It Was Stolen

The workbook was blue, and it was supposed to be in Aarav’s bag, and it was not in Aarav’s bag.

Aarav had checked the bag four times. He was checking it a fifth time when Kabir sat down next to him.

“You’re doing your face,” Kabir said.

“I’m not doing a face.”

“You’re doing the face you do before you cry in the bathroom.” Kabir looked into the bag with him. “What’s gone?”

“My workbook. The blue one. The homework’s inside it.” Aarav’s voice went very small. “I did the homework. I did all of it. I left the book on the kitchen table.”

“So tell Ms. Dhillon you left it at home.”

“I can’t.” Aarav looked at him as though he had suggested something obscene. “I have never not had my homework. Not once. If I say I forgot it, then I’m a person who forgets it. Do you understand?”

Kabir considered this. He did not understand it, exactly, the way he did not understand why his mother ironed clothes that nobody would inspect. But he recognized it. It was the same fear, wearing a smaller coat.

“Okay,” said Kabir. “Then you didn’t forget it. It was stolen.”

“You can’t just say it was stolen.”

“Why not?”

“Because it wasn’t.”

“Did anybody see you leave it on the table?”

“No.”

“Did anybody see it get stolen?”

“No, because it wasn’t stolen.”

“Then the two things look exactly the same from here,” Kabir said. “Nobody saw either one. So we get to pick.” He said it gently, the way he had explained the attendance the day before. “One of them means you’re a boy who forgets. The other means you’re a boy that things happen to. I’d pick the second one.”

Aarav opened his mouth to argue and discovered, to his horror, that he could not find the hole in it. This was becoming a thing that happened to people around Kabir.

Ms. Dhillon came down the rows with her hand out. “Workbooks on the desk, please. Blue ones.”

The blue books came out one after another, and Aarav’s row got closer, and Aarav went the colour of a boy who was about to be seen.

“Aarav?”

“It was stolen,” said Kabir.

Ms. Dhillon stopped. “Kabir.”

“His workbook. Somebody took it. Between last night and this morning.” Kabir was calm. “It’s very serious. This is supposed to be a notorious city. It says so on the sign.”

Ms. Dhillon looked at Aarav, who could not look back, and she understood the whole thing in about a second and a half, because she had once been a child who never forgot her homework, in a house exactly like his. She knew the book was on his kitchen table. She knew he would rather be robbed than be ordinary.

She could have ended it there. Instead she heard herself say, “Stolen by whom?”

She would think about that question later. She had a lesson plan, and she had set it down to find out what Kabir would do instead. This, she was beginning to learn, was the main danger of Kabir.

She left the lesson plan on the desk. She did not pick it back up. Twenty-two children leaned forward, because there was, suddenly, a crime at Gopher Ridge to solve, and it did not matter even slightly that there had never been one.