Handcuffs

by Bethany Griffin

  It’s a strange situation, being part of a geeky magnet school. The popular crowd is nearly feverish in their attempts to make Allenville as snobby and social as any other place. They’ve got a big GPA to overcome.

  Raye isn’t here yet. She’s running late. That’s the thing about having to bum rides. You’re always at the mercy of other people. Like my parents and, you know, fate. For instance, if something happens—like last night Raye broke up with Josh because he just wasn’t Ian, and then she sat in her little blue Honda and cried and she left the lights on and ran the battery down—then I have no way to get to school.

  After Raye called to report this my mom was seriously irritated. She started to tell me about the meeting she had to get to before nine and how she needed to prepare a presentation and write a memo.

  “It’s okay, Mom. I can get another ride.” I reached for the phone, trying to hide my nervousness. Would he be irritated if I called him this morning? Was he driving some other girl to school, would he come and get me if I asked?

  She pursed her lips. “I can take you.”

  My dad came downstairs. “You need a ride to school, sweetie? I’m not doing anything today. I can take you.”

  “Well then, you need to hurry, Chris. She already has enough tardies from stopping with Raye for croissants.” She never talked to him in that tone of voice before he lost his job. Or maybe she did and I didn’t notice. I felt bad for Dad in his paisley bathrobe, and more annoyed at Mom than usual, with her day planner and her stupid high heels. I don’t know who she thinks she is. She still can’t pay the electricity bill.

  “Oh, okay. Let me just grab my glasses. Do you want a croissant?”

  “No, Daddy.” He should know I don’t do breakfast, but he always asks. My dad really is a great guy. I hoped he wasn’t thinking about how disappointed he was in me. I started to feel nervous. What if he said something? I didn’t think I could handle a direct confrontation. I didn’t think I could handle him saying he was disappointed in me. I realized that he was looking at me, that he had retrieved his glasses and was standing in the doorway waiting. I forced myself to look at him and smile.

  “Anything? We can stop.” He stepped back into the bathroom and came out without the ratty robe. I guess he was wearing it over his normal Dad outfit, khakis and a polo shirt. I don’t think he can stand to be out of bed for five minutes without putting his polo shirt on. Anyway, he’s always wearing the robe over his clothes. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t notice that it’s freezing cold in our living room. Mom once said that Dad really thinks his robe is some kind of swanky-type housecoat that he ties with a sash and when he wears it he imagines he is both wise and comfortable. Like Sherlock Holmes with wire-rimmed glasses. About this one thing, I suspect she’s right.

  “Chris, you barely have time to get her to school.” Mom was on edge this morning, and I wished she’d just leave us alone.

  He wiped his glasses on his shirt and ushered me into the garage. It was quiet in the car. I realized that this was the first time we had been alone since it happened. It was not a good thing to think about.

  “I should’ve brought that cup of coffee,” Dad said, kind of to himself. As if the coffee that he left on the counter was something he couldn’t live without. I hoped he wasn’t going to start in again, wanting to stop and get me something to eat. I hoped I could get through the ride to school, that traffic wouldn’t be bad and we could just cruise into the parking lot and be done with this. I realized as we turned, getting closer and closer to school, that I was scrunched down in the seat, almost hiding behind the thin diagonal strip of tan seat belt. I forced myself to sit straight.

  “Do you want to pick a CD?” he asked. Paige and I used to always fight over what music to play, but it doesn’t really matter to me anymore.

  “That’s okay, Daddy.”

  My dad looked sad suddenly, like the one thing he thought he could do to brighten my day was let me pick some music to listen to on the way to school.

  “Daddy,” I said.

  “What, sweetheart?”

  I took a long breath and adjusted the strap on my backpack. “I love you.” He smiled at me as I climbed out and slammed the door of the Jeep, and I felt truly great for a minute, and then the look on his face in his office came back to me, and the good feeling sort of faded into nothing.

