Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Posted on a website called QWAKERDEPPS were nude photos of a female with fat, bulging breasts and thighs like hams and Nadia Stillinger’s head on her body; and a comical muscleman, also nude, with a small penis and Adrian Kessler’s head on his body.

  “Gross! This is disgusting.”

  “Is that real? It looks phony.”

  “Who cares?”

  Nadia Stillinger wasn’t in school. Nadia Stillinger didn’t respond to text messages or to calls from her friends.

  Merissa Carmichael was so upset, she went to speak with Mrs. Jameson in her office. “We have to stop this. We have to help Nadia. She’s not a slut—she’s the very opposite. I don’t know anything about her giving a birthday present to Mr. Kessler—but I do know that Nadia is very emotional, and that since Tink Traumer died, she hasn’t been—Well, I guess”—Merissa began to break down, as Mrs. Jameson listened sympathetically—“I guess none of us have been doing too well. But Nadia especially.”

  Mrs. Jameson said yes, Merissa was right, the postings were obscene and cruel and would come down immediately, she would see to it. And how was Nadia? Would Nadia like to speak with Mrs. Jameson, too?

  Merissa said, wiping at her eyes, “I don’t know. I don’t know Nadia all that well, actually. I just know we have to stop this—cyberbullying. We have to help her before it’s too late.”

  So sleepy! Sleep like a heavy embrace.

  She was sinking beneath the surface of the dark, choppy water; she would not keep herself afloat by the exertions of her arms and legs. Her mother’s spirit hovered near. Nadia pulled the covers over her head. Nadia, it isn’t time. Nadia dear, it isn’t your time. Go back, Nadia—to your friends.

  8.

  THE PLEA

  COME BACK, NADIA! WE MISS YOU.

  Nadia’s friends texted her and called her. And Merissa came to Nadia’s house to speak to her in person, to encourage her to return to classes.

  Nadia insisted she’d been planning to return. Soon.

  “Not ‘soon’—tomorrow. Come to school tomorrow.”

  Nadia felt a clutch of panic. “Maybe—next Monday.”

  “No. Tomorrow.”

  “But—I don’t think I—I’m ready. . . .”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Nadia. What would Tink say?”

  “I don’t know—what would Tink say?”

  “Tink would say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, dude.’”

  And when Nadia returned to school, and saw that a stranger named Mrs. Rappaport was teaching Mr. Kessler’s fourth-period science class, she was shocked, and she was suffused with a new sort of shame; she’d known that Mr. Kessler was still “suspended,” yet it had not seemed quite real to her, until she’d entered his classroom.

  Virgil Nagy looked at her, with his awkward smile.

  “Nad-ia! Welcome back.”

  “Thanks.”

  Nadia would have liked to slink into the room invisibly. But she knew that everyone was watching her and that there was no way she could be invisible—(this was like a dream of being naked in public!)—so she made her way to her desk by the window with whatever measure of dignity she could summon and a radiant blind smile, knowing that a blush was rising into her face for all to see. She would have stumbled over a boy’s long legs carelessly crossed in the aisle, except at the last minute she stepped over them nimbly.

  “And you are—?”

  The substitute teacher frowned at Nadia in a pretense of not knowing who she was. Mean, Nadia thought.

  “Nadia Stillinger.”

  “Oh yes. Nadia Stillinger.” Frowning, Mrs. Rappaport made a mark in a little notebook. “You’ve been absent quite a while.”

  Was this a statement of fact, or an accusation? Nadia, blushing, decided to say nothing at all.

  After a while, the stares of her classmates eased. With Nadia so blatantly in the room, at her desk, there was really nothing to see.

  Nadia thought, Maybe it isn’t so important. Nasty things on the internet. Maybe—like TV cartoons.

  After class Virgil Nagy walked with Nadia. You would not have known the scandal attached to Nadia Stillinger, judging by the way Virgil spoke to her. “Mrs. Rappaport isn’t anything like Mr. Kessler, is she? She couldn’t even pronounce ‘proprioception.’” (Virgil laughed: He’d been the one to “help out” the embarrassed teacher.) “We’re all tired of her getting things wrong and repeating the few things she does know. Some of us are thinking of signing a petition to get Mr. Kessler back soon.”

