The One I'm With

by Jamie Bennett

  “I’m sorry about your husband and I’m sorry about the position you’re in now. But I’m not the person to help you. Coco, it sounds like you need a lawyer more than you need a friend right now. If what you just told me is accurate, then I would suggest that you find a good one. I’m not trying to be snarky—it’s going to be a fight.” Pause, then a sigh. “Yes. Fine. We will talk more tomorrow.”

  I heard him put down the phone. In my tired, confused, sick state, I seemed to understand that Brooks was going to meet with Coco, his ex, and just after I had admitted to him that she was the horrible parent who was so awful to her son, the woman who was trying to ruin my life, again, at Starhurst. I lay back down and pulled the blanket over my head to block all that out, and Maisie settled herself across my chest. One of us was happy and content, the other felt like everything was getting worse by the moment.

  Chapter 13

  “Why haven’t you answered me? Where are you?” Jolie demanded.

  I cleared my throat, which was out of practice of talking due to me sleeping the whole day and not using it. “I’m sick,” I croaked. I picked up my head and looked the nightstand where there was a bowl with soup inside it, still warm when I reached out and touched the side. Brooks must have come in while I was asleep. I wiped gunk off the corner of my mouth where apparently I had been drooling—awesome.

  “You’re for real sick?” Jolie asked. “This isn’t a ‘I’m sick because progress reports are due’ kind of thing? Anyway, you picked a bad day to miss out…” She said something else but there were some strange echoes and I couldn’t hear her well.

  “Where are you?” I asked. “Your voice sounds weird.”

  She got louder as she must have held the phone closer to her mouth. “I’m in the old bathroom off the assembly hall. It’s kind of spooky in here but it’s private.”

  “Jolie, isn’t that a men’s room?”

  “I locked the door. Did you hear me say that the shit hit the fan today?” she demanded.

  “About what?” My sluggish brain wasn’t responding correctly to her dangling salacious gossip before my ears. I pulled myself up to sit and put her on speaker so I could try to eat the soup.

  “Oh, my God. It’s a shit-show around here. Your student’s mom, that Coco whoever, she went public today with her allegations!”

  My hand suddenly shook and broth and noodles spilled onto the comforter. “About me? What is she saying now?”

  “What? No, it has nothing to do with you. She’s saying that she had a sexual relationship with the assistant athletic director who just got fired, the sexting guy! She said when she was a senior in our high school and he was the PE teacher, he made advances on her and they had a relationship that lasted several months. It ended when she went away to college. And she was only seventeen.”

  My hands were still shaking and sloshing soup. I put the bowl back on the table.

  “Hello?” Jolie asked loudly. “Fucking cell service in this bathroom—”

  “No, I’m here,” I said. “I heard you.”

  “Her husband died yesterday, you knew that, right? While getting a blow job! Everyone is saying that she’s making up the story to detract attention from the fact that her husband died with his dick in someone else’s hands.”

  “That’s a hand job. Why would it be called a blow job?” Why was everyone confused about that?

  “I think you’re missing the point!” Jolie told me. “Can you believe all this shit? The administration is having a fit. There have been a million closed-door meetings. There was a tour and I heard prospective parents asking about it. Everyone is freaking out.” She paused. “You hate the mom, right? The one making up the story? Is she just crazy, or totally manipulative?”

  “I mean, she’s both, but why is everyone so convinced that she’s making it up?”

  Jolie paused again. “I guess we just all thought it was too coincidental for it to be true. Like, she made this big announcement to deflect from the way her husband kicked the bucket, death by blow job. The other thing I heard is that she’s already getting involved in some huge fight with her husband’s other heirs over money and custody and they have all kinds of dirt on her.”

  “Wait, you mean there’s going to be a fight about Felix? Someone else wants custody of Felix?” I coughed, hard.

