Authors: Holly Chamberlin
Last Summer (5 page)
Meg looked at her hands on the chains of the swing and realized they were stained with rust. Somehow, to have dirty hands seemed appropriate, a symbol of her sin. She couldn’t deny that she had betrayed her best friend to a bunch of thugs and yet, at the same time, she couldn’t really believe that she had done it. Why had she been so stupid? What had she hoped to accomplish? The counselor her mother had made her see for a few weeks, someone from their church, Sister Pauline, a nun who wore jeans and T-shirts and earrings just like a normal person, had asked her that question more than once and other than the incredibly lame answer of “I don’t know,” all she could come up with was the almost as lame answer, “I wanted them to like me.” It was all pretty pathetic, mostly the part she hadn’t had the courage to tell Sister Pauline. That she had been mad at Rosie for not fighting back; that she had in some small way wanted to punish her friend for being ... For being what? For being frightened. Yes, it was all pretty pathetic.
Well, whatever she had hoped to achieve, what she got in the end was no best friend and no nice and generous best friend’s mother, and even Mr. Patterson didn’t stop by anymore with his toolbox to see if anything needed fixing. Which meant that when something had gone wrong with the kitchen sink the week before, Meg’s mother had had to call a plumber and spend who knew how much money she claimed not to have on a quick fix Mike Patterson could have done in five minutes and for free. Certainly Mrs. Giroux hadn’t had the option of calling her ex-husband. Meg had known for years and years that her father was, in her mother’s words, “pretty much useless around the house.” Meg’s opinion was that he was pretty much useless everywhere.
Abruptly, Meg got up from the swing and pushed it hard, jumping away as she did so. It flew wildly, the metal chains clanging against the structure’s supports. Meg winced. She shouldn’t be wasting time on a stupid swing set anyway. She would be fifteen in August, but sometimes she felt that she was still too much of a child. Judy Smith had a boyfriend. So did a few of the other girls who would be tenth graders in September. That was one of the things that had begun to frustrate Meg about Rosie back before all the bad stuff had started. Meg had wanted to talk about boys and maybe start dating, though she was pretty sure her mother wouldn’t let her, not the way she ranted on about most men being bums. But Rosie hadn’t been much interested in talking about guys or dating. She said that her parents wouldn’t let her date until she was sixteen, maybe even seventeen, so there was no point in wasting a lot of time debating about who was the cutest guy in their grade or who was the hottest senior. They’d had a stupid fight, nothing major, but Rosie’s lack of interest in guys and dating had pointed out to Meg that maybe their friendship wasn’t as perfect as it had been when they were younger. Maybe they were growing apart a bit. The notion had not sat well with Meg. Although she had been annoyed with Rosie, the thought of life without her was too weird to contemplate. It was like trying to imagine your life without your right hand or something.
The swing had come to a stop and Meg headed back inside the house. She really had better get started on the housework. A lot of times her mother was in a bad mood when she got home from work. Finding the house a mess definitely wouldn’t help. Not that she was afraid of her mother. Frannie Giroux’s bark was way worse than her bite. It was just that Meg didn’t like to be around anyone when they were in a bad mood. She had enough of her own bad moods to deal with, thank you very much.
Right before stepping inside the side door, Meg looked over her shoulder at Rosie’s house. No one was in sight. Meg closed the door behind her. So what if Rosie wasn’t really into boys or dating yet. So what if she preferred to watch an old black-and-white movie when Meg suggested they go shopping for makeup. Those things didn’t really matter. What did matter was getting Rosie back into her life.