  “A petition? That’s a great idea.”

  Nadia was excited: She would ask her friends to help circulate a petition to all the students at Quaker Heights, not just those in Mr. Kessler’s classes.

  Almost immediately Nadia realized how complicated and complex things were at school—apart from a few glances, sniggers, and pitying smiles, no one was really so very concerned with Nadia Stillinger any longer.

  And public opinion seemed definitely to have swung to Adrian Kessler’s side. That was clear.

  Merissa said, “The next thing you must do, Nadia, is make an appointment with Mr. Nichols. Not just send him emails—go to talk to him. And to the disciplinary committee—maybe even the trustees when they have a meeting.”

  “Talk to the trustees! I could never do that.”

  “To get Mr. Kessler exonerated and reinstated, you will have to.”

  “I just don’t think that I—I—”

  “I thought you liked Mr. Kessler! Isn’t that what this is all about?”

  “Y-yes, but . . .”

  “You must help him, then. Only you can help him, really.”

  “Only me? I—I never thought of that. . . .”

  “Only you got him in trouble,” Merissa said wickedly, “so only you can get him out of trouble. What would Tink say?”

  It happened that Headmaster Nichols had convened a quasi-emergency meeting of the board of trustees and the disciplinary committee, to discuss the issue of Adrian Kessler. This was fifteen days after the “incident” had come to light, with Mr. Stillinger’s angry telephone call to the headmaster.

  Nadia had asked to be allowed to attend the meeting, to address the committee and the trustees.

  She was terrified of speaking to these strangers! She could not believe that such a thing would happen, by her own volition: Like a responsible adult, she’d actually made an appointment to see Mr. Nichols.

  Is this how life is? Nadia wondered. You don’t just think about things and get anxious about them; you do something.

  She could not trust herself to speak spontaneously. She spent hours composing her remarks.

  On the eve of the meeting, Nadia was sick with apprehension.

  It would be easy, she thought, to just not show up at the meeting, which was in the headmaster’s office at school. Or she could send an email to Mr. Nichols’s secretary saying that she was sick—she wasn’t coming to school that day.

  “I can’t. I can’t do this.”

  There was a deathly silence in her room. At a distance, wind was blowing in tall trees, like barrels being rolled across a pavement.

  Elsewhere in the Stillinger house there was silence, too: Both Mr. Stillinger and Amelie were out for the evening, together.

  There came a shivery presence in Nadia’s room. She knew, without turning, that Tink had entered.

  Was Tink disgusted with her? Nadia wouldn’t have blamed her.

  Nadia said in a faint, whining child’s voice, “See, I can’t. I just c-can’t. I c-can’t talk to these people.”

  And Tink said, You will do it, dude.

  “No, Tink! I can’t. I just—can’t. . . .”

  And Tink said, Yes, you can, and you will, dude. No turning back.

  One hundred eighty-six students! The names included a number of students who hadn’t yet had a course with Adrian Kessler but who had taken up his cause in the wake of the suspension.

  Mr. Nichols’s secretary led Nadia and Merissa into the oak-paneled room, in which tw
enty men and women sat around a heavy oval table. Several faculty members on the disciplinary committee were known to Nadia, but all of the trustees were strangers. It seemed significant to Nadia that she and Merissa were introduced to the room but that no one was introduced to them, for their time at the meeting would be brief.

  Nichols wasn’t the chair of the meeting, it seemed. The chair was a gentlemanly white-haired alum (class of ’56) who wore a glinting school pin in his lapel. His manner was bemused and curious but not unfriendly.

  “Girls, welcome! Tell us why you are here.”

  Nadia was trembling. She and Merissa were both wearing Quaker Heights Day School uniforms—a dark blue wool school jumper over a white turtleneck sweater, with the heraldic insignia of the school over their right breasts: a lion, against crossed staves.

