Standing room only.
That meant no emergency exits or first aid kits.
Or panic buttons or bank vaults.
And definitely no automated external defibrillators. Not that that would help.
Box fans humidified sweat into tropical mists. The floor was sticky. The ceiling was drippy.
The panic was real and you could read it in their eyes.
In this classroom, at an L-shaped teacher’s desk behind a force field, sat the five members of the local school board. They were here ostensibly to do a Q&A with parents about the upcoming board election. Normally, this was a quick, routine, check-the-boxes procedure.
Normally.
Now there was controversy. There was drama. This would be the most competitive school board election ever, and it was all because of their newest lightning rod of a member.
Jade Hart bobbed a toddler on her knee, smiling her smirky smile, hair-sprayed, perfumed, in a black dress and white blouse. The two-year-old pointed at the Vote Jade posters plastered on the wall. Jade beamed. “Yes sweety, that’s good, that’s very good.” She put his hand on her cheek and melted in his touch.
As various concerned community members crowded in, the parents got to sit at little kid desks in little kid chairs, babbling little kid words at her. Jade cupped her ear as if hard of hearing. The tweaked force field let no less than semi-complete sentences through to her table. No cursing. No slang. No late-night, holiday special rantings from your uncle.
“Look, Mrs. Jade, were you a Jedi or not?” shouted a dull-eyed man at the front.
Jade tore her eyes from the child. “What is your name sir?”
“Harold’s my name. Harold Dodders.”
“Well Mr. Harold, good of you to come.” She cleared her throat. “I was once an initiate of the Jedi Order long ago.”
Mr. Harold slapped his knee. “I knew it. Y'all Jedi blew up the space station.”
“I had nothing to do with that, Mr. Harold. The Jedi kidnapped me as a child.” Jade teared up, sniffing. “I had to say a pledge of allegiance to the Jedi flag every day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
A misinformed parent: “I heard they kicked you out?”
Jade gazed down at the bundle of love on her knee. “I wanted to have kids, and the Jedi Order wouldn’t allow it.” She wiped away the tiniest tear. “I’m sure they aren’t behind the destruction of our space station”—she shook her head hard ten times—”strike it from your minds my fellow Veronans, it’s too brutish and blundering, too incompetent, and when have the Jedi ever been incompetent? That’s why we need educated, young minds to sniff out the truth.”