What was behind most of the tension was all of us girls watching Kumiko dance around Ian, while we tried not to let anyone else know that we were watching. By the time school had started, we had other fish to fry and, since nothing obvious had happened, everyone's general behavior had gone back to normal, mostly at least.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back a couple days to Tuesday, September 3rd. In our part of Oregon, the first day after Labor Day is for students new to a school to get oriented, mostly first years. It's the usual boring speech from the principal, then teacher introductions, learning the layout of the school and classrooms.
With our girls there was a bit more that than, given their needs. I went with them to meet their new teacher, Mr. Xandros Hafiz. He was relatively new to the school himself, having just started a year earlier. He'd come on some kind of exchange program from Greece, found that he liked it here, and somehow finagled a green card. Hardly surprising given that there is always a shortage of good teachers...in any country I imagine.
Jane had already checked him out, naturally, and it seemed that he was popular with both students and other faculty (not always easy to do) and was a gifted teacher. Somewhat unconventional in his methods, but that was good in my book. Conventional usually means boring.
It was apparent that he'd been briefed about the girls already as he spoke directly to them and not to me like so many adults do when the children are different. Gods but I hate that kind of condescension. He didn't seem impatient when they typed their responses. In fact, he suggested some generic greetings, questions, and answers that they could call up with just a couple of taps. A great way to save time and wear on the fingers.
He also warned them about another teacher, Mr. Baird. "Look girls. Don't go repeating this anywhere, OK?" He smiled at his little joke, then continued.
"He is only a few months from retirement. He is a Vietnam veteran, and his experiences there changed him. It is not surprising actually. The things that he saw there must have been beyond awful." He shook himself then added, "Well, that is not relevant at this time. What is important is that he has had trouble adapting to new technologies and teaching techniques. He does not agree with the way we 'coddle' students nowadays.
"What that means in your case is that you are not only NOT going to be locked up with the other 'defective' children," he shrugged an apology, "but you are also going to be using some of 'those new-fangled toys' that he does not understand. Frankly it all scares him, and other people like him.
"And what do people who are scared like that do when they don't want to admit it to themselves?"
The girls looked at each other and shrugged minutely, then looked a question at him.
"Yes girls, that was a question I expect you to answer. Put your thinking caps on. You have obviously met people like that before and must have thought about what drives them, at least a little. How do they behave?"
The girls exchanged another glance, then Kimiko typed a short response: "They get angry?"
Mr. Hafiz grinned down at them -- way down. I guess I should have mentioned that he was about 6' 2" and built like a football player who was still in good shape, in spite of him being about 40 years old. "Very good answer, and very likely you have the right of it. Yes, most people who are chronically fearful get irritable and angry. That being the case, I would suggest that you just avoid him whenever you can. There is always more than one way to get from here to there in this school, so just go around the long way if you spot him. OK?"
Both girls nodded and displayed big "THANK YOU" messages on their tablets. For a change, Kimiko wasn't bouncing even a little bit. Strange to see her so subdued. And, before you ask, yes, I'd warned Mr. Hafiz about her habit already. He'd agreed that as long as it didn't disrupt the concentration of the other children, he'd manage to ignore it as much as possible. That, and he planned to put her at the very back of the classroom, so fewer children would have a chance to see her if her control slipped.
Kumiko was going to be sitting right at the front. Both by her request and Mr. Hafiz' decision. Sitting them together could easily be viewed as favoritism. (Though Mr. Hafiz had already confided in me that his main reason was that he'd had more than enough trouble with kids texting in class the year before -- 4th graders already doing that -- sheesh! -- and he didn't want the girls tempted to "talk" to each other all day.) Little did he know...
In order to change the subject to something less depressing I threw out the most cliched thing I could think of on the spur of the moment, "Mr. Hafiz, your English is extraordinarily good."
"Thank you Ms. Knight. When we hosted the Olympics back in '04 anyone with even a modicum of English was put through an intensive training course. It was nearly as bad as....ah...well, that doesn't matter. Since then I made a point of keeping in practice, though my English is mostly English English, as I am sure you have noticed. Tourists from England go everywhere, even more so than your countrymen here."
Truth be told I had noticed a faint British tone to his voice, but I hadn't paid any attention. In my line of work almost everyone I met had some sort of accent.
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On Thursday I had a call from the school. "Mrs. Knight, I need you to come pick up the girls. Everyone is at the Sprague High School parking lot. You know where that is, right?"
"Yes I do. Why at Sprague?" I waved frantically at Jane and mouthed "EMERGENCY" at her. She dashed down the hall to her workshop.
"Ah, Oh dear. My god! There was an incident! Someone broke in and...well....nobody got hurt, thankfully, it's just that, well....."
I cut her off. "Thank you. I'll be right there." I hung up and walked down to Jane's room. Please note, no hurrying. The girls were OK. Hurrying in cases like this just causes injuries, and panic definitely causes worse. So I'd stay calm till after everything was sorted out. Then I might have a fit. Too early to tell though.
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I leaned in Jane's door. She was staring at her monitors, and she was on the phone with someone, but she did give me a big "thumbs up" over her shoulder, so I went out to get the car.
It was basically a parking lot from the turn off of Skyline onto Kubler all the way down to Sprague. I noticed police cars everywhere, including a SWAT team, but they were having trouble wading through the traffic too.
Did you ever notice that whenever something happens, even if only one person is involved, every cop in a 20 mile radius shows up? Then they just stand around for a couple of hours while no more than 4 or 5 of them are doing anything.
