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#1
Three weeks into her new stint as principal, Root returns from lunch to find her office occupied by Parisa and her usually-nice teacher, Miss Maple, seated and seemingly waiting for her. “Why, hello!” she chirps as she wipes the surprise from her face. “What seems to be the matter?”
Parisa just stares at the ground and kicks her feet back and forth through the air.
"Oh, nothing too terrible," Miss Maple says, her eyes crinkling as she turns a cheery face toward Root. "Parisa here gave little Johnny Neiman a pretty solid kick to the knee on the playground."
Root circles around her desk to take a seat, then leans forward on her elbows. A grin threatens to overtake her, but she fights it down. “And why would you do that, Parisa?”
Parisa’s head jerks up, her lips twisted into a severe pout. “He was being stupid!” she yells, then huffs and folds her arms.
Miss Maple looks about to interject, possibly on Johnny Neiman’s behalf, but Root holds a hand up to stop her. “I’ll take it from here,” she says with a forced smile. “I’m sure you need to get back to the rest of your children.”
"Of course, Miss Germain," she replies, nodding and rising to her feet. "Will you need to speak to Johnny…?"
Root shakes her head and gestures to the door. “No need. And I’ll send Parisa back after we have a talk about…appropriate playground behavior.” After Miss Maple ducks out of the office, a light chuckle curls up Root’s throat. “Oh Parisa…” she says, voice thick with amusement.
Parisa looks back at the ground and resumes kicking her legs. “Mama, he said you and mom—”
"I know, sweetie." And she does know, because of course she made sure to install cameras in Parisa’s classroom and throughout the playground before her first day of school. And a very stern note will be mailed to Johnny Neiman’s parents this afternoon about exactly what he had to say regarding Parisa’s…family structure. Root walks over and rubs the top of Parisa’s head. “Maybe next time, though, you just come to me first?”
"Yes, mama…" Parisa mumbles.
#2
Shaw shoves her hands into her leather jacket’s pockets as she stalks through the school, muttering something fierce about being pulled away from a job because Root had to step down as principal after Ris’s first year. Something about the hours not being conducive to continued mission work. And the new old lady in charge really seems to have it out for Ris. It’s definitely not Ris’s fault that that Johnny kid totally stole some other boy’s lunch money. She was just doing good trying to get it back, just like Shaw’d taught her. Always stick up for the little guy.
She shoves her way through the door marked ‘Principal’ and finds Ris waiting for her, along with the Grinch, as Shaw had decided was her name and not that not-at-all appropriate Ms. Sweetwater. “Hey,” she grouses, then clears her throat.
"Miss Shaw," the Grinch says, her claw-like hands intertwined and folded atop her desk. "We’ve been waiting nearly thirty minutes for you to arrive.”
Shaw flops into the chair next to Ris’s and shrugs. “Takes a while to get out of the city sometimes.” She glances down at Ris and takes note of how quiet her kid’s being. “What’s this about?”
The Grinch reaches into a drawer and pulls out something that looks an awful like the phone Finch bought Ris a few months ago. “Parisa’s teacher caught her playing with this during classroom hours, I’m afraid,” she says, pushing the phone across the desk to Shaw.
"You called me down here because of a phone?” Shaw snatches it off the desk. “The hell were you doing on it anyway?”
The Grinch gasps. “Language, Miss Shaw!” she scolds.
Shaw just rolls her eyes and flicks to unlock it, only to be greeted by an in-progress Oregon Trail. An eyebrow raises, and she looks back down at Ris. “Really?”
Ris turns her big, brown eyes up at Shaw and shrugs.
"Thanks, Ms…uh, Sweetwater," Shaw says with a sigh. "I’ll take it from here." She shoves the phone into her pocket and gestures for Ris to follow her out of the office. "You and Root…" she mutters as they walk toward Ris’s classroom. They stop just outside the door and Shaw crouches down to Ris’s level and holds the phone out to her. "You swear you’ll only play it during lunchtime and recess?"
Ris nods furiously and snatches the phone away with both hands. “Swear!” she says through a toothy grin.
#3
Reese glances back and forth between a sullen Ris and a pinch-faced Sweetwater. “So…” he husks, folding his hands on his lap and leaning back slightly in his chair. “…You freed the class hamster.”
Ris gives a short nod.
His lips quirk slightly. “Well, did you catch it?”
"No…" Ris mumbles, drumming her fingers on her legs. "He got away…"
Sweetwater leans forward on her desk, and Reese is mildly surprised her bones don’t creak with the effort. “Mister…Shaw?” she starts, and cuts off at the choking sound Reese makes.
"N-No, no," he says, coughly slightly. "Reese." Definitely not Shaw. Boy, she’d shoot out a kneecap if she ever heard that.
He’s pretty sure he hears Ris snicker.
