When You Believe (2 page)

“Of course I could. We could get you into a study hall fifth period. We could find you a tutor for French II if you needed
it.”

“That’s all it would take to get you to help me with something, Miss P? To tell you about it?”

“Yes.”

“I want to tell you about it,” Shelby said, “because you’re the only one I can talk to.”

Lydia nodded, waited.

“You’re the only one who’s really listened to me for a long time.”

Lydia waited some more.

“Well.” Shelby’s fingernails, painted a
Glamour-
magazine buff, had been chewed on. With them, she bent the paperclip into the shape of an elongated
S
and dropped it on the desktop. “Really, it’s nothing.”

“It is that, then? Do you need a tutor?”

They listened to each other breathing for a while.

“No, it isn’t that, either.”

Another dead end. Well, Lydia knew how to find her way around dead ends. She began to try a little harder. “Things okay with
your peers? Everything okay between you and your friends?”

“Yeah.” The girl cocked her head. “Everything’s fine.”

“So, everything okay at home?”

At that moment the door burst open and in barreled three uninvited boys. “Hey, Miss P,” Tommy Ballard announced as the door
hit the wall. “My mom said I was supposed to stop by here and pick up something.”

“Tommy—”

“Don’t remember what it was, though.”

Lydia resented the interruption, but tried to sound reasonable. “Are you going to be out? Homework, maybe?”

“No. Something else.”

“You know the rules around here, don’t you? When you come into this office, you’re supposed to knock. We were talking.”

“Oh.” Lydia saw Tommy glance with interest at Shelby. “Sorry.”

Shelby surveyed the weave of the industrial carpet beside her left clog as if it were the most intriguing pattern she’d ever
laid eyes on. She looked like she wanted to disappear into thin air.

“What are you doing in here, Shelb?”

“None of your business, Ballard.”

“Tommy—”

“Oh.” He snapped his fingers. “I know what I needed. Is this where we get those SAT sign-up things?”

“Over there.”

“Thanks.”

In the same way they’d burst in with no regard, the boys overzealously helped themselves to what they needed. They started
out before Lydia finished. “And this is the book of sample questions on the test,” she called as she held out another pamphlet.
“You boys knock next time.”

Tommy seized the booklet from her hand, rolled it inside his palm, and smacked the doorjamb with it. “See you, Shelb.” He
led his tribe of friends out the door.

Wordlessly, they watched Tommy Ballard go. Lydia readjusted herself, settled in the chair. Shelby played with a buckle on
her backpack.

Lydia tried again after the silence seemed like it had gone on forever. “You didn’t answer my question, Shelby. Is everything
okay at home?”

Shelby tossed her head so one strand of unrestrained hair flew back against her shoulder and then fell forward again. Her
shoulders slumped against the back of the chair. Lydia saw her slight hesitation. The girl’s lips parted as if she wanted
to say something. Then they shut again.

Shelby grappled on the floor for her backpack. “I’ve got to go.”

Lydia couldn’t lose her now. If she did, Shelby might be gone completely. She might disappear into the river of students that
coursed toward their next classes when the bell rang.

With a sinking heart, she tacked a different direction, broaching the subject the way someone would check a tender bruise.
“You’re frightened. I can tell that much.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you want to run away.”

“I—I can’t do this.”

“But you’re here. You came because you wanted to talk.”

The girl rose, upsetting the nameplate on the desk. “I said I’ve got to go.”

“Shelby.” Lydia reached for her arm and grabbed her, but didn’t rise. To rise would have meant concession, and she wouldn’t
do that.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does.”

Silence.

“Sit down.”

“I can’t do it.”

Lydia searched her mind for something, anything, that might change the girl’s decision to leave. “Don’t let Tommy Ballard
mess this up.”

They stared each other down. At last, Shelby plopped back into the chair and dropped her backpack again.

“Okay,” Lydia said. “Let’s start over.”

Outside the counseling-office window, a sprinkler kicked out its traveling arc of water over grass that looked as shorn and
sun cured as a drill sergeant’s haircut. The letter board proclaimed in four-inch red-and-blue capitals
GO FIRE-RATTLERS! 1999 MISSOURI STATE CLASS 2A CHAMPS.

