Touch

by Francine Prose

  I say, “I want to be here, Mom.”

  I guess I must sound so definite, she doesn’t bother asking me why. Which is lucky for me, because I couldn’t really tell her if she asked.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Anything can start to seem routine. My awful life has begun to seem normal. There’s a kind of order to it, it’s almost comfortingly familiar: solitude and homework and trying not to think about what everyone thinks about me.

  I still see Doctor Atwood twice a week. For most of the hour she listens to me complain. I know she feels sorry for me, and I don’t ever think that she’s rushing me to get over this whole thing, to get over myself. To move on. But one thing she does say is that I need to stop feeling quite so self-conscious. Because I just might be wrong when I think that the other kids are thinking about nothing—and no one—but me.

  “I don’t think that,” I say one day. “I just think that when they do think about me, they think about what happened on the bus.”

  “Maybe they don’t think about you at all,” Doctor Atwood says. “Teenagers have short attention spans. They’re probably thinking about their parents, their girlfriends and boyfriends, they’re thinking about a million things before they even get to the subject of you.”

  “Am I being a narcissist?” I smile at her.

  “Not exactly,” she says. “Even paranoids have enemies.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask her.

  “Let’s talk about it another time,” she says. “I’m just suggesting it might help you feel better to tell yourself that you’re not at the center of everyone’s consciousness.”

  In fact, that makes me feel worse. It’s bad enough that none of the kids talk to me, or look at me. If they don’t even think of me, how do I know I exist?

  A funny thing: Around this time, there’s a school essay-writing contest about the line “I think, therefore I am.” I spend a long time thinking about it, and working on it. I really try to wrestle with the question of whether I am because I think I am. Or whether I am because other people think I am.

  It’s infuriating that Daria Wells wins. She gets to read her essay aloud in front of the whole assembly. It’s all about how happy she is to live in a country where she’s free to think whatever she likes. Then the whole essay turns into one big boast about how much thinking she does and how much she loves to watch her brilliant mind flitting like a butterfly from one fascinating subject to another. “Like a butterfly!” She actually wrote that! When what she should have written was, “I run to the principal and tell on other kids, therefore I am.”

  Of course, I wasn’t ever going to win any prizes, no matter how brilliant my essay was. Everyone knows who I am, and no one’s going to let Hester Prynne stand up and read her essay in front of the whole school.

  One evening, I walk into the kitchen to find Joan making some disgusting casserole she tells me she read about in a magazine.

  She says, “You won’t believe it, Maisie, but a single helping of this contains all the minerals and vitamins that our family needs for an entire day.”

  It’s supposed to be lasagna, but it’s all green and chewed-up looking. In fact, it’s the color of the gunk that’s been growing around the bathtub faucet in my bathroom, where Joan hardly ever goes.

  I know I should probably go to my room before I say something nasty about Joan’s supernutritious, gross cuisine. But I stick around to watch the spectacle of Joan misplacing her knife and finding it again, chopping everything way too small, nicking her finger, bleeding into the food, finding a Band-Aid, adding too much salt and pepper. All the time, I know that she’s thinking of herself as some celebrity chef on TV. It’s the Cooking with Joan show, and Joan’s showing her loyal viewers and devoted fans how to stuff their families with so many vitamins, they’ll never need to eat again. They’ll never want to eat again.

  “Get the phone, will you, dear?” she says, holding up her nasty green hands.

  Cynthia says, “How are you, Maisie?”

  “Fine,” I say.

  “Can I speak to Joan?” At least she doesn’t call her your mom.

  Joan makes motions that force me to hold the phone to her ear. I hate the way her stiff hair feels as it brushes against my wrist.

  Whatever Cynthia’s calling about must be pretty important, because Joan says, “Wait a second. Wait a second.” She goes and washes off her hands so she can actually hold the phone herself.

  “Tell me again.”

  When Joan finally hangs up, she’s delirious with joy. It turns out that there is going to be some preliminary something or other in front of some civil court judge. It’s scheduled for three weeks from now.

  “At least we’re making progress,” says Joan.

  I say, “That’s good. I guess.”

  “Of course it’s good,” Joan says.

  “When do they depose me?” I say.

  “Listen to you,” says Joan. “Depose. A whole new vocabulary. How amazing. I know it’s been tough for you, Maisie. But it has been a real education in the legal system and about the rights that you have as a citizen and a woman.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “That must mean it’s good that it happened, I guess.”

  “I don’t mean that,” says Joan.

  “So when is it?” I say.

  “When is what?” She’s going to make me say it.

  “The deposition.”

  “The deposition’s next week.”

  “Who’s going to be there?”

  “No one, honey. You, me, Cynthia. And a tape recorder.”

  So now I’m obsessed with the tape recorder. I think about it all the time.

  In my fantasy, I keep getting to the part of the story where I’m talking about saying no and Shakes is holding my wrists. Then I imagine myself stopping in the middle of a sentence and saying, “Or anyway, that’s how I think it happened. I’m not all that sure.”

