Maia holds up her hands. “I believe I’m allowed to have an opinion and my opinion is I’m just as invested in this as you are, T.S. And I am equally committed to Alex.”
“Guys,” I say. “I want you both there.”
“Besides,” Maia says, giving us both a sly look, “I did do my fair share of recon. It’s no surprise, really. You know, James Bond is my countryman.”
With that, the tension seeps out of the room and T.S. says, “Maybe you can go sniff out some laundry for us then, Ms. Bond.”
“What do we need laundry for?” Maia asks.
“If you were really a top secret spy, you would know. Since you’re not, grab your laundry. Both of you.”
We do as we’re told, snagging our laundry bags from the closet. T.S. extracts a roll of quarters from the pocket of her shorts. “I have mine.”
I pat my back pocket, where I stuffed three dollars in quarters after Martin’s tip. “Me too.”
Maia dashes to her desk and grabs a handful of quarters, then we follow T.S. down the hall, laundry bags in tow, like a couple of hobos.
“This is really glam. Mind telling us what laundry has to do with the you-know-whats?” I ask.
T.S. shakes her head. “You guys are the worst secret agents ever. You cannot put clues together.”
“You know, Maia, you should do your spring project on James Bond,” I say in a faux British accent and even force a smile, because I don’t want to be the dark and silent “date rape girl.” I can still laugh, like I did at Martin’s birdbrain joke. I can still be funny—or at least try to be.
“That’s a fantastic idea,” Maia says. She skips once, then turns around and walks backward so she can face us and talk. “You know, I could actually do something on the symbolism of the Bond Girl.”
“Okay, I’ll take the bait,” T.S. says as she pushes open the door to the stairwell. “What does the Bond Girl symbolize?”
“Independence. Because she’s usually smart, rich, and self-employed, meaning she doesn’t work for the government.”
I open the front door of the dorm as I ask, “So it’s better to be a Bond Girl than to be James Bond?” I like that we’re not talking about me or the Mockingbirds or the four-letter word, so I’m happy to keep steering the conversation to the trivial.
T.S. shakes her head, points down the stairs. “Do you do laundry outside, dork?”
“Are we really doing laundry?” I ask.
T.S. nods.
“I thought it was just a cover.”
Maia returns to my question. “It’s totally better to be the Bond Girl. You should never work for the government.”
“So, if you think about it, the Bond Girl really defies the idea of the Bond Girl stereotype,” I say, catching T.S.’s attention with the last word.
“As the reigning expert on stereotypes I’d have to say the Bond Girl both embraces them and defies them,” T.S. says.
“You’re both wrong. She rises above them,” Maia counters as T.S. opens the door to the basement level of the dorm. Someone’s cleaned up the mess I made of the lost-and-found bin.
“Okay, can we take a break from the Bond Girl debate so you can tell us where the hell we’re going?” I ask.
T.S. flips her short California Girl hair and tips her chin down the hall. “The laundry room.”
“Right, yeah, figured that one out, T.S.,” I say. “I mean, why are we going to the laundry room?”
“The Mockingbirds.”
“I know that! But why there?” I ask.
“You’ll see,” she says.
“Do you know Martin’s in it?” I ask.
“I’d heard he was in it,” she says.
“Why does everyone know these things and I don’t?”
“Like I told you before, not everyone knows,” Maia says.
But I still feel like an idiot. Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to what’s going on around me. Maybe if I paid more attention, I wouldn’t have been… I stop in my tracks, place a palm against the cold concrete wall. I still can’t say the four-letter word, even to myself, even silently.
“You okay?” T.S. asks. I’m still holding on to the wall.
“I’m fine,” I manage to say, and then keep walking.
“Anyway, as for Martin, yes I knew he was involved, but it’s not as if we really talk about it. The case they heard last semester involved a bunch of freshmen anyway, no one we knew. Theater students, I think.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird? That he’s on it?”
T.S. looks at me. “Not really. Martin’s always been, I don’t know, above the fray.”
