Touch

by Francine Prose

  Or maybe I was afraid that she’d try to talk me into moving back to Wisconsin. In a way, it would have been the most sensible solution, getting away from a school where everyone despised me and back to one where they just ignored me.

  But for some reason, I would have felt as if I was giving up, giving in—as if I’d been defeated. And Wisconsin had been boring. Whatever it was, my life at the moment wasn’t boring. I wanted to hang in there—at least long enough to find out what was going to happen, and how my own little drama would end.

  At the same time, I knew that my mother would eventually hear the truth. After all, she was my real mom—eventually, she’d pick up something on her real-mom radar. And now, it seemed, she has.

  After a silence she says, “Marian called me.”

  I say, “Marian as in Shakes’s mom Marian?”

  “Marian as in Marian,” says Mom. “Maisie, what the heck is going on? I want to hear it from you first before I talk to your father and Joan. I want to hear your version of the story. I need to know what’s happening. I can’t believe I’ve been left out of the loop for months about something this important. Maisie, you’re my daughter. Can you imagine how I felt when Marian called me and I had no idea what she was talking about? How do you think it made me look?”

  “Mom,” I say. “This isn’t about you.” I think about Narcissus gazing at himself in the water. Maybe Joan isn’t the only one. Maybe Dad has a weakness for women like that.

  “I know that,” says Mom. “I’m not upset about me. I’m worried about you, darling. What happened between you and Shakes? You were always such close friends. It was always so cute to see the two of you together.”

  “That was then. This is now,” I say.

  “What’s now?” asks Mom.

  “It got cuter, and then it got less cute.”

  “Maisie,” says Mom. “Could you try to make sense?”

  “I am making sense. But never mind,” I say. “What did Shakes’s mom tell you?”

  “Well, she says there’s a…discrepancy between your story and Shakes’s account of what occurred.”

  “So are you saying I’m lying?” I realize I’m holding my breath.

  “Not at all! Not at all! Why would you think I’d think that? Of course we believe you. And we’ll support you, dear. We’re behind you all the way. But I need to hear it from you. I want to hear your version.”

  I pause for so long that Mom says, “Maisie, are you still there?”

  “I’m here,” I say. “It’s just that, the funny thing is…well, that’s the same question everybody seems to be asking me all the time.”

  “And the answer is?”

  “Believe it or not, Mom, the answer is…I don’t know.”

  “How could you not know?” asks Mom.

  “Gee,” I say. “That’s an interesting question. Can I think about it a minute? Can I call you back later?”

  “I don’t understand,” says Mom.

  “I promise,” I say. “I’ll call you back. I need to think for a while.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Are the boys who assaulted you present in the courtroom?”

  “Your Honor, I object to counsel’s use of the word assault.”

  “Objection sustained.”

  “Are the boys who molested you present in the courtroom?”

  “Objection, Your Honor. Molested is inflammatory.”

  “Sustained.”

  “Are the boys who touched you inappropriately on the school bus here today in the courtroom?”

  Chris and Kevin won’t look at me. But Shakes does, and we stare at each other.

  “Will the witness answer the question—”

  I try to speak. Nothing comes out.

  And then, as always, my eyes blink open, and I wake up with the judge’s voice echoing inside my head.

  So that’s pretty much where we are now. Every couple of nights, I have the same dream, a dream like the cheesy ending of the cheesiest TV crime show. The final courtroom showdown moment. The witness contradicts herself. Then she bursts into tears and, through her sobbing, cries that she doesn’t remember what really happened. The defense lawyer rushes the witness stand, demanding to know how she can tell one story, then another, and not know which one is true. When I used to see those scenes on TV, I’d think: Sure. Right. No way. She knows how it happened. She just doesn’t want to say.

  So I guess that’s one difference between life and TV. Because now that it’s happening to me, I can actually see how you could remember two ways in which something happened, and how you could lose the ability to tell which story was true. First you think it happened one way. And then you think: No, maybe not…

  The fact that I keep having the dream seems a little strange. For one thing, Cynthia has promised me that I won’t have to appear in any kind of court. Because of my age and so forth, and the delicacy of the situation, they’ll just take a deposition. So I’m going to be spared that. I’m not going to have to see—not even once, in real life—what I get to watch in perpetual reruns in my dreams.

  Doctor Atwood says that the dream isn’t strange at all. It’s only natural that I feel responsible and guilty, even though none of it is my fault, and I need to remember that.

  Every time Joan talks to Cynthia, the case seems to have ramped up instead of simply going away, which I still keep hoping it will. Cynthia says that it’s critically indifferent of the administration to leave the boys in school, where I have to see them every day and where they have the opportunity to harass me again. Cynthia keeps insisting that the school suspend the three boys, as a “gesture of good faith,” but so far the school has refused to do that. I think that Cynthia secretly wishes they’d feel my breasts some more. Because she’s told us that our best chance of winning is if the harassment is severe and pervasive—and the school does nothing to stop it. That’s why Joan gave me the camera and told me to document stuff like the drawing of me on the bathroom wall.

