Raising Jake

by Charlie Carillo

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

The best kind of journey, one you don't want to end. . .funny, moving. --Mike Lupica, New York Times bestselling author of Heat In Charlie Carillo's funny, insightful novel, a divorced man gets to know his seventeen-year-old son in a tale that rewrites the book on quality time together. . . Sammy Sullivan is working his way down the ladder of success. Divorced and pushing fifty, his relationships have the longevity of a fruit fly. But how many men can get themselves fired and have their only son expelled from prep school all in one day? Now, after almost eighteen years, he and Jake may finally get to know each other. (That's if his ex-wife--the super-achiever Sammy can only dream of being--doesn't find out.) Jake knows virtually nothing about his roots. So, Sammy shows him the old neighborhood in the far reaches of Queens. But it's been thirty years. The older woman Sammy lost his virginity to now uses a walker to get around. Most of his hangouts are long gone. It's dreary, born-to-lose stuff. But Jake is on a mission. Wise beyond his (and his dad's) years, he doesn't want his father to miss out the second time around on the good things he blew the first time. And they've got a whole weekend together--a journey where Sammy will confront his, dysfunctional childhood and Jake will face a past he never knew he had. This isn't your typical father-son story--one is still growing up. The other is his son. "In the tradition of Tom Perotta, Carillo explores the strength of the family bond, the power of forgiveness, and the hope that comes from embracing second chances. . .truthful, and hilarious."--Alison Grambs, author of The Smart Girls Guide to Getting Even "I don't like funny, touching novels because they make me wish I'd written them myself. I enjoyed Charlie Carillo's book from beginning to end and now I'm miserable." --Sherwood Kiraly, author of Diminished Capacity "A literary romp through the minefields of a totally normal, and totally abnormal, family. . . I actually laughed out loud and kept turning the pages to make absolutely sure that all worked out at the end." --Cathy Lamb, author of Henry's Sisters "Scathingly hilarious and truthful." --Sally Jenkins Queens-born Charlie Carillo, like his protagonist Sam Sullivan, worked at the New York Post as a journalist for many years. He is also the author of My Ride with Gus and divides his time between New York City and London, England, where he works as an independent television producer.

Release date: August 7, 2009

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 353

Sample

It’s the first phone call from my son’s school that I’ve ever gotten at work, and of course I immediately think the worst. I’m a divorced father who catches glimpses of his seventeen-year-old son on weekends, snapshots of his life ever since I split from his mother, and suddenly my guts go into free fall with the knowledge that anything, absolutely anything could have happened to him. Failing grades. A drug habit. A fatal overdose. Whatever it is it’s my fault, entirely my fault for not being around.

These jolly possibilities shoot through my brain in less time than it takes to sneeze. If they ever have a Guilt Olympics, I’ll carry the torch at the opening ceremonies.

The caller identifies himself as the headmaster, and I can feel sweat breaking out along my hairline. This is the guy who writes letters to me and the rest of the parents, asking for contributions to fill in the “gaps” not covered by tuition payments. Those payments come to about twenty-four thousand dollars a year, two grand per month, including February, which has just twenty-eight days. I’ve always been proud of myself for never writing a contribution check, not once, not ever. I probably wouldn’t have written the tuition checks, either, except that those payments are part of my divorce agreement, and if I miss one I’m in court, and as much as I hate writing a tuition check, it beats the hell out of writing a check to a lawyer.

That’s not quite true. The truth is that unless my kid goes to private school, he’ll wind up in a school where he has to pass through a metal detector every day, and who wants that for their child? Like so many parents trapped on the island of Manhattan, I do what I have to do, and tell myself that it’s well worth the nightmares triggered by ever-deepening debt.

My mouth has gone dry. I have to lick my lips before daring to ask, “Is my son hurt?”

“Oh no! Nothing like that!” The guy chuckles apologetically. “Forgive me for frightening you, Mr. Sullivan.”

Actually, this is just the jolt I need to burn the fuzz off a hangover I’ve been nursing all morning. Now, at least, I’m clear in the head. Nothing like a death scare to blow the pipes clean.

“Why are you calling?” I ask, nearly adding the word “Headmaster” to the sentence. It’s a funny word, that one, the kind of word you’d sooner associate with leafy English boarding schools than you would a soot-stained brick building on the Upper West Side.

