The Good Girls

by Claire Eliza Bartlett

  Garson’s voice was colder than the top of the mountain. “I said go. Head out to the parking lot and I’ll meet you there.”

  Parking lot, I thought. Weird place for a counseling session.

  Lizzy stormed out. Garson watched her go, then carefully shut the door again, keeping us alone inside. “You’re an interesting young woman, Claude,” he said.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. I don’t usually have a problem being confrontational, but I was already in deep shit. And something bugged me. I didn’t want to look him in the eye.

  “You’re a juvenile delinquent with a missing record. You’ve been caught truant, vandalizing Anna’s Run . . . you’ve had so much time in detention, it’s a wonder you weren’t held back a grade. . . .” He stepped forward. “I’ve been wanting to get my hands on you.”

  Ew. Gross.

  “Lawyer mommy protects her tough girl, doesn’t she?”

  Get out. The softness in his voice made my stomach churn. Like he was enjoying himself.

  “You probably know what happens if I take this little bag to Principal Mendoza.” Garson plucked it from my unresisting fingers. “Expulsion. No high school diploma. No future.” He put a hand on my arm. I shoved it off, but it left a feeling like oil slicked across my skin. “Yes, you’re a fine young woman. It would be a shame to cut that future short.” The hand came back, landing fingertip by fingertip.

  I tried to skip backward, but my thighs hit a desk. I was trapped. “What do you want?”

  Wrong question. Garson’s eyes glinted. “You don’t need expulsion, Claude. You need counseling. Your sexual activities are infamous.” The hand moved from my shoulder toward my collarbone, where the strap of my bag cut across my body. Garson’s eyes fixed on the spot. Then he stuck his hand in his pocket. “You don’t need to be kicked out of school. You need a . . . more well-rounded perspective.” His breath hit my neck and chest and I jerked back. Get out.

  “And if you don’t come,” he breathed, “we may have to revisit that expulsion, hm?”

  BRYSON: You are involved in a sexual relationship with Avery Cross.

  GWEN: I’d call it a romantic relationship.

  BRYSON: Did your sister know about it?

  GWEN: Avery started talking to me after Lizzy died. So no. We texted after Avery came by with flowers, and then we started hanging out, and then . . . it happened.

  BRYSON: Did Emma know?

  GWEN: No. Avery kept our secret. But Emma was more like a girlfriend than I was. Emma was the one hanging out with my girlfriend all the time. She got to hear about Aves’s day. She got to actually be a part of it.

  BRYSON: You were jealous of her.

  GWEN: First Emma took my sister, and then she took my girlfriend. She was angling to take everything away from me. Yeah, I was jealous. And one day she just . . . switched off. She stopped answering questions in class, even when Mrs. Willingham called on her. She’d say she didn’t know.

  She always knew.

  Emma was friendly enough to most people, most people excluding me. I knew something was up when she screamed at Jamie Schill. He was only going in for a high five. Even then I thought it was stress. I didn’t realize.

  BRYSON: Didn’t realize what?

  GWEN: And then she stood up at the assembly and said, “Elizabeth Sayer didn’t kill herself.” After that, I didn’t care what made her scream at Jamie or look like a rabbit that’s about to be blown away. I just cared that she was hell-bent on ruining my life. And Avery still hung out with her, still tried to help her, still spent more time with her than she would with me. And Aves . . . well, she was already cheating on Michael, wasn’t she? What was it to her if she cheated again?

  I decided to end things. I went from yearbook to the Morning House, where I knew Aves and her squad would be with fries and Coke. I sent her a message and hung behind the garbage until the rest of them had sauntered off to their cars, then slid into the still-warm booth and took a cold fry. “You can tell me,” I said between bites.

  “Tell you what?”