I think about that for a moment: above the fray. Then the sound of a whirring dryer grows louder as my laundry bag bumps against my lower back. We continue our march down the linoleum floor and I can now hear more than one dryer going, tumbling in harmony, tossing clothes in endless circles. The double doors to the laundry room are wide open. There’s a sign on one of them, just a sheet of white paper with words in all caps in blue ballpoint pen: THE KNOTHOLE.
Clever. Very clever.
Chapter Nine
ATTICUS AND BOO ROLLED INTO ONE
I hear a voice asking, “What movie introduced audiences to a Mogwai named Gizmo?”
The question comes from a girl sitting cross-legged on a beat-up old mustard-colored couch all the way in the back of the laundry room. Her black hair is super-short, spiky almost, and she wears tight black jeans, black Converse high-tops, and a long-sleeve gray shirt. At first I think the question is for us, like a trick question, or a secret code or something. We have to answer it correctly or we can’t pass through. Maybe we’ll even fall through a trapdoor planted just a few feet in front of us. Then someone answers, a disembodied voice coming from the ground below us.
“Dude, Gremlins,” a familiar voice says.
“Nice,” the short-haired girl says. Then to us, “Hey, want to play Trivial Pursuit?”
“Sure,” T.S. says.
We walk past three rows of dryers and washers—one to our left, one to our right, and one on the far right wall. A boy and another girl pop up from the floor. The boy is Martin.
“Hey, Alex,” he says. He has a gentle look in his eyes, caring even. Then he nods casually to Maia and T.S., acknowledging them.
“Hi,” I say, still a little nervous to see him here, to even be here at all.
“Hey there,” the other girl says. She’s tall, dark-skinned with long braided hair and deep brown eyes. She’s curvy too, big breasts and wide hips and wears a blue tank top and a long gray skirt. I’ve never met her before. “I’m Ilana,” she says, offering a hand. I shake and notice her skin is toasty, as if she’s been sitting next to a fire. Must be the dryers. They’re all on high.
“Alex,” I say.
The three of them shake hands with T.S. and Maia next, which must be some sort of Mockingbirds gentlemanly—or gentlewomanly, as Maia would say—protocol. Then the short-haired girl stands. I’ve never had any classes with her either. “I’m Amy. Thanks for reaching out. You’re our first this term. Martin told us you guys all know each other. Cool.”
Cool? Is that cool? But if she says so, fine, it’s cool.
“Do you want to start your laundry and then sit down?” Amy asks next.
It’s less of a question, more of a directive. Maia, T.S., and I file over to the washing machines. I wonder if we’re just supposed to dry the clothes. I turn around, “Just dry?” I ask.
Amy, Ilana, and Martin all laugh, as if on cue. “You can wash your clothes,” Amy says. “We’re not into weird shit like making you dry clothes before you wash them.”
I nod, then stuff the clothes in a machine, add soap, and punch the quarters in. Maia and T.S. do the same and we return to the couch area.
“Sit next to me,” Amy says to me, patting the spot next to her on the couch. I do as I’m told. Ilana takes a chair this time, a mismatched partner to the couch. The chair looks as if it was born red but too many pizza
stains over the years have turned it the color of grease. The pizza stains remind me I’m still hungry—that dinner would have been nice. T.S. sits on the other side of Amy, while Maia takes a spot on the floor next to Martin. There’s a Trivial Pursuit game there with orange, purple, and blue pies on various spots on the board. They all have a few wedges in them already.
“You can be on my team,” Amy says to me, and hands me a die. Ilana nods to T.S. and Martin to Maia.
I roll, wondering what this could possibly have to do with why we’re here. But before the red dotted cube even lands Amy begins, “The game is for show, in case you were wondering. The laundry is for show too.”
I nod, then land a six. “You move,” Amy instructs. “Orange pie.”
