“What are you doing here?” I ask, but then I notice the hunch of her narrow shoulders like she’s shielding herself from a blow, and some dormant best-friend instinct sputters creakily to life. “Are you okay?”
Chloe shrugs, squinting at the 3D sea-glass sculpture on the wall in the hallway instead of looking at me. “Can we talk?” she asks.
I glance from her to my mom, who’s slipping discreetly into her office, then back to Chloe again. “Sure.”
I pull a hoodie off the row of hooks next to the front door and we head outside to sit on the porch swing, the chain link groaning quietly as we rock back and forth. We’ve had almost every important conversation of our friendship out here: sixth grade, the two of us trying valiantly to decipher the primitive dick-and-balls cartoon Brandon Farrow had scribbled on the back cover of her notebook; freshman spring when she told me her sister was leaving college to do inpatient eating-disorder treatment; last year when I was deciding if I wanted to lose my virginity to Jacob. I used to think I could tell Chloe anything. But now I don’t know what to say.
In the end it turns out I don’t have to.
“Can I ask you a question?” she begins, picking at the polish on her freshly painted thumbnail. She still isn’t looking at me. “Why did you trash Bex’s car?”
I whirl around, shocked all over again. “That’s what you came here to yell at me about?” I demand. “His douchey car? Because if it is you can just—”
“Can you calm down?” Chloe interrupts, finally turning to look at me. Her eyes are hot as flame. “I’m not yelling at you. Do you hear me yelling at you? I’m just asking you why you did it.”
I shrug. “Why do you even care?”
Chloe huffs a breath out. “Marin,” she says, tilting her head back against the swing. “Come on.”
“You come on.” I’m being a baby—I know I’m being a baby—but I can’t help it. I don’t know how to not be hurt by what she did.
“Look.” Chloe peels a flake of polish off her pinky nail, flicking it onto the floor of the porch. “I know I haven’t been a very good friend to you lately—and I know that’s even an understatement, probably,” she says, holding a hand up when I let out a sound of protest. “And you don’t owe me any kind of explanation. But I’m listening, if you want to tell me.”
So: I tell her. I tell Chloe everything, from Bex’s first day back to my call with Kalina, to his grip on my arm that day in the stairwell. “He wanted to get back at me for telling, and he did,” I finish finally. “So I guess I just wanted to . . . get back at him too.” I reach one foot out and push off the porch railing harder than I mean to, and we go swinging forward quickly. “But the only person I actually ruined anything for was myself.”
The swing creaks back and forth, back and forth, and Chloe doesn’t say anything. When I glance in her direction her face is almost as white as the clapboard on the front of the house.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her eyes filling so suddenly with tears that I can’t keep from gasping. “Marin. I’m so, so sorry.”
Right away I shake my head. “Hey,” I say, holding my hands up, palms out in shocked surrender. Our friendship has felt like one bizarre, inexplicable missed connection after another lately. But I wasn’t prepared for this. “It’s . . . okay.”
“It’s not!” she says, and she’s up off the swing now, pacing across the porch. “It’s a lot of things, Marin, but it is definitely not okay.”
“Chloe,” I say, curling my fingers around the edge of the porch swing. My voice is quiet. “What’s going on?”
Chloe shakes her head, her eyes flicking to her car in the driveway like she can’t decide if she wants to dive behind the wheel and peel away into the sunset or just take off on foot and never, ever stop. I know that look—I’ve seen it in the mirror a lot lately—but in the end she just sits back down beside me, clearing her throat like she’s preparing to give testimony in a courtroom. She takes a deep breath.
“I thought he loved me,” she confesses, then immediately digs the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, rubbing until her mascara smudges. “Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m saying that out loud right now. I sound like a fucking idiot. I thought he loved me.”
“Who?” I ask—even though I already know, in some secret part of my brain. Maybe I always did.
Chloe rubs her thumbs underneath her eyes, wiping the mascara away. “Who do you think?”
