Jokes

Chapter 1: The Fundraiser

The cherry blossoms along the main drive of Hartfield Academy had been strung with white lights, each branch glowing like something out of a catalog for the kind of life most people couldn't afford. Simon Harding stood at the edge of the east terrace, holding a glass of sparkling water he hadn't sipped, watching the crowd move through the evening in their careful choreography of wealth and goodwill.

He didn't belong here. He knew that. He'd known it since the day they'd enrolled the kids.

Hartfield Academy occupied forty-two acres of manicured grounds on the north side of Ashburn, Connecticut—a town that had once been farmland and was now the kind of place where even the gas stations had architectural review. The school itself was a collection of Georgian brick buildings arranged around a central quad, the oldest dating to 1897, the newest—the Colby Science Wing—completed just three years ago with a seven-figure gift from Richard Colby, whose name was carved in limestone above the entrance.

Simon taught ninth-grade English at Garfield High, the public school twelve miles south, where the ceiling tiles were stained and the textbooks were a decade out of date. His salary was sixty-three thousand dollars a year. The tuition at Hartfield was fifty-one thousand per child, per year, and he had two children enrolled. The math only worked because Victoria—his wife, his partner, the woman currently making her way through the crowd with a smile that could raise a hundred thousand dollars in an evening—sat on the school board and had negotiated a tuition reduction as part of her compensation. Even so, they were stretched thin. Even so, they were the poorest family at Hartfield by a comfortable margin.

He watched Victoria now. She wore a navy dress that he knew she'd bought on sale and then had tailored to look like it cost ten times what it did. Her dark hair was pulled back, her posture perfect. She was talking to Gerald Fisk, the headmaster, her hand resting lightly on his forearm in a gesture that communicated warmth and authority in equal measure. Victoria was good at this. She'd grown up in Ashburn, had attended Hartfield herself on a partial scholarship, and had spent the intervening decades learning how to move through these rooms as though she'd always had the right.

Simon had grown up in Bridgeport. His father drove a delivery truck. His mother worked reception at a dentist's office. He'd gotten into Yale on financial aid and had emerged with a degree in English literature and a conviction that education was the great equalizer. Twenty years of teaching had softened that conviction into something more complicated, but he still believed in it the way some people believed in God—not because the evidence supported it, but because the alternative was unbearable.

"Mr. Harding."

He turned. A young woman in a white catering shirt was holding a tray of something—bruschetta, maybe, or some variant he couldn't name.

"No, thank you."

She nodded and moved on. He watched her go, noting the efficiency of her movement, the way she kept her eyes down. The catering staff were from a company called Birch & Bloom, hired for every Hartfield event, and they moved through the crowd like ghosts—present, essential, invisible.

His phone buzzed. A text from Victoria: *Where are you? The Colbys want to talk. East hallway, Room 114. Come now.*

The tone was clipped, even for a text. Victoria was not a woman who wasted words, but this had an urgency that made him set down his glass and start walking.

Room 114 was on the ground floor of the humanities building, a classroom used for AP History during the school year. Simon had been in it once, during an open house, and remembered thinking that it had more technology in it than his entire department at Garfield. He pushed through the heavy oak door and found three people already inside.

Victoria stood near the windows, her arms crossed, her face arranged in an expression he recognized: controlled alarm. She looked like someone who'd just been told the house was on fire but hadn't decided yet whether to run or to check if the insurance was current.

Richard Colby sat on the edge of the teacher's desk, his jacket off, his shirtsleeves rolled to the forearms. He was a big man—six-two, broad through the shoulders, with the kind of tan that came from actual time outdoors rather than a lamp. He ran a private equity firm in Hartford and had been mentioned in the Courant more than once as a potential candidate for the state senate. His hair was silver at the temples, his jaw square, his watch worth more than Simon's car. He looked, at this moment, like a man trying very hard to appear calm.

Nicole Colby stood beside her husband, though not close to him. She was small and precise, with auburn hair cut to her jawline and the kind of bone structure that photographed well. She was holding her clutch purse with both hands, gripping it the way a person might grip the armrest during turbulence.

No one was smiling.

"Close the door," Richard said.

Simon closed it. The sounds of the fundraiser—the string quartet, the laughter, the clink of glasses—faded to a murmur.

