I wrote the statement on a Tuesday night, at the kitchen table, with my father's coffee at my elbow and my history notes shoved to one side. It was supposed to be five hundred words. It ended up being fourteen hundred, because once I started I could not stop. It was not an argument against Ms. Halvorsen. It was a description of what happened, from where I stood, in order.
I wrote about the note. I wrote about what it actually said, in full, and what I had meant, and how I had been trying for four months to say something to a girl and had panicked and made it about food. I wrote about the substitute, and the moment she picked up the paper between two fingers, and the flat expression on her face. I wrote about the packet on the wall the week before the meeting, and the word explicit in the