"Mister Reese," Sweetwater corrects with the fakest smile he’s sure he’s ever seen, "I’m sure you can understand how devastated Parisa’s class is at the loss of their dear Squiggles.”
Reese raises an eyebrow at the chosen name. “So we’ll buy a new one,” he says, shrugging. “They’re what, ten bucks?”
Sweetwater looks oddly affronted at his suggestion. “A replacement isn’t going to calm poor Johnny Neiman’s anguish!” she barks, then stops to clear her throat. “But I suppose the class does still need a pet for their science project…”
Reese gives her one of his patented side-grins. “Deal,” he says then looks down at Ris. “Ready to go?”
"M-Mister Reese!" Sweetwater yells, jumping to her feet far more nimbly than he would have guessed her capable. "You can’t just take Parisa out in the middle of a school day!"
He shrugs again. “If her class is that upset about a missing gerbil, we should probably get one before she goes back.”
He’s pretty sure he hears Ris snicker again.
”Hamster, Mister Reese,” Sweetwater practically snarls. He has to give her props for intensity, at least. “And very well, I suppose.” She shoos them both from her office with a stern, “Good day.”
The pet store they check out first has exactly one hamster, and it looks spritely enough that Reese forks over the cash for it then and there. Problem solved.
The voice mail from Shaw that awaits him when he gets off work later that night is especially amusing. She’s none too pleased that Ris managed to cajole him into getting her a pet for herself. Doubly pissed that said pet is an iguana.
#4
Finch taps away at one of the computers situated on tabletops around the middle school’s lab, pausing only to nudge his glasses back up. “You’recertain you saw Parisa doing something on this machine?”
Her principal, an affable man named Mister Tate, leans in and peers over Finch’s shoulder. “That’s what her teacher said, anyway,” he says in a booming voice.
Finch winches slightly at the loudness so close to his ear, but continues typing. Screens flash, fill with text, then flash clean once more, faster than he’s certain Mister Tate can keep up.
In fact, Finch hears him clear his throat and then mumble, slightly softer than before, “What is it you’re actually doing, anyway?”
"Oh, you probably wouldn’t understand," Finch demures with a smile. "Very technical." Indeed, they know by now just how quickly Parisa’s apptitude with computers is growing, and ‘funny business’ on school desktops most likely equates to some sort of hacking in play.
Mister Tate huffs through his mustache and nods. “Good thing her dad’s a computer whiz, then.”
Finch swivels slightly in the chair to first glance at him, then across the room to where Parisa leans against a wall with her arms crossed. “Indeed,” he murmurs, then turns back to the screen. “If you don’t mind, Mister Tate, it might be more beneficial to our cause if I speak to Parisa alone about what she might have done.”
"Of course, of course," he bellows, then steps away. "I’ll be across the hall in my office if you need me."
Finch waits until he hears the door slam shut before he beckons Parisa over. “Now, young lady, if I may ask what you were caught doing?”
Parisa sighs and shoves her hands in her jeans pockets. “I was just… Seriously…” she stammers, then huffs. “Miss Rankin totally failed Luisa and it’s not right because she and I totally do our homework together and we compare our tests when we get ‘em back and she always puts down the same answers as me and I got a B on my report card!” comes the onslaught of an explanation.
"And you were…" Finch trails off and studies her for a moment with squinted eyes. "…trying to hack into your teacher’s computer to see if some irregularities might be in play?"
Parisa nods furiously, then pouts at the floor. “I didn’t get too far before they stopped me, though.”
Finch makes a humming noise in his throat and taps a few times on the keyboard to clear the screen. “If you’re certain, there are ways we can check on this that don’t involve you hacking into school computers during class.”
He feels a twinge in his spine when Parisa throws her arms around him in a tight hug and muffles into his shoulder, “You’re the best, Finch!”
He does this due diligence, as promised, and definitely uncovers some discrepancies in Miss Rankin’s grading patterns, enough to send an anonymous e-mail to Mister Tate with several pieces of evidence attached. A week later, Ris practically dances into the subway bellowing the grand news that her teacher has been replaced by someone far less ‘crotchety,’ in her words.
#5
Fusco rolls his eyes and looks around the office. Figures everyone else is off working another case, leaving him to go clean up whatever mess Ris got into this time. It was bad enough when he had to do this with Lee, and that was just the usual scraps in the yard with other boys. He swears sometimes that Shaw’s kid is like some weird lab mishap that combined all their skills and quirks into one body. He’ll never say that around Shaw, though. Or Root. Root would be scarier. He knows what she can do with a taser.
"Mister…Fusco? If you please…"
The voice pulls his attention back to the moment and Fusco looks down at this Tate guy who called him up. “Yeah, so, what’s this about anyway?” He glances down at Ris, slumped over in a chair and holding a bag of ice against her right hand.
