Fury (15 page)

“I am not asking you to help
me,”
I replied. “Get over yourself Marianne! This is not a game—this is Lexi we’re talking about! Tell me that you really care about her.”

“Oh God,” said Marianne. She wrapped her hands around her head and nursed it like I had cracked it open. “I don’t know, I really don’t. Why don’t we go and talk to the student counsellor? She’s an adult we can talk to, right?”

“Okay fine,” I replied. “Let’s do that tomorrow then.”

“Tomorrow,” Marianne repeated for no good reason.

“When will Lexi wake up?” I ask.

“She’s being kept sedated for her own good,” replies Dr Fadden. “They will bring her out of it tomorrow, with her father by her side so she won’t go into shock.”

“Can I be there?”

“Like I said, Eliza, I am under strict orders to keep all of you apart. If you wanted freedom, then you should have thought twice before breaking the law. This is not a game.”

“I know this is not a game,” I mutter. I sigh and I drop back onto the car seat.

“You should tell me what what’s-her-name-bitch-face did to Lexi.”

“
Doctor
Jennens did nothing to Alexandria. She is a professional counsellor and she has Alexandria’s best interests at heart. What Lexi did was her action alone.”

I stare at the roof of the car. The roof looks plush. I feel like I’m inside a velvet-lined coffin.

“I don’t even know why I talk to you.”

“Well, too bad, Eliza; you’ve already told me too much.”

I can stop, you know,
I think in my head. But I wonder whether that’s true.

“Marianne and I went to talk to Miss Bailoutte.” I pause to sulk. “Boy, aren’t we glad we didn’t tell her
everything…
”

“I’ve spoken to Miss Bailoutte. And you just didn’t withhold information—you outright lied to her.”

“What? Why would I lie to her? After all, it was Marianne and me who approached her. She didn’t catch us doing something we shouldn’t and beat a confession out of us.”

“There you go. Let it all out Eliza. You’ll feel better.”

I don’t know why, but sometimes it seems easier to talk while driving. Maybe instead of leather couches in psychiatrists’ offices, patients should lie in the back seats of cars and be driven around and around, until all their stories have been told.

I went to see Miss Bailoutte during recess on Tuesday. Dragging a half-dead Marianne behind me. Lexi was still at home. Her dad thought she’d caught a fever. In a way, she had.

Miss Bailoutte’s quarters are on the other side of the lake adjoining the auditorium. The swallows were skimming the surface, leaving no ripples. The same swallows that Lexi said were bad luck. I blamed the swallows because I had to blame something.

We could see the library ahead. What used to be books and furniture were all charred and blackened inside the massive glass cylinder. It looked like a plastic pencil sharpener full of shavings. Any minute now, I expected a giant hand to reach down and empty it out.

Miss Bailoutte was drinking a cup of pale, milky-looking tea at her desk. She had wavy hair that’s tipped blonde at the ends but brown on the top, suggesting that at some point she stopped bothering to colour her hair and gave up on her looks. She had a photo of her cat in an expensive frame on her desk.

“What can I do for you girls?” she said with a big smile.

When Miss Bailoutte smiles, she flashes all her giant horse teeth and foamy spit pools in the corners of her mouth. It didn’t help that Miss Bailoutte liked to chew gum and talk at the same time.

“Is this about spare spots on the graduation committee? We still need lamington makers for the drive next week.”

“Um … no. We’ve come to speak to you about Lexi Gutenberg,” I said.

Beside me, Marianne looked haunted. She hadn’t looked right since Saturday night. I wish she would just pull it together. After all, she wasn’t the one going through this; Lexi was.

“Oh yes, Alexandria. A wonderful girl.”

I wished Miss Bailoutte didn’t have to try and sell Lexi to me.

“We want to tell someone something—in confidence. We thought we could speak to you.”

“Yes?”

“It’s about Aar—about Alistair Aardant. We were all at a par—”

I felt Marianne place her hand on my arm in warning.

Oh yeah.
The party.
No one was supposed to know about the party. If Miss Bailoutte found out about it and blabbed to Jane’s parents, we’d all get into trouble. And no matter how much I didn’t like Jane Mutton, it felt like we were all in this together now. We didn’t have a choice.

