When You Believe (15 page)

“Yeah.”

“Well, the ladies have to be
somewhere.
Definitely a serious lack of potential candidates in this room. Furthermore,” Tommy pulled out his slingshot and scraped
it across the edge of his sleeve, “I guess you haven’t noticed Shelby’s friends. Do you realize that not one of them has come
to talk to her since the two of you walked in?”

“Say, Tommy,” and Sam had in mind telling him something sarcastic like,
Butt out, Ballard. This isn’t your life; it’s mine.
But just as he opened his mouth to say it, he swallowed his words. When he thought about it, Tommy was right. And now, all
those girls Tommy had been missing were purposefully marching right toward them through paper-covered double doors, through
the strobe lights, across the dance floor lit by jewel flashes from the overhead disco balls.

Whitney Allen raised her hands, her mouth smirking. That’s when Sam’s stomach pitched—when he saw her fake smile, her dark,
intent eyes.

“Hey, Whit.” He tried to head her off. “How you doing?”

She ignored his question. This was a bad sign. She made a megaphone out of her fingers and called over the music, “Shelby,
hi.”

Shelby turned, gave an innocuous smile. “Hi.”

“Wanted to come over and tell you something.” The words in a neutral tone, not humble, not haughty. For a moment, when she
said this, Sam felt a sense of relief. “I thought you had a great soccer game last Friday.”

“Thanks.”

Nothing to worry about,
he thought.
Just soccer. Just things girls always talk about when they disappear with each other.

In the small of his back, he could feel Tommy poking him hard with the two prongs of his slingshot. The jabbing sensation
seemed far away. The strobe lights pulsed, savage and fast, connecting to a throbbing hurt behind his eyes.

“I
really
wish I could play games the way you do.” Whitney’s head was down, her face suddenly hidden, and Sam’s sense of relief started
to slip away.

“You can. You’re a good player, Whitney.”

“Are your parents going over to the Fremont game next week?”

“Yeah, I guess. I—I mean, I think they will.”

“Well, I don’t see why they’d come, because you’re not going to play. My dad says they’ll kick you off the team because of
all the lies you’ve told.”

Sam looked up. Shelby’s fingers bore down, her nails cutting into the back of his hand. His belly swarmed with alarm, as if
he’d been caught in something he couldn’t understand, like a bewildered child who only knows that he’s in the middle of something
bad.

Shelby, leaning against his left arm, pushing him forward as if he were the only thing standing between her and a deadly fall.
Her voice was calm, firm, unafraid. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ha. I think you do. The newspaper reporter who snuck into the pep assembly yesterday.”

It seemed impossible that she had missed all of that, he thought. Impossible that she’d been somewhere else in the building
and hadn’t seen the disturbance the
Democrat Reflex
had caused.

Sam heard the little, sarcastic bite rising in Whitney’s voice, didn’t like it, couldn’t stop it. “We know he asked all those
questions because of you. You’re the one who made all those accusations.”

Shelby didn’t move. Sam could feel her breath when she inhaled and didn’t let it go. The blinking strobe lights, their cruel
pulse somewhere deep behind his temples. And he couldn’t stop himself. He had to ask it.

Because he needed to know, too.

“Shelby, is that really true?”

“I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know anything about the pep assembly. I wasn’t there.”

“I know,” Sam said. “But where were you?”

Whitney’s teeth stood out like milk glass beneath the stain of
Mocha Mousse
lip gloss. “Does Sam know what you’ve been doing? Does he know what happened with Mr. Stains?”

Sam felt Shelby working her way out of his grasp as if he were the one she needed to escape from. “Shelb?”

“You could have done anything else to get attention,” Whitney said. “Why did you have to screw things up for
him?”

He wanted to hold Shelby against him, to keep her safe from them. He wanted them to be wrong. “What is it, Shelb? What are
they talking about?”

Tears glimmered in her eyes as she backed away. “Don’t ask me, Sam. Please don’t ask me.”

“Shelb. I’m here, don’t you see? I’m just trying to help you.”

“Well, you can’t.”

“Maybe you owe me.”

