by Amy Jo Burns
Near the end of September, I received a note from the school nurse during history class, directing me to visit her office. I had no idea why Mrs. March would summon me. I tried to steer clear of her—she had the look of impending death: a skull-like face, spindly fingers, drooping jowls with skin barely clinging to bone. Somehow, she’d gotten the nickname “Yutes” among the students, making every bizarre encounter with her even more awkward as I tried not to call her “Yutes” to her face.
When I reached her office near the junior high wing, I found Yutes just as expected, sitting in her black chair behind her black desk, engrossed in some report fastened to her clipboard. The tight office smelled like tongue depressors. I waited.
Slowly tilting her head toward me, Yutes gestured the knob of her pointer finger toward a closed door. “In there,” she said.
I paused, hoping for further instruction, but received none. I stepped inside the room. There I found Nora, blotchy-faced and red-eyed, sitting on top of a padded examination table, a sheet of sanitary paper crumpling beneath her. I fiddled for a moment, unsure where to sit in a room that appeared to be a converted closet. Nora scooted over, and I hopped up beside her. Together, we stared at the wall.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I miss you,” she said. “You and I used to do everything together.”
Taken by surprise, I didn’t respond. I had assumed Nora had been motivated to reconcile out of guilt. I’d never considered the possibility of her missing me even though I missed her. Boys were supposed to be a girl’s cure-all; I didn’t know one girl could break another’s heart so fiercely, so swiftly. She had the ability to hurt me in a way Pete never could because I’d loved her in a way I hadn’t loved him.
She continued. “You’ve put up this wall. I can’t get through to you.”
My sense of betrayal kept me stone-faced. “This is about Pete,” I said.
“This is about you and me.”
“I don’t know what you want,” I said.
Nora didn’t answer. Outside the door, Yutes tottered in her chair. Normally, I would have made a joke at Yutes’s expense, and Nora would have told me to be nice. She was always thinking the best of people, and I was always telling her people can’t be trusted. This was why we were friends—we made each other better. I still thought of Pete as my property, though I had vacated it. Nora had become the squatter, but she was partly right. This wasn’t about Pete or who belonged to whom. Nora and I were both opportunists; we both wanted out of this town, we both wanted to be more than just some girl from Mercury. The same quality that had first attracted us to each other now repelled us. But here she was, reaching a hand toward me, and I wouldn’t take it. This was the ghostly toll of a lie I’d told long ago—numbness was replacing the space inside me where emotion once had lived.
“Well,” I finally said.
“Well,” she said.
I didn’t ask her if she and Pete were really together. I knew she hated that kind of question. I didn’t ask her to apologize, either. I knew she wouldn’t.
After more silence, she slid from the bed and walked out, leaving me alone.
On my way back to class, I took my time through the empty halls. Nora’s words echoed: “You’ve put up a wall, a wall, a wall.” She still knew me better than anyone else.
My own capacity for coldness startled me. My friend had sobbed while I sat next to her, and I didn’t even flinch. The truth: I feared how deeply I could love someone, and not a boy, though a boy was the crown of every young beauty in Mercury. The love to be feared most was the kind one girl had for another. That kind of love had the power to unearth deep secrets, to dismantle the selves I’d constructed, to make me whole in a way I feared would cost me everything.
As it had with Nora, this fear often manifested itself as jealousy. Just before the rumors about Mr. Lotte began to swirl and the towns-people would identify my friend Carly as a troublemaker, we sat in class with a few other friends at the beginning of our fifth-grade school year. When Carly stood up from her desk and turned her back, I pointed out to the other girls how her black stretch pants sagged around her butt. “Carly pooped her pants!” I said, because I envied how perfect and beautiful and beloved she always was. We laughed, and she turned around and started laughing too, not wanting to be excluded.
“What are you laughing at, Carly?” I asked. “We’re laughing at you.”
