Like It Never Happened (22 page)

Principal Gladstone, who had been feigning invisibility, looked up with dazed surprise. Bunt's lips stretched triumphantly across her face. They were both staring at me like I had just confessed to the whole thing.

Bunt tucked her notepad inside the breast pocket of her uniform, right behind her badge. “Thank you for your cooperation, Rebecca. That will be all.”

“So what happens now?” I asked.

Nobody answered. Principal Gladstone inspected the pink stub of a pencil eraser.

“I mean, how long is it going to take?” I asked. “When can he come back to school?”

Pretending not to hear me, Bunt shook Principal Gladstone's hand and made her exit.

“Am I supposed to leave, or . . . ?” I looked at Gladstone desperately. I wanted the date on which this would all be over. I was starting to wonder if a person could die from panic.

“Not yet,” he apologized. “I have someone else who wants to speak with you.” He stood and slipped past the door frame, leaving me alone in his office. Feeling destructive, I briefly considered pulling open his desk drawers, or waking up his computer screen. Instead I just sat on my hands, obedient.

When Gladstone returned, he was trailed by a woman in a cable-knit sweater and plaid pants. She had a boring face and short gray hair parted down the middle. Her eyes were so blue they looked almost unfocused. Gladstone introduced her as Mrs. Meredith, a social worker from the City of Portland's youth services. Gladstone smiled and winked, like we were going to get along fabulously, and then he abandoned me altogether.

Calmly, the social worker perched on the edge of the desk. She splayed her fingers across her thighs. I stared at the leather band of her watch.

“Hello, Rebecca.” She spoke like a recording. “How are you doing today?”

I hugged my knees tighter to my chest, shielding myself. I didn't want to be alone with this person.

“Do you feel like talking?” she asked. Her raised eyebrows were meant to look inviting but were actually condescending as hell.

“No.”

“Okay,” she said, like it made no difference to her. Like her job
wasn't
to reduce me to a mess of tears and confessions. “We don't have to talk this time. But I want you to look these over, and call me immediately if you feel like talking.”

From her purse she produced a handful of pamphlets. She held them between us, and I forced her to keep her arm outstretched. When she started to tremble, I grabbed the pamphlets.

The one on top was entitled
Speaking out About Sexual Abuse
. It featured a girl sitting under a tree, staring intensely at an orange leaf. She looked kind of stoned.

The caption began, “Amy's stepfather was coming into her room every night . . .”

I read far enough to know that Amy and I had nothing in common. Mr. McFadden had never come close to hurting me. One night, weeks ago, he had given me a compliment I would remember forever. That was the worst of his damage.

“Shit,” I whispered, thrusting the pamphlets back toward the social worker. When she refused to move, I let them fall to the floor between us.

“Rebecca,” she protested evenly, “there is some very useful information in there.”

“No.” I slung my bag over my shoulder and looked into her weirdly blue eyes. I tried to appear much bigger and more consequential than I apparently was. “None of this is useful to me.”

On the front steps, I bummed a cigarette from a kid known for his endless supply of Marlboro Reds. We had ridden the same bus in eighth grade. A seat near the back had borne the phrase
REBECCA RIVERS GIVE
S GOOD HEAD
for the entirety of the school year.

The kid stood with his friends and it was obvious, what they knew about me. His hand shook as he held out the pack. He tried to conceal his nervousness behind a crude tongue-popping noise.

“Here you go,” he said.

I thanked him.

“Oh, it's my
pleasure
.”

His minions erupted with hyena laughter.

My status as school slut had officially been renewed. I moved farther down the steps to smoke my cigarette. At the first inhale, my stomach wrung itself out, dishrag tight. There was nothing that could make this day a good one.

The Essential Four emerged from the building, Tim on Charlie's left and the girls on his right. Frankly, my ex-boyfriend didn't look brokenhearted. He didn't even look like he was having a particularly bad day.

They turned west on Hawthorne, pretending not to see me. An afternoon without rehearsal was uncharted territory for all of us. I wondered where they would go and what they would say about me once they got there.

Tears stung in my eyes as I remembered that morning at Charlie's house—the tequila in our blood, the power out. Charlie's hatred had emerged then, burning through all his usual charm. So had my loyalty to Mr. McFadden.

I had heard people say that if there's onstage chemistry
between two actors, nothing's happening offstage. It's
when they're suddenly lacking sexual tension that you know actors have started sleeping together in real life.

Mr. McFadden and I were not costars. But something had definitely shifted during our last rehearsal. For the first time, he had found fault with my acting. Charlie must have caught on to something new between us—something suspiciously intimate when Mr. McFadden lamented my lost dignity.

When rehearsal had ended, Charlie had followed me to the staff parking lot. He had watched me aim for Mr. McFadden's lips, and rushed to the office to tell them everything he knew.

Everything he knew, and then some.

T
wo days after the accusation
,
I woke to find my father perched on the edge of my bed. I sat up and pulled the blankets to my chin. I could not remember ever waking up with Dad in my room.

He took a deep breath. “I need you to tell me whether there is any truth, any truth at all, to the claims this student made against your teacher.”

