I buried my eight-year-old daughter. Eight years later a new student walked into my classroom with her face, and when I finally called that girl’s parents in for a meeting, the door opened and my own husband was standing in it.

There are three of them still in my house and I have not been able to do anything with them. One of them has a torn corner of paper in the front with one line of handwriting on it and I am not going to write the line down.

When I knelt beside her desk on that Tuesday and asked what was happening, the only thing she said was: please don’t call my parents, they asked me not to cause any problems.

I thought that was about her marks.

I want to say what I actually did with that sentence, because it is the only competent thing I did in this whole business and it is also the thing that blew it all up.

I did not accept it. I did not say all right, I won’t and let her go, which is what a tired teacher does at the end of a Tuesday.

I sat on that floor beside her desk and said: Etta, if there’s a reason I shouldn’t call them, you can tell me and it doesn’t leave this room unless it has to.

And she said nothing for about eleven seconds.

Eleven seconds. I counted them afterwards, over and over, in the car.