It started in October, she tells me. He took her to his apartment, in the Victorian house with the built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. He wanted to lend her a book. They listened to records; he cooked her pasta. She told her parents she was at the library.
He told her she had an old soul.
“When you told me what happened between you guys I just kind of lost it,” Chloe admits. “The way you described it, him being a creep—it didn’t feel like that to me. Or not at the time, at least. I thought we were . . . a couple.” She rolls her eyes and another tear slips down her cheek. “We did couple stuff. Like—I went with him to the Cape back in the fall.”
My eyes widen. “You did what?”
“Can you not?” Chloe shakes her head. “I know now it was stupid.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid,” I promise. “I just—what, to a hotel?”
She shrugs. “His family has a house.”
“Of course they do.” I run my fingers through my hair. “I’m sorry. I’m being an asshole. I just—when?”
“The weekend I told you I was with Kyra.”
“Oh my god, I knew there was no way you were voluntarily spending a weekend with her!” For a moment I’m weirdly, horribly vindicated—that I knew her that well, at least, that I wasn’t totally fooled—and then I realize how messed up that is. “What did you tell your parents?” I ask.
“School trip,” she says miserably. “I made a fake permission slip and everything.”
“Weren’t you worried I’d say something to them about it when I was at work?”
“Are you kidding me?” Chloe exhales sharply. “I was terrified. It was all I could think about all weekend, only I didn’t want to tell him that, because I didn’t want to remind him—”
“That you’re seventeen?”
“All right!” Chloe explodes, shocking us both into silence for a moment. When she speaks again her voice is barely more than a whisper. “After you went to his apartment . . . he told me he’d just tried to be nice to you.” Her nail polish is mostly gone by now, pale pink dust scattered across her lap. “Like, that it was this totally harmless thing, and you’d gotten the wrong idea, or whatever. But then he broke up with me.”
“And that’s why you were so pissed?”
Chloe nods. “He said it was too dangerous now, and I blamed you,” she admits. “I’m sorry, I know it’s like I’ve never seen a movie or watched a TV show or read a book in my entire life, but I just . . . I did. I thought this was different, and I blamed you. I felt like you took him away from me.”
“I get it,” I say. “I mean, it sucks, but I do.”
“And I hate telling you this, but then after a while, we started back up again, but it wasn’t the same. He wasn’t the same, and there was, like, this part of me that knew he was going to do something to you. I just . . . I should have been there for you,” she says, voice breaking. “You’re my best friend, and I was—you had to do all this stuff by yourself.”
I shake my head, trying to push away the picture of everything she’s telling me now. “I wasn’t by myself,” I promise her, thinking of my parents and the book club and Ms. Klein. Thinking, with a pang behind my rib cage, of Gray. “But I really did miss you.”
“Yeah,” Chloe says, wiping her face with a heel of her hand. “Me too.”
We swing for a while, neither one of us saying anything. I look out at the late-winter street. Jayden next door is pushing a plastic shopping cart up and down the front path, determined; Mrs. Lancaster is salting her sidewalk three ho
uses down.
“Do you think I should report him?” Chloe asks finally. “To Mr. DioGuardi, I mean?”
I shrug. “I don’t know,” I tell her. “You have to do what feels good to you, I guess. Or, like, not even good, necessarily—just, least bad. I mean, I thought reporting was the right thing in the moment, and maybe I still do. But honestly, I don’t know if it was worth it, you know? Half the school still thinks I made it up.”
I tell her about the process with DioGuardi and the school board and how that didn’t work. How, no offense, but they’d probably make it into Chloe’s fault. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it. It’s not my place at all. I just . . . I don’t know. I wish I could say it would work.”
Chloe thinks about that for a moment, brushing the nail polish crumbs carefully off her jeans. Then all at once her head pops up.
“You know what?” she asks, turning to me with something like a smile passing across her expression. “I think I’ve got a better idea.”