I move the orange pie to a music space. But Martin doesn’t take out a card. Instead he says, “My parents tortured me with this game growing up. They made me play eighties Trivial Pursuit every Friday, so I took their board game over break and am determined to beat them at it just to prove you don’t have to have lived through that decade to win the game.”
He’s just Martin, trying to be funny, to poke fun at himself too. It’s not so weird he’s here, after all.
“So rather than tell us about some British hair band, the first order of business is actually for me to let you know everything you say here is completely confidential,” Amy says. Her voice is sweet, innocent sounding, despite the gravity behind the words. “Everything you say here stays here until you decide if you want to take it to the next step.”
“What’s the next step exactly?” I ask.
“Don’t worry. We’ll get there. For now, I want you to understand who we are, what we do, and why we exist. I have no doubt you know about our founding, right?”
“Just kind of sketchy details,” I say, rattling off the little bit Casey had shared the week before I started at Themis, including the part about it being a justice system for the students, by the students.
Amy nods. “Exactly. We’re Boo Radley and Atticus Finch all rolled into one. And our mission is to make things right. We investigate and try crimes committed by students against their fellow students.”
Ilana jumps in. “We have to,” she says, her voice strong, passionate. “The administration thinks because Themis is this liberal, progressive school, nothing bad could happen here. There’s no hate speech, no bullying here. How could there be? It’s Themis. We’re too good for that.” She scoffs, then keeps going. “So they have their training programs every year about being politically correct and right and wrong and they think that’s enough. They think being enlightened is enough, that we’d never do anything wrong because we’re here and because they had Diversity Day for us.”
When we were freshmen, we all went through an “Awareness Day.” We learned about being good citizens, about bullying, about drug and alcohol addiction. We learned about suicide prevention too. The year before I got here, a Themis girl killed herself. It was all sort of hush-hush. No one talked about the specifics much, but the school made sure to talk about warning signs at Diversity Day.
So because the school had passed on its modern wisdom, nothing could go wrong. We’ve been trained to be good, because we are good. Everything is wonderful. No one gets punished—no student ever gets punished other than losing an attendance point here and there—because the administration thinks we’re perfect. Because if we weren’t, it would reflect badly on them. Just don’t flunk a class though!
Maia can’t resist jumping in. “That’s completely what happened with my roommate, Kelly, last year. There was never any acknowledgment of her problem with prescription drugs. They didn’t ask what was wrong or look into what her issues might be. Instead, she was just the girl who failed, so she’s the girl who couldn’t come back.”
“They can’t accept we’re not perfect. We’re teenagers, we’re awful sometimes,” Amy adds.
“That’s why your sister started the Mockingbirds,” Martin continues, and it occurs to me these three people—two strangers, one friend—probably know more about Casey’s motives than I know. Maybe there’s even a Mockingbirds history book somewhere, full of rules and laws and all the violations ever brought before them. Martin adds, “Because the school has given us no choice but to police ourselves.”
Amy takes over now. “So what happened to you, Alex?” she asks, her clear blue eyes fixed on me.
I swallow hard. How am I supposed to tell them what happened? I can’t even say the word to myself, let alone out loud. I close my eyes and wish Casey were here to speak for me. But instead the voice I hear belongs to T.S.
“Alex went out with a group of us Friday night and we were drinking and she got really drunk and wound up back in this guy’s room, Carter Hutchinson’s room. And she passed out. And he had sex with her twice,” T.S. says, her voice threatening to break, but staying strong as the anger cements. She has her own anger over this, just like I have my shame.
I open my eyes and look away from them all. I watch the clothes, wet and clean in the washing machines. The dirt removed, they’re new again. Like I can be, if I let them help me.
“I’m sorry, Alex,” Amy says. Ilana and Martin murmur their condolences too.
I wipe away something wet on my cheek and look back at everyone. I shrug my shoulders, ready to move on. I don’t need a public mourning—however well-intentioned—for what I’ve lost. “What now?” I ask.
“You mean what can we do?” Amy asks me.
“Yeah, what can you do?”