From the street, I could hear Mrs. Almeida's sprinklers whirring. She watered her lawn every day that it didn't rain, like otherwise her stone cherubs would be parched.

I wondered if my mother had appointed my father to wrangle the truth from me. In two days she had said as many things to me: my name in exasperation when I left a wet towel on the floor, and later: “Have you heard from your sister?”

For the record, the answer was no. Mary had disappeared at the first sign of trouble, which wasn't exactly unusual.

“Did he ever take an inappropriate interest in you? Ever?” My father wasn't looking at me but at our reflections in the mirror.

I met his eyes in the glass. “No,” I said so sternly, there was no way he could doubt me.

Dad's shoulders relaxed. Through the blankets he rested a hand on my shin. He told me the truth was all that mattered. The truth would make this whole thing go away.

The part of me that was young and terrified wanted to throw her arms around her dad. But the rest of me was just waiting for him to leave. I needed to be dressed in order to hug my father. I needed to have brushed my teeth, to be wearing a bra and eyeliner—basically to have put myself together, so he didn't mistake me for the little kid I used to be.

Patting my leg for good measure, he left the room. I wondered what would happen if I confirmed his worst fears. My parents had never talked to me about sex, not once. I knew that when Tess was twelve, her parents had sat her down for a lengthy lecture on condoms and consent and disease, concluding with awkward hugs and big bowls of ice cream. Like,
You did it, champ! You listened to your mother say “vagina,” so enjoy some Rocky Road.

Mom preferred “private parts.” But even if she had bothered to tell me about sex back then, it would hardly make a difference now.

This was something of an unforeseeable situation.

When I got home from school—where rumors had swelled so far past the bounds of plausibility, we were apparently planning to elope in Canada—I found a neon sheet of paper on the kitchen counter. Beside it lay an envelope ripped straight down the middle. It wasn't like my mother to tear into the mail so recklessly.

The memo, from the office of Bickford Park Alternative School, was regarding the “disturbing allegations brought forth on Monday afternoon.” It was supposed to assure everyone's parents that student safety was Bickford Park's top priority. “At this point in time, we have a very limited amount of evidence in support of the claims. But if a staff member is found guilty of breaching student-teacher boundaries, he will be swiftly terminated and our hiring policies reevaluated.”

There were about six hundred students at Bickford Park, meaning that six hundred copies of this memo had been printed on fluorescent green paper—which seemed sloppy; didn't the occasion call for something more neutral?—and dropped in the mail. Six hundred sets of parents had read it and asked their kids for more information. And the kids, of course, would combine the only rumors they had ever heard about me and say it was probably true.

My mother, presumably, was upstairs dying of humiliation.

The memo also included a list of boundaries Bickford Park teachers were advised to maintain.

• Never compliment a student on his or her physical appearance.

• Never touch a student.

• Never meet with a student behind closed doors.

• Never be alone with a student.

• Never appear to have a favorite, or a “teacher's pet.”

• Never give a student a ride home, except in emergency conditions.

• Never encourage a student to reveal personal information.

• Never appear interested in social relations between students.

• Never react to a student's emotion with equal emotion.

I thought probably Mr. McFadden had done all of those things. And I thought probably no teacher had ever avoided all of those things. Still clutching the memo, I wandered through the house until I came to the closed door of my father's office. I lifted my fist to knock, but stopped when I heard his voice.

“There's no evidence, Linda. The principal just admitted that the kid can't get the story straight. First it was that they had hotcakes together on Halloween. Now it's supposed to be last Friday. Rebecca came home for dinner last Friday! You cooked the Moroccan couscous from the box.”

It seemed unlike Charlie to get his stories mixed up.

“This is such a mess,” moaned my mother. Then, softly, “You could tell it came from the box?”

Dad ignored this last part. “If you ask me, Linda, this whole ordeal is nothing more than dramatics between teenagers. Somebody wants to teach our daughter a lesson, so they've gone and fabricated this whole implausible story, with no concern for the consequences! What we should be asking Rebecca is why somebody would want to punish her like this!”

As much as I did not want to answer that question, Dad's words filled me with hope. I had never heard him so passionate about anything—aside from a few pivotal golf moments. No evidence, drama between teenagers. Yes, please.

My mother's voice dropped an octave. “This is unreal,” she said, like she hadn't even heard him. Dad was silent. I imagined him massaging her shoulders, his fingers smoothing the wrinkles from her lavender cardigan.

“Everyone is always going to remember this,” Mom added.

The only safe way to contact Charlie was to take the landline into my room. I figured there had to be something he wanted, something I could offer him in exchange for his confession. At this point, there wasn't much I wouldn't do.

I imagined Charlie's cell phone vibrating against his thigh. I knew he wouldn't recognize my home phone number on the screen.

A woman answered. She was all out of breath. Surprised, I hesitated before asking, “Is Charlie there?” I tried to sound like Liane.

The woman paused. “Who is this?” From her voice I could tell she was young for a mom. At least ten, maybe more like twenty years younger than mine.

“It's Rebecca,” I whispered. I was developing this terrible habit of telling the truth.

Another pause. “No, honey.” In the background, a microwave was beeping. “You can't speak to my son.”

Beneath the hardness in her voice was something like sympathy, which made it even worse when she hung up.