  “Fuck, you do sound really sick! I don’t know too much about what’s happening with your student. There are a ton of rumors flying around about everything and that’s one that the Mandarin teacher told me, that the older siblings are going for custody, but I don’t know how she knew that. Hang on a sec. It’s occupied,” she yelled loudly, the words echoing back again and again. “I didn’t think anyone really used this bathroom,” she told me in her normal voice.

  “Does everyone think that Coco is lying about this?” I asked.

  “Everyone I’ve talked to thought it was made up. I mean, if there is going to be some big public fight with her husband’s older kids about the will or whatever, making a public accusation is a good way for her to get sympathy for herself. Maybe she was trying to flip the situation so that she’d be seen as the victim, if they really do have a lot of juice about her because she’s been doing bad shit.” Jolie was talking a mile a minute. “But now that you’re asking me why we all doubted the truth of it, I guess I shouldn’t have flown right to the conclusion that this woman is making it up. I’m assuming that the assistant AD has always been a pervert, right? We know he was sexting the girl in the senior class this year.” She sighed. “Now I’m feeling bad that I doubted the story. It really is plausible. Oh, yuck, the guy is worse than we thought.”

  I swallowed and my head pounded. “No, don’t feel bad. It’s just like Coco to make up terrible lies about someone and try to ruin their reputation. She’s manipulative just like you said, and she’s mean, all through her.”

  “But you believe her about this?” Jolie sounded doubtful again.

  I took a deep breath which led to more coughing. “I do believe her.” I knew it was true.

  We talked for a while longer but Jolie had told me the main gist of the story, or all that she knew of it, and I was a wheezing wreck. She hung up after telling me to call her back when I wasn’t at death’s door. I balled up the wet, soupy comforter and carried it downstairs, leaning against the railing as I went and feeling terrible. I was just putting it in the washing machine in the alcove off the kitchen when the front door closed and Maisie went into hysterical paroxysms of happiness. Brooks was home. I heard him telling her to be quiet because her mother was sick.

  “I’m in here,” I tried to call to him, my voice still all hoarse. “I’m up.”

  He came into the kitchen frowning. “When I left you were asleep. Are you feeling better? You don’t look better.”

  I straightened up and felt dizzy. “Thanks,” I said, holding on to the top of the washing machine.

  “I mean, you look as cute as always, but you look sick.” He put his cool palm on my forehead and studied my face. “I don’t really know what I’m feeling for but my mom always did this. Your little freckles look more pronounced. Are you pale?”

  I put my hand over the freckles on my nose that were usually obscured by makeup, confused by the conflicting information coming out of his mouth about cuteness and blemishes. “What freckles?”

  “You have tiny freckles on your nose. You always have and they used to get darker in the sun.” He pulled my hand away and looked more closely at me. “See? Right there.” He pointed.

  “Thank you, yes. Maybe I’ll go back to bed.”

  “Did you eat the soup?”

  I pointed to the load swishing around in the machine. “I spilled it.”

  “Sit and I’ll get you more.”

  I rested my head on my hand as Brooks moved around the kitchen, wondering when I got comfortable enough around him that this was ok with me: sitting in my PJs, my hair in a straggly knot, no makeup, and probably a host of other problems. It was strange how it didn
’t seem to bother me. “What were you up to today?”

  He stopped for a brief moment as he pulled a bag of bread out of the cupboard. “I saw a former friend.”

  “Girlfriend,” I corrected him quickly and his head swiveled to me. “I’m sorry, I woke up when you were talking to Coco last night. It sounded like you were going to meet her.”

  Brooks nodded. “Yes, I did.” But then he didn’t say any more.

  “Why would you see her?” I asked. “Were you trying to hide it from me? I think you understand now…I mean, I told you, and I shouldn’t have told you, that she’s the one who…”

  He sat down next to me. “She’s the mom in your class who’s creating all the problems and lying about you to your boss. She was the ringleader back in high school who made you so miserable.” He picked up my germy hand. “I know. I hadn’t spoken to her in years, not since we ran into her that day outside of your classroom. She called me yesterday to talk about you. She wanted to get in touch with you.” He looked into my eyes, like he was searching for something. “She told me on the phone that she was abused by the school’s former assistant athletic director. Our old PE teacher. And she said that you knew, at the time, what was happening between them.”