Tate smiles up through one helluva mustache. “Well, Parisa here…” He stops and furrows his brow for a moment. “I’m sorry, are you her…other dad?”
Fusco rolls his eyes, and he’s pretty sure he catches Ris doing the same. “No, course not,” he grumbles. Not sure if the guy means Reese or Finch as the first dad, but he’s not partner to either, anyway. “I’m the…uh…uncle.”
The confusion clears from Tate’s face. “Ah, of course, of course!” He flips open one of the manila folders sitting on his desk, and a quick glance tells Fusco that it’s Ris’s school file. “Parisa does seem to get in a peculiar amount of trouble… This time, I’m afraid she landed a right hook on another boy during lunch hour.”
Fusco’s been around Ris enough to know that the kid doesn’t just go around socking people for no reason. “What’d he do?”
Tate looks up it him with wide eyes. “I-I’m sorry?”
Fusco shrugs. “I know our kid pretty well,” he says. “If she punched the kid, he must’a done somethin’ first.”
"W-Well…" Tate stammers, closing Ris’s file. "She says he got a little too friendly with one of her friends…"
Fusco fights off a grin. “Are his parents pressing charges or anything?”
"Oh my, no," Tate says. "John’s okay, anyway. Nothing broken."
"Shame about that," Fusco hears Ris mutter under her breath, and he directs a smirk down to her.
With a clap of his hands, Fusco reaches down and buttons his sports coat back up. “I’ll make sure her mom hears about it, then. We done here?”
Tate clears his throat and stands, hand outstretched to shake Fusco’s own. “O-Of course, sir.” He looks down at Parisa with a broad, though wobbly, smile. “But you’ll have to take Parisa home for the remainder of the week. We do have a zero-tolerance policy for violence, you understand.”
"Sure, sure," Fusco mutters, then gesture at Ris. "C’mon kid. Let’s go get burgers."
He’s not sure how Root finds out about the fight, but he figures she does because a week later he overhears Ris boasting to her about how “stupid John Neiman totally got his Playstation and laptop taken away”. Must have been some note to the kid’s parents.
#6
"You ever think it’s strange how we stopped getting calls from her school?" Reese asks one day.
Shaw looks up from cleaning her gun and shrugs, then glances over at where Ris is furiously working on some kinda paperwork on Finch’s desk. “Maybe kids stopped doing dumb shit to provoke her,” she mutters.
Reese returns her shrug and they resume going through their weaponry one by one, until they hear Finch yell, “Parisa, what blueprints are those?!”
Root pokes her head around a corner, eyebrows raised. “Blueprints?”
"Oh, what the hell…" Shaw grumbles. She climbs to her feet and walks over with Reese to join Finch and Root in gawking over whatever Ris had been working on. It definitely looks like blueprints, with several scribblings and x-marks drawn in pencil over a few spots. Shaw squints, studying some of the markings. "Is that…your school?"
Ris puffs out her cheeks and crosses her arms, but doesn’t answer.
Finch plucks the papers off the desk to look more closely. “Definitely her school…” he mumbles under his breath. “How did you get ahold of these?”
"What, like it’s hard?" Ris huffs.
"Young lady—"
Shaw interrupts Finch with a pointed finger at one of the marks. “Does that say Stupid John always eats lunch here?” she says. “And loosen bench seat?”
Reese starts to chuckle. “Definitely beats punching the kid in broad daylight.”
"This is definitely not okay!" Finch says as he rolls up the blueprints.
Root snatches them from his grip. “C’mon, Harry, this is what we’ve been training her to do for the past few years.”
"I’d call it a success if she’s not getting caught anymore," Shaw grins. "Unscrewing a bench is still pretty child’s play, though." She gestures for Root to spread the plans back out on the desk.
"Mmm, true…" Root hums as she lays them out, then taps one of the x-marks with a finger. "You’ve tracked Tate’s path to and from the bathroom several times per day, but what about lunchtime?"
Ris shrugs. “He has a fridge in his office, doesn’t have to leave.”
"And if he doesn’t get to the school until almost eight, that’s plenty of time to sneak in with your wrench set…" Reese murmurs with a nod.
Finch sighs and starts hobbling away, leaning heavily on his cane. “I can’t be a part of this…”
Shaw hears footsteps from the entryway and looks up to see Fusco shoving open the gate. “What’s goin’ on?” he asks, glancing back and forth between their gathering over the desk and Finch adamantly ignoring everything inside the subway car.
"Planning some pranks on the class bully, you in?" Reese says, grinning.
Fusco rolls his eyes, but joins them at the table. “As long as I don’t hafta go talk to that Tate guy again…”
The next day, at lunchtime, Johnny Neiman winds up with quite a bruise on his ass when his favorite bench seat collapses out from under him.