She sighed. “What do you know?”
“I read everything I could online.”
“Then it paints a pretty good picture.” But she summed it up for him anyway. How she’d been in the kitchen when she heard Chris at the computer, watching some kind of movie. There were screams and cheers, then the mistakable sound of flesh smacking flesh and grunting, and she’d figured he was watching porn. It had been unusual, no question; she suspected he watched when she wasn’t around, but this had been pretty damn blatant. She’d peered into the room but had been too far away to see much more than a few bodies shifting around. Too far to discern faces.
Then two days later a rumor started to spread, and something in her stomach grew cold and heavy. She hadn’t wanted to know. That was still the truth. She hadn’t wanted to know and she hadn’t wanted to look and she hadn’t wanted to be right. But she did know and she did look and when she searched through his e-mail one night when he was at practice, she found what she hadn’t wanted to find: an e-mail containing a link to a video that showed half the high school baseball team gang banging a teenage girl who was obviously too drunk or high to make the decision herself.
She’d saved the file to the hard drive and that night when Chris returned home she’d asked him about the rumors, if he really thought someone had been raped, if any of his athletes had been involved. He’d been the star pitcher at the high school growing up, and when injuries ended his dream of a career in the majors, he’d simply smiled and gone to college and later gotten a job as a PE teacher, soon taking over for the outgoing coach of the baseball team. The video had been sent to everyone on the team e-mail list, and Chris had been among them. He wasn’t in the video—she’d checked, as hard as it had been—but she knew he’d seen it, knew he’d been acting different. And then he denied it.
“Nah,” he’d said, kissing her cheek before turning off the light to go to sleep. “Those guys would never do anything like that.” If she hadn’t seen it herself, she would have believed him. Chris was dangerously persuasive, wielding his charm so casually he had people convinced before he even started speaking.
The next time she checked his e-mail—something she’d never done before—the message was gone. But she still had the video. A week later the girl went to the police. The boys were arrested, and though half the people involved were seventeen, the town was small enough that everyone knew their names, even though they hadn’t been released.
And then the denials started. The boys were athletes. Strong students. Upstanding young men with bright futures. Look at that girl. She had a reputation. If she’d had sex with any of them—and she couldn’t prove it, not a week after the event—if she had sex with them, she’d been completely willing. It had probably been her idea.
Olivia hated the fact that she had hesitated. She was a woman. She was a teacher. She’d dedicated her life to helping shape children into good people with bright futures. And still it was another three days before she saved the video to a flash drive and drove it to the police station.
It was five days before news of the video leaked, and approximately one day before her name was connected to it. Before everyone knew the boys were fucked and she was the one responsible. As though she herself had somehow lurked in a corner of the room and recorded the whole thing on her phone, then e-mailed it to the entire team as a joke.
Chris tried not to hate her. He’d cried when he asked if it was true, and she’d cried when she asked what he’d planned to do with the tape. “The right thing,” he’d assured her, but she knew better. They could barely stomach each other after a month, though his presence was probably the only thing that saved her in those first weeks.
His parents had died in a car crash shortly after their high school graduation, and her parents had pretty much adopted him. When he left her they cleared out the spare bedroom and he moved in, and they’d all praised her bold independence as they left her out to hang. The first night alone in the apartment—her first night alone anywhere, ever, really—someone had thrown a brick through the front window. Without saying a word Chris’s move made a very clear statement: if Olivia’s parents were on his side, surely that made Olivia the villain. She would never know if the manipulation was intentional, but it was certainly effective.
Over the next month she’d paid to have her crappy car repainted twice to cover the slurs, and after she’d woken to find it tagged again—TRAITOR, LIAR, BITCH, WHORE, and, for some reason, COCKHOLDER—she’d given up. Work was getting tough. She’d been a popular teacher at the elementary school and suddenly people couldn’t look her in the eye. Four parents removed their kids from the class, and she began to hear rumors that enrollment was down because people didn’t want their children being taught by a traitor.
Olivia tried to be strong. She believed it would blow over. She loved her town and many of its people. She’d been popular; she’d been loved. And just like that they’d turned. Friends were too busy to hang out or call, people whispered under their breath when they passed her in the street or in the aisle at the grocery store. She used to run outside three nights a week, and suddenly she’d been afraid, hearing things, seeing things, coming home once to find her front door broken open, though nothing inside had been disturbed. She bought a treadmill and started running inside, away from the window.
And her parents. They assured her they understood what she had done, that it had unquestionably been the right thing to do. They still invited her to dinner on Wednesdays, still made her favorite foods and acted like they loved and cared for her. But how could she go home when she knew Chris lived upstairs? He’d go out on the nights she was scheduled to come over, but it was beyond weird to know he was sleeping down the hall from her parents while she’d had to install a second deadbolt on the apartment door.
By the end of June she knew she couldn’t keep working at the elementary school. They couldn’t actually fire her for what she’d done, but they’d made it pretty unbearable for her to continue. She didn’t want to run away, didn’t want people to have the satisfaction of thinking they’d chased her off, so she drove her slur-covered car and tried to keep her head up, even as she wanted to cry every time she approached it.