  I closed my eyes. “Yeah. Yes, I did know. I knew, but I didn’t tell anyone. I saw them together but I kept my mouth shut. I thought about it all last night.”

  “What did you see?”

  I rubbed my closed eyes. Everything ached, because I was sick and because I felt so guilty. “I walked into the training room and witnessed them, you know, uh…”

  “Having sex.”

  “Yes. I mean, I heard Coco laughing, that giggle she has, and I turned the corner…and then I walked right out.” Not before she had screamed that I was a fucking sick Peeping Tom, so she had noticed me, too. “But I thought that almost everyone at the school knew that there was something going on between them, at the very least a really weird, inappropriate flirtation. I was the most socially inept person of all time, and I saw it, even before I saw them doing it.”

  “From what she said, everyone did know, including some other teachers. And no one did anything.”

  Now I looked back at Brooks. “I should have done something after I saw them together in the training room. I was pretty dumb back then. It honestly didn’t occur to me at the time how he was taking advantage of her. I thought of Coco as some kind of all-powerful she-devil. And years later, when I did understand how wrong it had been, that he was a criminal, I still didn’t say anything. I saw him sometimes around campus and I just thought, yuck. But I still didn’t report it.” I rested my face in my hands. “And because of that, he got the chance to start trying it again on another girl. He probably has been, all these years. I should have spoken up.”

  “Coco said that no one will admit to knowing. She’s contacted all her friends—I guess I should say, all the people that she hung out with back in high school. They’re refusing to back her up now and corroborate her story.”

  “What? Why?” I asked.

  “They don’t want to get involved,” he explained. “They don’t want their names associated with anything sordid. Some of them want to send their children to Starhurst in the future and they don’t want to get into issues with the school.”

  “But if they were her friends…”

  “I guess they really weren’t. From what she was saying today, it doesn’t sound like she has anybody in her corner. Coco is estranged from her own family, and now her husband’s grown children have pushed her out of her house and kept her son with them.”

  “She doesn’t have Felix with her?” I was relieved, because I had to think that anyone would be better than Coco for him.

  Brooks shook his head. “The oldest son told her to leave and that Felix was staying. She didn’t argue. The older children didn’t want their father to marry her and they’ve been watching her, gathering information for years. She wouldn’t tell me what they have on her, but I’m sure it isn’t about her doing too much yoga.”

  “You were her boyfriend,” I said slowly. “Did you not know what she was really like?”

  “Coco never acted like that to me. She didn’t usually mistreat people in front of me,” he said, but then stopped, and nodded. “No. That’s not right. I knew she wasn’t very nice. I knew she and her friends liked to make fun of people, especially all the girls who wanted to hang out with them. In a way, I liked the idea that she was popular. It meant I was doing another thing right, checking the box of being with the girl who everyone wanted. It never occurred to me to worry about how she got into that position. I was too caught up in trying to show how I had everything perfect, how I was this stupid golden boy.”

  That was what I had called him. I had put him on a pedestal, too. “You know it about her now,” I said softly. “I told you. But you went to see her anyway.”

  “I do know it now and I saw it more today.” He held my hand tighter. “She doesn’t appear to have much of a heart. She doesn’t care that her husband’s dead. It doesn’t seem to bother her at all except how she can’t do all the things she used to do and she’s embarrassed about the way he died. I asked her about her son and how he’s doing and she acted surprised, like he wasn’t on her mind at all. He’s not with her, her little boy, but she’s totally unconcerned.”

  “Oh, poor Felix.” My lip started to tremble.