She looked stricken, and I felt immediate regret. Soon she would forgive me without an apology. What troubles me most is that I can’t throw this memory into my own receptacle of blame for Howard Lotte. My insides were crooked long before the lie ever left my mouth.
Carly’s father, Charlie Knox, has one of the most glamorous jobs in town—he’s the manager of Rip’s Sunrise Market, Mercury’s only grocery store (until Giant Eagle opens across from the courthouse, that is). But Giant Eagle doesn’t stand a chance, what with Rip’s Sunrise Market’s reputation for baggers who will push your cart through the crowded lot and load your trunk with groceries. The baggers won’t even accept tips because it’s ungentlemanly, and what would we do if one of them saw us shopping at Giant Eagle? It would be nothing less than a personal affront, and the mothers across town will have no part in it. Besides, the word on the street is that you have to bag your own at Giant Eagle. What does Mercury need with two grocery stores, anyway? One suits us all just fine, and that store is run by Charlie Knox. We young, naïve girls think managing a grocery store must mean the Knox family has money because managing is synonymous with owning, isn’t it? Never mind that the store is named for some unseen “Rip” character. There are a lot of things we don’t yet understand.
During the day, Mr. Knox can be found within the confines of his meat-and-produce domain, emerging through the thick plastic strips that separate the store from the back warehouse or pushing a tall, rolling tray of bread next to the deli meats. His daughter Carly is following in her father’s footsteps, selling hard root-beer candy for a penny out of the open window of her playhouse in her parents’ yard when she isn’t practicing piano or her ballet routines. But after Howard Lotte’s investigation begins, the Knox family can’t continue life in Mercury as they had before.
When Carly’s father takes the stand on August 28, 1992, during Mr. Lotte’s sentence hearing, none of us are present to hear him speak. The courtroom is no place for children. We’re probably back-to-school shopping at Kids-R-Us or painting our nails or writing in our diaries while taking the extra time to draw hearts over the i’s, trying hard to forget anything that happened with Mr. Lotte. We’re wiling away the hours before we return to the school where he will no longer be a sixth-grade teacher. His room will be occupied by an unfortunate replacement who must work within the memory of a living martyr, a room that will remind everyone on both sides of the Lotte “incident” what is wrong with our town.
Although Lotte has pled guilty, rumors of his innocence are still quite robust in Mercury, so the judge has asked for spokespeople from both sides to testify at the hearing. Five parents of the victims will take the stand, and seven will speak on Mr. Lotte’s behalf, including Lotte himself. Most of those speaking on Lotte’s behalf are fellow teachers, many of whom teach the grade Carly will be entering in September. When the judge asks her father to share how the “incident” has affected his family, he does his best to put the feeling into words:
You can’t explain what it’s like to have a daughter come home and cry and say: Dad, this stuff happened to me; and the school’s raising money to protect this man. Don’t they believe me? Do they think I’m a liar?
And when you think it’s all over and you say: Well, finally the man will plead guilty and it will all be done. And it’s not over yet. We still walk around town like we are the criminals, and we are nothing but the victims.
Even someone like Carly’s father knows that we—the unspoken, the liars—exist, though we persist in hoping that our diaspora will suggest otherwise. He states that “there’s
many, many that haven’t come forward because they weren’t willing to take the ridicule.” And here we thought we’d outwitted an entire town with our faux naiveté! Did our own parents ever wonder if we had lied to save ourselves, or was it just as easy to believe in Lotte’s stronghold of virtues along with everyone else? Did you know he plays the organ for the Sunday morning choir, for goodness sake? We’ve cast our lot with him, no pun intended, and there’s nothing we can do now. Somehow, we’re liars either way—if we say he didn’t touch us, and if we say he did. Nothing will soil a young girl’s splendor like being called a liar or a potty mouth. To lie is bad enough, but to lie about this? There may be no hope for saving us.