  I was still climbing the front steps of Allenville High School when the warning bell rang, so as I walk down the hall, I’m more focused on being on time than anything else. Of course I scan the hall for him, my ears hypertuned to the sound of his voice, but I don’t really expect to see him until lunch. Our paths just don’t cross that often.

  I’m hurrying because even though I like croissants as well as the next person, I also like to be on time.

  There’s a puddle beside my locker. Last year the air conditioner units started leaking and there were puddles everywhere. I really hope we aren’t forced to have classes in the gym again. That pretty much sucked.

  I turn the combination and swing the door open, and there in the open wall cavity that is my locker is a big pile of slushy melting ice. It’s one of those moments when you just don’t know what to do. The slush is soaking into my books, but I have no way to get it out of my locker, no place to put it. I feel violated.

  Somebody opened this locker, which is supposed to be my private space, and they dumped a bunch of ice, which they knew would melt. Why? Who would hate me this much that they would want to destroy my calculus book, and my careful notes on eighteenth-century literature, and a few early copies of my secret drawings of my dream house? I mean, they weren’t secret in the beginning, but I just kept working on them and trying to make a pretty stained-glass window. Now all that hard work is a glop of pulp. I feel like a glop of pulp myself, formless, drippy. The icy cold water has splashed and is running down my leg. Perfect.

  Yeah, I know that it has to be connected somehow to the whole Ice Princess thing. I’m alone and humiliated, standing there as the last few kids scamper to class. The tardy bell rings. An office aid comes by with a clipboard, checking the halls for cutters. He seems surprised when I wave at him, motion for him to join me in front of my still-open locker. I take a deep breath and pull myself together. I won’t give whoever did this to me the satisfaction of seeing me upset. But after a minute I don’t even have to try to act normal, because the whole Ice Princess thing kind of takes me over. My face feels frozen.

  “What should I do about this?” It’s such a relief to ask another person for help, and this guy looks capable. He’s tall and skinny with reddish brown hair and these black-rimmed glasses. He’s holding this clipboard, and he has really nice hands with long fingers. For an unreal moment I imagine him touching me with them. I imagine enough that I start to blush. I hope he thinks my blush is due to my mortification over the prank, not from imagining him slipping his hands under my shirt.

  “Holy crap!” he says. I laugh when he says it, actually forget myself and laugh out loud. He stares into my locker and shakes his head. “Who did this to you?” I feel my fake smile sliding away from my lips. I don’t want to be a victim and I don’t want this guy, or anyone else, to consider me one.

  “I don’t know.” I am now totally studying my shoes.

  “Well, let’s grab a garbage can and scrape the ice into that. Do you think it was Marion Henessy? She hates you.”

  I glance up at him, surprised. He looks kind of embarrassed and shrugs. “I read the blog when I’m bored sometimes, and I was at my grandparents’ house for three days over the vacation. Let’s just say I was very bored.” I can’t believe this, it’s like everybody in our school reads that stupid thing. Great.

  “Oh yeah, me too,” I tell him seriously. “Not the grandparents, but I read the blog sometimes.” He’s looking at me, kind of running his eyes over me. I put my shoulders back a little. I mean, I have been totally slouched since he first came over to investigate. I don’t want him to think I have exceptionally poor p
osture or something. I guess this is my version of nervous flirting. Some girls would giggle and push their hair back or something, but I just try to stand straight and look okay. It’s a nervous reaction, though, not serious flirting.

  “You ever post on there?” he asks.

  “I did a few times, but Marion deleted them.”

  He positions a black rubber garbage can in front of my locker and starts scooping the ice out with his big capable hands.

  “Do you think I’ll get in trouble for being out of class?” I don’t mean to be so anal about it, but I do wish he would hurry, because, as I have mentioned, I don’t like to be late, and because, as I have not mentioned since I don’t want to draw attention to negative possibilities, I do not want to be standing here peering into my locker when the bell releases everyone for first period. I have already had enough thawed comments to last me a lifetime.