The headmaster clears his throat. “It’s a matter I’d prefer to discuss in person. Could you come to my office at one p.m.?”

An hour from now. “That’s not a great time for me, Headmaster.”

“I thought maybe you could extend your lunch hour.”

“I don’t get a lunch hour. Look, his mother will be back in town on Monday. She’s really the one who handles educational matters.”

My son is obviously not in a life-and-death situation. It seems fair to pass this mysterious mess off to the ex, the one who selected and insisted upon this school in the first place.

“I’m afraid it can’t wait,” the headmaster says. “I feel I really must see one of Jacob’s guardians today.”

Guardians. He actually says guardians. That’s a bad news word, if ever there was one. I start to sweat all over again. “What the hell did he do?”

“One p.m., then?”

“Yeah, all right, I’ll be there.”

He couldn’t have picked a worse time for a meeting. The newspaper goes to press at 2:00 p.m., and the story I’m working on this particular day is a bit complicated, and so far I’m not getting anywhere with it.

The story is this: was that bottle of liquid Britney Spears was photographed swigging from during a stroll with her elaborately tattooed boyfriend a bottle of whiskey, as the editors of the New York Star would like to believe, or a bottle of ginseng, as Britney’s publicist vows it was? Believe it or not, this is our third day covering this matter, and the bosses are eager to stretch it to a fourth. It’s just an excuse to publish the photos over and over, but by now our excuses are starting to seem a little lame.

It’s also a tightrope walk, legally speaking. The words have to be just right, all your “allegedlys” and “reportedlys” tucked in place, which is probably why the story goes to a crusty old rewrite man like me. I’m good at this shit, it both shames and thrills me to say. I can imply things without actually saying them. I can titillate without showing tits.

And now, suddenly, I’ve got to dump this hornet’s nest into somebody else’s lap so I can go and see the headmaster at a school I haven’t set foot in for more than five years.

The day city editor is a prematurely balding Australian named Derek Slaughterchild, and I’m not looking forward to telling him I have to bolt with a deadline coming up. Slaughterchild is one of those guys who learned young that the way to move ahead in the tabloid news game is to go through the day with a pained, miserable look on your face, hang around long past your shift, and always be anxious. He believes that work done in a state of panic is better than anything achieved in a state of relaxation.

And that’s pretty funny, because his father, a lovable alcoholic named Malcolm Slaughterchild, was his polar opposite. Malcolm was the day city editor back when I was a copyboy, nearly thirty years ago, and no matter what was happening I don’t think his pulse rate ever changed. Moments after Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, everyone in the newsroom was running around screaming, and as I handed the latest wire copy to Malcolm he took a deep breath, ran a hand through his thick, silvery hair and murmured, “This could alter my dinner plans.”

Apparently such a temperament skips a generation. Malcolm and his ruined liver were dead and buried, his son was alive and miserable, and here I was, damn near fifty years old, screwing up my courage to ask for the afternoon off. Working for a tabloid newspaper is a little bit like being in high school forever. They scream your name when they want you and treat you like an untrustworthy child, and prom night never comes.

“Derek.”

He looks up at me squinty-eyed, the light from the overhead fluorescents making his scalp gleam at the crown, where his hair is thinnest. “You wrapped up?”

“Not yet.”

“We really need a new angle on this Britney bullshit, Sammy. Got to freshen it up, mate.”

“Yeah, well, sadly for us, there wasn’t a second photographer on the grassy knoll.”

If he gets the Kennedy reference, his face doesn’t show it. “What have you got, then?”

“Nothing.”

“Mate.”

“Derek, we broke the story. Then we broke Britney’s denial. Then we went to the man on the street for his opinion. The only thing left to do is wait until she checks into rehab.”

For the first time, he seems interested in something I have to say. “Is she checking into rehab?”

“I have no idea. But I don’t think there’s any way you can abuse ginseng, so I’d say it was unlikely.”

Derek picks up the photo of Britney and stares at it like a man hoping to hear voices from above. Suddenly he says, “What about her body language?”

“Excuse me?”

“Her body language, mate.” He runs a bony finger along the length of Britney’s body. “The way she’s positioned. Does it or does it not indicate whether she’s drinking a health supplement, or whiskey?”