When reading Carly’s father’s testimony, it’s difficult to discern who the true perpetrator is: the man who enacted the crime or the town that protected him. Can you feel it, the bitter chill of an entire town turning its back? Mr. Knox’s final words are of his daughter, and they include a prescient hint toward their future:
This past week, my daughter came to me in tears and she said: Dad, don’t send me back to that school. Don’t send me back to that school. And so I’ve had to take her out and put her in a private school; and we walk around town, and people look at us like we did something wrong. This is America. Why should we have to pay the price?
The cost of truth is hefty, indeed. Soon, Mr. Knox will no longer be found in the aisles of Rip’s Sunrise Market. We won’t get a chance to say goodbye before Carly starts attending private school. Soon the whole family will leave their swimming pool and Carly’s playhouse behind when they move to a neighboring town. Within a few years, they’ll move out West to start over, and who can blame them? Mercury is not a place anyone comes to begin again.
Vanity Fair
IF I WANTED TO SAVE MYSELF from becoming just another girl in Mercury, I was in need of a man whose actions I could mirror. I found him on opening night of the annual school musical, just after I’d gotten a bloody nose. Throughout its short run in the auditorium, Li’l Abner and its flat notes were rewarded with tepid applause. Even so, the Mercury High School auditorium was packed for the first show. The pulleys creaked as the curtain opened on just another day in Dogpatch, a town hidden in the Appalachian hills. The set was bare, just an art-room mural of some smoky mountain in the background and the façade of a broke-down cabin.
The cast didn’t need to shop for costumes at the Salvation Army that year—we all had the wardrobe for the part. Flannel. Old jeans, cut off above the knee and dark eye shadow smudged across our cheeks. Our inspiration for the characters we portrayed relied on the pillar of hillbilly self-esteem:
There is always someone more redneck than you.
The bloody nose came when the Dogpatchers realized we’d been voted the most unnecessary town in the country, and we broke out in a square dance. The Dogpatchers paired up, boys with girls, to hoedown. Heel-toe, heel-toe. Swing that partner round and round. Pick her up and put her down. During rehearsals, this number had caused all of the female chorus girls gross amounts of anxiety because the choreography called for the boys to hoist us in the air. Were they strong enough? Were we too heavy? Some of the girls in Mercury could eat and drink the boys under the table—though neither the boys nor the girls wanted to admit it.
The climax hit when the boys threw the girls over their shoulders and trotted around in a circle. Mercifully, no one fell. The song concluded and the audience applauded. The boys swung us down. But the boy beside me was too close and the wooden high heel of his partner’s shoe cracked me in the nose on her way to the floor. I didn’t even see it coming. I’d never seen stars before, but I saw them that night, shining against the black auditorium. I blinked a few times and held my pose. Never let the audience see your mistakes, Martine always said. I don’t care if your costume comes off. My head teetered as I struggled to hear whether or not the applause had ended. I realized everyone else was running offstage and the transition music had begun. I followed the rest of the cast into the dark wings.
“So sorry!” the girl beside me whispered. “Are you okay?”
“It’s nothing,” I answered as my eyes started to tear. She apologized again before running off for her costume change. My head dizzied. I sniffed and slid the ridge of my finger beneath my nose. A line of red ran the length of it.
Once my vision righted itself and the bleeding stopped, I rushed into the choral room to change into my next costume, a barely there skirt with a gold sequin belt and a matching army-green top and a military cap. Along with Becca and Nora (with whom I’d graduated to a constrained form of niceties, as in “oh-my-gosh-that-skirt-looks-so-good-on-you” or “do-you-have-an-extra-piece-of-bubble-gum”), I was one of General Bullmoose’s “secretaries,” and this was how we dressed. The role was rewritten for four girls instead of four men, since the men around here were habitually scarce.
From the hall, I could hear two off-pitch voices singing on stage. An actor flubbed his lines, a girl fell short of her high C. My head throbbed. I still had about fifteen minutes before my next scene.
Someone almost ran into me, and I stumbled into the side door that led to the gymnasium balcony. No one would see me here, or so I thought.