"What's going on?"

Richard looked at Victoria. Victoria looked at the floor. Nicole looked at nothing.

"Sit down, Simon," Richard said.

"I'd rather stand."

Richard nodded, as though he'd expected that. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, which was draped over the desk chair, and pulled out a tablet in a pink protective case. Simon recognized it—or recognized the type. His daughter, Lily, had one just like it.

"This is Brooke's," Richard said, meaning his daughter. "She left it at our house last weekend. She usually keeps it at her mother's." A glance at Nicole, quick and loaded. "I was looking for something else—a photo she'd taken at a school event—and I found these."

He turned the tablet around.

Simon stepped closer. The screen showed a social media profile—an account on a platform he vaguely recognized, one of the ones the kids used. The username was @hartfield_truth_bomb. The profile picture was a stock image of a laughing emoji. The bio read: *Exposing the fakes. You know who you are.*

Richard swiped through the posts. Simon read them.

The first was a photo of a teenage boy—thin, dark-skinned, wearing a Hartfield uniform that looked slightly too large—with text overlaid: *When the charity case thinks he belongs here.* The next was a screenshot of what appeared to be a test score, circled in red, with the caption: *Scholarship student, scholarship grades.* Then another: a candid photo of the same boy eating alone in what Simon recognized as the Hartfield dining hall, captioned: *Table for one. Again. Maybe take the hint.*

There were dozens more. Simon stopped reading after the sixth one because his hands had started to shake.

"Who is this?" he asked, though he already knew.

"Tyler Green," Richard said. "He's a sophomore. Full scholarship. His mother works—" He stopped. "His mother is here tonight, actually. She's one of the caterers."

Simon felt the floor shift slightly beneath him. The young woman with the bruschetta tray. The efficient movement, the downcast eyes. He didn't know if that had been her, but suddenly every member of the catering staff became a person with a son in the ICU.

"Tyler Green attempted suicide four days ago," Richard said. His voice was flat, informational, the voice of a man who delivered bad news in boardrooms. "He's in the ICU at St. Francis. He's alive, but it's—" He paused. "It's serious."

The room was very quiet.

"The school launched an internal investigation," Richard continued. "They know about the accounts—there are three of them, actually, across different platforms. They haven't identified who's behind them yet. But I found this on Brooke's tablet, and when I looked more carefully, I found draft messages. Conversations between accounts. Coordinated posts."

He swiped to a different screen. A group chat. Four participants, each with an anonymous handle. Simon didn't recognize any of the usernames, but Richard pointed to them one by one.

"This one is Brooke. This one is her brother, Aiden. And these two—" He looked at Simon. "These two are your children. Lily and Jack."

Simon heard the words. He processed them. He understood their meaning. But for a long moment, they existed in a space that was separate from his actual life, as though Richard were describing characters in a novel, fictional people doing fictional things.

Then the separation collapsed, and he felt sick.

"You're sure," he said.

"I'm sure. The draft messages reference things only they would know. Inside jokes. Plans for specific posts tied to specific school events. There's a message from Lily's account—the anonymous one—that references a conversation she had with Brooke at our house. I checked the date. Brooke was at a sleepover at your place that night. The accounts were created using email addresses that trace back to—" He stopped himself. "I had someone look into it. Someone discreet. They're sure."

Simon turned to Victoria. "Did you know about this?"

"Richard just told me. Five minutes before you walked in."

Her voice was steady, but her hands weren't. She'd uncrossed her arms and was now pressing her palms flat against her thighs, a gesture he'd seen her make during arguments, during crises, during the moments when control mattered most.

"Four children," Simon said. "Our four children did this."

"Yes."

"And a boy is in the ICU because of it."

"Yes."

Simon looked at the tablet again. The laughing emoji stared back at him. He thought about Jack—his son, fifteen years old, who played lacrosse and liked Marvel movies and had asked for help with his college essay outline just last week. He thought about Lily—thirteen, quiet, artistic, the kind of girl who cried during nature documentaries. He tried to connect these children to the words on the screen and could not.

"What do you want to do?" he asked Richard.

Richard set the tablet down. He looked at Nicole, then at Victoria, then at Simon.

"I want to protect our families," he said. "And I want to do it before this gets any worse."