Touch (6 page)

Doctor Atwood says, “Maisie, do you think we could revisit the incident on the bus?”

“Revisit?” I say. “
Revisit
as in you want me to tell you the story that I’ve already told a million times because you don’t believe me? I thought you were supposed to believe me. I thought that was part of your job.”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” says Doctor Atwood. “Because the fact is, Maisie, I think
you
believe
what you’re saying happened. But memory’s a funny thing. It can distort things. People tell themselves a story about what happened, and they start to believe the story, and then they start thinking that the story is what actually happened. And it becomes the truth. Or
a
truth. Whether it happened exactly that way or not. The mind’s a funny thing.”

“
Your
mind, maybe,” I say.

“Don’t be like that,” Doctor Atwood says. “I’m trying to help you.”

It’s something she says so often, I’m almost starting to believe it. “You want me to tell it again?”

Outside the window behind her chair, it’s winter, winter, winter.

“Please,” she says. “I think it could be really helpful at this point. It’s been a while, after all.”

“Okay,” I say. “If that’s what you want.”

I’m so bored with the story. I’ve told it so many times. To Joan and to the principal, to the school administration, and to Cynthia, our lawyer. At first it was hard to tell. In the beginning, it was really embarrassing. But each time, it got easier. And eventually it got boring.
Now I can basically tell it as if it had happened to someone else, to a girl named Maisie who had a bad experience on a school bus. Every time I mean
a girl named Maisie
, I just use the word
I
.

I say, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

“Maisie, please.”

“Okay. The older kids were away. Chris and Kevin sat near us. They started saying that Shakes told them I let him touch my boobs, and since we’d been such good friends, it didn’t seem fair. I should let them do it, too.”

“Why do you think they said that?” asks Doctor Atwood.

“I think they wanted to touch my boobs.”

“You know it’s more than that, Maisie. You know perfectly well that the boys didn’t say that to make you feel comfortable or good. They didn’t say that to make you think it was something you might enjoy, something that would feel good to you.”

Well, obviously. I didn’t think that. But it was better than thinking they wanted to hurt me and make me feel bad. Why would they want to do that? They blamed me for their growing up and for turning into a girl with breasts. Chris and Kevin blamed me for having chosen
Shakes over them. And I still didn’t know what Shakes blamed me for. Maybe for confusing him, for making him feel he had to choose between me and Kevin and Chris. But I wasn’t the one who’d made him choose. Sometimes I wanted to corner him, and confront him, and ask how he could have done it. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Maybe I was afraid that I’d get my heart broken all over again.

“What are you thinking right now?” asks Doctor Atwood.

“Nothing,” I say. “My mind is a total blank.”

“Never mind. Go ahead.”

“There’s nothing else to say. I told them I needed to think about it a minute. Then I said, ‘No.’”

“You said no?” she repeats.

“Yes,” I say. “I mean
no
. I said no.”

“And then what happened?”

“They looked at each other again. They had it all planned out. Shakes grabbed my wrists and held them down in my lap. Kevin and Chris kind of pawed at my boobs.”

“Simultaneously?” asks Doctor Atwood.

“No. First Kevin, then Chris. I think. Or maybe it
was the other way around.”

“And what were you thinking about while this was happening?”

“I was telling myself, ‘It’s just your breasts. It doesn’t mean anything really. It’s no different than if they were touching your arm. Go ahead, touch my arm if you want.’”

“You detached yourself from yourself?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“That couldn’t have been pleasant.”

“Duh,” I say.

“And then?”

“Then they touched my breasts some more. They took turns.”

“Were you scared?”

“Of what? We were on the bus! What else was going to happen? Mostly, I was pissed. And then, right in the middle of it, I got so pissed that I yelled really loud, in my nastiest, most sarcastic voice, ‘Oh boy, oh boy, that feels really good.’”

“And then?”

“I looked up and saw Daria Wells looking straight at
me, straight at
us
, at me and at the three guys. She was furious. She knew what we were doing. She hated me, and she blamed me. And I knew that she was going to tell.”

“Which she did,” says Doctor Atwood.

The clock ticks off a few minutes.

I say, “Okay. What part don’t you believe?”

