student next to me, and wander over to the sound.

“ Hoy ! Ollie!” stage-whispers my mother, who is gripping onto my younger sister Izzy’s arm, the two of them peeking around the edge of the bounce house and wearing identical grins .

“Mama? Izzy? Why are you hiding? What are you doing here?” I frown. “Wait…Did you pay to get in?”

“Psht. My son is the principal here. It’s free for me and your sister.”

“Ma, it’s not…” I mash my palms into my eye sockets. “It’s a donation. To the school. This is a fundraiser,” I tell her, exasperated, giving her and Izzy a kiss, making a mental note to throw in a hundred-dollar bill for the two of them later. “How did you get in?”

“We found a big hole in the fence,” my sister tells me, matter-of-factly. “Ma is pissed because one of the barbs scratched her fake Louis Vuitton on the crawl under.”

“Well, that’s what you get for sneaking into an elementary school fundraiser , Ma,” I say, shaking my head. That money we made should go to fixing that fence , I think. “Why are you guys here? I already told you I’m coming to the family dinner tonight.” I look at my watch. “That’s in, like, four hours. I was going to go straight there after this.”

“We wanted to spy on your crush, hah . You never told me what she likes to eat, so we came to find out for ourselves.” Ma pokes me in the stomach.

Sputtering, I yell, “Are you fucking serious?!”

“LANGUAGE, Oliver!”

“Ma, I told you a million times, I do not have a crush on anyone. I am the boss here, and it would be extremely, extremely inappropriate for me to have any sort of relationship with any of my employees,” I tell her, chest heaving with the force of my outburst. “I didn’t text you what she likes to eat, because. She. Is. Not. Coming. To. Dinner,” I yell, feeling like I’m ten years old again and need to stomp my foot to get my point across.

My mother and my sister are no longer looking at me.

“When you say ‘she’, Oliver,” Izzy says, nonchalantly, “you wouldn’t happen to be referring to that pretty, spicy little thing over there, fighting with a man four times her size, would you?”

I feel my heart drop to the ground.

I whirl around and immediately spot a crowd of people surrounding Georgia on the far side of the yard. Her back is to me, but she is toe to toe with an especially red-faced, enraged Mr. Jones. No .

“ Hala ! That’s her, all right. Did you see his face?” my mom is saying, but I don’t hear her, my blood beating in my ears.

I break into a sprint. I shift into autopilot damage control, a semi-robotic state. I wrench my phone from my pocket and dial 9-1-1. “Please send a car over to the PS 2 school yard immediately. There is an irate, aggressive man here, potentially armed, who is endangering the safety of hundreds of children.”

Pushing through parents and feeling like I’m wading through mud, I can now see that Georgia is not only toe to toe with Max’s dad, but she seems to shield Dorothy’s moms from him, the two of them in turn shielding Dorothy behind. The three women stand strong, feet planted, protecting Dorothy in a triangle formation with Georgia at the front, in the face of this raging bull primed to charge. Max, thankfully, is nowhere to be seen.

“—get the fuck out of here immediately, Mr. Jones, you racist, homophobic jerk. How dare you come here and start with these wonderful people, you sad, sorry, sack man—” I hear Georgia say. What the fuck are you doing, Georgia?

Finally, finally , I get there, heart pounding, willing my face into a mask of control. I squeeze my body in between the few inches remaining between Georgia and Max’s father. Mr. Jones, thankfully, is the one that stumbles back. I catch a whiff of liquor on his breath. I feel Georgia squeeze my hand from behind me .

“Mr. Jones,” I am detached from my voice, which is projecting a calm I do not feel inside. “Mr. Jones, why don’t you take a few more steps back, and let’s all relax? Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?” I speak to him in soothing tones, hands spread wide, like I am approaching a caged, wild animal.

“These abominations,” he slurs, pointing a swollen finger to the women behind me, spraying spittle everywhere with the force of his yelling, “do not belong here. It’s sinful. My son does not deserve this. My son does not deserve to be around these disgusting, debased?—”

“Mr. Jones,” I keep my hands spread open, slowly walking forward, forcing him to move back and away from the women behind me. “I hear what you are saying. I do.” I say, nodding my head, appeasing. “That sounds incredibly unfortunate. Do you want to talk about it in my office again?”

I spot five NYPD officers coming through the crowd behind him, two of them moving children and parents away from the area. I make eye contact with one of them and nod.

“I’m done talking to you. Go back to your country, you dirty, brown chi-” He doesn’t finish his sentence, because he is laid out on the pavement, five cops immediately on top of him, cuffing his hands behind his back.

I stare at him cooly as he screams unintelligible profanities from the ground. I realize that the only reason he went down is because of the element of surprise. The crowd parts as it takes the strength of four men to lift a thrashing Mr. Jones and get him to walk towards the street, everyone watching in disbelief.

One cop approaches me, one that I recognize. “We’re going to need a statement, Principal Flores.”

I nod. “We’d also like to file an order of protection against him. His son is always welcome here, but that man is no longer allowed on the premises. ”

The cop nods. “Can you and all the other affected parties come down to the precinct?”

“Yes, we’ll meet you there in a second,” I say, knowing the precinct is a block away. I make eye contact with Dorothy’s parents. They gesture towards the precinct, suggesting they’ll go straight there. I nod at them, hoping to convey sympathy, smiling at Dorothy, who refuses to look up from the ground.

I turn back to the officer. “Can we have some of your people stick around for a bit?”

“No problem, boss,” the officer gives me a mock salute and walks back towards his cruiser, talking to his team, pointing at the egress points around the yard.

I look around at the mass of children and families gathered around me. They all stare with wide, shocked eyes, frozen. “Everything is okay now, everyone. You are safe. I really, truly apologize for that. I hope you can still enjoy the rest of the festivities. We’ll still start the movie on schedule,” I glance down at my watch, “in about half an hour.”

Families trickle away. Some parents leave with their kids. I don’t blame them.

Heart still racing, my eyes scan the crowd then, searching, hoping, furious , but looking for the one person…

And I then spot her. Georgia’s slender, trembling body is seemingly bent in half, shrinking herself to be contained by the force of my five-foot-tall mother’s embrace.