“. . . And so then all of their cutie marks got scrumbled,” Esme was saying. Scrumbled was her way of saying scrambled. “And Rainbow Dash was trying to talk to the animals and Fluttershy wasn’t funny and Applejack couldn’t make apples! Isn’t that crazy, Mommy?”

“Uh-huh.” Ronnie watched all the moms approach school. Every woman who passed could have been the culprit.

“Do you know how they got all their cutie marks back?” Esme chattered.

Except Ronnie really didn’t want this to be the work of a mother. She wanted to be friends with the parents. Let Esme go on playdates and to birthday parties and frolic with kids in the park. Esme deserved as much. And also, how could a mother have executed such a complicated technological plan? Unless she’d hacked into Esme’s device? And all the moms had been at the breakfast—who’d had the time?

So what did that mean, then? According to Lane, all the teachers were saints.

“Mommy!”

Ronnie peered at the little girl in the car seat. Both her pony toys lay on their sides now, and Esme was showing her what Ronnie called her “bossypants face.”

“Firstly, you didn’t answer me,” Esme said. She did this when she was angry: talk even more like an adult. Since she’d learned to talk, people had marveled at how her verbal skills were years beyond her age. “And also, why aren’t we going into school?”

Ronnie took a breath. “Sorry, ladybug. I was just thinking about something.”

She had a choice. She could peel away from this parking lot and never look back, not unlike what she had done in Cobalt. Except that would be to Esme’s detriment. Also, what would Lane say when he didn’t see Esme on the playground later? And how would Ronnie explain that she’d pulled Esme from school on her second day?

Another option, then: she would walk Esme in with her head held high. What had the girls at Kittens told her? You’re as good as anyone else. Don’t let those assholes make you think you’re nothing.

“Let’s go,” Ronnie said, and grabbed Esme’s backpack from the passenger seat.

She didn’t make eye contact with a single person as they crossed the blacktop to the red door. Inside, parents and kids crammed the school hallway. No one was looking at Ronnie, per se, but if whoever wrote that note was there, they’d see she hadn’t backed down.

Esme pulled Ronnie to her cubby in the hallway and helped the little girl out of her coat. “Excuse me, Miss Stuckey?” came a polite voice behind her. Piper’s assistant, Carson, approached. He wore a fluorescent crossing-guard vest and a petulant expression. “Um, we stress that Silver Swans is a walking-only zone, except on the playground. Can you try to remember that next time, in the parking lot?”