"Stay down," Harlan Briggs said, stern as a metronome.
Naomi's heels hit the stage steps. Two students stood frozen in the wing of chairs: a white boy in a plaid shirt, mouth open; a white girl with blonde hair and a dark patterned top, both hands lifted as if she had meant to clap and forgotten how. Clarinets lay abandoned on stands. Someone's reed case had spilled.
Naomi did not raise her voice into a scream. She raised it into a blade.
"Take your hands off him."
For half a second, nothing moved except the flag's sag and Isaiah's shaking breath. Then Briggs's fingers loosened—not in apology, in calculation—and Naomi crossed the last three feet of polished wood as if the floor itself owed her a debt.
She did not yet know the story Briggs would tell. She did not yet know what the school would call it, what papers would be filed, what phrases would be polished until they shone with institutional calm. She knew only the shape of her child's back under another man's hand, and the clarinet pressed white-knuckled against a mustard sleeve, and the sound of her own pulse filling the brick room like a drum that would not stop.