  Avery has this thing where she pretends to be stupid. Her eyes go wide and her mouth softens. It makes students roll their eyes and teachers take pity. This time, though, she looked genuinely confused. It only made me angrier. “If you don’t want to be study buddies anymore.” Avery reddened and ducked her chin, taking a fry and tapping it on the table. Something hardened in me. “I get it,” I said, though I sounded like I didn’t. I tried to push some kindness into my stony words. But it was hard to be anything other than angry—at my situation, at Avery, at the fact that I had to deal with being in the closet, my first girlfriend maybe cheating and my sister killing herself. “I’m boring. I only ever study. I don’t want to . . . you know.” Come out. I couldn’t help glancing around to see who was close enough to hear. “But I’m already a side piece, and I don’t want to be. I’m not going to take third place.”

  “What’re you—” Avery’s eyes widened in panic as a shadow fell over our table.

  The waitress scooped up half-empty baskets and cups of ice and backwash. “You need anything else?” she asked pointedly.

  “Let me drive you home,” Avery said.

  I didn’t want her to. But I said yes, because I’m a stupid sucker for Avery Cross.

  I always feel prickly in Aves’s car. The seats are real leather and the car still has that “new” smell, the smell of fancy cars that aren’t bought at the friends-and-family rate. Dad’s truck is legitimately older than me. I kept my thighs off the seat and squeezed my shoulders in so that I was touching as little as possible.

  Avery looked at the clock on the dash. “Crap.” Then she turned the wrong way out of the parking lot, away from my part of town. “I need to stop at school first.”

  “Why?”

  Avery’s leg started to bounce up and down. “I just have to do something real quick.”

  “With Emma?” I said before I thought about it.

  “Gwen, no.” And she sounded so earnest—so pained. I wanted to believe her. “Is that what this is about? Why you’re talking about . . . breaking up?”

  “You have to be together to break up,” I muttered.

  “Whatever. Stopping whatever we’re doing.”

  “Well, why not? We never hang out.” Because you’re always hanging out with her.

  “Gwen, people have been spreading rumors about me forever.”

  “Well, it feels different with her,” I snapped. “Like there’s something I don’t know about you two.”

  For a long moment, she was silent. Then she said, almost too quiet for me to hear, “There’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “Then tell me,” I said.

  The silence built up as we drove, becoming thicker and thicker, a rising river. And the silence was worse than whatever she might have said. It was a rising tide and I was drowning. Time after time I tried to say something, but choked on my own words.

  We pulled into the empty parking lot of JLH and she turned off the car. She stared at the steering wheel. Her hands were shaking.

  I had to say something. “Seriously, Avery. If you had to do this, any other person at JLH would’ve been better. Do you know what she’s done to me? To my family?” My voice was rising but I didn’t care. The drowning feeling had been replaced by a flood. “Why her? Why pick that freak over me?”

  Avery’s voice was a bobbing tremor. “I’m not picking her—”

  “You spend all your extra time with Emma. You do homework with her instead of me. She’s with you for cheer, math, history . . .” Things that I could be doing with her.

  “She’s going through something,” Avery said.

  My sob built in me. I tried to push it out as a sarcastic laugh. I could touch my rage. I could turn it into claws and tear off the roof of the car.

  It took me two tries to unbuckle my seat belt with shaking fingers. “Thanks for the ride, but I’ll walk from here.” I jerked the car door open and fell onto the asphalt. Palming the tears from
my eyes, I grabbed my backpack and set off toward the road.

  I heard the scramble of Avery tumbling out of the car. “Gwen, wait! Just—just listen. . . .”

  That was what hit me the hardest. Just listen. Unreasonable Gwendolyn just has to listen, and then she’ll understand. Gwen’s strong so she doesn’t ever hurt. Gwen doesn’t show pain, so she obviously doesn’t feel it. Gwen’s under control, so you can say or do whatever you want. I whirled around and let the rage overtake me like the tide. “She’s going through something? I’m going through something. My sister died and no one gives a shit? My girlfriend goes out with two other people? What can she possibly be going through that’s so bad?”

  And Avery told me.

  And it was that bad.

  CLINE: So you planted a murder weapon at Ken Garson’s house? Because you wanted him to take the fall? Because you claim he had a sexual interest in you?

  CLAUDE: The Jefferson-Lorne police, ladies and gentlemen. Capable of being so right and so wrong at the same time.

  I’m not surprised you don’t register it as sexual interest. It’s what happens to girls all the time, right? We should be used to it. We should take it as a compliment. We should wear something else or be something else. That’s what I thought, too, when it all started.