“I
do
believe you,” she says. “But it just seems so…unlikely that your crippled friend would be the one to hold your wrists.”

“His names is Shakes,” I say. “And he’s not crippled. He was the closest to me. It makes sense.”

“But he’s the weakest,” she says. “He’d have the most trouble restraining you. You could have escaped.”

“He’s not
that
weak.” Why am I still defending Shakes?

“And if Daria was Chris’s girlfriend, why would she tell the school about something that would get Chris into so much trouble?”

Doesn’t the so-called therapist know one single thing about human beings? “Maybe she was just mad. Or maybe for once in her life, she was doing the right
thing. Anyway, she
didn’t
say that Shakes was holding my wrists. She couldn’t have seen it.”

“I realize that,” says the doctor. Why don’t I think she believes me? Am I being paranoid, or is Doctor Atwood a double agent hired to wreck our case?

I say, “There’s something else. The money part.”

“What money part?”

I say, “Something that happened later.”

“What?” asks Doctor Atwood.

‘The hour’s up,” I say. I can hear Phlegm Man in the waiting room. Until now, I never appreciated what a hero the guy really is. I never knew that he could save me.

“Let’s start with this the next time. To be continued,” she says.

My mom used to talk about waiting for the other shoe to drop—waiting for the second bad thing to happen after the first bad thing that’s happened. After that terrible morning on the bus, I waited for that second shoe. And somehow I knew that Daria Wells was going to make sure that it dropped. Every time I thought of the expression on her face when she’d seen the guys grope me, I knew she was going to tell someone.

Time goes slowly when you’re listening for the sound of that second shoe. When you’re expecting trouble. But in this case I was glad for every hour I waited in a state of total dread. Because it gave me some time to think about what I was going to do and say when the truth came out.

Nothing was what I decided it’d be. It had been weird with the guys touching me and all. But there was still a code of honor. These were my oldest friends. I didn’t have to rat them out just because they’d touched my boobs. It had been totally uncool of them, totally mean and cruel. Shakes had hurt me so badly, I couldn’t stand to think about it. But still I didn’t have to go running to the principal and cry like a baby.

Even if Daria told on us, I could just deny it. I could say I’d asked them to touch my breasts. I could say I liked it. Or I could say it never happened, that Daria was making it all up because she was jealous of what good friends Chris and Kevin and Shakes and I were.

For the whole rest of the day of the incident, school was normal, as far as I could tell. No one seemed any different than they usually were. Shakes and I didn’t have
any classes together, and when I saw Kevin and Chris, they pretended not to see me.

I was trying to convince myself that if everyone pretended the groping incident hadn’t happened, maybe that would mean it hadn’t happened. Of course, anyone who knew anything about me would have known that something was wrong when, on the bus ride home from school, I sat all the way up front even though, with the seniors still gone, I could have sat anywhere I wanted. When I got on the bus, I noticed that Shakes and Chris and Kevin were in the back row, but I didn’t even look at them, not once.

I couldn’t help wondering if the guys felt sorry for what had happened, for what’d they done to me and how they’d made me feel. I hoped so, but I doubted it. I was pretty sure that their strongest feeling was fear that I—or someone—might tell on them. It certainly wasn’t going to be me. I told myself it didn’t matter. Big deal if some guys touched my breasts.

By that evening, I’d pretty much convinced myself that nothing else was going to happen, that the whole problem was just going to go away.

That was when the phone rang. I knew it wasn’t for me. No one ever called me anymore.

I was walking through the kitchen when I heard, “Why, Doctor Nyswander!” and I stopped short. It wasn’t as if the principal called every day. It wasn’t as if the principal had ever called before.

“Why, that’s terrible,” Joan kept saying, her voice getting higher and sounding so totally stressed and tragic that I thought something
really
terrible had happened. I don’t know what I imagined—a school shooting, a kid killed in a car wreck, a school bus crash. It was almost as if I wished it was something like that. Obviously, I didn’t, not really. But I knew what the principal was calling about, and I wished it was anything but that.

Finally, Joan said thank you and hung up and turned to me and said, in a totally flat, expressionless—and completely terrifying—voice, “What happened on the bus this morning, Maisie?”

“Nothing. Why?” I said.

