The Stud Book (27 page)

Nyla asked, “How come nobody here followed up on it? Nobody noticed or investigated?”

The principal tightened down on her smile of success. She said, “Please. We have twenty-four hundred kids in this school. We have five security guards a day rotating through. Our job is to curtail any culture of drug trafficking or other problematic behavior, and maintain a quality education. When there’s a problem, we shut it down. We don’t test drugs ourselves. If there’s an error, the police will find and fix it.”

It sounded so easy. So rational. And so very impersonal.

“Understand this—we can’t afford a situation like they’re having in Washington right now.”

A sexting scandal going through a southern Washington school district had been all over the news. A photo of one girl’s naked body, forwarded through the whole school system, left every child involved charged with distribution of porn. It was a nightmare. Parents had filed lawsuits against the district, citing a hostile learning environment. The lawsuits had started piling up on top of one another.

“Your daughter will be fine,” Mrs. Cherryholmes offered. “The support of a concerned parent like you makes all the difference in the world.”

The principal stood up, and Nyla stood with her. They nodded their heads in unison. It’d all be all right. And in that way, the principal silently convinced Nyla to leave. She walked her out of the office and down the hall to the school’s front door.

“Good luck with it. Let us know,” Mrs. Cherryholmes said. “You’re doing everything right.”

Nyla was happy for the talk. It felt like they were friends. It almost made her want to volunteer in the school again, though she’d given that up years before when she got in trouble for letting kids play with matches in the name of an art project, working with burnished driftwood and melted paraffin.

Back then, one of the girls had long, curly hair. They were supposed to tie their hair back! But anyway, Nyla had put the fire out fast, using her own wool jacket even, and the girl had only a few singed bits, and she looked good with her new short hair the next day. She did! It could’ve been worse, and it wasn’t, because Nyla knew what to do in a crisis, and that was something they needed around schools.

Nyla didn’t want to remember that scene too much but knew if she’d been there when Arena was accused—even if it was someone else’s daughter who had been caught selling a mysterious powder—she would’ve seen the project through and had the substance in question tested. Definitely.

The truth was, Nyla hadn’t given up volunteering back when Arena was in grade school—she’d been banned. Maybe they’d forgotten. For now, though, she wouldn’t volunteer anyway because she had her own project, and that project was her daughter.

At home, Nyla called the nonemergency police number. She went through the hoops, pushing one button to indicate her precinct, then another to tell the computer it wasn’t a stolen vehicle problem. No, it wasn’t domestic violence, which would mean pushing two. It wasn’t assault, corporate crime, a traffic incident, or a food poisoning grievance. They had a whole menu of options.

It wasn’t a mass cult suicide. She thought of the Temple Everlasting, that creepy dive, and hoped to never push button six.

When the option came up, she chose “evidence room”—“press eight”—and then listened to Muzak for a tooth-grindingly long time, but toughed it out. She listened to that shitty excuse for hold music because this, the phone call, was about Arena.

The Muzak cut. A man said, “Case number and date of complaint.”

It caught Nyla off guard. She fumbled. “What?” She’d expected something more like a conversation.

He said it again. “Case number. Upper right hand. Sixteen digits, two letters.”

She dug through her purse for the folded yellow paper they’d given her the day it all started. She read her case number off the slip. This was the path to the solution. She’d do it their way. Eye on the prize.

There was the light click and tap of a keyboard on the other end.

She asked, “Can we revisit evidence without bringing in lawyers?”

The man on the phone coughed. Then, in his tired voice, he said, “We show no evidence on hold associated with that report, ma’am.”

She said, “None?”

He said, “Sorry. Nothing listed. Maybe it’s still in processing.”

The legal system and the school system both had their own paperwork, their own rules. Nyla made phone calls, memorizing the pattern of buttons to push to move through electronic instructions. She had a constant sound track of Muzak in her head. Out of all her calls, nobody could come up with “evidence,” and at the same time, the school wouldn’t agree to let Arena off the hook.

It was like she’d fallen, her feet moving in two different directions, all of it tangled. The paperwork was in process, Arena’s name was on it, and there was a gap between the humans who worked at the school, the paper pushers in the district’s legal offices, and the law, which was inhuman, disembodied, and looming.

Somebody, somewhere along the way, had made a human error. Somebody operated based on an assumption. Maybe it took more than one person, but nobody was willing to step up and fix the error, which could, at least theoretically, involve laying blame.

Another day, another call, a man from the local district attorney’s office said, “The report says she was selling a controlled substance, ma’am.”

Nyla said, “I know it does, but she wasn’t.”

She heard the crunch of food on the other end of the line, as though the man was eating chips. He took a deep breath. He said, “You’d want to get yourself a lawyer.”

His words sunk to her stomach like rancid fat.