  I’d intended to stop dealing. Really, I wanted to. But then Mom lost out on a promotion to an idiot guy at work, and Janine’s timing belt broke, and honestly? Once I moved my business off school property, it seemed to matter less. Who cared if I had to endure one old dude creeping on me? That’s the life of a girl. We shrug off detailed questions about our sex lives and preferred positions. We don’t tell them to go fuck themselves when they suggest a padded bra. When they touch us over our clothes, well, at least it’s over the clothes.

  We’re women. We endure. And I thought, Two more years. Two more years and I’ll be out of this mess.

  Mandatory counseling involved massages. He tried to unbutton my jeans to “check for cutting marks” on my thighs. He accused me of stealing from his office and asked what I’d do to keep him quiet. I told him I’d tell Principal Mendoza what a perv he was, and he only laughed. “Principal Mendoza knows I’m trustworthy,” he said. “He’s been watching you be a slut for years. And sluts get what they beg for.”

  I don’t beg, I wanted to snarl. But he was right, wasn’t he? No one would believe me if I cried rape. If I complained now, they’d say, Why didn’t you complain earlier? If it was so traumatic and horrible, why wasn’t I screaming from the rooftops the moment he touched me?

  CLINE: Well, why didn’t you?

  CLAUDE: If I scream without evidence, I’m the Girl Who Cried Rape. “Men can’t even give hugs anymore.” “He was so misunderstood.”

  Trust me. You think we haven’t been here before?

  CLINE: But if your whole objective was to get rid of Ken Garson, why did you wait until now? Why are two others dead while Mr. Garson is on a field trip with the cheer team?

  CLAUDE: Because I thought I was free. Garson stopped calling me in for counseling last year. He left me alone. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care. I figured he got bored with me.

  I didn’t realize he’d found another target.

  MUÑEZ: CCTV footage shows you with Emma behind the school on September 8. She’s crying, you’re angry. Eventually you hug and leave the scene together. You never mentioned that in any of your other interviews.

  AVERY: It was a couple weeks after the assembly. Gwen kept texting me, things like what the hell and you still friends with her? Gwen wanted me to pick: Emma or her. And I was ready to pick her.

  I took Emma out behind the school, so I could kick her off the cheer team. I didn’t want to do it in front of the other girls, right?

  Her face was blotchy, her mascara smeared. Her ice-blond hair stuck up in two-day tangles. She met my eye, just for a second, and within her I saw . . . emptiness. Not boredom, like she sometimes got on the squad. Not distraction, like when she was finishing an essay in her head. She’d been cleared out. Like she didn’t care.

  I took a deep breath. “Emma, you know the cheer squad has a code of conduct to uphold.”

  Emma didn’t say anything.

  “And, well . . . you broke it.” I floundered. How do I sound like the eloquent and clever one when I’m talking to the smartest student at Lorne? “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Done what?” Her voice was flat, like she wasn’t really there.

  “You shouldn’t have brought up Lizzy,” I said. “We’re all trying to move on.”

  “I can’t,” she whispered, and she broke.

  She bent at the middle as though I’d punched her. The air around us went dead. I leaned forward without thinking and grabbed her shoulders, watching her tears as they hit the ground in fat drops. Emma’s face had twisted into an unrecognizable horror. It was a horror so deep I couldn’t comprehend it. But the self-loathing that came with it was something I understood so well.

  We’d talked about Lizzy before. This was more than Lizzy. This was something new.

  Emma was trying to say something. I leaned in close. Her breath came in great gulps, a cycle of gasping and sobbing and gasping again.

  “He—” she wheezed. She couldn’t say anything more.

  “He who?” My mind raced through possibilities. He, Michael. He, her dad.

  He, Garson, who touched the tops of girls’ bras and let his hands run down our backsides. He’d seen Emma for mandatory counseling. What had he done?

  I put my arms around her and I lied to her. I said it was going to be okay, and I would drive her home now. She didn’t tell me that day, but I found out. I talked to her and I sat with her and I helped her on our routines, and I kept Gwen off my back about her, until she was finally able to tell me.