  Brooks was staring at our hands, linked together. “She’s mainly worried about money. Her husband didn’t get to where he was in the world by being dumb, and his older kids aren’t, either. It seems to me that she may end up walking away with nothing, maybe not even custody of Felix. When she called me yesterday, she tried to convince me that she’s coming forward now about the PE teacher, the athletic director guy, to protect other girls. But by today, she couldn’t keep that story going. She’s pissed off at everyone and she couldn’t hold it in. When I met her just now, within ten minutes she was telling me that she’s going to sue the school because she’s going to need the money. She’s hoping they’ll pay her off to go away. Lanie, that’s where you come in.”

  “What about me?” I asked warily.

  “I saw Coco today for only one reason, which was to tell her to leave you the hell alone. To leave you out of it, period. I told her that I knew how she had treated you in the past, pretending that you were some kind of terrible person because of something that didn’t even happen between the two of us ten years ago. I said I knew she was still treating you like shit and now it wasn’t just about making you feel like crap about yourself. It’s about your job, and it has to stop. The conversation didn’t end very well. She’s very angry.” By the expression on his face, the words “it didn’t end very well” were somewhat of an understatement. “In spite of everything she’s done to you, she wants your help. She wants you to corroborate her story that she had a relationship with the PE teacher, corroborate it publicly.”

  I looked at our hands, too. “I thought about it a lot last night. I couldn’t sleep, thinking about it. I’m going to talk to my boss tomorrow and let her know that I was a witness. Then I’m going to call the police and tell them, too.”

  “Peanut, if you do that, you’ll probably lose your job. The job you love. They probably can’t fire you right away because of whistleblower protections, but I can guarantee they can make it bad enough that you won’t want to work there until they do finally let you go.” He stopped, and looked at me. “Have you thought about that, about not working at Starhurst anymore? And if you do get fired, how hard it will be for you to get another job? I know how much you care about your students. Would you give them up, for Coco?”

  “I know all that. I have considered it—I thought and thought, going over everything. But, Brooks, it’s the right thing to do. I should have done it a long time ago and I’m sorry that I didn’t. I don’t have any excuse except that I thought it was in the past, and then when he got caught, again, I thought it was over. I’m so sorry that I waited
but I have to do the right thing now. Even if I lose my job, even if they make it terrible so I want to quit. I have to.” I swallowed and simultaneously winced, because tomorrow was going to suck, and probably a lot of days after that. And also it hurt my throat to swallow.

  Brooks was staring at me intently. Then he picked me up off the chair, so suddenly that I squawked like a bird, and put me on his lap. He hugged me tightly, pressing me to him, and slowly and carefully, I put my arms around his neck and hugged him back.

  “You’re a tough little nut,” he told me softly.

  “I’m not little,” I said, and sighed, because no matter what else was happening in my life, sitting with Brooks like this had to be the most wonderful feeling in the world.

  “You’re my best little peanut,” he murmured back, and he rubbed his cheek against my hair. “I’m so proud of you and how brave you are. See? I told you that it was in you. It was there, all along.”

  I wasn’t sure about that, because at the moment I seemed to be filled with quivery Jell-O, at the feeling of Brooks so close to my body, and at the thoughts of what was going to come the next day.

  Chapter 14

  The door to my room was slightly ajar when I got myself to school the next morning. I walked toward it cautiously. It was early and still quiet in our lower school courtyard, and I listened to my feet tiredly shuffle. I had already thrown up from nerves that morning and between that and still feeling sick with whatever else had plagued me, I was moving very, very slowly. I pushed on the door and there, in the half-light of the rising sun, was my boss, Shirley. She stood quickly when I flicked on the switch and fluorescent brilliance filled the room, and she lifted her hands from where they had been searching through my papers and files.

  “Hi,” I said slowly. “Can I help you find something?”

  Shirley moved to the side of my desk. “How are you feeling today, Lanie?”

  “Just great. Totally better.” Pay no attention to the snot running out of my nose, I commanded her with my mind. “Did you need something in my room?”