Underneath, smaller type declared
Homecoming Dance, Oct. 10, A Night To Remember.

“It’s hard, you know.”

“Whatever it is that’s happened, Shelby, there’s probably a way to make it right.”

“Not this.”

“Try me.”

“Sometimes there’s things that are just… impossible to tell.”

Folks in St. Clair County, Missouri, liked to say that Lydia Porter had once had a gift. When she’d been a little girl, she’d
been able to take her father’s hand, lead him into the hill country, and find deer hunters who had lost their way. They’d
written up a story about her in the weekly
Shadrach Democrat Reflex
when she’d been ten and her father had brought her here to visit her Uncle Cy—the year Eddy Sandlin had turned up missing
during Cub Scout Troup 517’s day hike.

She’d helped find him sitting on a beaver dam in Yesterday Creek, snagging driftwood with his feet.

They said she did it by listening to the trees. They said she walked along through the forest at the edge of town, guiding
her way through the dusk, touching the heels of her palms against the shaggy, rough bark of the hickory and the smooth, overlapping
blue-gray mottles of the sycamore, listening. Letting something bigger than herself guide her, thinking maybe it could be
the Lord who whispered to her. For a long time, she’d been willing to hear Him with an innocent child’s ears.

They said she heard things that grownups wouldn’t let themselves hear anymore.

But that sort of thing hadn’t happened to Lydia Porter in a very long time. Except for the yellowed newspaper clipping her
mother kept pressed in the family scrapbook between faded Polaroids of Border collie pups and her first communion, Lydia could
hardly even remember.

Lydia had learned to rely on other things now. She relied on asking the right questions.

And so she kept asking questions now. “If there isn’t something wrong at home, is it anything to do with the boys?”

A bloom of color burned Shelby’s cheeks. Lydia knew she was on to something. She tried to see into the girl’s downcast eyes.
“Is that it? Boys?”

The girl clenched her fist in her lap. “No.” Then she unclenched it again. “Maybe.” Tears glossed her waxy lashes. One escaped
and ran down, leaving behind a track of eyeliner. “I keep thinking maybe it’s something
I’ve
done. Maybe it’s something I’ve said to him to make him think—
”

Lydia watched Shelby try to focus her attention anywhere but on a counselor’s face. She watched her stare at the square letters
on the sign beside the desk that read
LACK OF PLANNING ON YOUR PART DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN EMERGENCY ON MY PART.
She watched her play with the tiny gold promise ring on her left hand, with its almost-invisible diamond chip. She watched
her snuffle and wipe her nose on the back of her wrist.

“Well,” Shelby said at last, “you know there’s Sam Leavitt.” In distress, she stopped and began to wiggle the ring back and
forth until the tiny stone captured a prism of sunlight from the window. The reflection moved like a flitting bug against
the wall.

“You want to finish that sentence?”

“I’m in family science this semester, you know.”

“I know.”

“W-we talked about abstinence, how it was the best thing to do to keep your body healthy, to be pure. We talked about signing
a
contract
.”

A tear fell onto Shelby’s hands. Another onto her jeans. Then another, leaving wet splotches on her denim the size of nickels.

“See, I told you there wasn’t anything anybody could do.”

“That contract makes you uncomfortable?”

“I c-can’t sign something like that. Not after what’s—” The girl tucked her elbows hard against her ribcage and moaned. “Sam
wouldn’t ever want somebody like m-me.”

Instinctively, Lydia moved toward her. She was caught off guard by the flare of terror in Shelby’s eyes. Shelby tucked up
her body to protect herself, warding Lydia off with her hands. Lydia was stunned. Hastily, she withdrew to the other side
of the desk. “You can’t think that about yourself. Why would you?”

Their eyes met.

“Have you been”—how to pursue this, to be respectful and gentle with a child who had, perhaps, lost her innocence?—“
active
with someone? With this boy you like? Or with someone else?”

“No.” The girl’s answer came quick and sharp. “No, of course not.” Then, “Not exactly.”

“Well, what do you mean by that? Have you and this boy done some things?”

