Exposure (32 page)

He heard Sheri make a soft “Oh” sound, while pain like a blade of fire sliced through his stomach.

Amelia’s photo was the least flattering he’d ever seen of her. It appeared as if it had been scissors-cut from its original background, whatever that may have been, and superimposed on the news channel’s vivid blue background, then framed in silver. Her hair clung to the sides of her face; a blemish on her chin stood out like a bright pockmark against her white, flash-lit skin. The tops of her cheeks were rosy—meaning they must have been bright red in person—and she looked indignant. Winter’s photo, similarly displayed, was also raw, and he looked frightened. Harlan scowled. Didn’t it just figure that Winter would put on an act even while being booked? If all a person had to go by was this display, they’d label Amelia as the troublemaker for sure. Amelia.

He said, “Where’s Amelia?”

“Upstairs. She was watching a movie, but I heard it end a little bit ago. She’s in her room, I’m sure.”

“Maybe go check? I don’t want her seeing this.” But Sheri remained where she was, as unable to tear herself away as Harlan was himself.

The mug shots remained while news anchor Mark Hoffman summarized the story, not failing to mention that Amelia was Harlan’s daughter. Then he turned toward a pale, plain-faced woman in a gray suit jacket and white blouse—a child psychologist, he said—who was seated at the corner of the news desk.

Hoffman, who had bought his last three cars from Wilkes Lexus, was beloved by his viewers. His Rock Hudson face grinned at drivers from billboards all around the viewing area.
News and Views You Can Trust!
the signs insisted, and Harlan understood people well enough to know that most of them believed what they were told. The pain in his stomach flared again.

“Dr. Patrice Shriver, thank you for joining us this evening. Can you give us some insight into the troubling story of these teens?”

“Thank you, Mark. Yes. What we have here are two people who, perhaps because of her privileged upbringing and his exposure to that lifestyle there at school, have elected to disregard the parameters of common decency that keep most of us from wanting to expose ourselves to others so explicitly. One can only speculate as to what problems there are in the home—I’m given to understand that the young man was raised without a father? And this can lead to a lack of effective discipline or lack of transfer of desirable values—and so they act out in oversexualized ways. Our culture, with its depictions of skin and sex, and the objectification of women in general, just adds to the trouble.”

“I see. Well, and isn’t the easy availability of phones and cameras and computers a part of the problem?”

“Absolutely. Children do
not
need cellphones,” she said vehemently. “When we put them in the hands of children who don’t have the self-regulators they need to have, whether due to young age or, as with these two, perhaps a sense of entitlement or being above the law—”

“But do kids even know they’re breaking any laws when they’re doing what this pair has allegedly done?”

“Even if they haven’t heard of other cases of sexting, I think they know they’re breaking
rules
, certainly, and an eighteen-year-old male is going to be well aware that his age is the threshold for legal access to pornography, so producing photos for or encouraging or accepting lewd photos from an underage female would of course be a criminal act.”

“What can viewers do to prevent their children from ending up like Miss Wilkes and Mr. Winter, who theoretically could be facing
years
of
prison time
for their misbehavior?”

“Excellent question. Build in them a strong sense of self-esteem and good moral judgment. Let them know that their body belongs
only
to them, and that it’s not to be shared casually in any manner with anyone. Also, limit or deny access to all these unnecessary gadgets, and
never
give a teenager unsupervised, unregulated access to a computer. If you must give your child a cellphone, get a model that doesn’t have a camera. Girls of this age, especially the ones like Miss Wilkes, who are both attractive and have advantages that young men desire, often recognize that they have a lot of power over those young men and, without a carefully laid foundation of right and wrong, they’ll make use of that power.”

“What do you think they’re getting from using it?”

“Oh, all kinds of things, but worshipful attention seems to be the primary attraction, in my experience. Their parents are often very busy and neglectful. It’s a sad, but not irreversible, state of being. Counseling, along with education, usually helps build a healthy self-worth.”

“We’re out of time, but thanks very much, Dr. Shriver. Good food for thought. Join us tomorrow at six for the second part of this series, with our guest Olivia Sanchez, who’s with the district attorney’s office. We’ll be talking in detail about the laws affecting teens who sext, and the life-altering consequences of breaking those laws.”

“Neglectful?” Sheri challenged. “I do not neglect my daughter.”

Harlan felt his mouth hanging open, and closed it. His throat was tight, and his face and neck and ears were burning. Sheri rushed over to him, asking, “Are you all right?”

He couldn’t speak. The protest that had been ignited by Shriver’s bullshit, uninformed, sensationalized “expert opinion” of his daughter and his home and his life stayed lodged like a boulder in his chest, threatening to suffocate him. He put his hands on his knees and leaned over, hanging his head, trying to catch his breath. He felt Sheri’s hand on his back. “Harlan,” she said. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

He coughed hard, caught his breath, and, looking up at her, said, “What’s
wrong
? Did you not hear that woman?”

She moved her hand and sat back. “Yes, of course I did. I just thought that you were …”

“What I am,” he said, sitting up again, “is sick to my stomach over the lies these people are telling about Amelia. And she made us out as failures—practically said we’re the ones to blame!”

