"Then let me take you."
"No, just tell me, I don't want to inconvenience ..."
But she was already five steps ahead of him down the corridor.
Mrs. Jones was still there, though she was already shrugging on her coat and if Step had waited to get directions instead of having a guide, he probably would have missed her. So he thanked Dr. Mariner profusely, even as he wondered whether this interview was even necessary. Clearly the librarian's version of reality had been the true one.
"Why Mr. Fletcher," said Mrs. Jones, after Dr. Mariner had left. "We don't have many fathers come to school. If only you had made an appointment, I could have stayed longer."
"Perhaps this won't take long," said Step. "I mostly came to talk to you about Stevie's project."
"His project?" she asked.
"His second- grade project. The-environment thing. He did an underwater scene. Out of clay."
"Oh, of course, yes. That was so creative."
His heart sank. He should be relieved, of course, to know that Mrs. Jones had not given him a C. But it meant Stevie had lied.
No, he told himself. Don't give up on Stevie so easily.
He reached into his pocket and switched on the microcassette recorder. He had already tested it in the pit at work. It picked up very well through the denim of his jeans.
"I wondered if you could tell me, Mrs. Jones. What grade did you give Stevie for that project?"
"Oh, I can hardly remember, that was so long ago."
"A week ago," said Step.
"Oh, here it is." She had her thumb down on the gradebook, but Step noticed that she glanced toward the door. Why? To see if Dr. Mariner was still there? "My," she said. "I see here that he got a C."
"Ah," said Step. He felt himself to be on fire inside. Stevie had told the truth. And so had the librarian. The project won first place, and yet somehow, somehow it got a C.
"Yes, that's it," said Mrs. Jones. "Definitely a C."
"Well, now," said Step. "That's hard to understand."
"Not really," said Mrs. Jones. "There's nothing wrong with a C. It means average."
Step had already scanned down all the other grades in the column of her gradebook where Stevie's C was marked. "It's hardly average," said Step, "when everybody else got A's and B's."
"Now, Mr. Fletcher. We don't let parents look at other children's grades, and you clearly were peeking at the wrong column of my gradebook."
But Step was looking around the classroom, not at her. "I was hoping," he said, "to see what an A project looked like, if Stevie's was only worth a C. It would help us as his parents, you see, to know what the standard is that he must meet, so we could help him do better on future projects."
There was the thing he was looking for. A blue ribbon, pinned to a bulletin board. Nothing written on it or by it. Just a blue rib bon.
"Oh, the projects have all been returned," said Mrs. Jones. "Stevie chose to throw his away, I'm afraid, but it was just a mass of clay by then. It was a shame what those ill- mannered children did to his project, but then, we really didn't have any practice at dealing with sculpture. If Stevie had brought a poster like everyone else, it wouldn't have happened."
Step reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the folded-up assignment sheet DeAnne had armed him with. "I've looked and looked on this assignment sheet you sent home, and it says nothing about a poster. It just says, 'A depiction."'
"Well, you see," said Mrs. Jones, "that means a poster."
Step looked back at the blue ribbon. "Ah," he said. "And how was I supposed to know that? I mean, the Mona Lisa is a depiction, isn't it? And yet it isn't a poster. And wouldn't you call Michelangelo's David a depiction?"
"All the other parents managed to figure out that a poster was what was intended," said Mrs. Jones. Her tone was getting quite frosty now.
"I see," said Step. "Perhaps they knew the local custom. But we're new here, and we did not."
"Obviously," said Mrs. Jones.
"But surely you're not telling me that Stevie's project was given a C because it wasn't a poster, are you?" asked Step.
"Not at all. As I said- it was creative."
"Then I still need your help to figure out what Stevie did wrong."
"And I keep telling you, Mr. Fletcher. You don't have to do something wrong to get a C. That signifies average. It was an average project."
Short of calling her a liar right now, there wasn't much Step could say to that, not directly. It must be time to talk about the ribbon. "Well, Mrs. Jones, it makes me wonder why Dr. Mariner would give the first-place ribbon to an average project."
"Dr. Mariner has her judgment, and I have mine," said Mrs. Jones.
Yes, thought Step. She is definitely sounding quite cold. "Oh, of course," said Step. "But you see, you didn't give your grades until after Dr. Mariner had made her decision, did you?"
"My judgment was completely independent."
"But wouldn't you say, Mrs. Jones, that for you to give the lowest grade in the class to the very project that won first place, you must surely have found something wrong with it?"
He faced her. Her expression was hard, but she was holding her hands together in front of her very tightly.
Oh, yes, she's afraid. She's very much afraid. Because everything that Stevie told me was true.
"Very well, Mr. Fletcher," she said, ending the silence at last. "I will tell you what was wrong with Stevie's project. It was the writ ten portion of the project, the report. The other children turned in reports of five or six pages. Stevie's report was only two pages."
With great difficulty, Step controlled his rage. "Stevie's paper was typed. Was anyone else's paper typed?"
"That hardly matters," she said.
"They were all written in big letters, weren't they- like these papers on the board. Right?"
"Of course. This is the second grade, Mr. Fletcher."
"My rough count here gives me ... let's see ... about fifty or sixty words per page, handwritten. Is that right?"
"Oh, I suppose."
"But Stevie's paper was single-spaced, and that means he got between four and five hundred words to a page. So each of his pages was about the same amount of content as-"
"A page is a page!" said Mrs. Jones.
"And the assignment sheet," said Step, "said nothing about a minimum number of pages."
"Everyone else managed to figure out that four or five pages were required! And they didn't have their mothers type it for them-they used their own handwriting."
"The assignment sheet didn't say anything about penmanship being part of the assignment," said Step. "So naturally Stevie thought he should do the same thing I did with my dissertation. He went to my computer, turned it on, brought up WordStar, and typed every letter of every word himself. Then he printed it out and stapled it- himself."
"That was another problem," said Mrs. Jones. "The other children's reports all had very nice plastic covers, and your son's report was nothing but two sheets of paper with a staple. It showed a lack of respect."
"The assignment sheet didn't mention a cover," said Step. "If it had, there would have been a cover. But in graduate school, you see, I turned in my papers with a staple in the corner. So of course Stevie thought that that was the grown- up way to do it. And in fact, Mrs. Jones, it is, isn't it? Surely you're not telling me that the difference between an A and a C is a twenty-nine-cent cover?"
"Of course not," said Mrs. Jones. "It's just part of the difference."
"Don't you think that computer literacy and college- level presentation should count for him rather than against him?"
"Other children don't live in wealthy homes with computers in them, Mr. Fletcher. Other children don't have fathers who went to college. I'm hardly going to give one child an advantage over others because of money."
"I'm not rich, Mrs. Jones. I work with computers for a living. I have a computer at home the way car salesmen sometimes bring new cars home." Watch it, Step. You're letting her sidetrack you. "What matters is that Stevie's paper was probably ten times as long as any of the other children's papers. He did all the work himself, and he did not violate the assignment sheet in any way. Now, why did the first-place project get a C in your class?"