If I say my skin is vibrating off my muscles, which are bursting off clattering bones, that’s exactly what it feels like, with the fear that they just won’t hear us, and I’ve got to get it together. I want to yell in their faces.

I’m going to yell in their faces.

“I would like to go back inside now. I want to be warm and filled with coffee when everyone wakes up and the shit hits the fan,” Taylor says.

“This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, et cetera,” Nevaeh says.

We gather up our stuff. I take Nevaeh’s hand to help her down the icy stairs. Katherine plucks my mittens out of my pocket and hands them to me. The hearing is a few hours away, but right now the sun is rising, bright and sure, and on the sidewalk in front of us, our long shadows merge.

25

I keep calling it a trial room in my head, instead of a hearing room, which is maybe why the hearing room looks nothing like I pictured it. The floor isn’t marble, and the ceilings aren’t high overhead, no long velvet curtains, no judge in black robes. Instead, Ms. Flores shows us into a conference room down the hall from the dean’s office. It looks nothing like the rest of the building, with dull white walls and flat gray carpet, mini blinds pulled shut on each of the three windows lining the wall. A long conference table and black rolling chairs. Too ordinary, for the ragged block of ice cutting up my gut, the way my heart feels like it’s beating around the spike slammed directly through it.

“There,” Ms. Flores tells us, holding the door wide and waiting for us to move to the seats she’s pointing to, across from the honor board. The group isn’t large—two teachers, Mr. Banerjee and Ms. Warren, Nevaeh’s Shakespeare teacher. Three student council members—two I don’t know very well, though I bet Katherine knows them, and Ellory. She nods when she looks up from the laptop in front of her. I take a rough breath. I can feel Katherine trembling at my side. She and Nevaeh are hand in hand, and Katherine reaches for mine too. It’s shaking.

“We’re okay,” I tell her, my voice soft. We make our case or we go home, try to reassemble lives from whatever they leave us. We make our case or they take away Tisch, Juilliard, Angles.

They’ve torn us apart. They’ve demanded that we explain ourselves. We’ve come to fight. I have never felt this light-headedly frightened in my life.