  You’d think the school would cave in and give Cynthia whatever she’s asking for. But Doctor Nyswander seems to think that it’s a matter of principle. He must believe I provoked the guys into touching my boobs, and then had second thoughts and felt guilty, and turned on them. And he’s not going to make them suffer.

  Apparently, he brought up The Crucible, and the Salem witch trials. Big Mistake. That sent both Joan and Cynthia totally over the edge into blind raging fury. Was Doctor Nyswander accusing them—and me—of being hysterical raving female witch-hunters? In fact, everything that happens seems to make Cynthia and Joan even angrier and more determined. So they’ve reached a kind of standoff. Joan says the school board is digging in its heels, that they’re circling the wagons just the way the male power structure always does when anyone challenges their authority.

  Anyway, the result is: I get to see Shakes and Kevin and Chris every day. I see them, but they just look right through me as if I’m not even there. I can’t blame them for not wanting to be friends with the person whose lawyer would love to get them expelled from school with giant black marks on their permanent records.

  The fortunate thing in all of this—if you could call anything fortunate—is that now the other kids pretty much leave me alone. You’d think a bunch of normal high school kids would keep on teasing and torturing me, but no one does. They practically scatter when they see me coming down the hall.

  Doctor Atwood says they might be scared to come near me. She says that once you start getting lawyers involved, everything changes, and people get nervous; they start watching their backs. Even kids, she says. Their parents have probably told them not to get involved with me, not to go near me or provoke me. Who knows whom I’ll accuse next, and what I’ll claim they did?

  From time to time, I get the feeling that Doctor Atwood wishes that this hadn’t become a whole legal mess. She’d prefer it if she could just deal with me and my problems without the added pressure of Cynthia trying to set a new precedent that might put her in the
news and in all the law books.

  No one jingles coins at me anymore, in return for which I don’t keep wanting to back every kid in the school against the wall and say, “I didn’t do it!” Mostly I try not to think about the guys saying I wanted to let other guys grope me for money, but when I do, it still has the power to make me mad, and ashamed, but especially mad—enough so that I’ve stopped trying to sort through my memory of whether or not Shakes was holding my wrists.

  I sort of remember it happened, just as I sort of remember it didn’t. But who cares? Something happened. And whatever happened was enough to ruin my life. Every day, the incident itself gets more distant. Hour by hour, it recedes into the past and gets harder to remember. And who wants to remember, really?

  But no matter how much I forget, or try to forget, I can’t forget the part about them saying I was willing to let guys feel me up for a small fee. That little detail seems to have a life of its own, and it doesn’t seem to be losing its power to come around and bite me. Whenever I think about that, I notice that I tend to do something weird. Like, I’ll suddenly shout some nonsense word out loud, or I’ll run and look in the mirror to see if I look like the kind of person who would do something like that.

  One evening, Joan comes home from the office totally wired, and even though she’s usually annoyingly anti-TV, she turns on the evening news. Josh and I watch her go through the networks until she finds what she’s looking for: courtroom footage of a case in which four hunky guys from some rich Detroit suburb are being accused of raping a retarded girl in their school.

  Joan says, “They’re throwing the book at these guys.” She’s so jacked up, she can hardly breathe.

  The camera focuses on the boys, who slump down in their seats and look sullen and macho and terrified in their neat haircuts and the brand-new suits that their moms probably bought to make them seem like clean, upstanding, decent citizens. I almost feel sorry for them until I remember what they may, or may not, have done.

  “Everything like this that happens is good for us,” says Joan. “Good for our side. I mean, not for that poor girl. But it alerts the public consciousness to these cases, and it makes people want to nip this sort of thing in the bud. To pay serious attention to cases like yours, Maisie. It makes people want to take action before things get drastic.”

  I nearly say that what happened to me wasn’t exactly drastic.

  Joan says, “Of course, what happened to you wasn’t as bad as what happened to that poor unfortunate girl. Heaven knows, it was bad enough. But at least it wasn’t rape.”

  Oops. Joan claps her hand over her mouth and wheels on Josh. I can see her wondering: Does Josh Darling know what a rape is? I want to tell Joan that Darling Josh knows the fine points of how you get a girl to take off her T-shirt in front of two hundred sweaty, screaming frat boys.

  Josh shrugs, like he doesn’t care, like he doesn’t know a thing.

  “It’s our culture,” Joan says. “It’s the world you kids live in.”

  Another weird thing is, my grades have improved. My teachers are surprised. I know that, in these situations, victims—which Joan and Cynthia keep telling me that I am—tend to let things slide. They fail their courses and overeat and forget to wash their hair. But I’m not doing any of that, so maybe that means I’m not a victim.

  Believe it or not, I’ve begun to think about college. I know it’s years in the future—three and a half years, to be exact—but still, the thought’s entered my mind. I think that even if the worst happens—if Joan and Cynthia totally blow this thing and I don’t get to go to a different high school and I’m condemned to the unbelievable living hell of staying where I am until I graduate, and it never gets any better, no one ever forgets—even then, I’m going to graduate. I can leave, get out of here, go away to college, and start over somewhere else.