“Then what is this about?” said Joan. “Did anyone…touch your breasts?”

“Somebody’s making it up,” I said. “To make me look like a ho.”

“Why would anyone want to do that?”

“Boys are always trying to do that. To spread rumors and tell lies and make girls look like hos.”

I don’t know who was more surprised by what I’d said. My best friends had always been boys. But they weren’t anymore. And it wasn’t the kind of thing that Joan expected me to say—especially not to her.

Joan paused a minute, then sighed deeply.

“Sad, but true,” she said.

The next day was maybe the worst, although by this point I’ve kind of lost the ability to tell better from worse, or even to distinguish slightly better from lots worse. But I’ve noticed that every time I think,
Things can’t get any worse than this
, I can be sure that something will happen that’s worse than anything that has happened so far. So let’s just say that the next day was a really bad day.

I rode up in the front of the bus again, me and Big
Maureen. I had a seat all to myself. I pretended to be asleep. And I guess I did fall asleep, because the next thing I knew, we were at school.

I walked in the door, and from the minute I entered the hall I heard this funny jingling sound. Everywhere I looked, all the kids seemed to be jingling the change in their pockets and purses and backpacks. It sounded sort of like Christmas, except this wasn’t some happy jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.

The sound had a nasty edge that seemed to be saying, This is about
you
, Maisie. I knew that they were doing it
to
me,
for
me,
about
me. The kids were looking straight at me as they did it. They were sending me a message. Plus, in case I didn’t get the point, some really classy guy would shake his pocket and grab between his legs or make believe that he had breasts growing out of his chest, and he’d squeeze his imaginary breasts as if they were those clown balloons that squirt water.

One guy hissed at me as I passed him in the hall.

“Okay,” he said. “How much?”

Were the kids saying that I was a whore who had let the guys touch me for money? Was that what Chris had
told jealous Daria and what she had told the principal and the whole school?

It hurt me and made me angry, but some part of me felt like it was a sick sort of compliment. The whole school seemed to think that I had the kind of breasts that boys—none of whom, I knew, had gigantic allowances—would pay real money to touch. Okay, it wasn’t exactly like making the honor roll or being the class president. On the other hand, I could name a half dozen celebrities, movie stars, and singers who had nothing going for them
but
breasts. And some of them had giant careers. They were probably much richer and more famous than the kids they went to school with, the senior class presidents and honor roll students and so forth. So breasts weren’t exactly
nothing
.

Meanwhile, I’d become sort of famous. It wasn’t the kind of fame I would have chosen, but still, kids who’d never noticed me before suddenly knew who I was. Everyone seemed to think I had celebrity boobs that guys would pay to touch. I told myself that breasts weren’t the only thing I would ever have. They were just what I had now, my special gift that I’d done nothing to earn.

I could live with everybody thinking the guys had paid to touch me. But I couldn’t help thinking that there was something else going on—some secret signal that I wasn’t picking up on. And there was no one I could ask, no one who would tell me what the kids were doing and saying, what they meant when they made that jingling sound. It was sort of like having toilet paper stuck to your shoe, or spinach between your teeth, and no one will tell you. It didn’t exactly make me feel like the giant of self-esteem that Joan always claimed she was trying to turn me into.

Last night, on the phone, Joan and the principal agreed that she would come to school for a two o’clock meeting. It was snowing, but—just my luck—not hard enough to close school early and save me. I kept hoping that the snow would make Joan want to reschedule, but—also just my luck—she had the fancy Swedish SUV. She’d show up in a blizzard, probably hoping that someone would ask her if the roads were bad, and she could boast about her car.

My memory of that entire day is of watching the clock, of waiting for two o’clock to come, and of hearing
that constant jingling jingling jingling. It was so bad that in English class, someone jingled, and everyone snickered, and Mrs. Shea said the next person who made a sound or said one word was getting detention. In grade school, I’d
been
that kid, the kid who would say the last word or make the one last sound that sent the teacher over the edge. Now, that part of my life was over. No one would have thought it was funny if I’d fished some coins out of my backpack and started jingling them now.

Finally, it was five to two. Time to go to the principal’s office. Mr. Merrill, my social studies teacher, seemed to know all about it. When I held up my hand to be excused, he shut his eyes and nodded.