5
I
t had been one of those days. And in Frannie’s opinion, there had been too many of “those days” lately. A traffic jam had come up out of nowhere, half of the office staff had mysteriously called in sick, and her intestines had been playing a game of Hacky Sack since noon. She had forgotten to bring in milk, and then had forgotten to ask Meg to pick up a carton, so at dinner Petey had had to drink orange juice. For some reason, this had struck him as a fate worse than death, which was odd, because Petey was the easy child. It was very unlike him to make a fuss about anything, but make a fuss he had. She would keep a close eye on him for the next day or two. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe some bigger kid at day camp was picking on him. The bullying epidemic loomed large in Frannie’s mind these days.
t had been one of those days. And in Frannie’s opinion, there had been too many of “those days” lately. A traffic jam had come up out of nowhere, half of the office staff had mysteriously called in sick, and her intestines had been playing a game of Hacky Sack since noon. She had forgotten to bring in milk, and then had forgotten to ask Meg to pick up a carton, so at dinner Petey had had to drink orange juice. For some reason, this had struck him as a fate worse than death, which was odd, because Petey was the easy child. It was very unlike him to make a fuss about anything, but make a fuss he had. She would keep a close eye on him for the next day or two. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe some bigger kid at day camp was picking on him. The bullying epidemic loomed large in Frannie’s mind these days.
Already in her worn and fraying flannel nightgown, Frannie left her room for the house’s one bathroom. In a perfect world she would at least have a powder room on the first floor, but it was not a perfect world. Unflinchingly, she looked at her face in the mirror over the sink. Her eyes, once what her first boyfriend way back in high school had called chocolate brown, now looked downright muddy. Dark circles surrounded them and a spray of fine lines (Be real, she told herself, they’re wrinkles) shot from the outer corners of both. Her complexion had muddied, too, in spite of using lots of moisturizer (generic brand, of course) each morning and night. She supposed she should have been using some product that claimed to lighten and brighten the skin, too, but it was too late now. Besides, what did it matter? She was pretty sure nobody really looked at her anymore, other than to see the cookie-cutter outline of Employee or Mother. And the last thing she wanted to do was date. No. Way. So what did it matter if Frances Giroux the person became invisible by the time she was forty? That was most women’s fate, anyway, to fade away quietly. Frannie didn’t have the energy to be one of those women who refused to go gently into social oblivion. Helen Mirren she was not.
Frannie sighed and turned to the process of brushing her teeth. She was only thirty-eight years old, but most times felt as if she were at least sixty. An old sixty, not a Helen Mirren kind of sixty-something. But unless a fairy godmother was going to magically offer her a free lifelong membership at a gym and an endless number of complimentary massages and facials, she was going to continue slogging along toward middle age with her wrinkles and sags and bulges. Amen. There were certainly more important matters with which to concern herself, like what had been going on with Meg. And like her own sense of responsibility and guilt.
Frannie turned out the light in the bathroom and walked back down the hall to her bedroom. As she passed Meg’s room she noted that her light was still on. She hoped her daughter was reading something a little more substantial than a fashion magazine, like one of the books she was supposed to read for her new English teacher. Petey’s light was out. He had fallen asleep right after dinner, another indication that something might be bothering him.
Or maybe,
Frannie thought,
I’m becoming a professionally nervous parent.
Or maybe,
Frannie thought,
I’m becoming a professionally nervous parent.
She quietly closed the bedroom door behind her. Well, maybe she was right to be nervous. Their family situation often meant that Frannie didn’t have the time to pay enough attention to her children, especially to her daughter, who was at that tender and often powder-keg age when the simplest incidents or the most innocent words could seem dire and dramatic and miscommunication between the old and young was the unfortunate norm.
Frannie pretty much collapsed into the bed she and Peter had bought when they were first married. Though she was bone tired, she knew within a minute of settling the light covers over her body that she would not be able to sleep for some time. Usually, she was snoring not long after her head hit the pillow (Meg had complained about the snores keeping her awake), but in the last weeks she had endured more and more near-sleepless nights. And a sleepless night did not make for a particularly easy day, especially not with Frannie’s job. For the past ten years she had been employed as the office manager for a midsized lumber supplier and home improvement company called Le Roi Lumber and Homes. Appropriately enough, it was owned and operated by a family named King. The pay was decent and the job afforded her health insurance, which sometimes seemed more essential than the salary, like when you looked at what it cost to pay for a policy entirely on your own. But the hours were long and a few members of the office staff were incredibly incapable, kept on only because they were somehow related to the president of the company, Trip King, who wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist himself. Still, she was thankful to have a job in the first place, especially with two children to support and little if any help from her ex-husband. Peter never had two nickels to rub together, and his asking for a loan and her refusing to give it was pretty much a monthly ritual. And on top of his fiscal irresponsibility, there was his general inability to be there for his children. His inability or his simple lack of interest or maybe even both.