Willa Jetz, her closest friend from college, taught kindergarten at a school outside of Boston, and read about the story in the news. She called in July with Olivia’s first real spark of hope: Willa and her husband were expecting their first child, and she’d be going on maternity leave. Olivia could fill in for Willa beginning in November, and escape Candor. Assuming she could survive that long.
She quit her job and lived off her savings, spending months researching things to do in Boston and looking at apartment listings online. She hadn’t told anyone but her parents of her plans, and they’d been supportive. Maybe a little too relieved. And then, on October first, Willa called in tears. She’d lost the baby. They’d been trying for a while and she was devastated. She wouldn’t be going on maternity leave. She was sorry.
Olivia said all the right things—no, she was the one who was sorry, was there anything she could do, don’t worry, she’d find something else, take care of herself, they could try again. And then she’d hung up the phone and sobbed, harder than she had in ten months, as hard as she’d wanted to. She looked for jobs but it was a weird time of year to be hired as a teacher, and no one wanted her as a substitute. Her money was running out, and she’d become a friendless hermit, leaving the apartment only as necessary.
And then one day she’d been looking around online and seen an ad for a certificate program to teach English as a second language. She had nothing better to do so she clicked on it, read the testimonials, and started looking at web sites that offered job listings for ESL teachers. She was already a teacher, which qualified her for pretty much everything, and while she wasn’t really considering moving abroad, it was a nice way to kill the time. To fantasize. She would never actually do it.
Then she went to her parents’ house for Wednesday dinner
, and there were two additional place settings at the table. Chris was there with his new girlfriend, and they were very happy. Chris, who had seen the video and not reported it, Chris who was still the coach of the baseball team, who was still the fucking town hero, was very happy. The girl had dropped the charges, the boys who hadn’t graduated were back on the team, their lives would go on.
The food tasted like chalk. She couldn’t look her parents in the eye. At ten o’clock she’d returned to her dark, lonely apartment and applied for a job in some town in China called Lazhou. Two weeks later she bought a plane ticket. And the day before she left, she called her parents and told them she was going.
Jarek didn’t think she knew she was crying until the story was over. Her cheeks were wet with tears, eyes huge and glossy, and suddenly Olivia, the strongest, most self-possessed woman he’d ever known, looked fragile. And he’d been the one to shake the box until the pieces rattled.
“Satisfied?” she asked, swiping at her cheeks.
He felt like shit. “Of course not.” He’d done far worse to a lot of people and couldn’t have cared less. And now he did. And it was awful.
“Anything else you simply need to know?” The words were angry but her voice was empty of any real vitriol.
He hadn’t actually intended to ask her about Michigan. After talking to Jonah on Thursday, he’d bailed on her on Friday, choosing instead to spend the night in that grimy Internet café, reading everything he could about the case. He’d felt alternately sad and angry, and hated that he felt anything at all. That he couldn’t turn it off, no matter how hard he tried. And then on Saturday morning Ritchie mentioned that Marcus had gone to Shanghai with Olivia and he’d felt a whole host of things he hadn’t felt before, jealousy chief among them. And he was fucking furious—with himself, for feeling that way, with her, for making him. With Marcus, for being a geologist or a geographer or something equally smug, and with Olivia, for going off with him.
He’d stewed all day Saturday, drowned his sorrows at the bar with Brant and Dale in the evening, reluctantly admitting his irritation with the news but downplaying his jealousy. They saw right through it, but pretended not to. He used to be a wall no one could penetrate, now people were walking through left, right, and center, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
He didn’t know what time she was getting back from Shanghai, or he’d have been waiting at her apartment when she pulled up in the cab. He spent Sunday morning taking out his frustration on the punching bag in the gym trailer, then at home, staring blankly at the television as the Canadian guy failed to teach him Mandarin. He’d been on his way to the dining trailer when he passed the gym and heard Dale needling her. His first instinct had been to storm inside and tell the other man to back off, but he knew firsthand that Olivia was perfectly capable of standing up for herself.
His heart kicked up a notch when he went inside and saw her, cheeks flushed, the overhead light catching on the beads of sweat that dotted her chest and throat. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to throttle her or fuck her, so he’d settled for the least mature option and gotten her alone in the carpentry trailer so he could make her cry.
“Fuck,” he muttered, running a hand over the back of his neck. “I’m sorry about all the stuff that happened to you. You did the right thing.”
Her jaw set. “I know that.” But it was obvious she resented it.
“And I’m sorry about hauling you in here.”
That blond eyebrow arched. “That’s it?”
“What else should I say?”
“That you realize it’s none of your business where I go or with whom, and then tell me why you felt like any of this was appropriate.”
Oh God. She was so fucking difficult when she was in teacher mode. He loved it and hated it in equal measure. He opened his mouth to repeat the part about it being none of his business, but instead what came out was, “It’s my business if my girlf—you go out with another guy. Deal with it.”