“I don’t owe you anything
.
I don’t have to respond to any of this if I don’t want to. That’s what they said.”

Whitney lifted her chin like a hound on the scent. “Who said that? The cops said that? Is that what they told you when you
reported Mr. Stains?”

“Shelby.” From somewhere in the distance, Sam heard the sound of his own suspicious voice. “Did something happen between you
and him?”

“No,” she cried, “Oh, no.”

“Then, what?”

“Not like what you’re thinking.”

“Then what’s everybody talking about it for?” Adrenaline surged up his spine. “Are you the student they were talking about
at the assembly yesterday?”

Of course he had known something was wrong, with the way her mother had gone on and her stepdad had peered out of the peephole
and the way she’d had to be coaxed into her dress.

But in sort of a naïve, superhuman way, he had thought nothing could have gone wrong for Shelby that his caring about her
couldn’t fix. In his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have imagined this.

If that teacher’s done something to her, I’ll kill him.

Questions dropped on them, raining down from every direction, sifting groundward, as if they were standing in the woods and
leaves had begun to fall.

“What exactly did he do to you, Shelby? What was so bad that you had to run to everybody and blab?”

“You must feel guilty, don’t you?”

Sam scooped his arm around her waist, tried to propel her out of the crowd. And mouthed,
Come on, Shelb. I’ll take you home.

“Remember last week when you told me he was your favorite teacher, Shelb? I do.”

“How’s he your favorite teacher if, the next week, you say something that ruins his life?”

“I don’t want to go home,” she said, wresting away from Sam. “I’d rather die than go back to that place right now.”

“You’ll be safest—”

The voices around them shrill and hostile, “But Mr. Stains will never be safe. You made him lose his job
.”

Whitney’s white hand lifted like a chalice above their heads, as if she could reach beyond everyone’s questions and string
them together to her liking. “Shelby, you can’t leave the dance without this.”

“Without what?”

“Your crown.”

“Why don’t you get that later?” Sam asked, a little angry at Shelby now, and frightened because of it. “Let’s get out of here.
Somebody else can pick it up, okay?”

He tried to steer Shelby away, applying pressure against her spine, against that vulnerable, beautiful curve that he loved,
where white chiffon and zipper and gathers met. There was a general rustle of skirts, some cautious, jittery laughter, a hush
of ugly expectation. Up it came, passed from hand to hand, as the dancers split or moved tightly together to let the thing
pass through.

“Here you go,” somebody said, and Sam heard her gasp. Her eyes had adjusted to the blinking dark-and-light faster than his
own, but he saw it a moment later. He saw the thing staring out over them like a round, inflated head. It wore a rhinestone
crown. Someone had given it eyes, a nose, a hackneyed, thin grin.

It’s just the stupid soccer ball,
he lectured himself.
They got it out of her house or something.

Hand-sewn, it said. Gyro KwikGoal. Shelby’s ball.

The face had probably been drawn with a Sharpie, or something else that would never wash off. The eyes were big and weepy,
the upturned nose drawn like a pig’s nose.

“That’s mine.” Shelby grabbed the ball from Whitney, locking it away beneath her arm. “Where did you get this?”

“I don’t know,” Whitney said. “It just showed up.”

A roomful of people exchanged blank stares. Not a one of them seemed to know anything more than that. Not one girlfriend stepped
forward to stand beside Shelby or to support her. Sam knew that, since they’d started dating, she had cut herself off from
most of them. And from somewhere in another world, the strobes were still pounding, Voltstar Productions was still churning
out dance party songs.

“This is for the girls who love to make
noise,”
the deejay shouted, his mouth jammed up sideways against the microphone. Drums picked up the rhythm and music swelled.
Who let the dogs out? Uh-oh-oh-oh?

Sam could see the curse words that they’d scribbled across the leather, to accompany their pictures, written in bold, dashy
strokes.

LIAR.

LIAR.

LIAR.

Shelby yanked off the tiara they’d taped on it and pitched it across the floor. It didn’t take more than a moment for the
thing to be broken beneath someone’s feet.

“You’ll get ink on your dress,” Sam urged her. “Give me the ball, Shelby. Please just let me carry it for you.”

