The school was deserted, the classrooms silent, the halls dark. It was, Shaindele thought, like walking into a nightmare. Everything the same, but subtly, eerily sinister. Like your bedroom as a child when there is no moon and the lights go out.

Was she about to be thrown out of school? And did it matter? She wasn’t sure. But then, what would her life look like? The dream of being a teacher would be flushed away like an appetizing meal that had undergone a process of digestion, leaving it putrid waste. This bothered her more than the idea that the shadchonim wouldn’t want to find her a husband. Who needed a husband? Only you didn’t want your family to suffer because of you, of what you’d done. You didn’t want your good and pious tateh looked at sideways, whispered about; or your kind if clueless stepmother maligned and turned into the butt of jokes or malicious lies and gossip. And why should your blameless, naive older brothers ensconced in their comfortable little haredi lives, the lives they’d been brought up in and were eager to continue, be thrown off course by roadblocks they’d done nothing to erect? Let them punish her all they wanted, she thought bravely. Just let them leave her family alone.

But would anything be up to her at this point? Or was it all a lost battle and they’d been summoned simply to negotiate the terms of their surrender?

They ascended the stairs where a sliver of light banded beneath a single door. They didn’t knock, walking immediately inside. The secretary was gone, her desk a pile of loose papers in disarray. The door to the principal’s office stood open. Yaakov walked through, beckoning to his wife and daughter to follow.

Rabbi Halpern didn’t get up, waving off-handedly toward the hard chairs that were arranged in a semicircle at a safe distance from the large desk behind which he was barricaded.

Yaakov ignored him, standing tall, but nodded to Leah and Shaindele to be seated.

“Rav Halpern,” he said, offering the man his hand, “Shalom aleichem.”

Reluctantly, the other man half rose, taking it. “Aleichem shalom, Rav Lehman,” he responded without enthusiasm, averting his eyes from the women with a thin pretense of piety that did little to mask the obvious hostility and arrogance transparent in the twisted puckering of his thick lips beneath the heavy dark mustache and even heavier beard.