If you ever find yourself working for a tabloid publication, remember that it’s important not to laugh at moments like these. You’ve got to take every editor’s suggestion as seriously as Marie Curie took the tons and tons of dirt she boiled to get that one little teaspoon of radium. The only difference in the tabloid game is that you boil tons and tons of bullshit to get one little spoonful of dirt.

My heart is hammering away. I am actually afraid to ask this man for the afternoon off. I am ashamed of myself for being afraid to ask. I am angry at myself for being so cowardly about the whole thing.

And I’m gasping as if I’ve just run a hundred-yard dash.

Derek notices. “Are you all right, there, mate?”

I force myself to calm down, wondering where the tumor that’s sure to be triggered by all this pent-up anxiety will strike me—lungs? Liver? Kidneys? Ten years from now, I’m going to die of cancer of the something-or-other because of my reluctance to ask for a few hours off in the middle of a workday. This is insane. I’ve just got to go ahead and do it.

“Thing of it is,” I begin, fighting unsuccessfully to quell the quaking in my voice, “I’m going to have to hand the story off to somebody.”

Derek’s eyes narrow. “Why must you hand the story off?”

“I need to duck out of here for about two hours.” I’ve picked a bad verb with “duck.” It sounds like I mean to run out to the racetrack, but it’s too late to worry about it now.

Derek is shaking his head. “I need a reason, mate.”

I stare at him long and hard, this son of a man I liked very much, a man who used to bring little Derek to the newsroom when he was a toddler. He had a red fire engine that he’d roll back and forth along the floor, and once one of its rubber wheels came off its rim and rolled out of sight, so I got down on my hands and knees and found the little black doughnut under a desk and squeezed it back onto the rim, good as new. I handed the truck back to the teary four-year-old and urged him not to cry, because everything was okay, and the kid even thanked me for what I’d done, unbeknownst to anyone but the two of us.

And if someone had tapped me on the shoulder that day and told me that the cute kid in short pants would grow up to become my boss, busting my balls over a request to take a few hours off from work, who would have believed it?

Of course, there is a way out. I could tell Derek that it’s an emergency of some kind involving my son, but I wouldn’t even share my zip code with this man, much less a problem from my personal life. I’m actually suffering a miniature nervous breakdown here, having imagined everything up to and including my son’s death, and all I want to do is get to his school and find out what the hell is going on.

“Derek,” I manage to say, “just trust me. I have something important to do, so I’m going.”

“No, you’re not,” he singsongs.

“I’m not?”

“Leave now and you’re fired.”

He says it flat out, no emphasis on the word “fired,” no real emotion in his voice. He means what he says, and not only that, he’s happy to say it. This has been building for months now, I suddenly realize. He knows I think he’s a lousy editor, and he can taste my contempt for him. I guess he’s grown tired of the taste.

I’m not exactly dealing from a position of strength. I’m one of the dinosaurs in the newsroom, older than most of the reporters by fifteen, twenty years. The paper has always been lousy, but there was a time when it was the best lousy thing around, funny and irreverent and occasionally even sympathetic to the plight of the little man. We used to do stories about honest cabbies who returned lost wallets. Now the only time we write about a cabbie is when he turns out to be a suspected terrorist, or when a celebrity stiffs him out of a tip or pukes in the backseat. Mostly we’re up the asses of celebrities—following them, photographing them, trying to guess what they do with their genitals, and how often. It doesn’t take much to become a celebrity anymore, so the field is huge, a cluster of idiotic young people either posing for the camera or pretending to dodge it.

Something in me snaps. Suddenly my fears are gone. All that’s left is rage, but it’s not a blind rage. In some weird way, this is exactly how I wanted it all to play out—me versus the asshole in charge.

I clear my throat and say, “You’re going to fucking fire me, Derek?”

He’s almost smug about it. He leans back in his chair and folds his hands together behind his head. “You heard what I said. If you want permission to go, I’ll need a reason.”

I think it’s the word “permission” that does it. It’s in the same league with “guardian.” Suddenly the ridiculousness of it all comes into diamond-hard focus. I am literally embarrassed by the way I have spent my working life.

