Flanna waited in one of the overstuffed easy chairs scattered across the reading area of Taylor and Pi’s while Susan spoke on the phone with the school principal.
“I understand she was in a fight,” Susan almost growled into her phone. “What I don’t understand is why she is suspended.”
Susan paused, visibly shaking with anger while she waited. The explanation did not calm her.
“You have witnesses who say he attacked her, knocked her down, and then tried to punch her, and you’re suspending her for defending herself?”
She glanced over at Flanna, and the sharpest edge of her anger seemed to dull a little. She tried a sympathetic smile that looked like a grimace of pain, then turned her back.
Flanna had expected Susan Taylor to be hateful, unfair, and cruel, as befitting a Phoenix Girl, an