  “You won’t get in trouble.” He smiles at me shyly. Is he flirting with me now? I gotta get control of this hormonal fluctuation thing. I may be sending the wrong vibes to unsuspecting guys everywhere. He puts my soggy books into a second rectangular garbage can and picks one up with each hand. I follow him. We reach the office just as the bell rings.

  One of the football players is waiting to talk to the principal, sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs that everyone knows are really there for the parents.

  “Whoa, it’s the Prescott girl,” he says. I know, I know, Paige’s little sister. Paige was pretty popular with Allenville’s sports teams—football, basketball, tennis. You could say that guys with balls adore my sister.

  “You can call me anytime, Prescott. I like hot tubs, too.”

  I die right there in the middle of the office, standing there between the attractively geeky office aide and the stocky football star (both seniors, I think) with the contents of my locker dripping onto the floor.

  How does he know about my personal life? What does he know? How? Did I already say that? I stand there for a really long time while the office aide reports to the principal. I wonder if I should try to care about what they might be saying.

  The counselor, Ms. Miller, calls me into her office. Before I go in, the office aide touches my shoulder. With his very nice hand.

  “Hey, my name is Mason. If you have any more trouble around here, let me know.”

  “Thanks, Mason.” He’s being so nice to me that it almost freaks me out. I move my mouth in a way that I think is a smile. I know, normal people don’t forget how to smile, but it just doesn’t come naturally to me right now.

  I go on into the counselor’s private chamber. Two weeks ago, I sat here doing my mandatory ten-minute “What colleges are you applying to?” session. That was when Ms. Miller looked into my file and suggested that I should consider community college. So somehow Ms. Miller realizes I’m poor. Because it can’t be my grades, I have very good grades. There must be something in that file that says Parker Prescott’s father lost his job. Parker Prescott has thirty-seven unpaid lunch charges or something like that.

  For over a year I’ve been collecting glossy college brochures from all over the country. I would really like to go to a nice private college. If I were in a private school with gleaming hardwood and quiet hallways, I wouldn’t do anything to get myself kicked out.

  “Do you know who might have done this, Parker?” Ms. Miller asks, as if I am somehow to blame. I try to focus on her instead of thinking about colleges, instead of thinking about hot tubs and being an ice princess and slush melting. Ms. Miller is tan, like the tannest person in the world. She’s seated at her desk, and the assistant principal is standing behind her just a little bit to the left of her chair. Compared to Ms. Miller, he looks like a white skeleton-man. She must go to the tanning bed every single day, go through a gallon of tanning lotion a week.

  “I don’t know, but I think it could be Marion Henessy,” I say in my quietest voice. I so do not want to be here. I need to get out of here and start finding out what’s going on, whether—my stomach clenches up here—my ex-boyfriend has been running his mouth. His perfectly shaped mouth with the soft lips. There’s only one thing that I can be sure of, and that’s that these administrators aren’t going to help me figure out the important stuff.

  Ms. Miller and Mr. Dawson give one another a look and I am reminded of last year when Paige was a senior and Kyle was also a senior, and Paige filed the restraining order against Kyle. It made things kind of a nightmare here at school. Classes had to be changed. We weren’t supposed to even pass each other in the halls. The administration was both exasperated and annoyed and they did not try to hide it. So I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to do much for me now, and I’d like to just get out of here and go to class.

  “Why do you think it was Marion?” Ms. Miller asks.

  “She wrote some things on her blog last week. She used the word thawed.” They look at me blankly. I nudge the black rectangular garbage can that is sitting in front of me with my foot. It sounds almost like a glass of ice water shaking back and forth. “The ice is, um, thawing,” I say stupidly, waiting for her to get it. “Like, melting.”

  “You know that a student’s personal blog is outside of school jurisdiction, right?” Mr. Dawson asks me. “Unless someone brags about it online, if they actually were to say they did this, then we might be able to do something, since the, er, prank was on school property.”

  “The Supreme Court hasn’t really ruled on Internet posting as freedom of expression in relation to schools, and what she says on her blog could technically be called bullying,” I say quietly. I looked all of this up a long time ago when Marion started the blog from hell. I found a ton of articles about legislation being filed against cyber-bullying, but I couldn’t figure out what, if anything, had been passed.

