How Green Becomes Wood

"The history teacher?" Dark repeated, for the first time feeling anything even near to regret for leaving. Of course it would be his replacement who was being racist.

Then he took the two projects from Xander, reading the notes aloud to Daizi, but hesitated when he saw the title of Alec's, looking up at him and nearly asking why he didn't let him know that was his project but deciding it wasn't a needed line of questioning. Anyway, he vaguely recalled Daizi letting him know something about it, but at the time she had told him Alec was being a bit cagey about it. He didn't know it was about this. Then Dark read the notes to Daizi as he had done before, his voice as even as it had been before.

"Weren't your sources given to you by your Aunt?" Daizi asked.
 
Alec nodded and then answered aloud, "Yes. It's all public stuff, and I could have eventually found most of it, but it's also all available on request. I asked Aunt Ciara if maybe I could get some of the harder-to-find files, and she got them for me. Some of them have been redacted a little, but I only used what I could find. No assumptions, no filling in the blanks."
 
"By the FBI because..." Alec hesitated, feeling guilty for saying the words even though he knew they were not his fault or in any way approved by him.

"The FBI wants to make themselves and the government look better now that there is a higher concentration of Arab people living in the States. Votes and public opinion and all that," Xander said bluntly. "If they make things look better, then people will be happier. I presume that it would also make oil companies over in the Middle East happier too, but that is assumption."
 
"One would imagine if they wanted to please us, they would try to minimize it," Dark said, hiding his agitation as best as he could manage.

"Has she ever done something like this before?" Daizi asked, putting her hand on his knee.
 
"Maybe. Not to this extent," Alecc said. "Mostly just kind of an odd smile and a laugh and wave it away. I think once she told me not to use such biased sources, but I can't remember what that topic was about."
 
Both Dark and Daizi fell quiet in turnp, thinking carefully about what they had been told. It was horrible, what they were being told. Worse still what it meant. But they both knew this game, they knew how it worked. It wasn't enough.

"I can talk to your teacher," Dark said at last, "about your grade."
 
Again, Dark and Daizi were quiet, not having expected to have this conversation so soon. They knew it was inevitable they'd have it with their daughter, but they expected they had a few years to figure out what to say.

"The why she is this way?" Daizi asked, "Or...?"
 
Alec sighed. "No. What I mean is, the grade itself doesn't matter to me. At least, not that much. What matters is why she gave me the grade, and it wasn't because I messed up. If it'd be better to say nothing, I would, but I don't know that it is, but I don't know what to say or do."
 
"The worst she could do is fail me, and I'm pretty sure eventually the principal would notice," Alec said with a shrug. "Not to sound immodest, but it would be very strange for the son of the former History teacher to completely fail."
 
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