  Mr. Garson raped Emma Baines.

  It sucks that I just look at you and know you don’t believe me.

  BAINES: That’s a fucking lie.

  GWEN: No it’s not.

  BAINES: You’re trying to cover for yourself. You killed my daughter because you were jealous of her and your girlfriend.

  BRYSON: Chief, I got this—

  BAINES: No, you don’t. You think I wouldn’t know if my own child was raped?

  GWEN: She didn’t know how to tell you.

  BAINES: Shut up—

  GWEN: She’d gathered all this evidence—

  BAINES: I told you to shut up.

  BRYSON: Chief, can I talk to you for a sec?

  BRYSON: It’s Sunday, December 9th. The time is 12:14 a.m. Recommencing interview with Miss Gwendolyn Sayer, with Officer Bryson present. Gwen, would you continue please?

  GWEN: Everything cracked. The buildup, the anger. My heart. I wanted to throw up. Avery’s face was awash in tears. Her shoulders shook. I came forward slowly, like the air was water between us, and wrapped my arms around her. She fell against me.

  I know what raw pain looks like. I’ve seen it in my mother’s face every day for a year. When something happens to someone you love, and you can’t understand why, the pain cuts deep and angry and over and over. As Avery sobbed on my shoulder, my first thought was: She’s definitely in love with Emma.

  My second thought was: Someone raped Emma, and that’s not okay.

  “What happened?” I said. “Who did it?” I was ready to report him to Principal Mendoza. To get him expelled and kicked out of Lorne at the very least.

  “It was a teacher,” Avery whispered against me. My blood turned to the ice of Anna’s Run.

  You can’t tell the administration when the perpetrator is the administration.

  “It’s not just her,” Aves said, and her shuddering gave way to trembling. To fear. I locked my arms around her and held her up. “He . . . touches me.” Her entire body locked up. “He tried to kiss me.” Her shoulders rippled as a fresh wave took over. “Gwen, don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad,” I said. I could’ve lit a match with the power of my fury. “Who
did it?”

  “Wait, Gwen.” Avery’s voice was so faint I almost couldn’t hear it. She took a breath, then another. “Emma said . . .” She swallowed.

  I took her face in my hands. Her skin was smooth, her cheeks rash red from the sting of the cold and from her tears. “You can tell me.” I needed her to tell me. I needed her to trust me, like girlfriends trust each other.

  “Emma said he did it to Lizzy, too.” And the bottom dropped out of my world again.

  CLAUDE: I started dealing to Avery last year. Valium, an easy pill. She was always skittish about getting it, so we worked after hours, usually meeting in the JLH parking lot after everyone else had gone home.

  The day I found out, I was waiting for her. I sat in Janine, doing the required reading for English, when I heard an unexpected voice: Gwen Sayer, sounding pissed. “What could she possibly be going through that’s so bad?”

  “She was raped,” Avery screamed back.

  I don’t care about JLH’s gossip. I know better than anyone how rumors are manufactured. But this hit. I knew it wasn’t rumor.

  I eased open Janine’s door. Gwen and Avery didn’t notice. They were locked in a hug that looked a tad intimate.

  “Who did it?” Gwen asked.

  I didn’t hear Avery’s entire response. But I heard the word teacher, and I knew. I knew why Garson stopped bothering me.

  I stood awkwardly, waiting for them to notice me. They didn’t. So I cleared my throat and said, “Is now a bad time?”

  They sprang apart. Avery booked it without giving me a second glance. Gwen gave me a serious I’ll kill you glare and followed. And I stood alone in an empty parking lot, feeling like an asshole, wondering what I was supposed to do. I waited around for half an hour, but Avery never came back for her stash.

  I took Janine over to her house later that night. I parked down the road and walked up the pristine white concrete drive, between pseudo Greek columns, to knock on her maple-and-gold door. The doorbell echoed inside with a Big Ben chime. A moment later I heard the light patter of Avery’s feet. “I got it,” she called as she opened the door.

  Her eyes met mine. She turned pale. “Go away,” she whispered, and tried to slam the door.