“Because either he's lying,” Caleb replied, “or somebody has destroyed evidence since yesterday.”
CHAPTER 03
What the Notebook Held
Washington looked like a city washed clean for a ceremony when Flight 618 finally descended through a ceiling of pale clouds. Mira watched the roads and rivers slip into view below the wing, trying not to imagine the passengers thinking about the girl who had delayed their flight. June Park had brought her ginger ale and crackers. The woman across the aisle had offered a small package of tissues without insisting Mira explain herself.
“Your seat looked better with its proper passenger,” the woman said as they landed.
Mira managed a smile. “Thank you.”
“My name's Marisol Bell. I'm a librarian. You can tell your father there was a witness.”
Mira wrote the name in her notebook, along with the approximate time of the exchange. People were most reliable when they wrote things down before memory polished the edges. The idea had come from her mother, who worked nights as a hospital interpreter and labeled everything from frozen soup to old photographs. “Proof,” her mother liked to say, “is kindness to your future self.”
Before the baggage claim, Mira passed a wall of photographs showing early commercial flights. The pictures were full of men in uniforms and families waving from the ground. She wondered who decided which people became part of a historical display. There must have been thousands who boarded planes without anybody photographing them, each with a reason for traveling. She had been imagining that everyone on Flight 618 now knew her story, but what they knew was an argument about a window. They knew nothing about Samira's kitchen chair or her father's lost wages. The contrast made her resolve to be careful when she spoke for others.
At the restroom sinks she washed her hands twice, waiting for her fingers to stop trembling. Another teenage girl offered a paper towel when the dispenser jammed. They exchanged the brief half smile people share in public places and never learned each other's names. Mira liked that encounter enormously. It was proof that ordinary kindness continued without a camera, a caption, or a witness statement.
At baggage claim Caleb Valdez waited near a column holding a cardboard sign with her name, even though she knew perfectly well what he looked like. He had arrived in Washington the night before to meet lawyers and had not shaved since. When he spotted her, he folded the sign and hugged her so tightly the notebook bent between them.
“Sorry,” he said, releasing her. “I needed that.”
“Me too.”
He examined her face, careful not to ask a question that would make her feel she had to perform bravery. “Hungry?”
“Terribly.”
They ate grilled cheese sandwiches in a quiet café outside the airport. Caleb put his phone face down. He explained that the airline had reported Price's removal because he refused instructions and because his proximity to a protected witness required further review. They had not accused him of any crime. Caleb emphasized the difference.
“Will they believe he tried to scare me?” Mira asked.
“We can describe what he said. We can't prove his intentions simply because we suspect them.”
Mira opened the notebook. One page contained a hand-drawn map of her middle-school cafeteria, where students had begun comparing their so-called Harborlight Scores. Crownbridge Learning had sold Harborlight as an early-support tool. It gathered attendance, assignments, counselor notes, and, with the district's promised consent procedures, optional voice journals intended to help staff recognize students who needed attention.
The optional part had been quietly forgotten. Children had been required to record emotional check-ins during homeroom. Those who refused received a yellow noncompliance marker, which contributed to the very risk scores the journals were supposed to improve.
Mira had first questioned it when her friend Samira Nasr was removed from the school musical after the software ranked her an “escalation concern.” Samira had written about her father's recent death. The program classified words such as empty, gone, and unbearable without understanding the story around them. An adult moderator had approved the alert in seventeen seconds.
Then the district told Samira's mother that an algorithm could not be challenged without a professional assessment. Samira had stopped singing in the hallway. Mira had begun writing.
Her notebook contained not just accusations but the ordinary things that made each student real: Owen played the cello badly but joyfully; Talia folded paper cranes when anxious; Luis needed speech support and hated when the transcription system turned his pauses into periods. The school had reduced them to colors. Mira had written sentences back onto the page.
“Do you regret bringing it?” Caleb asked.
She shook her head. “I regret not writing down more.”
He told her about the morning's call from the Youth Data Clinic's litigation partner, attorney Rebecca Cho. The federal oversight hearing where Mira would speak was scheduled for Thursday. The district was also under a discovery order in a civil case. The latest records exported from the servers had apparently lost an entire column: the identities of the employees who manually changed student classifications.
“That's the part he meant,” Caleb said. “The audit history.”
“Can a computer just lose a column?”
“A computer can do exactly what a person tells it to do.”
Mira turned to her own early notes. She had recorded a conversation with a guidance counselor who insisted the program operated automatically. Yet on the following page, she had written a phrase a substitute teacher accidentally mentioned: override queue.
She pointed to it. “I thought this was just what people called the errors.”