I’d been anticipating it for so long by then that I’d forgotten to keep worrying, so was duly shocked, even frightened. It shows how long-lived anger is, the desire for vengeance: it has a nuclear half-life, and it teaches people patience in the most sinister way.Reza was attacked again. This time more surreptitiously, more brutally. Under the lackadaisical eye of the after-school girls, Bethany, Margot and Sarah—feckless texters, busy planning dates on their cell phones—a massive snowball fight had been allowed to erupt among the children. There were two dozen kids or so in after-school, and all but the most timid were involved: they’d formed teams, and built a fort, and I, kept from my studio by an appointment with Chastity and Ebullience’s mother and Lisa, the reading specialist, to discuss strategies for dealing with Ebullience’s gloating about Chastity’s dyslexia, or rather, about her own ebullient lack thereof—anyway, I conducted my meeting with the shouts and laughter a joyful tympani through the windows, and it sounded like childhood should sound.But in among them like an evil spore lurked Owen, the angry fifth grader who’d attacked Reza before, just smart enough and just dumb enough to think of packing his snowball with rocks; and the misfortune that he chose a sharp one, and the greater shame that his aim was good (hard for it not to be: he was, it was later established, only a few feet from his target), and the greatest shame that Reza didn’t see it coming.Reza, one girl said, fell at once to his knees, and she could see blood through his fingers—his fists over his eyes—before she knew what it was.