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS: THE WHOLE TRUTH
BY MARIN LOSPATO AND CHLOE NIARCHOS
Dear Fellow Students, Faculty, and Administration of Bridgewater Preparatory,
Over the past several weeks, many of you may have heard rumors regarding allegations against a much-beloved teacher here at Bridgewater. As a community, it’s safe to say we have struggled to separate information from innuendo and reconcile our own personal experiences with others’ lived realities. It is never easy to come to terms with the idea that someone we admire—even adore, even perhaps love—may not be worthy of our continued esteem.
However: as the coeditors of the Beacon and young journalists ourselves, we are committed to the integrity of this newspaper and to using its power to speak truth. We believe in the power of the press to bring about positive change in the communities it serves, and it is in this spirit of truth telling that we write to you today.
The allegations against this teacher—that he has had inappropriate emotional and physical relationships with his students; that he has invited students into his home under academic pretexts and made advances of a sexual nature; that he has retaliated against students who have spoken up about his behavior—are true. We report this information with confidence in our sources, because our sources are each other. Both of us have experienced this teacher’s behavior firsthand.
We trusted him. We looked up to him. We found him charming and charismatic. And he took advantage of us. We were not special. We were not, as he told us, “old souls.” We were simply his students.
When one of us came forward with these allegations, Bridgewater Preparatory’s official position was that the administration did not have enough credible information to pursue further disciplinary action against this teacher. When the other of us admitted her strikingly similar situation, we could not help but question if she would be met with the same response. Would she, too, be asked if she was simply “confused” by the situation? Would she suffer the same rumors? Would she, too, be accused of looking for attention?
We write this letter today to shine a light on a dark place at Bridgewater, and also in the hope that any other student who has had a similar encounter—be it with this particular teacher, another authority figure, or someone else at this school—will feel safe and supported should they choose to come forward.
We believe you.
Sincerely,
Marin + Chloe
Thirty-Five
Our piece goes to print on the front page of the paper the following Monday, my first day back at school after suspension. I take care of the editing and Chloe somehow manages to keep the whole thing a secret from the rest of the staff, including, of course, Bex.
Newly unsuspended or not, there’s no way I can sit through Bex’s class this morning, so I head outside as the bell is ringing for the start of third period. It’s almost spring now, the cold air laced with the smell of something damp and briny. I cross the muddy field and make my way up the bleachers, climbing halfway to the top before sitting down and tilting my head back toward the weak midday sunshine, like a new plant desperate to grow.
I don’t know how long I’m sitting there, the light making patterns on the insides of my eyelids, before somebody calls my name from the other side of the field. I open my eyes and there’s Gray crossing the fifty-yard line below me, backpack slung over one broad shoulder. He’s off his crutches now, but he’s still walking with just the tiniest limp, the kind you wouldn’t even notice if you hadn’t spent the whole semester noticing things like the way he normally walks.
“Hey,” I call back, holding up one hand in greeting as he makes his way carefully up the wide metal steps. He’s wearing a Bridgewater hoodie over his uniform, his ridiculous step counter fastened securely around one wrist. “You back up to twenty thousand per day yet?”
“Getting there,” he reports with half a smile. He hesitates a moment like he’s asking for permission before I nod, and he settles himself down beside me, stretching his long legs out in front of him.
“I read your piece,” he says, nodding at the Beacon sticking out of his bookbag. “I think it’s awesome. I mean, it’s shit what happened to your friend Chloe, obviously, but . . . That was really brave of you guys.”
I muster a smile. “Thanks.” The truth is, it doesn’t feel brave at all: I’m glad Chloe had the chance to talk about what Bex did to her. I’m a little nervous I’m going to get expelled. But mostly I’m just sort of numb. It’s like I keep waiting for some cinematic moment to signal I’m totally over everything that happened, that means it’s all done and dusted. But the hard, frustrating reality is that all I can do is move on one day at a time.