Sheri sat down next to him. “Maybe we are to blame—not for all of it, but—”

“This is Winter’s fault, and if any parent’s to blame, it’s
his
mother, not you. I swear to God, if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to set the record straight.”

Amelia heard her father’s declaration from where she was sitting in the game room on a luxurious velour sectional, her knees drawn protectively to her chest. The TV, a sixty-five-inch plasma screen on which she’d been watching
A Chorus Line
to pass the time, was now tuned to the same local news broadcast that had provoked her father.

Seeing her mug shot, and Anthony’s, had horrified her. Hearing the psychologist’s disparaging judgments of Anthony and their parents and herself had horrified her, too. But it was her father’s vengeful words that cut like a newly sharpened blade.

Unbidden came the rhyme,
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me
. Words, oh, they could hurt all right. They could trip you up. They could pull you down. They could cut your heart right out of your chest and make you wish you had never been born—or that you were born to someone else.

21

XPLAIN THIS BOND BUSINESS
,” M
ARTA
W
INTER SAID TO HER
daughter, Kim, in Marta’s sunroom early Friday morning. “The arrest, all right, I see how that all works, but this I’m not sure I understand.”

Kim took the cup of coffee her mother offered and sat down in a chair upholstered in a raucous print of orchids and colorful long-tailed birds. The room, a small add-on to the back of the ’60s split-level that was located in an area called Five Points, had the feel of an exotic aviary. One of her father’s last projects before his illness had been to build what he’d called “your mother’s bird box,” a floor-to-ceiling cage, three feet in depth, eight in length, for finches. Inside the wire enclosure were mounted various branches and baskets and ropes, seed trays, and water bins. The inhabitants were six pairs of finches, two each of zebra, society, and the color-blocked gouldians. They chattered and hopped about cheerfully, which Kim usually enjoyed. Today, their beauty and music and the fact that they paired faithfully, for life, was depressing. Why should it come so easily for them while humans, purportedly the highest of Earth’s life-forms, had so much trouble finding mates—and when they did, their fellow humans so often worked against them? What did people like Harlan Wilkes and Gibson Liles—Liles especially—have against love?

She’d looked up Liles, and what she’d found had chilled her. He was forty-one years old, a handsome enough man (though his ears stuck out a bit far), father of three girls, married to his Kinston, North Carolina, high-school sweetheart. He had the kinds of church affiliations she’d come to expect from politically ambitious men everywhere. None of that troubled her. His agenda, though, the one that had boosted him up from being just one more eager prosecutor for the State, was that he was unapologetically, overtly, rabidly conservative. Now, Kim certainly wanted criminals off the streets and punished appropriately. She believed there were moral “oughts” and “musts.” As an educator of teens, she knew as well as anyone that precocious sexuality was unhealthy, and that young women were especially susceptible to pressures from boys, from the entertainment media, from advertising, from popular music. She was glad that there were laws protecting children of all ages from perverse and predatory activities. It was obvious, though, that in the case of Anthony and Amelia, Liles was using a definition of
criminal
that happily twisted the intent of the law to suit his moral outlook—or, perhaps, the moral outlook that he knew would propel him further up the prominence ladder. When asked, in an interview Kim watched as an archived video clip, whether he might like to run the state, he had said, “If the good people of North Carolina and the good Lord in His wisdom see fit for me to do it, it would be my profound honor to be governor one day.” Asked on Thursday for a comment on “the Ravenswood sexting scandal,” he’d said, “We cannot have young people behaving in ways that will damage them so profoundly as taking and sending sexually explicit photographs is bound to do. I want to send a message to all the teenagers, my own daughters included, that such behavior is in every way wrong. In
every way
,” he’d repeated. “We need a lesson here. Actions bring consequences.” Yes, Kim thought, especially when the state’s prosecutor found it expedient to make it so.

Kim shifted so that her back was to the birds and told her mother, “The court sets a bail amount—a ridiculous amount, in both kids’ cases—and then you either pay the entire amount, which they hold until after the case resolves, or, if you don’t have enough, you get a bondsman to pay it for you for a ten percent fee, or you get a property bond—a promise to pay that’s secured by your home’s equity, which is what I did.”

Her recollection of the past few days was a blur. The arrest, a panicked call to the lawyer, a first night with no sleep at all when she’d sat up staring into the darkness wondering if Anthony was doing the same, feeling as if she’d been jettisoned into a nightmare from which she would one day emerge battered and bleeding but, until then, she would remain its helpless captive.

The next morning, Tuesday, could not come fast enough. She’d gotten right to work on Anthony’s release, getting her home-purchase paperwork from her bank safety deposit box, scheduling an emergency appraisal (for five hundred dollars!), then expending her nervous energy cleaning the house from corner to corner and top to bottom in anticipation of the appraiser’s Wednesday morning visit. Throughout it all, she’d watched the clock. Every minute she had to wait was a minute that Anthony was passing locked up unfairly. Caged. Frustrated. Cursing his bad luck, bad karma, the random vindictiveness of the universe. Stunned that his love for Amelia, and Amelia’s for him, could get him into this mess.

Love: it had the power of flowing water to find even the most miniscule crack and to seep through it, then widen it, and then, in the case of a dyke or a dam, to burst the structure entirely. Love was a pleasure and a danger at the same time, a force of nature that humans naïvely imagined could be controlled.