Connor Blake's statement, when it came, was handwritten and devastating in its childlike clarity. He wrote that Mr. Briggs looked mad, not scared. He wrote that Isaiah was crying and holding his clarinet. He wrote that Ms. Reed came in and said take your hands off him and that everybody got quiet like the fire alarm had stopped. He wrote that he wished he had said something louder. Naomi read it once and then again with Marta, and Marta said, "Juries understand this voice." Naomi said she did not want a jury if she could get a future. Both things remained true at once.
Emily Dawson's statement was shorter and filtered through a parent who insisted on being present. Emily confirmed the hold. She confirmed Isaiah's plea. She said she had been scared. Her mother added, on the record, that she believed teachers needed authority. Nguyen noted both comments with the same neutral pen. Neutrality, Naomi thought, was a tool that could look like fairness while functioning as fog.
On the day Briggs was finally walked out on leave—quietly, through a side entrance, no spectacle—Isaiah was in science class watching a video about mitosis. He did not know until last period, when a friend whispered it like gossip. Isaiah felt nothing for a full minute. Then he felt a flood of relief so intense it embarrassed him. He went to the bathroom and sat in a stall and breathed the way Dr. Shah had taught him: five things he could see, four he could touch, three he could hear. He saw the grey partition, the scratched door, the gap of tiled floor. He touched his own knees, his backpack strap, the cool metal latch. He heard a faucet, a distant bell, his own breath. When he returned to class, the world had not been repaired. It had only, for the first time in weeks, stopped actively ripping.
Naomi got the call from Nguyen at 3:40. She closed her office door and pressed her forehead to the wood. Marta found her like that and did not ask questions. She put a mug of tea in Naomi's hand and said, "One step. Then the next."
That night Isaiah asked if he had to go back to band if Briggs was gone. Naomi said no. She said band was not a debt he owed anyone. She said music would wait if it was truly his. He looked toward the bed, toward the hidden case, and did not retrieve it yet. Waiting, too, could be a form of claiming time.
Isaiah stopped practicing.