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“The first adult should have dealt with it. She did not. On Monday I will make certain there is a specific person you go to, and that everyone agrees what happens when you do.”
“That sounds like paperwork.”
“It will involve paperwork.”
“So nothing happens.”
I glance at her.
“That sounded like me.”
“I know.”
Gabi sees the ice pack first.
“What happened?”
“Tova hit someone.”
Gabi looks at her.
Tova puts her backpack on the break-room chair. “He cried.”
Gabi looks back at me.
“I am attempting not to reward that detail.”
“How’s that going?”
“Poorly.”
“I thought so.”
She smells faintly of coffee and the citrus hand cream she keeps beside the sink. Pretty, competent, and entirely uninterested in making either fact a performance, which took me eight months to believe and which I still test for occasionally, because people are not generally like that and I have been wrong before.
When I came here knowing almost nobody, Gabi was the first person who stopped slowing her English after I told her once that I understood it. She did not make a speech about it. She simply began talking at her own speed, and I have never told her what that was worth.
She takes my sandwich from the refrigerator, cuts it in half, and puts one piece in front of Tova.
“That was mine.”
“I know.”
“You are feeding my lunch to a suspended minor.”
“She said thank you.”
“Thank you,” Tova says.
Gabi raises her eyebrows at me.
“This feels coordinated,” I say.
“It is.”
A smile gets out before I can stop it. Gabi notices and, more importantly, says nothing.
For a moment nobody in this building needs anything from me.