I want to bash Derek’s face in. There hasn’t been a newsroom punch-out since the old days, when boozing chain-smokers would mix it up and then buy each other drinks after hours. Now nobody smokes, and nobody fights. The reporters belong to gyms and exercise in spandex pants, to the barking commands of their personal trainers. When conflicts arise, they phone their lawyers. I know that if I touch Derek, I’ll wind up in court. Enraged as I am, I remain sane enough to know I don’t want to go to court, so I can’t hit him.

All I can do is leave. In my head, I can hear the drumroll that precedes my next words.

“I’m going now, Derek.”

“You’re fired, Sullivan.”

These are the words every man in the world is supposed to fear, right up there with “It’s inoperable,” but the first thing that hits me is the absurdity of the fact that this little weed should have the clout to speak such a sentence. A short, perfect sentence, noun-verb, bang-bang. Hemingway couldn’t have put it more succinctly, and Derek Slaughterchild is no Hemingway.

I look at my hands, where I can feel a tingle of blood flooding to my fingers. Without realizing it I’d balled my hands into fists and loosened them at last at the words “You’re fired,” and what, I can’t help wondering, would a body language expert have to say about that? (“Loose hands? Well, it’s clear that deep down, you’d been clenching your fists for many, many years, and not until you were free of this miserable job did you finally relax….”)

I rub my hands together, push the blood along. “So that’s it? That’s all there is to it?”

“Give your notes to Hoffmann.”

“There aren’t any notes, asshole!”

I’m practically shouting. Derek picks up his phone and dials. “I’m calling security,” he says, his voice suddenly gone shaky. “You’ve got five minutes to pack up.”

I walk back to my desk, every eye in the newsroom on me. The only good thing is that a few years back, when the thrills had gone out of my job, I got rid of all the shit that had accumulated in and around my desk, so I have nothing to pack—no files, no personal effects, nothing. It’s as if I always knew my departure would be sudden and ugly.

And I have no photographs to take off my cubicle walls, because I never hung any pictures here. I hate the whole idea of trying to turn the workplace into a little piece of home. This was never home, it was where I went to make money.

Until today.

Hoffmann is looking at me over the border between our cubicles, both fascinated and scared, as if getting fired might be contagious. He’s about fifteen years younger than me, single and wild, a true cowboy of tabloid journalism. His blind quotes always sound as if they’ve been spoken by the same person, a person who sounds a lot like Hoffmann.

I put on my jacket, straighten my tie, tap on the partition separating me from Hoffmann. “Feel free to knock this down and make a duplex, Hoff.”

“Are you really fired?”

“I am canned goods, man.”

“Aren’t you going to appeal it?”

“No.”

Hoffmann extends a hand over the partition to shake with me. “I’m really sorry, Sammy.”

“Water my plants, would you?”

“You don’t have any plants.”

“Good point,” I say. “Good luck with the Britney story.”

I walk to Derek’s desk for the last time. His hands are trembling as he pretends to read the latest edition of the newspaper.

“Hey Derek—”

“Don’t come any closer! Security will be here any minute to escort you to the sidewalk.”

“Fuck security, I’ll be gone before they get here. Listen to me, Derek.”

He sighs with mock impatience as he looks up at me, feigning courage. “I’m listening.”

“I’m sorry I fixed your fire engine that time.”

He stares at me in genuine wonder. He doesn’t remember the favor I did him, all those years ago. “Fire engine?”

“Never mind.”

I flip him the bird and begin my final walk down the long hallway to the elevator. The walls are covered with framed front-page stories from years gone by, three or four of them written by yours truly, back in the days when my heart harbored something that resembled hope.

I have been a reporter at this newspaper longer than I have ever been anything else. I didn’t love the place, and much of the time I didn’t like it, but I did fit in here, and now I’ll never be coming back. I guess I should be crying, but I’m not. I’m just numb over how such a momentous thing could happen so abruptly.

I don’t know what my next move will be. For that reason I’m almost glad I have to go to my son’s school, to find out what this fuss is all about.

Being fired doesn’t fully hit you until you leave the building, look around, and take your first breath as an unemployed person. I’m standing there on Sixth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and the sidewalks are jammed with people, and all I can think about is whether or not they have jobs. They’re all in motion, and they all seem to have destinations. You know you’re in trouble when you’re jealous of strangers.

It’s Friday, and Friday is a big day for firing people, if only for clerical purposes. I can’t be alone in this fix. I don’t want to be alone in this fix.