“No,” she said, clutching it, refusing to let it go. “I can carry it by myself.” With defiance, she tucked it tighter inside
the crook of her elbow.

The storm began as a black stain against the stars to the east, the underbellies of the clouds lit by the streetlight on the
corner of Montgomery and Elbow Knob that stayed burning all night long.

First came the dry rasp of leaves across rooftops, the soft scudding as the wind lifted leaves from the ground, swirling them
in the corners between houses. Lydia heard the rain begin just after midnight, while she lay in bed knowing she wouldn’t sleep—those
first few drops that smacked the pavement and left a wet spot the size of your thumb.

Lydia’s nose burned with unshed tears. And every time she closed her eyes, she envisioned sheets of water like sheets of grief,
falling the way they fell into the Brownbranch when a storm was windy and pouring, like ruffles on the hem of a petticoat
surging across the ground.

She closed her eyes. This time, as she struggled to pray, words finally came into her mind.

No tears. Please God, no tears.

And even as she thought it, she wiped her face with the back of her hand and found it wet.

The rain spattered off awnings and poured out of gutters like someone had turned on a spigot. It ran down the glass panes
and splashed on the shingles and sang its way in rivulets down the eaves.

I know I’m supposed to believe in Charlie. But all I feel is punished.

And somewhere beyond the clatter of the autumn storm, Lydia almost thought she heard tapping at the door.

Father, why would you let adolescent girls have to know the things Shelby knows?

She rolled to her other side, punched up the feather pillow that had seen better days, closed her eyes.

Why would you let broken lives be the picture of your love?

Her eyes opened.
Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.

She listened for the wind, realized it had passed. Only the rain made any sound, and that had settled to a tender soak. She
heard the knocking again.

Off went the covers. With a blind hand and a huge clatter, she felt around for her cotton robe, knocking a stack of magazines
and her massive bottle of women’s vitamins off the top of her nightstand. The lampshade jostled. She finally found the robe,
sailed it across her shoulders, shoved an arm into each sleeve. She made her way downstairs on cold, bare toes, letting each
step groan with her weight before she moved on to the next one.

When she peered out the oval, beveled glass, everything looked rain-streaked, a mercury gray. But on the porch she could see
the small, hunched form, the watercolor smudge of something white. A young woman. A child.

“Shelby.”

She couldn’t get the lock opened fast enough. She flung the door open to the fresh ozone smell of rain. And to the girl who,
like a cat, looked smaller because she was drenched.

Water plastered Shelby’s blonde hair in strings to her head. Her dress clung to her small thighs, to the athletic shapes of
her legs, the knobs of her knees. Water sheeted her lips and dripped off her chin. Her mouth was trembling, almost blue. Lydia
threw open the screen and guided her by the elbow. The robe came off Lydia’s shoulders and went around Shelby almost before
the girl could be ushered inside the door.

“Come into the den,” Lydia said. “Get yourself dried off. There are coals. It won’t take a minute to open the damper and warm
up the house.”

Shelby nodded without saying anything. She stepped forward with frozen, small, shuffling steps, her teeth chattering.

“I’m getting towels,” Lydia said, still directing her toward the stove. “You stand right there.”

With everything else going on, Lydia hadn’t done laundry in a week. In the bathroom, she pulled towels from the hamper and
shook them out one by one. She found one or two that seemed useable and dry. As an afterthought, she grabbed an old nightgown,
too, thinking it might be best to coax the girl out of her wet clothing.

I believe this is my job, Lord, but how many times do you want me to stand beside this child? No matter how much it hurts,
why do you keep sending her to me again?

Shelby stood where Lydia had left her, huddled beside the Vermont Castings stove where the coals made red, roving patterns
in the ash, like hidden threads of silk. “Let’s get you out of that wet stuff, okay?”

“T-this is m-my new dress,” Shelby whimpered.

Lydia peeled the robe off Shelby’s shoulders as Shelby shuddered with cold. Chills racked the girl’s arms. The chiffon dress
was not only wet; the skirt had been torn. Mud plastered her bare legs. She must have been running for miles through the brambles.