Frannie sat up and adjusted the pillows behind her. How long had it been since she had replaced the pillows? She couldn’t remember, which probably meant that it was time for new ones. These were probably full of dead skin and dust mites. Next time she found herself in South Portland—which could be quite some time; summer was her employer’s busiest season and some weeks she found herself going in to the office on Saturday—she would stop in Marshalls or Home-Goods and see what was on sale.
She lay back down and sighed. Yes, Peter was useless in a situation like this, a family crisis. At least, he had been useless to date, and she didn’t expect that to change. He wasn’t a bad man, not really, just insensitive to emotional nuances, and also, she had to admit this, he was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. And there was the cheating thing, too. Peter would never agree to go to therapy—not that he had the money for treatment—so Frannie had no idea if he was indeed a “sex addict.” But he certainly had exhibited some seriously wayward behavior in the days of their marriage, and she wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn he was still sowing his wild oats at the age of thirty-seven. Some women didn’t mind a premature paunch and missing front teeth. Frannie knew she was being mean—like she was physically perfect!—but at that moment she didn’t much care. She would admit such unkind thoughts to Father William when she next went to confession. But Father William had known Peter, albeit not very well. She doubted that deep in his heart he would condemn her for not thinking of her ex-husband with charity. Father William might be a priest, but he was a human being first.
Adjusting the pillows had not helped her to relax. And thinking about her ex-husband wasn’t helping either, but she couldn’t seem to stop.
To tell herself she should have known better than to marry the dubiously charming local boy with the spotty reputation didn’t help matters. The fact was that she had married Peter when she was twenty-three and he was twenty-two. The following year she had given birth to Megan Christine. Almost eight years later, Peter Jr. had come along, unplanned, an accident, but welcomed. By then, the marriage was a sham, held together only by Frannie’s willpower and the firm belief that divorce was fundamentally wrong and should be avoided at all costs. And then things had gotten really bad, with Peter losing his job and maxing out their credit card and taking up with a much younger woman with a drug habit, and reason and the instinct for survival had triumphed over her church’s noble but unrealistic teachings. When Petey was barely two, Frannie kicked his father out of the house he was failing to pay for or maintain and began life as a single parent, which, in a way, she had been all along.
Maybe that was why Meg had acted so irresponsibly, Frannie thought now. Maybe she just hadn’t been a good enough single parent. In all her reading she had yet to come across any study that identified kids from single-parent homes as necessarily more likely to bully or to betray a friend. Well, she hadn’t yet come across such a study. Maybe that study was just waiting to hit her over the head with an accusation of failure.
Frannie looked over at the pile of books and magazines stacked on the night table. With few exceptions they were from the library, as her book- and magazine-buying budget was pretty pathetic. It was actually okay in this case because she didn’t really want to keep all the information on such a grim topic as bullying in the house. It felt—contaminating.
The number of terms to learn and absorb was overwhelming—“relational aggression,” “bullycide,” “social contagion” (that was when nice kids joined in the bullying—was that what Meg had succumbed to, the disease of social contagion?), “potential defenders,” “cyber-bullying.” So-called experts differed in their sometimes dubious, sometimes legitimate credentials as well as in their definitions of the types of bullies, though all seemed to agree about how a victim or a witness should respond to a bully. In short, walk away and tell an adult.
And the staggering statistics! Frannie had read in one of the magazines that every day an average of 16,000 children in the United States stayed home from school for fear of being bullied. Another source said that 30 percent of American kids were directly affected by bullying. Seriously, what the hell was going on? And the damn Internet wasn’t helping matters, either. Children were being tortured in their own homes, the one place where traditionally they could feel safe and protected. It was insane. And it was criminal.