I head west and north, in the general direction of my son’s school, my blood tingling as if it’s been carbonated. The sidewalks are peppered with young people wearing Walkmans, or iPods, or whatever the hell they call the latest thing they need to ensure that they’re amused every waking hour of the day. The sight both bothers and pleases me. On the one hand, these kids are missing out on the sidewalk sounds I’ve loved my whole life. On the other hand, it impairs their ability to concentrate and keeps them good and stupid, and a whole generation of stupid kids buys me another five years in the workforce. Or so I thought until today, when a stupid kid fired my rapidly aging ass.

I walk all the way to the school, and as I enter it the smell is exactly as I remembered, an all-boys’ school smell, a testosterone and no-showers-after-gym-class odor. It hangs in the air like an arrogant, dangerous cologne, and I get the feeling that if a fertile woman walked in here and took a deep breath, she’d miss her next period.

On my way to the headmaster’s office I pass a series of carved marble plaques featuring the names of all the school’s headmasters, dating back to 1732.

Seventeen thirty-two! This place has certainly been around. Part of what you’re shelling out for is its history, and right there at the bottom of the newest plaque is the name of the guy who phoned me, the latest keeper of the flame, etched into the marble: Peter Plymouth. How fitting that a guy named Plymouth should have his name carved into rock. His start date is carved in next to his name, with a dash next to it. When he dies, quits, or gets fired, a guy with a hammer and chisel will chip in his departure date. This has got to be the only school in Manhattan where part of the tuition fees go toward a stonecutter.

There’s a secretary seated at a desk in front of the headmaster’s office, a sixtyish, owl-shaped woman with her hair up in a tight gray bun. She’s perfect for this place, the kind of woman no young male will lose valuable study time to over masturbatory fantasies.

I tell her who I am, explain that I have a one o’clock appointment. At the sound of my name her eyebrows go up, a clue to me that I’m in for some serious business. It happens to be one o’clock on the dot. She gestures at the closed door and says, “Go right in.”

But I can’t. Just being in a school setting has made me timid. I have to tap on the door first, and only when the voice from the other side tells me to come in am I able to do it.

It’s a big room, with windows facing out on the branches of a sycamore tree. Headmaster Peter Plymouth sits at a wide mahogany desk with his back to the windows. He’s wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a black tie, and his long, bony body seems to rise from his chair in sections, like a carpenter’s ruler. His hair is cut short, his face is unwrinkled, and his handshake is hard and dry. He gestures for me to sit down before returning to his own chair.

A lot had been made of this headmaster’s appointment the year before, because he’d graduated from the place twenty years earlier, gone to Yale, and then begun an academic career that took him from campus to campus all over the Northeast, with a “year out” somewhere in the middle, when he got a grant to write a book about Great Sailboat Races of the 1930s.

I know all this stuff because the school bombards my mailbox with letters, keeping me abreast of this kind of news. I throw out most of the mail without reading it, but there was something about the “Return of the Prodigal Son” memo that caught my eye.

So now we’re both seated, looking at each other. He’s giving me a bit of time to drink in the diplomas, the awards, the ribbons, and the sailing trophies that adorn his office. There’s even a ship in a bottle, right there on his desk.

“Well,” he begins, “you have quite a son.”

I have nothing to say in response to this. It means nothing—it could be good, it could be bad. If this were a tennis match, he’d have just served the ball into the net. I’m willing to sit and wait for as long as I must for his second serve, which is even weaker than the first.

“I’m sorry to drag you in here like this,” he ventures. “I know you’re busy.”

That would have been true an hour earlier, when I had a job, the kind of job this man couldn’t do in a million years. He’s never been in a newsroom full of frantic people, with editors yelling for copy and copyboys rushing around and hysterical reporters using the word “fuck” as a noun, a verb, and even an adverb (i.e., “You are the fucking slowest copyboy in the world!”).

No, Mr. Plymouth’s pressure is a different kind of pressure, the pressure to get the boys placed in Ivy League colleges so the school can maintain its prestige and continue to have desperate parents clamoring to hurl their money at him.

“Don’t apologize,” I say. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

The headmaster opens his desk drawer and pulls out a couple of sheets of loose-leaf paper covered in jagged, spiky writing I immediately recognize as my son’s.