  Think won’t be good enough. Think won’t exactly cut it for Cynthia or Joan. And that will be the end of that. No new school, no money, no making Shakes and Kevin and Chris see that you don’t go around saying that a person asked you to find someone to pay her to touch her boobs, just because that person has boobs, and because she used to be your friend, and because she chose one of you over the other two.

  Every moment when I’m not busy and doing something, like, for example, when I’m trying to fall asleep—not that I can sleep—I go over my speech in my head. I rehearse every word of the deposition I’m going to give. The story of how I said no, and of how Shakes held my hands, and of how they kept touching me and touching me, and of how I was so scared that I pretended that it felt good. I even said it out loud.

  By now, it’s a miracle that I can do anything else. Walking to Doctor Atwood’s, I used to think about what I was going to say to her. But now all that seems unreal, and the only real thing is what I’m going to say on the tape.

  Pretty soon, the scene in the lawyer’s office—the scene that hasn’t happened yet—is more real to me than anything that has happened. Everything looks like a double exposure, like one of those photos where they’ve screwed up in the lab and two images get printed, one over the other. The image of the present moment always seems to be stamped beneath the scene of myself talking into Cynthia’s tape recorder.

  “Maisie,” Doctor Atwood says one afternoon. “You’re a million miles away. Want to talk about what’s bothering you?”

  What’s bothering me? She knows the deposition is only a few days away. What does she think is bothering me?

  “I was just thinking,” I say.

  “About what?” she says.

  “Next week is the deposition.” Might as well point out the obvious, since she doesn’t seem to be getting it. I’ve figured out that one of her techniques is to make me say stuff out loud, even if she already knows it.

  “Are you nervous about it?”

  Did she really just ask me that?

  “No. I mean yes.”

 
“What do you imagine that makes you nervous?”

  I close my eyes and try to get into the fantasy, which isn’t all that hard, since it’s always right there, right alongside what’s really happening.

  “The tape recorder’s going,” I say. “Some legal secretary says the date and the place and explains that it’s me, Maisie, and that I’m going to give my statement. I open my mouth and start to talk, but I can’t get anything to make sense. I start making excuses. I say it’s been so long since the incident on the bus, I’m not really sure what I remember and what happened and what I think happened. And I go on talking and talking, sounding more and more spacey and brain-damaged, digging myself in deeper, until everybody’s looking at me like it is The Crucible. Like I’ve made the whole thing up just to get attention or maybe because I am some kind of sexually weird hysteric, which means I probably did ask them to find someone who’d pay to touch my boobs.”

  “But you know that didn’t happen, don’t you?”

  I nod.

  “And you know what did happen?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Stay with that, Maisie. What do you mean, you guess so?”

  I’m quiet for a while. Then I hear it—the voice of my deliverance. Phlegm Man hacking and coughing in the next room.

  “The hour’s up,” I say.

  “Do you want to schedule another session this week?” she asks. “It’s not something I usually do. But when a patient’s clearly in crisis…”

  “I’m not in crisis.” I hate the word crisis. I don’t even like the word patient. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. Trust me. I’ll be fine.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Two days before I’m supposed to make my statement, my deposition, I’m in English class, and someone knocks on the door. It’s Diane, one of the secretaries who works in the front office. Somehow I know that it’s about me, and as she whispers to the teacher and scans the room, I know she’s looking for me.

  I’m right. It turns out that I need to go to the principal’s office, right away. I wonder what new horror is waiting for me. What have I done now?

  On the way, I ask Diane if she knows what this is about.

  “I don’t think it’s anything serious,” she says, but something in her tone makes me doubt her. Halfway there, I realize that this is the first time I’ve been to Doctor Nyswander’s office since the day they told me that everyone believed I’d practically begged the guys to touch my boobs and asked them to find guys who’d pay me so someone could do it some more.

  No wonder I’m nervous! That is, even more nervous than I usually am these days, which is pretty nervous. Red alert. In fact, I feel like I’m revisiting the scene of some disaster or traumatic accident—the curve where the car ran off the road, the place where my house used to be before the tornado destroyed it. As I get nearer to the office, I’m literally shaking. I practically have to put my fingers over my eyes, like at a slasher movie, before I can look in the general direction of Doctor Nyswander’s door. But he’s got the door closed. He’s probably telling some other poor kid something that’s going to ruin her life.

  “Maisie,” says Joy, the principal’s secretary. “What’s wrong? You look pale.”

  What’s wrong is that Joy knows my name, as if I’m some kind of school celebrity. But of course they know who I am. I’m the one who’s suing the school board. Still, even at the height of my paranoia, it doesn’t seem like they’re looking at me as if I’m their enemy. In fact, they look worried, sympathetic. Of course. That makes sense, too. I’m the poor victim-girl who got molested in the back of the school bus.

  “Am I in trouble?” It takes all my concentration to get those four words out, and somehow it calms me down. “I mean, more trouble?”

  “Why would you think that?” asks Joy.

  I think, Because I am? “Then why am I here?”

