28. The Wrong Right Thing

THE WRONG RIGHT THING

There were certain images that burned in the boy's mind. His mother, toward the end of the pandemic, crying and crying and saying, "I can't do this anymore," not to him but through him.

The blood pooling on the pavement after he hit Toby. Seeing the bat in his hand. Realizing what he'd done.

The expression on Maya-Jade's expression at the fair after Emma had protectively shoved Toby behind her and yelled at the boy to go away. At first Maya-Jade had blinked in confusion, like she just couldn't understand what Emma was saying.

And then she could. He saw the awful truth of it dawning on her. She didn't cry or yell or spew out a dozen sentences in one second. She just stared at him, something zippering her expression closed, hiding away all that Maya-Jadeness, all that love.

He left the fairgrounds, the exuberant fireworks exploding behind him, Maya-Jade's disgusted expression in front of him. Hurting Maya-Jade was maybe not the worst thing that he'd done.

But it was close.

Hate crime.

That was what they charged him with. It carried punishments that were different from those for other crimes, explained the judge assigned to his case, a judge who loathed squandered opportunities. Which was why, in addition to being expelled from school and not being allowed to be within five hundred feet of Toby Crawford, the judge was considering sending the boy to a special locked facility for violent young offenders.

The defense attorney had objected to the harsh penalty for a twelve-year-old's first offense and requested a stay, which is the legal term for stalling. The judge agreed to delay the hearing until the end of summer.

Hate crime.

They weren't wrong. The boy had attacked Toby because he hated him. Not for the reasons the police or the judge or even his defense attorney seemed to think, especially after they had talked to Toby and the guidance counselor and seen the notation in their records that the boy was homophobic. But hate was hate. What difference did it make where it came from?

"I want you to know that I wouldn't have placed him with you if I thought he was a danger," the social worker told Etta after she called him that Monday after work to tell him what she knew, what everyone at Shady Glen now knew.

"I believe you, Frank," Etta said. She had known the social worker since he'd brought his own father to Shady Glen a decade before, and though he hadn't told her everything about the boy's background, she trusted the social worker and whatever instinct had told him the boy needed to be here. And he'd been right, hadn't he? The boy had transformed Shady Glen that summer.

"But he can't come back," Etta gently told Frank over the phone. "You know that, right?"

Of course he'd known this in his mind, but that didn't mean he'd felt it in his heart. When he hung up the phone, he put his head in his hands and cried.

Frank's wife knew that sometimes his cases got to him because of what he'd been through. She wrapped her arms around him and said, "I love you." Soon his daughters were there too, all hugging him.

Encircled in his family's embrace, Frank thought of the boy. Some of the cases he worked with were children neglected and unloved from the start, and that was a tragedy. But other times, the children had known love and lost it, and as the boy himself had attested, that hole where love had once lived was immense.

Why were some children lucky and loved wholly and constantly and others left to scramble for shards of affection? It had never seemed right to him. Never seemed fair. But Colleen, his friend's mother, used to say: Life is not fair. The most you can hope for is that it's just. It had been the guiding principle of the social worker's life.

He hugged his family and promised, silently, that he would envelop them in love his entire life. Then he took his car keys and drove to the boy's apartment to tell him what he suspected he already knew. That he was no longer welcome at Shady Glen.

"He's sick," his aunt Lisa announced when she answered the door. This was the excuse the boy had given that morning for not going to Shady Glen that day, and though she'd known there was nothing physically wrong with the boy, she'd never seen him like this.

"Of course," the social worker said, playing along with the charade. "I just needed to go over a few things with him. For the hearing."

"Right. That's coming up." She sighed. "I guess I have to take another day off."

"I'm afraid so," the social worker said, trying to keep his voice level. The hearing was serious. A judge was going to determine whether the boy had to go to a reformatory home or could stay put, with relatives who didn't particularly want him. This bruised a mostly healed wound in the social worker, who knew what it was like to be rejected by family.

Even though, at the end of the day, he had been one of the lucky ones. It was difficult at times—his father hadn't spoken to him for fifteen years; one of his brothers still didn't—but he'd had so much love to fill in the gaps: Uncle Phillip and Colleen and Daniel and of course his best friend of more than thirty-five years, Bug. Their ferocious love had surrounded him like a force field. Many people weren't as fortunate. It was his job to lessen that imbalance, to help make the world if not more fair, then more just.

But the boy, whose mother had left, whose aunt resented him. Did he have anyone to love him?

Did anyone love this child?

The question answered itself.

We loved this child.

I loved him.

Minna loved him.

Julio and Leyla loved him.

The social worker felt that love, understood that the boy had opened himself up to us and we had responded in kind. Some of us, like Vivian and Lois, would never forgive him, but others? There was grace in this world. The social worker knew that.

And that was why, instead of doing what he'd planned, which was to tell the boy he was fired, he ordered him to get dressed. "You're going to Shady Glen."

Fat, silent tears slid down the boy's cheeks. "I can't go back there," he said. "Everyone will hate me."

It was after six. Etta would be gone for the day. The social worker would supervise the visit, and tomorrow he would ask Etta's forgiveness for not seeking permission. The social worker knew what you knew, Olka. Sometimes you had to do the wrong thing to do the right thing.