“Do you remember two years ago when Paul Oko stopped playing football?” Amy asks.
“He was the quarterback, right?” I say. Paul Oko was a star athlete, the pretty boy of the school, the golden child. One day, he simply stopped playing quarterback. I had never been to a Themis football game, but you didn’t have to follow football to know about his exodus from the team. Especially because he chose to quit. I was a freshman but I still heard murmurs that there was more to it. He didn’t just lose interest in his favorite sport.
Maia dives back in, always eager to contribute. “Right, it was totally out of the blue. One night in the cafeteria he just stood up and said ‘I can’t play football anymore. I’m quitting the team.’ ”
“Do you know why he quit?” Amy asks, looking to Maia now to see if she knows the answer.
But Maia always knows the answer. “Of course. He was the one who kept calling the receiver a faggot. Every day at practice Paul kept saying he didn’t want to pass to a queer,” Maia recalls. For a second Maia reminds me of T.S. with her encyclopedic knowledge of sports, but there’s a key difference between them. T.S. allocates brain space for sports, plays, and strategy, Maia for people.
Amy nods. “The receiver came to us. Classic hate speech case.”
“You’re the reason he quit?” I ask, looking at Amy, Ilana, Martin. “I mean, that was the Mockingbirds? You can do that?”
“Just like we heard the case of the Dishonorables. We call them by the name they called their victims,” Amy says with a snort. “Anyway, they all were leaders of the Honor Society. President, VP, secretary, and treasurer. Proof that power corrupts, right? Anyway, the Mockingbirds heard that case three years ago, when Casey was a senior. We heard Paul’s case two years ago. Heard them both right here in this laundry room, and the council ruled in both cases. Seniors were guilty, Paul Oko was guilty.”
“Are you the council?” I ask.
Amy shakes her head. “No, we’re just the board of governors. We run the group, but we don’t decide guilt or innocence. The council does, and it consists of nine students we appoint each term. The New Nine, so to speak. We’re interviewing candidates now, so our tryout flyers are around campus. They come up through our system,” she says, and I wonder what she means by system, but I don’t ask. “Then we’ll settle on the nine. And then when it’s time for a case, three are randomly chosen a few days before to hear the case and render a verdict. That way the council can’t really be manipulated or bribed
for a specific case. It keeps everything honest and it works.”
“The council just hears the cases,” Ilana adds in her smooth voice. “In a perfect world—in the world Themis thinks we have—there’d be no cases. But there are never no cases. There are always too many cases. There’s always someone doing something wrong.”
“So when Paul was found guilty, you made him resign from the team?” I ask.
“We don’t make people do anything,” Amy says. “But he knew what he was getting into.”
Martin steps in to explain. “If you consent to a hearing one way or the other, as the accused or the plaintiff, you agree to the consequences,” he says.
“And those are?”
“The thing you love most is taken away,” Amy says. “That’s the punishment. That’s the justice we can dole out. Paul quit, as you know. And before our time, the four students on the Honor Society stepped down too. They had to.”
I let that sink in for a minute, the idea—no, the reality—that underground justice is alive and well at Themis Academy. That students mete out punishments. That other students adhere to them. “But what if the other person doesn’t agree to that? I mean, how do you enforce it?” I ask.
The trace of an impish grin forms on Amy’s pert face. “We don’t usually have to enforce it. Most students agree to the code, because the code is for them. We’re here for each other. So it’s not usually a problem.”
Ilana leans her head to one side, then the other, stretching her neck, as she adds, “But just in case, we make sure students are, how shall we say, compelled to appear before the hearing and agree to the terms.”
“You don’t beat them up, do you?” Maia asks aggressively. “Because that would go against the whole purpose of the group, you know? You’re supposed to be ‘doing good.’ ”
Ilana and Amy exchange smiles. “I like that you brought your bulldog, Alex.”
“English bulldog,” Maia adds, never content to let someone else get the last word.
“Martin, do you want to explain?” Amy asks.
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