Joan had wanted a big drama. She’d wanted me to meet her at the front door of the school so she and I could march down the hall like superheroes—superwomen—come to battle for truth and justice. Ever since the principal called the night before, she’d been practically foaming at the mouth. And now she was coming in to save my reputation from malicious lies and slander. I’d told her it would be better if she met me outside the principal’s office.

The meeting had been arranged in the way that Doctor Nyswander said would be easiest for everyone. If necessary there would be a full investigation. Meanwhile, everybody would keep calm and not go ballistic like Joan. Doctor Nyswander said we would have an open, reasonable, fact-finding conversation, and we’d get to the bottom of what really happened.

Joan was waiting in the hall outside the principal’s office so she and I could walk in together, sweeping into the room as we made our dramatic Minnie Mouse–Superwoman entrance.

Doctor Nyswander, Miss Notley, the assistant principal, and the guidance counselor, Mrs. Blick, were all waiting for us in the office. Doctor Nyswander looked like he was my dad’s age, but compared to him, my dad looked like a rock star. Doctor Nyswander’s clothes fit wrong, and he wore baggy pants belted under his armpits.

Otherwise there was hardly anything about him distinctive enough to make fun of. The only joke kids told was that he’d been hired because he had the only skill you need to get a job as a principal, which is the ability to walk completely silently and creep up behind kids and
nab them for not having hall passes or for cutting class. Everyone said he’d gotten his doctorate in tiptoeing. They said there was a special store where high school principals buy their shoes. They said Mafia hit men go there, too. They have the same needs in footwear.

Beyond that, there was the icky way Doctor Nyswander said students.
Stoooodents
. As if the word was so delicious, he sucked on it like a Popsicle. I’d laughed at him, along with everyone else. Laughing at the principal was just something you did. Like breathing. But now I almost felt guilty for making fun of him. Every time he said
stoooodents
and everybody snickered, he must have felt like I felt when the kids jangled coins in their pockets.

The principal, Miss Notley, and Mrs. Blick had obviously been talking about me, but when Joan and I walked in, they fell dead silent. That didn’t exactly give me the most comfortable feeling, and it certainly took the drama out of our grand entrance. I had to remind myself that no one had been hurt or killed, that all these adults had gotten together and were looking tragic just because some guys supposedly touched my breasts on the back of the bus—which I was going to deny, anyway.
Then I remembered that Shakes had been one of them, and I must have looked tragic, too. Which made them feel they had to look even more serious, and sadder.

Doctor Nyswander stood and shook Joan’s hand and then mine. The principal stared into my eyes. He was going to get to the bottom of this—starting, I guess, with me.

“Thank you both for coming in,” he said. As if I had any choice. He was doing everything in his power to seem supercollected and calm. But I kept noticing droplets of sweat percolating up from behind his tie and leaving dark blotches around his collar.

“We can’t thank
you
enough for taking this seriously,” said Joan. “If someone’s spreading lies about Maisie…”

“We take it very seriously,” said Miss Notley, and the principal and Mrs. Blick nodded.

Joan said, “My husband—Maisie’s dad—would have liked to be here with us. But he’s performing an emergency root canal.”

“Poor thing,” said Miss Notley. It was hard to tell if she meant my dad or the poor patient having the root canal.

“Terrible weather we’re having,” said Mrs. Blick. “I hope the roads weren’t too bad.”

“Oh, no. No problem. I’ve got a Volvo. It handles marvelously in adverse weather conditions,” said Joan. Everyone stared at her for a moment, then looked at their hands.

“Please sit down,” said Doctor Nyswander. They’d brought two chairs in for us. The principal closed the door.

After a long silence, Miss Notley said, “Maisie, one of the reasons I decided to attend this meeting was in case it made you feel more comfortable to have only women present. Doctor Nyswander can step out of the room, and it will be just the two of us and Mrs. Blick. And, of course, your mom.”

“Stepmom,” I said.

Miss Notley smiled sympathetically at Joan as she said, “Stepmom. Of course.”

I said, “It’s fine with me if Doctor Nyswander stays. I mean, is it supposed to, like, make me die of embarrassment if I have to say the word
boob
in front of the principal? Or what?”