“Alistair, he did … something to Lexi.”

That was all I could say.

I was ashamed. I was ashamed for her.

I thought about what would happen to Lexi if the whole school found out. I mean, Lexi’s father didn’t know, and shouldn’t he hear it first from her own mouth? I know I was making up excuses—but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t confess
what happened to Lexi. I couldn’t say the
R
word.

Miss Bailoutte zeroed in on us immediately. She looked almost excited. It made me feel queasy.

“Alistair Aardant? The school football star?”

I should have known. But I said, “Yeah, that one.”

I guess it is inconceivable that the school football star could rape someone. Maybe if we pointed our fingers at Gauntly, with the death metal in his ears, no one would be surprised. Maybe if it were Neil, the delinquent who beat up other kids for no good reason, they would have said they saw it coming.

“What did Alistair do?”

“He assaulted Lexi.”

“In what way?”

“He tried to come onto her.”

“And?”

“It scared the sh—, it scared the
bejesus
out of her. But it’s all right—she managed to fight him off.”

Marianne turned to me with her eyes wide. It must be how a rabbit caught in the headlights looks, shortly before it comes face to car tyre. But I couldn’t help it. The way Miss Bailoutte was looking at me—she was almost salivating. I couldn’t say it.

“Do you think Lexi did anything to encourage it?”

“No!” I shouted and tried to block the question. Easier than trying to block the doubts that I shouldn’t have, but suddenly did have, ripping up inside my mind. Lexi said they “talked”. What exactly did she say to him?

Oh God Lexi, are you telling me the truth? Oh God, why am I even…

“Come on now, girls, don’t be afraid to express how you feel. I’m here for you to talk to.”

I didn’t want to express how I felt. I didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted something done about it.

“Maybe if you talk it through it will help you to better cope with the events, like where you were when the attack happened,” suggested Miss Bailoutte with another smile.

I didn’t like how Miss Bailoutte used the word
attack.
I thought about Lexi, sitting on Jane Mutton’s bed next to Aardant, the boyfriend of one of the most popular girls at our school. Lexi wasn’t walking down a dark alley; she didn’t accept a lift off a stranger and end up in a ditch. She was right here, in East Rivermoor. With a friend of Neil’s.

Last year, I went with my mother to some pretentious art exhibition with one of her clients—dark and tall, a human handbag. I only tagged along because my mother promised to buy me that new chocolate Cooper St dress. Anyway, there was one installation by this young guy who had made a model of a hotel the size of a dollhouse and wrapped in gauze.

I suppose I had a chat with him because he was the only decent person there. I was bored and my mum was more preoccupied with social networking. I guess I kinda thought he looked a bit like Neil as well.

He told me he was trying to highlight the suffering of those young women who had been murdered, trying to get the old cases re-opened. In between the layers of gauze he had inserted little pieces of glass, bottle tops and other pieces of refuse he had found at the bottom of that ditch. Apparently trying to “express the hidden pain” that society had long buried.

I asked him why he cared so much and he took out a photo from inside his jacket. It was a photo of one of the murdered girls, the first one. He said that although he never knew her, he couldn’t put his finger on why it affected him so much; he felt it was wrong that those women could be thrown away like rubbish. He said he felt frustrated that no one seemed to care. At the same moment, we looked up at the crowd around us, all busy sipping their tall glasses of champagne, laughing and absorbed in one another, and we both knew that it was true.

Miss Bailoutte stood up, teacup clunking, and waddled around to our side of the desk.

“I—I was busy,” I stuttered. “It was Marianne who should have checked on Lexi. After all, it was her fault Lexi got sick in the first place. It was Marianne’s idea that we go out past curfew that Thursday night in the rain!”

There, I said it. I was angry, I didn’t care who heard. I didn’t feel like holding back how I felt. Beside me, Marianne stirred. I turned to feel her backlash. Instead, what I was confronted with took me by surprise.

Marianne’s eyes were huge and watery, like some Disney princess. Then she did something I have never seen her do in the thirteen years I have known her. She started crying.

“Oh no, my dear, you poor thing!”

Miss Bailoutte leaned over and hugged Marianne. Marianne didn’t try to resist. In fact, looking at Marianne’s face, it almost seemed like she was grateful.