I closed my eyes and listened to the squeak of the varsity boys’ rubber soles against the vinyl floor, the thwap of the basketball passing from one pair of hands to the next. The blunt clang of the ball hitting the rim, the swift crack of skilled hands dribbling down the court. It was the best music I’d heard in a long time. A symphony in dribbles and missed shots. My head began to clear.
Because I’d broken up with Pete, a beloved Mercury boy, I was becoming known as a girl with a cold heart. It didn’t bother me all that much—I’d rather be known as coldhearted than as a girl who was damaged goods. What did bother me was whether it was true. I’d lost two of my closest friends, and I couldn’t help wondering if there was anything alive left in me. I felt the chill of growing up and growing apart, and I thought I needed a beacon to shine down on me and warm what had frozen.
Boys were never more romantic than when they played basketball. The way their feet felt the floor, the way their hands made sound. Such poetic stallions. They courted the ball, watched it, chased it. Played with it, cradled it, shielded it. Fought for it. What tender fingers extended from such forceful arms. A speaking grip: This ball is mine, and no one else’s. Oh, to be that ball, to quicken his pulse. To be so round, snug between a set of palms. To be the object of affection, to move, and to be moved by, so many.
The previous spring I decided to try out for the cheerleading squad, and I’d made it. I thought then that I wanted nothing more than for Pete to see me perform in another short skirt. I’d resigned my job as the basketball team’s bookkeeper, and watching these boys play, I realized I’d made a mistake that couldn’t be undone. I gave up something I loved for another opportunity to exhibit myself for a crowd. An Appalachian Vanity Fair, that’s what all this was—the football games, the school plays, the basketball court. It was everywhere, and I was just another antiheroine submitting to its fancies.
I hooked my legs onto the metal pipe at the lip of the balcony. Simon Tierney, a steely-eyed senior and star of the team, turned his head upward and spied me. Simon’s father, Mr. Tierney, had been one of the first to confront Mr. Lotte before the rumors had started to swell. Now, five years later, Simon was one of the most popular boys in school. Athletic prowess would always trump any other kind of misdeed in Mercury. Simon’s sister Aria was a year behind me in school, and a remarkable athlete in her own right. If anyone thought about the Lotte scandal when they saw Simon or Aria, they didn’t dare mention it. Even thinking of it would require facing a difficult truth, and none of us had the courage to face down such a beast.
Simon and I eyed each other for a few moments before the whistle blew again and the basketball boys started a new drill. I tiptoed back toward the stairwell to get in place for my next scene. When I opened the doorway into the hall, I got smacked again w
ith off-key music.
I joined the other secretaries backstage as the tech crew readied some props and the lights went black. Soon, opening night would be over and we’d perform a Saturday night show, then a Sunday matinee. Then, in the wake of musical season, basketball would become the latest object of our affections. As I waited in the dark, I could only see the faint glitter of material at my waist. I thought about Simon, how he observed me with unveiled curiosity. Later, he would tell me it was the glint of my sequin belt that caught his eye, the look of my legs stretched on the balcony railing that kept his attention.
The scene: a varsity basketball game held in some old, small gym in some old, small town, one where fans waited in line to get their hands stamped in exchange for flimsy red ticket stubs. A concession stand set up camp in the hallway where members of the basketball boosters club filed dollar bills in envelopes and kept the change in a canning jar. Everyone in town attended; no one dared miss such an affair. It happened this Friday, or last Friday, or three weeks from Friday. This was one night of many, many nights.
7:48 p.m. Like a league of marionettes, the pep band hopped to attention when the band director flicked his wrist. The pregame entertainment, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” had remained the same as far back as I could remember. A cheerleading cohort, of which I was the first, flooded the court and formed a double line along the center.
Just before the opening song, the basketball team gathered in the wings, ready for their cue. While waiting, the crowd swapped titillated murmurs until the show began.
When it did, the audience quieted as the pep band counted us in by the numbers on a clock.
One Two Three Four
Shaking our pom-poms, the cheerleaders popped their hips to the side.