They came closer. Mackenzie glared at Emma, as if daring her to say something. Emma felt her heart thrum and her stomach knot. She hated confrontations, and Mackenzie could be so intimidating. There was still time for Emma to turn around.

But she kept going. When she was a dozen feet from Mackenzie, she stopped. With her hands on her hips, Mackenzie snapped, “What?”

The words Emma wanted to say were in her throat, but she wasn’t sure she could get them out. Mackenzie kept glaring.

“I know what you were doing,” Emma said.

“What are you talking about?” Mackenzie asked in her most disdainful voice. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

Despite feeling like her body was being racked by tremors of fear, Emma forced herself to speak firmly. “You were going through the lockers, looking for money.”

“You’re crazy,” Mackenzie practically spit.

“I saw you,” Emma said.

“Liar.”

With a trembling hand, Emma held up her phone and played the video she’d just taken. The color left Mackenzie’s face. Her eyes darted like a trapped animal desperate to escape. But finally realizing that there was no way out, she hung her head. Emma studied this girl, who had treated her so meanly and tormented her for so long. It would be so easy to show the video to a teacher or to Principal Summers. Even better, to post it online for the whole world to see, and then show it to Principal Summers.

But instead she said, “I’m not going to tell.”

Mackenzie looked up, her eyes wide. Her mouth fell open.

“I should tell on you,” Emma went on. “But I want to show you that people can be kind and forgiving. You can be kind and forgiving. There’s no reason why you have to be mean. People would like you more if you weren’t. Maybe you’d like yourself more, too.”

Mackenzie blinked. Her eyes began to glisten.

“You have to give back everything you’ve taken,” Emma said. “Not just today, but all the other times, too.” Once again, she held up her phone. “And if I ever hear that money is missing from a locker again, then I really will show this to everyone.”

And with that, Emma turned her back on the Mistress of Microaggressions, and walked away down the hall. With a smile on her face that Mackenzie couldn’t see.

In the emergency room at Franklin Hospital, Aunt Mary held a small plastic cup of water against Crosby’s eye and told him to blink. The water soothed the burning. Wearing a blue paper hospital gown, he was propped up on a narrow bed in a room lined with medical equipment.

Aunt Mary smoothed his hair. When Crosby was first brought to the emergency room, the nurses made him remove his pants and shirt because both were still full of tear gas. Someone asked him his name and address, and when Crosby told them, there were murmurs and he heard someone say, “You better get Mary.”