Of course, Frannie reflected, staring up at a new crack in the ceiling paint, the situation wasn’t entirely hopeless. It seemed that every week someone was establishing an organization to educate students and their parents about bullying, how to prevent it, how to stop it, how to heal from it. And there were successful campaigns out there, like the “It Gets Better” effort. A band, Rise Against (Frannie had no idea who they were but had read about them), had teamed up with that campaign and had recorded a song called “Make It Stop (September’s Children)” in which they called for the end of the kind of culture that fosters hate and bigotry. That had been after the rash of teen suicides in the fall of 2010.
Nickelodeon, which Frannie knew all too well from personal experience (if she never saw another episode of
Sponge-Bob SquarePants
it would be too soon) was very popular with kids and tweens, was running a two-year on-air public service campaign featuring some of the network’s young stars. There were several activist groups in her own state of Maine pushing for a law to define and prevent bullying, and there was something called a “System-Wide Code of Conduct” that addressed bullying and harassment. Even the federal government was involved in the education effort. And not too long ago a New Hampshire boy had successfully petitioned the Boston Red Sox to make a video for the “It Gets Better” campaign in honor of his uncle, a gay man, who had recently died while traveling abroad.
Sponge-Bob SquarePants
it would be too soon) was very popular with kids and tweens, was running a two-year on-air public service campaign featuring some of the network’s young stars. There were several activist groups in her own state of Maine pushing for a law to define and prevent bullying, and there was something called a “System-Wide Code of Conduct” that addressed bullying and harassment. Even the federal government was involved in the education effort. And not too long ago a New Hampshire boy had successfully petitioned the Boston Red Sox to make a video for the “It Gets Better” campaign in honor of his uncle, a gay man, who had recently died while traveling abroad.
That was all unarguably good stuff. But there were some aspects to the conversation surrounding the issue that worried Frannie. For example, some people in the anti-bullying industry were arguing that there was or should be no such thing as an “innocent bystander.” They argued that it was every person’s moral imperative to act to prevent, deter, or stop violence no matter the risk to personal health or happiness. That was a powerful ideal, but it was a tall order to expect a kid to act courageously when adults throughout history had failed—and continued to fail—to resist or criticize abuse. All you had to do was read the daily news to be reminded of human frailty. If you were really honest, all you had to do was look in the mirror each morning.
Frannie stretched her legs, toes pointed down, and felt instead of relaxation the beginnings of a cramp in her left calf. Quickly, she turned her toes up in the direction of her shins, hoping the cramp wouldn’t fully materialize. It didn’t. Good. Maybe if she exercised regularly her legs wouldn’t cramp so often. Maybe if she exercised at all.
Like that was going to happen. Frannie sighed. Maybe what her daughter had done—betraying a friend’s secret—would not be considered bullying by many people, but the results of her action, coming hard upon the terrorizing behavior of Mackenzie Egan and her gang, had undoubtedly pushed Rosie over the edge. Rosie had always been, from the very first, a quiet sort, a bit shy, a bit emotionally ... delicate. Just like her mother, in fact. Before the girls were out of Pull-Ups, Meg had emerged as the leader of the two, the one who had walked first, the one who decided what toys they would play with, the one who jumped first into the pool while Rosie followed more carefully, using the ladder to ease her descent. Meg had given up her favorite stuffed animal, a plush little puffin named Puffy, by the time she was four. Rosie had carried around her favorite stuffed animal, a fluffy brown puppy named Harold, until she was eight. (Frannie had often wondered what sort of kid named a stuffed animal Harold. The answer seemed to be, a special sort of kid.)
No, Frannie decided again, her daughter should not be demonized. She was not evil. In a moment of adolescent weakness she had spilled a secret. She had done something wrong but not something demonic. She had confessed to Father William and had been absolved. She had apologized to Rosie. What more could she do? There was no changing the past.
From her bed Frannie could see several lights on the second floor of the Pattersons’ house. So, it looked as if she might not be the only one who couldn’t sleep. It was probably Jane who was lying awake into the small hours. It was usually the woman who suffered the sleepless nights. Not always, but usually.
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