The adults looked as if
they
were going to die of embarrassment. But what did they expect? Did they think I’d just stand there like Hester Prynne and let them make me wear the letter
B
for
Boobs
on my chest? I was still the same person, the same kid who’d go right up to the scary house on Halloween, the one who’d say the last word to push the teacher over the edge. Did they think that person had disappeared just because she’d grown breasts? All at once, it struck me: These people had never known that other person. They’d only known the girl with big breasts. Joan had known me back in the day, but Joan had a short memory for anything that wasn’t about Joan, and Joan had forgotten who I used to be.

Now Joan said, “Maisie, dear. Please be calm. We know how hard this must be for you.”

“Exactly,” said Doctor Nyswander. “Which is why we
all
need to keep calm. Perhaps then…Maisie, you could tell us in your own words what happened?”

Who else’s words did he
think
I would use? I said, “There’s nothing to tell. Nothing happened.”

Mrs. Blick said, “Dear, denying it won’t mean it
didn’t happen.”

I shot her a furious look.

“Denying what?” I said. I had the strangest feeling—detached, somehow. As if I were watching myself in a movie.
Maisie in the Principal’s Office.
Or,
Maisie Versus the Adults
. I had to admire the girl playing me. She was gutsy and cool and smart.

The principal said, “Yesterday morning, a
stoooodent
, one of your classmates, came to my office in tears and made some pretty serious accusations.”

“Like what?” Of course he’d told Joan what Daria had said, but I wanted to hear it from him. “Like who?”

“Never mind who,” he said, as if we all didn’t know. “This was reported in strictest confidence. She…I mean the
stoooodent
, said there had been an inappropriate incident involving you and some boys in the back row of the school bus.”

“It never happened,” I said. “Nothing…
inappropriate
…happened.” I told myself that what had happened wasn’t
inappropriate
, it was just creepy and weird. I didn’t like lying, but it seemed important, even necessary. And at that point I still had the fantasy that if I covered for
Shakes and Kevin and Chris, they’d apologize for asking to touch my breasts and would tell me they still cared about me. That they didn’t know what they’d been thinking, they hadn’t meant to hurt my feelings. First I’d give them a hard time, but after a while I’d forgive them, and we could go back to being friends again, or anyway whatever we were before the incident happened.

Miss Notley said, “Maisie, why do you think a student would tell us such a disturbing story if it wasn’t true?”

I said, “Because Daria Wells is a big fat liar. Because she’s jealous that I’m such good friends with those guys. She’s jealous because I’ve known them longer than she
ever
will. Those kids and I have been friends since we were babies.”

When I said
Daria
, the name sort of sat there for a while, in the middle of the room. What about
strictest confidence
? I wasn’t supposed to know. Time stopped for a moment, then started again.

“
Exactly
what did she say happened?” I finally asked, when the silence became unbearable.

Miss Notley said, “Well…borders were crossed.”

“Like the U.S.–Mexican border?” I said.

“This isn’t a joke, dear,” said Joan.

“It certainly isn’t,” agreed Mrs. Blick.

I said, “You mean the border around my boobs?” Oops. I didn’t want to sound like I knew what they were talking about if I was going to pretend that nothing happened.

The three school officials sighed, deeply and at once, and Joan sighed, too, as if she was imitating them.

“Maisie,” said Doctor Nyswander. “We’re not accusing you of lying. We understand exactly why you might not want to talk about this.”

“About what?” I said.

More sighs, all around.

Joan said, “We all know how rumors get started. Especially in the student population. I’ve seen many youngsters in my practice who have been hurt by cruel whispering campaigns. And frankly, if Maisie has no memory of this, it’s a little hard for us to figure out where all this could possibly be coming from—”

I jumped when Doctor Nyswander cleared his throat in a way that sounded like the bark of a big, nasty dog. It
shut Joan right up.

He said, “We took the liberty of speaking to the boys who were accused. Er…implicated.”

“Separately or together?” I asked.

Miss Notley said, “Separately. Of course.”

“And?” said Joan.

“And,” said Doctor Nyswander, “all three of them admitted it rather quickly.”