Both of us are quiet for a minute, watching as a couple of Canada geese totter across the field, honking irritably at each other. A chilly wind rustles the budding branches on the trees.
Finally Gray takes a breath. “I told my moms I don’t want to go to St. Lawrence,” he confesses.
“You did?” I whip around to look at him, everything that’s happened between us momentarily forgotten. “How’d they take it?”
Gray shrugs. “I mean, they weren’t thrilled,” he admits. “They lawyered me pretty hard. But eventually we made a compromise—I can take the job at Harbor Beach as long as I’m also taking college classes someplace local, Bunker Hill or UMass or someplace. So I think I’m gonna do that.”
“Good for you,” I say, reaching out to squeeze his arm like a reflex before remembering myself and dropping my hand awkwardly. “I’m, um. Really proud of you.”
“Thanks,” he says, smiling a little sheepishly. “You’re kind of the person who inspired me to do it, actually. I guess I figured if you could put yourself on the line, then at the very least I could nut up and tell my moms I didn’t want to play sports at college.”
I laugh, I can’t help it, and then my face abruptly falls. “Gray, I’m really sorry.” This time I do touch him, just the tips of my fingers against the sleeve of his shirt. “About like . . . everything. I was a total asshole to you, and you didn’t deserve it at all.”
Right away, Gray shakes his head. “Hey,” he says, “don’t even sweat it. You were going through a thing, you know?”
“I mean, I guess so,” I say, unwilling to let myself off the hook quite so easily. “But that’s not an excuse. You were a really, really good boyfriend, and I took a bunch of stuff out on you that wasn’t actually your fault. And I’m sorry.”
“Really, Marin, don’t worry about it.” Gray waves me off. “We had fun, right?”
“I—yeah.” That stings a little—both the words themselves and his casual shrug as he says them; just like that, he’s the guy I thought he was back in October, a vaguely douchey lacrosse bro only looking for a good time. I think it could have been more than just fun, whatever there was between us. I guess I thought it was. But I’m pretty sure I missed my chance now. “Yeah,” I say again, brushing some imaginary lint off my jeans. “We had fun.”
Gray
nods, like he’s glad that’s all settled. “So, um, what about you?” he asks, clearing his throat. “You figure out where you’re headed in the fall?”
“Amherst,” I report, aiming for excited and mostly getting there—it’s still an awesome school, even if it’s not the one my gram went to, and I know I’m incredibly lucky to have the option at all. “Sent in my deposit yesterday, actually.”
“You’re going to be amazing wherever you go,” Gray predicts easily, like it’s just a given. “Amherst’s not too far either.”
I look over at him in surprise, not sure what he means—not too far from here? Or from him? The miracle of Gray was always how easy he was to talk to. But now it’s like I don’t know how.
“No,” I agree finally, careful. “Not too far.”
Gray smiles. For a second it feels like he’s going to say something else, or maybe like I am—like there’s unfinished business here and both of us can feel it. But the bell rings for the end of the period before either one of us can find the words.
“Shit, I’ve got a trig exam,” Gray says, getting to his feet and reaching down for his backpack. “Take care of yourself, okay? With the article and everything, I mean. I’ll see you around.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I will.” Then, suddenly: “Gray—”
“Hm?” He turns around. “What’s up?”
I open my mouth, then close it again. Of everything I’ve lost in the last few months, somehow this feels like the worst.
“Nothing,” I tell him finally. “You take care of yourself too.”
Thirty-Six
School is strangely quiet the rest of the day. Chloe and I were fully prepared for a fallout of epic proportions—we even drafted emergency letters to our respective colleges in the event we were both expelled—but other than my conversation with Gray on the bleachers, no one says anything to me about it. I take a calc quiz. I sit with the book club at lunch. Even Michael Cyr leaves me alone.
Rules for Being a Girl Page 17