Her mother always brings a gift back from France for Millicent, every trip. Two years ago it was a wind-up ambulance complete with a siren that whooped and thrashed around the floor of her bedroom. Last year it was a miniature Eiffel Tower that lit up when she pressed a button. This year it’s a red beret that Felicity insists Millicent wear to school despite the fact that it’s April and way too hot for wool, especially in her seventh-grade homeroom where the radiators are still hissing out steam. Every year it’s like this, a few weeks of unseasonably warm weather during which the radiators go on clanking and cranking out heat, but this spring is so hot that their science teacher scrapped a unit on earthworms to focus on the damage climate change is doing to the planet. Her father sides with Millicent, but Felicity won’t take no for an answer and goes on arranging the beret on Millicent’s head, tilting it forward and to the side before finally declaring it adorable, the French way, in a gargle of syllables. Felicity is like that for a few weeks after every trip before she settles into her life again, like a reluctant car backing into a narrow garage.
The kids at school mostly ignore Millicent and her silly, too-hot hat. The school is known for teaching tolerance and inclusion; it’s why parents of children who are gifted and weird or just plain weird pay a truckload of money to send their kids to a school where they won’t be de-pantsed or mocked in the lunchroom, where a single incident of bullying is cause for suspension and eventual dismissal. Millicent sometimes wakes in the night and overhears her parents arguing about money and the school will inevitably come up. Her parents argue a lot these days, about everything. Her father complains the school costs as much as a single year in a good college, but Felicity is adamant that her daughter won’t be picked on or laughed at because she’s a girl. And only Troy Dennison says anything about the beret, calls her Fifi and Pepe la Puke and asks why she’s walking around with a red cow plop on her head. Troy will be admonished by their homeroom teacher but gently because his father will pave over any problems Troy may cause with money. After Troy hit a girl in the lip with an iceball, his father donated enough to build an indoor pool that’s named for his paternal grandmother, a woman who, in her last year of her life, took off her bra in the meat section of Wegmans and twirled it above her head like a cowgirl at a rodeo.
When the beret is snatched off Millicent’s head in the shuffle between classes, she does nothing. Her head is free, she’ll live. A couple of Troy’s friends run it up the flagpole in front of the school where it stays for most of sixth hour before it’s hauled down by the janitor who tosses it into the lost and found. Later, when her mother asks where her beret is, Millicent will conjure up a story about a toilet that flushed and clogged. She won’t think of how the hat stared up at her from the lost and found box like a reproachful red eye or how, at the end of the year, what’s unclaimed will be donated to a homeless shelter. Millicent’s pretty sure there won’t be a mother who says adorable in a fake accent but will pull the hat down over her child’s ears in January, a child who will wear the beret like it was intended to be worn.