“Um, Miss Bailoutte? We really have to go now. I just remembered we have to, um, help Professor Adler set up another one of his ‘educational’ experiments.”

I tugged at Marianne’s arm.

“Oh, of course,” replied Miss Bailoutte absent-mindedly. “There, there dear. You know you can always come back at a better time, don’t you? I will be here to talk.”

I watched Marianne nod and wipe her eyes on the back of her hand.

“Let’s go,” I hissed into Marianne’s ear and I steered her out by the elbow.

Outside, I confronted her.

“What was all that about?”

Marianne sniffed and hiccupped, but said nothing.

“Can’t you see she’s doing absolutely nothing to help us? Sitting around talking about how we feel and what it all means—what crap! Does it make a difference to Lexi? Marianne—
hello Marianne!
What is wrong with you?”

“Sorry if I happen to just appreciate a little bit of kindness! I’m human after all, Eliza. In case you forget!
Which is, like, something you do
all the time
these days.”

I stared at Marianne, with huge tears dropping from her eyes.

“Marianne!” I shouted. “Sometimes I wonder why you are even part of our group. I mean, what makes you want to hang around with us when
everyone
knows you can do so much better with Jane Ayres?”

“Have you ever considered,” replied Marianne, fully crying now, “that instead of trying to make myself look good—I might actually
like
you and Lexi? Is that too hard to believe?”

I never could have anticipated Marianne’s response. I stood there speechless for a while.

“Let’s just get to the next class,” I said.

“What happened after that?” asks Dr Fadden.

“Miss Bailoutte took care of it all right. By the end of the day Aardant had been suspended. And the whole school knew about it. Because at about three o’clock the principal came on the intercom asking Aardant to come to his office.”

“Isn’t that good?”

“The whole school also found out why Aardant was suspended. I don’t know which two-bit skank spread the rumour, but if I ever—” I stop myself. It is easy to let the blame tumble out of my mouth, like more dirty gossip. What was done was spread, but it was no rumour.
It was the words I had told Miss Bailoutte.

It was my
half truth.
My
dirty secret.

Lexi ended up being away from school for almost two weeks. Her father stopped believing she had a strain of the flu. He thought she was suffering from some other illness instead.

She told me how he had taken her to St Christina’s to have her blood taken, three vials, exactly. How it was run through one-hundred-and-eighty-three tests, exactly. Lexi turned out to be perfectly healthy. The doctors didn’t find anything except a mild intolerance to gluten. That was all.

“I’ve got something to show you,” says Dr Fadden.

He has stopped the car at a traffic light. The ticking indicator beats at the same time as my heart. The single red traffic beam fills up the car like an emergency light.

“Here,” he says, popping his head up from the passenger side with a newspaper in his hand. He throws it over the backseat to me.

“What is it?”

“Check out the article on page three. There’s a feature on your teacher, Miss Bailoutte. I thought you might like to know.”

I unfold the paper. It’s a copy of the
East Rivermoor Eye.
On page three is a picture of Miss Bailoutte. Her hair is freshly
coloured and she is holding a framed plaque. The headline reads, “East Rivermoor Recipient of School Counsellor of the Year.”

“No way,” I say.

“Well, it’s true.”

“Do you know what?” I answer. “Neil told me once that I shouldn’t worry about what happens to the people that do wrong, that there are forces in this world that will take care of them. You know what I think? That is just utter and complete crap!”

“Tell me more about Neil,” Dr Fadden replies quickly, turning his head to look at me with one side of his face.

I wanted to be alone. To stew over Miss Bailoutte. But there is nowhere to go in the new East Rivermoor. The park is purposely flat and bright green so that the fitness junkies and trendy young couples can be seen as they pose on the grass. Even the old peppermint trees that used to line the paths have been cut down, as if the whole goddamn suburb was scared of its own shadow.

I didn’t want to go shopping, I didn’t want to sit in a café and sip a mocha-soy-latte. I didn’t want a pedicure or a manicure or my hair or my eyelashes curled. I didn’t want something new. I wanted to be somewhere old. So I could contemplate, too, that I was slowly crumbling apart.