  Nadia had suggested the uniforms. Merissa asked where she’d gotten such a great idea, and Nadia said proudly, “It’s something Tink would do. You know—dressing funny.”

  Nadia had written her own statement. At first her voice quavered as she read it, then gained strength as she continued.

  “I have come here today to appeal to you to exonerate Mr. Adrian Kessler from any purported wrongdoing or ‘unprofessional behavior’ and to reinstate him as an instructor at this school. I know that many cruel and crude and inaccurate things have been said about him, and about me, but Mr. Kessler is entirely innocent of anything you might have heard. He had nothing to do with the fact that I left a gift for him in his car, which he knew nothing about; he returned the gift to my father as soon as he was notified whose it was. He did not ever speak improperly with me. He was always kind, considerate, thoughtful, and professional. I am so sorry—my mistake was to act without thinking, and to give one of my teachers an expensive present that wasn’t mine to give. And to give it anonymously. I would not ever do such a thing now. Mr. Kessler had no idea who’d left the gift for him and was totally surprised! I know that my father, Roger Stillinger, has filed a formal complaint about Mr. Kessler, but that’s because my father is angry at me. He wants to punish me by punishing Mr. Kessler. But I am hoping that you will see that this has all been exaggerated.”

  Nadia paused, breathing quickly. After her initial panic she’d begun—almost—to relax; it was clear that everyone at the table, including Headmaster Nichols, was listening intently to her, and respectfully—several were even nodding sympathetically.

  Then Merissa spoke, presenting the petition to the meeting—(it was passed around the oak table, examined and admired)—and telling of how Adrian Kessler had been a wonderfully encouraging teacher to her: He’d inspired her to write an essay that had won a prize in a national competition sponsored by Scientific American, and that had been posted on the magazine’s website for a month; moreover, Mr. Kessler had encouraged her to apply for early admission at Brown, and she’d been accepted weeks ago—“I will always be grateful to Mr. Kessler.”

  Early admission at Brown! That was greeted with unanimous approval.

  It seemed that both Nadia Stillinger and Merissa Carmichael had made a strong impression on the adults. They were thanked for their testimonies by the courtly chair of the board and escorted from the room, and in the morning a notice was issued by the headmaster’s office that Adrian Kessler had been taken off his suspension and would resume his teaching duties the following day.

  Pretty damn good, guys!

  Couldna done better myself.

  9.

  THISTLE

  She would call the little lost lynx-cat Thistle.

  She knew her father would disapprove. Her father would disapprove strongly.

  She’d mentioned this to Tink.

  And Tink had said, So? Don’t tell him.

  “Don’t tell him? My father? He’ll discover the cat, and—”

  Maybe. But maybe not.

  “Unless I could hide her. The house is so big, and Daddy is never home much. . . .”

  Nadia laughed. This was a very wicked idea!

  But not so wicked as stealing her father’s painting. Or anything of her father’s.

  That, she vowed she would never do again.

  Or, if she did, she would never, ever behave so carelessly as to get caught.

  When Nadia returned to High Ridge Park, she brought with her not only a can of tuna fish but a cardboard box with a few strategically positioned airholes in it.

  She hadn’t told any of her friends about the beautiful little lynx-cat that had mewed at her in the woods. Not even Merissa.

  Nadia believed that if she persevered, she would rediscover the lynx-cat.

  Or Tink would send the cat to her.

  “Kitty? Oh kitty-kitty . . .”

  In the wake of the meeting in Headmaster Nichols’s office the day before, Nadia was feeling very good. It did not seem real to her—and yet, it was real—that a decisive action of her own had had such an immediate and positive effect: Mr. Kessler had returned to teaching!

  Merissa, too, was thrilled—though she had had much more experience with things going well for her, as Nadia knew.

  “The Perfect One—it must be wonderful to be you.”

  Nadia had spoken without guile or irony to her friend, who’d stared at her for a moment as if suspecting that Nadia must be joking—then laughed and said, with a droll little grin, “Oh, yes—it’s wonderful. I have to pinch myself to make sure that I’m real.”

  Strange how Merissa Carmichael was now, as if overnight, Nadia Stillinger’s closest friend. The girls guessed that Tink had had something to do with this, but—what?

