Chapter 6 : Monday morning the low overcast had come back, the same flat white sky from Friday, like the week had never moved. My mother drove me. We left the house at 6:55. She was wearing what she wears to work: dark slacks, a soft blue blouse with

We walked in through the front doors at 7:24. The front office was empty of kids. The secretary's desk had one of those little school-issue cups of pens. Mrs. Okafor's desk is by the door to the attendance office, in the back corner, where she can see everybody come in. She looked up when we walked in, and she looked at my mother, and she looked at me, and she did not smile, and she said, "Room 100."

I said, "Yes ma'am."

She said, "You're two minutes early."

"Yes ma'am."

"The vice principal is not in the building," she said. "He will not be in the building today. Don't ask me why."

I didn't ask.

Room 100 is the small conference room off the front office — the one with the long table and the fishbowl window that looks out into the lobby, where the attendance committee meets, where kids' families meet, where the district's investigators meet. My mother and I walked in at 7:26. Alvarez was already there, in a chair on the far side of the table, with a spiral notebook open in front of her and a yellow legal pad under it and a pen in each hand, which I would later understand meant she had already taken notes and was taking more. She stood. She shook my mother's hand. She shook mine.

"Thank you for coming," she said.

Then she said, "Kayla, before we start, I want to say something, and I want to say it on the record, because there is going to be a record of this morning, and I want it to include this."

She looked at the notebook. She looked at me.

"On Friday afternoon, before the pep rally, Vice Principal Pruitt entered the front office, requested the third-period attendance log, took it to his office, and returned it eleven minutes later. We have the front-office camera footage showing him with the log in his hands during that window. We have the office-copy log showing Miss Brenner's row marked U. We have the original log showing Miss Brenner's row marked U, and the row beneath it, Nicolas Vega, altered from T to U. Both margins initialed C.P. We have Mrs. Okafor's column showing that the original had already been marked E pending confirmation as of seven forty Friday morning. We have Miss Brenner's email confirmation from the front office. We have a call log for Friday at one-oh-five p.m. from a phone number belonging to Denise Brenner. I want to read this list into the record, Kayla, so that you understand that as of this morning there is no longer any question of what happened. There is only the question of what happens next. Do you understand?"