“Here’s my number,” Detective James told me. He pointed to a yellowed stack of business cards on the corner of his desk and I took one. “Call me if you see those Scandinavians again.”
Sarah stood up and swung her bag around her shoulder.
“Wait,” I said, “don’t you need us to, I don’t know, help out?”
“Help out?” Detective James chortled a little. “No, son. We’ll take it from here.”
“But how—”
“Like I said, we’ll take it from here. The case is in good hands.”
“So that’s it?” I asked, standing in the parking lot with Sarah.
She didn’t say anything for a few moments. When we got to the sidewalk, she took out her phone and scrolled to the text she had gotten while we were in Detective James’s office.
Safeway. Tice Valley Road. WC. We have Balz. No Police.
“Who’s that from?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I know where that Safeway is. My grandma used to live in the old folks’ home across the street.”
Back in the car, Sarah opened the glove compartment, found a Dead Kennedys tape, and popped it into the stereo. I wanted to ask what the plan was, whether we should call for some help, like maybe the police. I wanted to tell her to slow down, or at least to signal when she was changing lanes. But the music was too loud to think. All I could do was hold onto the armrest, watch the green hills of Orinda flash past, and let the lyrics drill into my skull.
“So what’s the plan?” Sarah asked as we pulled into the parking lot.
“Ride the wave,” I said, a lame attempt at sarcasm.
“Yes,” she said, patting my knee. “Now you’re getting it.”
She put the car in park and scanned the lot. “Over there.” She pointed at a woman standing next to a pile of watermelons by the front entrance. Then she jumped out of the car and walked straight toward her, paying no regard to cars or shopping carts.
“Mrs. Eliason!” she called out.
And there she was, my old biology teacher, the new principal of our school. Mrs. Eliason was just about the last person I was expecting to see in that parking lot. But neither she nor Sarah seemed very surprised.
“So nice to see you here,” Mrs. Eliason said, scanning the parking lot behind us. “You kids wouldn’t mind helping me with these bags, would you?” She pointed to the shopping cart next to her.
“Sure,” I said.
We each took a bag and followed her to her car.
“I hear you two have had quite the morning.”
Before we could respond, Mrs. Eliason opened up her new BMW. Sitting in the passenger seat was none other than Mr. Balz.
“Hey, guys,” he said with a weak little wave.
He seemed good, as good as anyone could be after being thrown in the trunk of a car and whatever else he had endured.
“If you don’t mind,” Mrs. Eliason said, motioning to the backseat, “I think we’ve had a little misunderstanding.”
I glanced at Sarah and she looked at Mr. Balz, who nodded.
“All right,” Sarah said, “this ought to be good.”
While Mrs. Eliason loaded her groceries into the trunk, Sarah pressed a few buttons on her phone. I thought she might be calling the police. In fact, she was turning on her phone’s voice recorder.
You can find a transcript of the whole conversation on page 4. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, I’ll give you the overview.
It was all a big misunderstanding, Mrs. Eliason told us. What I had seen the night before was just a prank, a little thing that teachers do for fun. And the guys at Mr. Balz’s house, they were just trying to find his toothbrush. Mr. Balz nodded, but you could tell that he was just trying to make Mrs. Eliason happy. When we asked about the documents in Mr. Balz’s safe, Mrs. Eliason’s tone changed. She told us that no one would believe us, that she knew Detective James personally and that it would be easy to convince him that nothing untoward had happened, except for our false accusations and the documents we had faked. And, of course, something like that would most certainly reflect poorly on our academic standing, which would obviously put our college admissions in jeopardy.
She could ruin our futures with a few keystrokes. Or, she said, we could call Detective James right now and make it all go away.
“You have a choice,” she said. “Either you’re part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.”
Well, Mrs. Eliason, we’ve made our choice.
My fellow graduates, esteemed family members, after reading this article I hope you will be somewhat closer to the truth and can decide for yourself what you think.
Thank you for your time and congratulations again. This is your day. Enjoy it!
Frederick Douglass Elementary
by Aya de León
West Berkeley Flats
Keisha waited until everyone else left the office. It was Friday night and nobody seemed to be working late. Still, she shoved her sweatshirt up against the bottom of the door, in case any light could be seen. Only then did she turn on the fluorescent light in the windowless copy room.
A few weeks before, she had swiped a contract on letterhead from a real estate agency. Earlier that day, she had borrowed a coworker’s computer to write the fake lease for a rental apartment. She had copied the language off the Internet, but was anxious about any spelling or grammatical errors. Especially because she couldn’t save a forged document on a company computer. She had sat at her data-entry cubicle during lunch, reading the words over and over until they blurred, proofreading it to the best of her ability.
That night in the copy room, she cut and pasted and made copies of copies, until she had a reasonable-looking forgery on fine linen paper. She squinted at it in the glaring fluorescent. It looked legit. It “proved” that she rented a two-bedroom apartment in Berkeley.
Keisha and her seven-year-old son Marchand lived in Holloway, a few towns north of Berkeley, just past Richmond at the end of the BART line. Holloway’s student population was nearly all black and Latino, but the teachers were predominantly white. All of the schools were performing far below the national average, and the district was on the verge of bankruptcy. Her son had been bullied by bigger boys, and one of the teachers had been fired for hitting a student. Apparently, the administration had tolerated it for years, but one of the staff had caught it on video, and it had gone viral on social media.
That was the last straw. Keisha wasn’t going to allow her son to be in a school where white teachers were physically abusive. But she couldn’t afford private school. Even a partial scholarship was out of the question. Bay Area rents were exorbitant.
When she first got pregnant with Marchand, she and her boyfriend had a great one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in Richmond. She was working at the law office doing data entry. Her boyfriend was working as a security guard at the mall. They had enough income to save for the baby. But one night, her boyfriend got stopped by the cops for no apparent reason. Ultimately, he was hauled off for resisting arrest and battery on an officer. The dashboard cams, however, had been turned off. They beat him badly enough that he was in the hospital for a week. Then he was locked up.
Keisha gave up the apartment and moved in with her mom in Holloway. She was numb with grief for the first couple weeks, then she cried for another month.