  “Oh.” Joy actually has to think a minute. “That’s right. Your stepmom called. Her car broke down, so she can’t pick you up this afternoon. She needs you to take the school bus home. She’ll meet you back at the house.”

  Joan’s fancy Volvo broke down? For some reason, this makes me so happy that I have to fight the urge to high-five Joy and Diane. I imagine the look on Joan’s face when her dream vehicle wouldn’t start. I imagine all sorts of grisly automotive scenes: smoke pouring out from under the hood, the brakes locking on a downhill curve. I can practically hear the sounds of the engine sputtering and dying, sputtering and dying.

  Then I say, “I don’t get it. Why did I have to come all the way here? Why couldn’t you just send a note to the teacher to give to me? That’s what happens when other kids’ parents need to get them a message, right?” I’m wondering if Joan is such royalty around here that her needs and requests get special treatment.

  Joy and Diane exchange quick looks, and suddenly I understand. Joan probably started yelling at them before she even said hello. I imagine her saying something like, “Given the efficiency with which you people have handled problems in the past, I want a personal guarantee—I want witnesses!—that my stepdaughter will get the message.” I understand that they’re scared of Joan, afraid she’ll sue them about this, too. And maybe that’s why they look so sorry for me. It’s not just because I’m the girl to whom that thing happened on the bus, it’s because I’m the poor victim who has to live with Joan.

  The whole situation must be making me stupider, slower to react. Because only now do I think, The bus. I’m going to have to take the bus home from school.

  Doctor Atwood has told me not to dwell on the thoughts that I know are going to make me miserable. So here’s a thought I try not to have. Or if I think it once, I try not to think it twice. In a row. Ever since the incident, I’ve sort of felt like I was dead. Or, to be more exact, I feel like that girl in Our Town, the play the seniors put on last year. I feel like the girl, Emily, in that scene where she looks at the world from heaven. Or like those characters in movies where the person dies and then gets a chance to come back to earth and see life going merrily on without them.

  I’ve been feeling as if there used to be the living Maisie who used to go to school and hang out with her friends and ride the bus and whatever. And now there is the other me who might as well be in another world, haunting the places where that other Maisie used to live. Sometimes I close my eyes when I see the school buses parked in front of the school, or when any bright yellow vehicle passes us on the road. Because that’s when it really gets painful, when I compare my old life with the life I have now, and I think, I used to ride a bus just like that, like a regular ninth grader.

  The three o’clock bell rings and, as always, the whole school erupts. You’d never think the same thing happens at the end of every day. You’d think the bell had never rung before, that the kids had been stuck at school forever. Everybody’s so happy to be set free. Everybody, that is, but me.

  It seems amazing that my old bus—number 29—is parked in the same place where it always used to be on the afternoons when I used to take it. I hang back and wait till the other kids have gotten on, because I don’t want to be sitting there and have to look at them, one by one, as they board and walk past me. Then I realize I’ve made a mistake, because I could have sat down and buried my face in a book and refused to look up. But now they’ll all be looking up at me, and there will be no way to avoid them as I try to find an empty seat, or look around for someone who’s brave or stupid enough to agree to sit next to Leprosy Girl.

  As I get on, Big Maureen says, “Hi, Maisie. Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “Hi.” I glare at her. Why did she have to open her mouth and say anything at all? She never talked to me before, when I used to ride her stupid bus every day. Maybe she’s trying to make me feel comfortable, or maybe she just thought it would be weird not to say anything, not to acknowledge that there was a problem. Or maybe she feels guilty because the incident happened on her bus.

  I think she’s trying to be nice. Okay, I know she�
�s trying to be nice. But the truth is, I’d like to kill her, or at least tell her to shut up. But of course I don’t. She’s already shut up. And maybe I’m being rewarded for not being rude to Big Maureen, because sure enough there’s an empty seat directly behind her. It’s the perfect place to hide.

  I don’t look at one single kid, and I don’t want anyone to look at me. I feel like, if I make eye contact with another human being, I’ll melt, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz.

  I grab the seat and sit right near the edge on the aisle, so someone would have to tell me to move over if they want to sit down. Which they won’t, because it’s me. No one’s going to sit next to me. On the one-in-a-million chance that someone doesn’t know who I am, that person won’t be able to ask me to move over, because I’ll be reading.

  I grab a book from my backpack and open it at random and pretend to read before I even know what book it is. It’s my American history textbook, and I’ve turned to the part about the Civil War, which we’ve just studied. I read about slavery for a while. I feel like it’s a message. A private communication that says, Maisie, get over yourself! Human beings were being bought and sold and whipped and separated from their families, and you’re worried about riding a bus you haven’t been on since some kids touched your boobs?

  I take a deep breath and find my actual homework assignment. It’s a chapter about the Spanish-American War. The motor starts up, and we pull away from school. So far, so good, I’m okay.

  I read about how President Theodore Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” It’s something I need to remember, partly because it’s the sort of thing that could definitely be on a test, and partly because it sounds like good advice. Or is it? If you carry a big stick, does that mean you’ll have to hit someone with it? Or that you’ll never have to hit someone with it, because they’ll see the big stick and leave you alone?