The police were screening every car that pulled into the Sprague driveway. Well, at least that part was useful. When the girls saw me, they ran across the smaller lot where they'd been standing and over to the car. Since nobody was moving at the time, there wasn't any danger. Hah! With those two, it was the other cars that were the ones in danger.
As they got closer I had a sudden near migraine from the intensity of their thoughts: "I'm so very very sorry Okaa-san. I know that you are going to be furious with me, but I did not know what else to do!"
"Kaa-chan, please don't get mad, at least not a lot. I had ta do it. There wasn't anything else I could do. Please, please!"
"Calm down. Discipline. Get excited later if you must, but calm down and tell me what happened. Why should I be angry at you? Oh my GOD! You aren't the reason for all of this, are you?
"No, of course not. Neither of you would be stupid enough to do anything that would cause a SWAT team to be called in. So, what did happen?"
The girls had one of their personal conversations and then, rather surprisingly, Kimiko told the story.
"I was sitting in the back of the room, so I saw it better. That's why I'm telling ya. I'm sure nee-chan will correct any mistakes I make."
She half-heartedly stuck her tongue out at Kumiko, but Kumiko looked too faded to invent a comeback, so Kimiko just started talking.
"Well, it started at about 1:30. Did ya know that the kids who eat sugary stuff for lunch start getting sleepy about then?"
She totally ignored my glare. This must be pretty serious, not that I wasn't suspecting that already.
"Mr. Hafiz was standing in the front of the room, tossing a baseball around. Not just from hand to hand, but behind his back, over his head, catching it between his legs, stuff like that. Even the sleepy kids were watching. He was talking the whole time, about how math is important in real life, whether we like it or not, and how math is important in baseball, and physics, and statistics."
"Then the door banged open. Someone had pushed it really, really hard. Anyway this thing in a suit came in and it had a gun in its hand. When it started ta lift it... We had ta do something Mama, we really did! There wasn't any time! I'm so SORRY!!!"
She started sobbing. Kumiko blotted her eyes with a tissue and took up the story from there.
"We threw our tablets at it Mama. They were what we had in our hands, and we did not have time to pick up anything else. But it was soon apparent that we had not needed to. We acted rashly and have destroyed your gifts to us. And they were so expensive. And now we cannot talk to the other children unless we write, and my handwriting is still even worse than Kimiko's!"
OK. Typical stress reaction when the victim, or potential victim realizes that she really is truly safe. Gotta move fast here, or I won't get a coherent story for hours.
"So, why is it that you didn't need to throw them?"
"Because...because Mr. Hafiz hit it in the head with the baseball even before our tablets hit it. He was closer after all. But we had no way of knowing that he would do that. We thought that if we did not do something ourselves, that thing would have started shooting people!"
"I take it that he hit him pretty hard?"
"I think that it was already unconscious when our tablets hit it. The other kids did not even seem to realize that anything had happened, and it was already over. The thing with the gun had already fallen on the floor when the other kids started to get up and run over to see what had happened.
"Mr. Hafiz told them to stay put and not move. You know, he barely raised his voice, but everyone did exactly what he said. Then he called the office and said that they had an incident and to lock-down the school and call the police.
"I did not have a good chance to look at them, but I know that the tablets are broken. The frames on both of them were crushed from hitting it."
Of course I didn't care about the tablets. Once the girls were coherent, Jane and I, and probably Ian too, would be slathering them with praise, comfort, and cookies. While I normally dislike sweets on principle, there are times when they're needed.
<
Why are you looking at me like that?>>
What did concern me, a lot, was how they described the gunman. They kept calling him "thing" and "it." Normally you don't talk about people like that. Heck, even in high stress situations you don't use those terms.
Combining thought with action (yes, I love cliches) I called Jane and briefed her quickly. The girls were holding each other and crying in earnest now, so I went ahead and told Jane about what Kumiko had said.
"Right Mama. I'll have Mr. Forsythe on it immediately. Yes, I have him back on the phone again. I think that we need to get our hands on the body before anyone else gets a close look at it. I know that he teases us about being paranoid, but this time I think that he'll agree with us. Something very weird is going on."
She paused. "It's even more weird that you know. There's something on the surveillance footage that is scarier than anything else that's happened today. I'll tell you when we get the girls home and calmed down.
"By the way, Mr. Hafiz called me a few minutes ago. It seems that the police are letting him "catch his breath". He says that he has the girl's tablets stashed and that nobody knows what they did. For the record, he's the one who stopped whatever that is...was."
"Huh?" Yes, back to my brilliant monosyllables again. Things were already strange, but this was even stranger.
"I can't tell you yet. I know that this is encrypted, but still, some things need to be face-to-face."
"OK Janie. We should be home in another 15 or 20 minutes, I hope."
FINALLY, a break in the traffic. I pulled off and used the road behind Kaiser Permanente to get over to Skyline. After that getting home only took 10 minutes.
The girls had, mostly, quit crying by the time we got home. I'd explained, 3 or 4 times, that I didn't care about the tablets and that what I DID care about was that they were safe. I think that they were finally starting to believe me.
Jane met us at the door, wearing her favorite apron. The heavenly aroma of chocolate chip cookies baking hit us the moment we got inside and the girls made a beeline for the kitchen. Children know what's really important.
As we followed them, at a somewhat more sedate pace, Jane whispered to me that the new tablets would arrive tomorrow. FedEx is a wonderful thing. Besides, I doubted that school would be starting up again before next week.