  In the vicinity of the path above the river, and the steep fall to the water thirty feet below, Nadia searched for Thistle.

  Cupping her hands to her mouth, calling, “Kitty-kitty-kitty!”

  And after a while, maybe forty minutes, maybe an hour—there came a faint mewing sound, from deeper in the woods.

  Quickly, Nadia turned, calling, “Kitty-kitty!” and hearing the mewing until at last there was a movement in the underbrush, and there, the little lost cat with the silvery brindle markings and glassy-green eyes.

  10.

  “NOT GOING ANYWHERE”

  Winter was ending: Rivulets of icy water ran glittering in the sun, as banks of soiled snow melted. A sharp wind blew last year’s leaves scuttling along the pavement like scraps of tin, and overhead the sky looked like a giant flame was pushing against a cloud barrier and about to burst into flame.

  Nadia seized her friends’ hands. Excitedly they cried, “What?”

  “It’s Tink. She’s here.”

  “Tink? Where?”

  They turned—they looked up—they were desperate to see Tink, knowing that she was close, teasing.

  “Tink? Tink!”

  “Tink—are you here?”

  But there was silence. Except for the wind, and leaves blown across the pavement—silence.

  “It’s like Tink not to come when you want her.”

  They laughed nervously. Their fingers, gripping one another’s fingers, had gone icy cold.

  “Tink is a bitch.”

  “Tink is so bitchy.”

  They laughed. They listened. They heard nothing.

  The house at 88 Blue Spruce Way had been sold. Veronica Traumer had moved away—to L.A., it was believed.

  On the internet, Veronica Traumer continued to exist in a sequence of glamour photographs, of which virtually none resembled the others. The actress’s exciting news was that she’d just signed a contract for another Lifetime daytime series, in which she would play the female lead.

  There was very little about Veronica Traumer’s daughter, Katrina, except notations that the “seventeen-year-old former child actress” had died in June 2011. On the Wikipedia website was the additional information that Katrina Traumer, a “longtime leukemia patient,” had died of “complications” involving that disease.

  Leukemia! None of Tink’s friends had ever heard that she had had leukemia.

  “Tink would have to
ld us if she’d had leukemia. We would have known!”

  “Well—maybe. But—you know Tink.”

  “But—if Tink did have leukemia, then—”

  “This Wikipedia page says it’s ‘uncorroborated.’ We can’t believe it.”

  “I think that Tink had a bone marrow transplant when she was a little girl. I think she’d mentioned that once—in the way that Tink alluded to things, you know? So you didn’t know if they were true or not—or maybe they’d happened to that little girl Penelope she played on television, and not to her.”

  “Bone marrow. We could have donated bone marrow to her. . . . They look for donors, don’t they?”

  “Maybe that’s what she was asking me. ‘A favor.’ Oh God! And I didn’t realize.”

  Merissa was stricken. She pressed her hands to her face, in sudden horror.

  “I mean—she’d started to ask. Then she changed her mind.”

  Hannah clutched Merissa’s hand. All the girls stood close to Merissa, who was trembling.

  “It would explain so much, wouldn’t it—if Tink had been sick. If she’d had operations, and was tired of being sick. And so that’s why she—why she did what she did. To spare herself more pain and also to spare other people who loved her . . .”

  “But Tink would never have said a word; she didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her.”

  “She didn’t want anyone to really know her. That wasn’t fair.”

  “Look. We don’t know. And if we tried to ask Tink’s mother, we wouldn’t know if she was telling the truth.”

  “Tink’s mother probably made it up herself—that Tink was sick. That that was how she d-died—of a sickness that no one could cure—not something Tink did because she wanted to. That way Big Moms could have sympathy for losing her daughter, instead of people hating her because she was a lousy mother.”

  Nadia spoke with surprising vehemence. Since the incident with Mr. Kessler, and the cyberbullying, she was much less passive and compliant than she’d been; at times, you could discern an edge to her voice that was reminiscent of Tink’s voice when Tink was in a combative mood.