She’d worked with court-appointed lawyers after the wreck that killed her husband. Lawyers like that? They’re budgeted for a limited amount of standard paperwork. You can’t even talk to a lawyer without accruing a bill. To ask a lawyer to read a single sentence of e-mail could cost more than a hundred dollars. To send three lawyers the same short note was a fortune.

She wouldn’t contact a lawyer if she could help it.

The DA’s office man said, “I’d recommend you let your daughter go through the process. It’s a small thing. It’ll be like water running its course. She might even learn from it. You can have it expunged from the record later.”

Nyla asked, “Does expunging take a lawyer?”

“It does.” The man’s voice was forgiving, but his facts stayed the same. After a pause, he said, “I’ve seen people spend more time and money fighting the law than it takes to just participate in it.”

O
n a porn shoot, you’d call it the “C-light” and use it to cast a cunt or a cock into the brightest glow. The C-light directs a viewer’s eye, leads the way like the yellow brick road right to the moneymaker. Dulcet had one hand on the black casing of what would be her C-light. She gave the piece a twist and a tap, and aimed the beam. She said, “Stand on the X.”

Georgie, with Bella in her arms, shifted uncertainly to an X made out of duct tape on the floor.

Dulcet’s photography studio was a rented room on the first floor of a warehouse building in southeast Portland. There was a black cloth backdrop rolled down and ready. The windows were covered with poster board and silver duct tape. Bitchy Bitch slept curled up in a well-worn overstuffed armchair.

Dulcet said, “Taking photos is about creating a relationship between the subject and the photographer. And we already have that. This’ll be fabulous. Ready to strip?”

Georgie adjusted one of the nursing pads lodged in her cotton bra, cradled Bella, and looked around. “It’s cold in here.”

It wasn’t that cold, though, really.

The walls were lined with pictures, a few framed and more un-framed, and then even more on the floor, leaning against the wall. There was one of a naked woman on a beach, her body echoing the planes of sand and driftwood. Another showed a curvy, nude blonde alone in her retro kitchen with a Wedgewood stove.

Georgie let her eyes rest on it and felt a pang of stove envy.

Even more, she had a hit of envy for the way all these women could stand naked and made-up and act casual.

Some of the photos were theatrical: There was a bare naked black-haired, ivory-skinned princess sprawled on a polished bar top, a cherry floating in an amber Manhattan, the tumbler tucked between her thighs; in another, the light hit a woman’s ass, close up, and the woman turned her head to look back at the camera and laugh, playing off an exaggerated angle between her narrow face, lower down, and her broad fanny, which loomed large.

Dulcet hauled out a space heater. The heater hummed its own song.

Georgie held her baby’s wobbly head close, glad for the cotton sling that kept her daughter’s gaze veiled. A newborn’s eyes aren’t strong, but a baby is wired to learn fast, and it didn’t seem right to let a two-week-old girl baby look far into Dulcet’s panopticon of female sex.

In one photo, a satin-skinned woman, dressed only in high heels, talked on an old-school phone with a long curly cord. She seemed to have gotten terribly tangled, fallen over in her tipsy shoes, then pulled a pillow under her stomach just enough to lift her rear and give a glimpse of an inner-thigh tattoo.

Georgie moved closer, inching away from the X on the floor. She said, “What’s the story here?” She looked for the narrative line, the rhetorical angle. She read a picture the way she’d read a book.

“Story? That was a blast. That’s the PE teacher.”

Georgie looked at Dulcet. “The one who got you kicked out of the schools?”

Dulcet laughed in a way that meant yes, of course, and no at the same time. “I got myself kicked out the schools.”

“The famous PE teacher.” Georgie smelled Bella’s head, her soft hair, the scent trapped and condensed inside the fabric of the dark, cradling sling.

Posing nude was esteem building. That’s what people said, anyway.
The immergence of the gaze invests itself in the legitimation of the gendered body
. The photo shoot was Dulcet’s postpartum gift to Georgie: a mother and child portrait, which sounded like a great plan back when Georgie pictured herself reclaiming her pre-pregnancy body, back when she still bothered to wash her hair.

She wanted pictures of Bella, so new and delicate. But photos of her own naked ass? That she could put off forever.

“All systems go,” Dulcet sang.

Georgie hesitated. How did other women do this? This was not self-esteem building. Not at all.

Dulcet said, “Stand on the mark. We’ll take a few test shots.”

Georgie kept her clothes on and held Bella in the sling in front. She walked over the sheet on the floor, stepped onto the X, and claimed her fate.

Dulcet snapped away, then squinted at the image on the back of her digital Nikon, checking light and composition. She took another. Georgie smiled into the lens and winced under the flash.

“I vote you get naked. At least get the baby out of that hammock. You’ll look totally hot.”

Georgie said, “Do we have to go for ‘hot’? Maybe something more Madonna-ish.”

Dulcet lowered her camera. “Madonna? That’s what you want?”