“I’d like you to look at this,” he says softly. “It’s an essay your son composed yesterday in English class. It was a little exercise in spontaneous expression, assigned by Mr. Edmondson. The topic was ‘The Cold Truth.’”

“The cold truth about what?”

“That was entirely up to the student. He could take the title and go any which way with it. I think you’ll be interested in your son’s choice.”

He passes the pages to me. I take my time getting out my reading glasses, which I’ve only begun to wear after decades of squinting at the green glow of computer screens. I’m a little bit nervous, I’ll admit, but at the same time it’s a joy to read something that’s actually been penned by a human hand for a change, however disturbing it might turn out to be.

THE COLD TRUTH
by Jacob Perez-Sullivan

You don’t know it when you’re a kid, because nobody tells you, but the key to life is being in the right clubs, pretty much from the time you start walking.

Nobody sells it to you that way—in fact, they try to spin it the other way, so that it seems important to embrace and understand as many different kinds of people as you can in the course of your lifetime—but the truth is, that’s not the truth.

Far from it. It’s important to get into the right preschool, because this will naturally lead to the right elementary school, followed by the right high school, and then, of course, the right college.

The college is to this process what the orgasm is to the sex act. Anyone who makes it all the way through the other schools only to drop the ball when it comes to college has not understood the process. You don’t belong to exclusionary groups all your life just to start mixing in with the general population at age eighteen. It makes a mockery of your entire life, not to mention the monumental waste of your parents’ money.

The clubhouse life is a true commitment, made first by the parents and then by us, the students, by the time we’re old enough to ride a two-wheeler. We get the point. Nobody has to spell it out for us. It’s not a complicated or sophisticated strategy.

The saddest thing about the clubhouse life (there are many sad things, but we only have fifteen minutes to write this essay) is the fact that we only get to know each other. A school like ours is careful to stir the occasional African-American or Hispanic into the mix, but that’s not for the benefit of those students, who are hand-picked for their apparent harmlessness.

No, those students are here so that the rest of us won’t freak out every time we go to a cash machine and there’s a member of a minority waiting behind us.

This is part of the clubhouse process—recognizing the fact that now and then, we must step outside the clubhouse, whether we like it or not. Step out, and then quickly step back in. And shut the door fast, lest an outsider follow you inside.

You’re either in a good club, or you’re in a bad club. The walls are there, whether you see them or not. It’s all about the walls, and which side of the walls you’re on.

That’s the cold truth. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t fair, but it’s the cold truth. I can only hope the day will come when this sham just cannot go on, and the entire system collapses under the weight of its own bullshit. Maybe then, life will be fair.

When I finish reading the essay I continue holding the pages, just to stare at the symmetry of my son’s handwriting. It’s a beautiful thing. Nothing has been crossed out. It just flowed out of him, as if he’d been waiting all his young life to express these thoughts. And yet, according to the headmaster, he’d knocked it out just moments after getting the assignment in “spontaneous expression.”

At last I look up at the headmaster, whose face is as blank as a blackboard on the first day of school.

“Quite an essay,” he ventures. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I certainly would.”

“Naturally Mr. Edmondson was alarmed when he read it, and quite rightly he brought it to my attention.”

“Alarmed?”

“Of course! This is clearly just a peek into something much more disturbing that your son is experiencing. It’s the reason I called you here.”

“You called me here because my ex-wife is out of town. I know I’m number two on the emergency phone call list.”

“Mr. Sullivan, I hardly think this is the time to quibble over parental rivalries.”

“Have you spoken with my son about this essay?”

His face darkens. “That’s another reason I called you. Yes, I have spoken with him. Sometimes students do things like this in an attempt to be satirical. If that were the case, well, fine. We could all just laugh it off. But according to your son, he meant every word of it. Every single word.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“We gave him the chance to apologize, and he refused.”

“Apologize for what?”

Mr. Plymouth’s eyes widen. “Mr. Sullivan. Did you read the essay? He called this school a sham! He wants the entire system to collapse!”

“Under the weight of its own bullshit,” I add helpfully.

“That’s how he put it, yes. He wasn’t exactly subtle about it.”

“What did he say when you asked for an apology?”

“He said, and I quote, ‘I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t mean it.’”

“He saw through your game.”

The headmaster falls back in his chair, as i. . .