  The other thing that’s boosted my grades is that now I have all the time in the world for homework. I have nothing but time for homework. No long bus rides, no emails or phone calls, no one caring if I’m alive or dead except maybe to think that the whole school would be better off if I weren’t around.

  I guess I could probably find some chat room frequented by girls who’d been involved in inappropriate groping incidents in the back of their school buses. But it would be really pathetic to have that be my little club. My own little demographic.

  Doctor Atwood keeps telling me that I should try reaching out to other kids—that I should try making friends, maybe even with some of the girls in my class. Maybe they have sympathy for me, and they’re just hesitant to express it. Maybe something similar happened to them. Plenty of girls have been in situations in which they haven’t felt in control of what happens to them and their bodies.

  Every time she says it, I have one of those moments of thinking she doesn’t know anything about people. She has no idea what she’s talking about. Because the girls in my school think they are the boys, or they want to be the boys. They’re totally identified with the boys. The boys are kings, they’re gods. And no girl is going to be friends with a girl who represents the most pitiful kind of loser a girl can be. And that loser girl would be me.

  Besides, it’s not exactly something you can go around asking people. Excuse me, but did you ever have anybody touch your boobs when you didn’t want them to? Really? Wanna be friends?

  Though I would never admit it to anyone—so maybe it’s good that there’s no one I could admit it to, even if I did want to—I’m actually starting to like doing homework. How pathetic is that? Math is still boring and hard, but sometimes, when I’m working on an assignment or paper or book report for English or social studies, and I’m at my computer, writing it over and over until it’s as perfect as I can make it, I suddenly notice that hours have gone by—hours in which I haven’t thought once about Shakes and Chris and Kevin.

  We’ve been studying the Bill of Rights, and I like knowing about it. I like knowing what my rights are, and what the people who started this country went through to make sure I had those rights, and that they couldn’t be taken away from me. I’d read Huckleberry Finn when I was in Wisconsin, but this time, reading it for school, I get really caught up in Huck’s whole thing about lying and telling the truth and how you can tell one from the other, and if there are times when it might even be okay to lie.

  Our English teacher is always talking about how characters in books learn through suffering, so maybe that’s what’s happening to me. Sometimes, in the evenings, I turn on the news—not just to find out about rape trials, like Joan does, but to learn what’s going on in the world. And when I see people who are poor, or who have just lost someone in their family, or who are in the middle of a war raging around them—well, I don’t know how to explain it, but I just feel sorrier for them than I ever did before.

  Maybe it makes me seem really self-centered, but the truth is, I think about people like that when I start feeling sorry for myself. I won’t say that it cheers me up, but it puts things in perspective. I mean, let’s face it. Having some guys—your former best friends—touch your breasts isn’t the worst thing that ever happened to anybody in the world.

  Still, it’s pretty bad. I’d be lying if I didn’t say things got really lonely, with no friends and no one to talk to except my therapist and my lawyer and my parents. It’s made me appreciate Darling Josh. He’s an intelligent, sensible little kid. Once, he asked me if it was true that I’d be going away to boarding school pretty soon. I told him I hoped so, and then I felt bad because it was as if I was saying I hoped I’d leave him.

  So I said, “I’d just like to go somewhere where the kids are a little…cooler. A little nicer. Know what I mean?”

  And Josh said, “I do know what you mean.”

  Meanwhile, days go by. A week, then another week. I keep thinking winter is just about to end, and then it turns out to have another giant snowstorm up its cold white sleeve.

  Sometimes the phone rings, and I listen to Joan’s half of the argument sh
e’s been having with my real mom about my going back to Wisconsin. I know Mom thinks I should get away from the nightmare that school has become.

  One evening, I creep into the next room to eavesdrop. I mean, after all, they’re talking about me. It’s my future they’re discussing. Not that it would occur to them to consult me. It’s like it’s their decision, though I know that, in the end, they won’t force me to go anywhere I don’t want to go. Like Wisconsin, for example.

  I hide behind the door just in time to hear Joan say, “You know, Jeanette, I think that standing up for her rights—her rights as a woman—may be the most important part of any education Maisie will ever get. If we win, which believe me, we will, this lesson will stay with her for a lifetime.”

  It cheers me up to imagine the expression that must be on my mom’s face as she listens to Joan. By now, my mother’s eyes must be flipped all the way back in her head.

  Joan says, “It will make her the kind of woman that I wish we all were. How can you deny her that, and how do you think it will look for Cynthia and me to go through all this, and then have her turn and run?”

  Wicked Witch, I think. For a minute I’m almost tempted to go and live with my mom just so it will look bad for Joan. But then I remember Geoff and the TV remote. Also, I want to stick around and see how things are going to turn out. So I creep away from my hiding place without letting Joan know I’ve heard.

  When Mom gets me on the phone, she says, “You don’t have to stay there. There’s no need for you to suffer through this. They can have the hearing or trial or whatever circus they’re planning. They can make their point, or whatever Joan’s doing for the greater glory of Joan, without dragging you through this.”

  I know my mom must feel pretty strongly, because she and Dad seem to have made a sort of pact not to criticize the other person or the other person’s new spouse. It surprises me that she’s breaking their agreement, which she never does.