  “Be that as it may, we are discussing a prank, not Miss Henessy’s blog,” Ms. Miller says.

  “Destruction of school property, though.” Dawson sounds frustrated.

  “It’s going to be very hard to figure out who did this, very hard,” Ms. Miller tells him. I tune them out and start thinking about the hot tub. Who knows about it and how? How could he do this to me? I feel tears start at the corners of my eyes as the embarrassment sets in. I trusted him. It takes all of my willpower to ignore the tears and focus on what the counselor is saying to the assistant principal.

  “Someone must have seen something,” Mr. Dawson argues. I understand that Ms. Miller thinks it’s a waste of time to go after the perpetrator and Mr. Dawson can’t stand the fact that something bad—a prank, as he calls it—happened in the school and he can’t figure it out. And, more importantly, I realize that I’m not going to make it to second period, maybe not even to third. Finally, they find me these pitifully flaky old textbooks to replace the glossy ones that are landfill bound by now and send me off to lunch.

  “Try to stay out of trouble,” Mr. Dawson calls after me as I leave the office. Great, now in his mind I’m a troublemaker. He’s probably making a note of it right this minute, opening the folder and writing on my permanent record. Thanks, Kyle, Paige, and Marion. If it weren’t for you guys I could’ve made it through high school without a single administrator knowing my name.

  I square my shoulders, take a deep breath, resquare them. During my lengthy office stay I’ve managed to get over the locker fiasco, soggy literature book and all. I mean, I know the whole thing was an hour-long discussion of the Prank, but talking about it gave me a chance to put the incident in perspective.

  I mean, it sucks, and I will certainly miss the nice textbooks. The replacement ones really should be in a Dumpster somewhere, a recycling bin. But people have tormented me on and off throughout my years of school. It’s just something that happens, for some reason, to me. If I let myself think about it, I would have to sit at home and be home-schooled or something, and I don’t think my relationship with my mother could survive her trying to teach me, well, much of anything. She won’t even try to teach me to drive. I wish I’d let
Dad get me something for breakfast now. Something with a lot, and I mean a lot, of caffeine.

  I have a new situation to obsess about now that I’ve gotten the locker thing under control. Hot tubs. I’m totally weirded out by the fact that Joe Football Player knew about the hot tub thing. How could he know? That was private. That was between me and him. And yet, since we were the only people there, he must’ve told someone.

  First I think maybe he has run his mouth. It’s very possible that he ran his mouth. Then I think, He doesn’t talk to all that many people, definitely not any football guys.

  My next thought is, But this is Allenville High School. If he told just one person, even innocently, even just mentioned it like I might’ve mentioned it to Raye, chances are good that everyone would know by now. But what if it wasn’t innocent? What if somehow he’s making a fool of me? More of a fool than I already am, I mean. God, I wish I had stayed in bed today. The flu, a nauseating virus that would have kept me sick and in bed, miserable and pathetic, wearing my pajamas and wishing for a quick death. Anything would be better than this.

  19

  I want to call my dad. He’s not interviewing today. He could come and pick me up and take me home. We could watch daytime TV shows together and pretend he’s not unemployed and I’m still his perfect daughter. But I’m not going to do it. Whatever people may think, I am not a doormat and I am not a wimp.

  Who am I kidding? I’ve never stood up to Marion, and in my advanced lit class the Gruesome Twosome said awful things to me and all I did was pretend to be deaf. I like to think that eventually I would have stuck my deadly pencil into someone’s scrotum. It was just that I generally use a mechanical pencil and I didn’t think it would do enough damage. Plus, there were three of them making fun of me, which made it hard to decide who most deserved to get their balls impaled by a number two pencil. Yeah, that’s why I didn’t do anything. And, see, I’ve already told myself more than once, this ice-in-the-locker thing is the same sort of deal. Ignorable, really.