Her jaw dropped and she kicked him in the shin, but not hard. “Deal with it?”
“Yeah. Deal with it.”
She studied him for a few seconds, then asked, “What’s a girlf?”
“Shit. Olivia.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“You remember what I said to you that first night when you kissed me?”
“If I’m not mistaken, you squealed like a pig and ran away crying, ‘I hate girls!’”
“Christ. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hate you sometimes.”
She folded her arms, pushing up her breasts so he could see a hint of cleavage where her zipper was undone. “I’m not offended.”
“I told you I’m not what you’re looking for.”
“Trust me, I know.”
“I don’t know how to—I can’t be—”
“I know.” Her eyes were dry now, and steady on his. Like she saw right through him, and didn’t care that there were pieces missing.
“You’re leaving in June.”
“That’s right.”
“So if you want to…Until then…”
“Just say it, please.”
“You know what I’m getting at.”
“Do I?” She tilted her head and stared at him quizzically. He knew she knew. This was punishment for the most failed interrogation he’d ever conducted. He’d come in here expecting to get answers from her, and instead somehow heard himself putting the painful truth on the line, hoping it wouldn’t hurt him.
He wiped a hand across his mouth, his tongue suddenly dry. “You’re my girlfriend, so don’t fucking hang out with Marcus.”
She burst out laughing, surprised and unimpressed. “It looks like you’ve been learning something from those romantic movies after all.”
“Yes or no?”
“He’s leaving in two days anyway. I wasn’t going to see him.”
“Don’t fuck around on me. I have issues.”
“No kidding.”
He stepped close enough that their thighs pressed together, and caught her ponytail in his hand. He didn’t kiss her or grope her, just held her like that, resting his chin on top of her head, letting his thumb brush her neck so he could feel her pulse, steady and reassuring. His heart was racing, and he imagined it doing drills, back and forth, one side thrilled, the other horrified. She was his first girlfriend in thirteen years. He didn’t know how to do this. But he hadn’t figured out how to walk away, either.
“Say yes,” he said softly.
“Yes,” she replied.
Chapter Ten
“REMIND ME AGAIN why we’re doing this?”
“Just shut up and push.”
A faint thud, then a muffled curse. “I think I got hit by a car.”
“Clipped. You got clipped. You’ll live.”
Jarek turned to look over his shoulder at Brant, Ritchie, and Dale, sweating as they slogged along behind him. He and Ritchie had one dolly, Brant and Dale had the other, and each was laden with a dozen unpainted wooden tree cutouts, each about five feet tall. The company trucks were still full of work supplies, so they’d had to use dollies to wheel the fake trees the twenty-minute walk to Olivia’s school, and the men had been complaining the entire time. In exchange for their blood, sweat, and tears, Jarek had had to promise to buy them beer and admit that Olivia was his girlfriend.
He had never known grown men could gossip this much. After he’d left the gym with Olivia yesterday, Dale promptly spread the word that Jarek had confronted her, and this morning they’d all been waiting for him in the lobby, demanding details. The acknowledgment that she was his girlfriend had felt stiff and awkward coming from his lips, but there’d been a sense of satisfaction there, too. Like he’d accomplished something. He’d been demanding the truth from other people for so long that he’d almost forgotten what it was like to admit it himself.
They arrived at the front gates to the kindergarten, locked durin
g the day to keep strangers out and kids in. The older woman manning the booth inside peered at them strangely, then smiled as she recognized Ritchie. She said something in rapid fire Mandarin then picked up the phone. Two minutes later Olivia and Honor emerged from the hallway that divided the front two buildings, shielding their eyes from the sun so they could see the unexpected visitors.
Jarek’s heart threatened to leap out of his chest at the sight of her, and his palms grew damp on the dolly handle. He wiped them on his pants and was glad he’d chosen to wear sunglasses so she couldn’t see the rising panic in his eyes.
“What is this?” Olivia asked as the gates slid open and they wheeled the dollies through. The trees were unpainted, just flat wooden cutouts that suddenly felt really fucking stupid. What had he been thinking?
Then she gasped. “Wait—are these trees? For my play?”
Everyone was staring at him. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the trees. It had taken him days to cut them all out, using scraps of wood from the site and pieces he’d purchased from a local supplier. They were a variety of shapes, some rounded, some pointed, some abstract, as the shape of the wood he’d used had dictated. Eventually he realized everyone was waiting for his response. “Ah, yeah. We had some extra wood and you needed trees, so I just figured…we could get rid of the wood.”
Brant looked at him and shook his head, disappointed at the lame response. He couldn’t perform with these guys watching him. He didn’t know how to be her boyfriend while they were ogling him like this.
“Well, thank you. I love them.” She patted his arm appreciatively as she circled the dollies, taking it all in. “Can you help bring them to the classroom?”
“Yeah. Sure. Of course.” He avoided looking at Dale; the man’s shit-eating grin made him want to break something. They were loving this, the jerks.
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