Even as she asked the question, Lydia was afraid.
Say yes, Shelby. Yes. Because anything else means something unthinkable is going on.

“Oh no.” The tears came fresh and Shelby’s voice broke with regret. “No… no… no, no, no.”

Lydia leaned to the edge of her chair, her mouth gone dry with dread. Suddenly she began to understand. “Is it someone else,
then? Someone else being inappropriate with you? An adult?”

No nod. No answer. Just a bitten lower lip, eyes that seemed to stare through the floor, tears streaming down the face of
a girl who had always seemed so happy. Just the desperate, broken expression of a young lady with her shoulders shaking, who
twenty minutes ago had seemed to have everything in the world on her side.

Shelby found a gash in her fingernail and bit a sliver of it away, leaving raw, pink skin at the quick.

“Shelby?”

The girl covered her mouth and gasped like she was going to be sick. That one helpless gurgle told Lydia everything she needed
to know.

Lydia went numb, the silent air pounding heavy against her ears.

Everybody in Shadrach knew everybody else. Surely no one in this little town would be capable of something like that.

“You want to give a name, honey? You’ve got to tell me who’s doing this and”—she followed her professional training now, no
leading with her words, no power of suggestion—“bothering you.”

“I c-can’t.”

“You can.” Lydia struggled against her own frantic need to press.
Keep this girl safe. Keep this girl at ease, and talking.
“I need you to tell me.”

Shelby was an achiever, a girl they’d all known since she’d first learned to write in cursive and do long division and run
the right direction on a soccer field. If there
was
someone capable of touching a teenager inappropriately in this town, the folks of Shadrach would find him out, punish him,
put him away.

“Then everybody will know, and he said… he said…”

“It’s hard, Shelby. But it’s important. It’s appropriate that you would tell someone.”

“. . . he said if they found out, nobody would believe me anyway. That they’d blame
me
for what happened.”

From the hall came the wakening sounds of Shadrach High School as the minutes moved toward the bell—the hoots of girls in
the corridor; a reprimand from a voice she recognized as Maureen Eden’s; the stale, wet-bread smell from the cafeteria creeping
under the door. A door opened and, through the window to the hallway, Lydia could see the blue plastic easel with brochures
that read
JOIN THE AIR FORCE. AIM HIGH.

“He said if I told, he would say I was lying. He said something horrible would happen to me.”

“We can only keep you safe if you’ll let us help you.”

“I just want… I w-want it to stop.”

“If you want it to stop, Shelby, you have to give a name. You can’t protect him.”

The girl sounded as if she were trying to speak through a gag. But she repeated herself, and the meaning sank in. “I-I’m scared.”

“We’re not going to let him hurt you. Do you understand that?”

Shelby shook her head again. No.

Who? Who would want to do this? Who would do this to some young girl who just wanted to stay pure?

“If you’ll just tell me—”

A meeting of eyes.

“—who did it.”

Silence. Shelby leaned all her weight onto her hands. “He’s going to say it was
me.
He’s going to say he didn’t do it. That everybody ought not to believe me.”

“If you’ll just tell me what went on, we can keep this man from… from
hassling
you again.”

“He… he touches me when I don’t want him to. And he makes me touch him back.”

“You have to tell me who this is.” Lydia knew she was pushing, but she couldn’t hold herself back any longer. Hearing these
things, she couldn’t keep herself from pressing on.

Shelby stared out the window as if she was uncertain what to do next. Out of the corner of her eye, Lydia noticed a shadow,
probably one of the teachers walking by outside. Shelby studied the person walking by outside. She studied her thumbnail,
first one angle, then another. Finally, after all that waiting, she said it so quickly that Lydia almost didn’t realize what
was happening. She spoke in a child’s voice, telling secrets.

“M-Mr. Stains. It was him.”

Lydia took a full five seconds to realize what she’d heard.

The first blow, when she understood Shelby wasn’t accusing someone in the community. She was accusing someone in the
school.

The second blow, when her brain registered his name.

For one of the few times in her life, Lydia experienced a physical reaction to words. Adrenaline jolted through her, deserted
her, leaving her faint. The silence roared. She couldn’t think past the ringing in her ears.