by Zoe Whittall
Most of the accelerated students in the upper grades were students of George Woodbury. He taught applied physics, chemistry levels one and two, and one ninth grade science class in the regular stream. Sadie was able to take an independent study for physics, because it would have been too peculiar to be his student.
She nodded as Dorothy, who was peeling back a container of yogurt, pointed Sadie towards the open door of the principal’s office. Sadie poked her head inside.
“Hi, I need a note to get back to class and I was told I had to come see you?”
“Have a seat, Sadie,” he said, and motioned towards the blue leather chair where students sat when they were getting disciplined or told bad news about a dead relative.
He had wispy greying-blond hair that fell below his ears and a face with subtle acne scars along his jaw. He was thin in a way that one assumed was his genetic destiny but still made his bones appear out of place. It occurred to Sadie that she had never really looked at him in the face for very long before. They regarded one another for a few seconds. He had several empty coffee cups on his otherwise empty desk.
“I’m worried about the stress you’re under, because of what has happened,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“And how is your mother getting along?”
She shrugged.
“I think you should see Mrs. Caribou,” he said, reaching for a permission slip that he tore from a pink stack on his desk. Mrs. Caribou was the flaky guidance counsellor, whom her father once referred to as a Jungian hack. Students always made fun of her matching cotton-knit sweater sets. If you got out of line in any way, the solution was to see the counsellor, just as celebrities go to rehab any time they misbehave. Sadie had never had to see her. Everyone she knew who had experienced the pleasure essentially described it as a digging session to ensure you had no plans to shoot up the school.
“That won’t be necessary.”
“I’m requiring it,” he said, writing out her slip and handing it across the desk. When she didn’t take it, he thrust it impatiently in the air with a stabbing motion and she grabbed it.
“Dan,” Sadie said. He bristled at his first name. “I’ve known almost every teacher at this school since I was in diapers. I’ve been to your summer cottages. I’ve seen you and coach Johnson drunk on tequila and singing ‘Hotel California.’ Don’t pretend I’m just some regular student with a criminal father.”
Dan paled. “Sadie, you really don’t sound like yourself right now. I don’t appreciate the tone that …”
Sadie folded the piece of paper in half and then quarters and slipped it into her blazer pocket.
Dorothy appeared in the doorway. “Sadie, darling,” she said, “your father isn’t a criminal. We have all loved your dad for a long time, and we will continue to support him through this.” She dipped a spoon into her yogurt, holding it aloft while waiting for Sadie’s reaction. Sadie stared awkwardly until Dorothy finally put the spoon in her mouth.
“Dot, we can’t say that,” said Dan in a stage whisper. “Don’t put ideas in her head. This is a complicated legal situation.”
Dorothy scraped her spoon along the bottom of the container and smiled wide, the kind of creepy clown smile you got from dental hygienists when you were a scared toddler. A Valium smile, Joan would have called it. “Your father has done so much for us at this school, and in this community. There is such a thing as innocent until proven guilty in this country, and I for one will not just stand by and watch someone we love get assassinated by the perverts in the media.” Dorothy stormed out and went back to her adjoining office. When Obama was re-elected, Dorothy had cried for most of the day.
Dan looked down at his desk in a defeated fashion. “You can go, Sadie. I’m sorry you had to witness such unprofessional behaviour.”
“Again, Hotel California, Dan.”
“This is hard on all of us, and we want to support you and your family until the courts determine what to do.”
It sounded like a line, and like he couldn’t wait to get her out of the office. She could see that he wanted her whole family to move away so he could stop thinking about it.
“Anyway, you should start attending your advanced physics class with your father’s replacement. Overseeing an independent study is not something we can ask of the new teacher, so you should be in room 306, okay?”
She nodded and exited the office, standing in the deserted main hallway.
“We’ll be in court tomorrow,” Dorothy called out when Sadie passed her door. “I’m organizing a large group of supporters.”
Sadie didn’t know what to say about this. Dorothy reached into her pocket and pulled out a postcard and handed it to her. It read Men’s Rights Under Attack on one side and Just Because You Regret It Doesn’t Mean It’s Rape. There was a website at the bottom. Sadie made a face and handed it back.
Dorothy furrowed her brow. “Keep it. What’s happening to your father is a symptom of what is wrong with young women today. Men are victimized, and no one cares. Does that sound right to you?”
“I guess not,” Sadie mumbled. She curled the card up in her hand and shoved it in her kilt pocket before making her exit. She was expected in room 306, a class of about fifteen gifted students. She was second-last to arrive, making it just before Alison the pothead who smoked between every class, claiming it was for her adhd. The teachers knew and didn’t say anything. Sadie sat in the front, pulled out her peppermint lip balm, and applied it carefully in her pocket mirror, mostly for something to do. She and Amanda had made the lip balm together one afternoon in the winter, using essential oils and shea butter melted in the microwave. She saw others watching her in the mirror’s reflection while she pursed her tingling lips, trying to look unbothered. It’s any other day. Act like it’s any other day.
George’s replacement arrived, a dotty-looking bald man in a bad brown suit. He wrote Mr. Taylor in serial-killer script on the blackboard and moved the portable table with the laptop on it to the side of the room with a flourish, as though pushing aside the idea of interactive technology. He removed his suit jacket, which only served to confirm the pit stains Sadie knew would be there. She turned to look at her classmates, and they were almost all leaning forward like a pack of leopards getting ready to circle and attack from all angles.
In the middle of the teacher’s mumbling introduction, Jonathan Moore stood up abruptly and cleared his throat. Jonathan was understood to be a kind of genius, socially isolated but seemingly uninterested in high school in that way anyway. If he’d had any proficiency in art, drama, or English, he would’ve matched Sadie’s grade point average. George thought him exceptional, which was saying a lot considering he never spoke that way about his students. In public he would claim, “You can do anything you want to do!” and the students would smile bright, beaming tooth-filled symbols of their inner confidence. He considered it part of his job description to instill the anchors of self-esteem. At home he was more disparaging, admitting most kids weren’t bound for greatness but conceding there was a kind of greatness in choosing to be ordinary as well.
George and Jonathan would often have lunch together on the courtyard grass. Jonathan, who normally skirted the edges of the halls, lit up around her father. It was well known that he was a scholarship student who lived in an apartment above the Mac’s Milk Mart with a disabled, housebound mother and a father who liked to sit on the back balcony and shoot at any pigeon or squirrel that dared to approach his Ford Explorer.
“This is bullshit. Mr. Woodbury was the best teacher in this whole mediocre school full of privileged assholes, and now we have to deal with you? Mr. Woodbury has been slaughtered by some gossip perpetrated by some fucking cheerleading sluts. This is not fair! You cannot even compare!”
The sub slammed his hand on the desk. “I won’t tolerate that kind of language in my class. I understand the situation with Mr. Woo
dbury has been very stressful, and no doubt you are all feeling … so much … right now,” he stammered, his brow growing sweaty. “But I will not tolerate this language in my class,” he repeated, as if it were the language that was the problem.
“Punitive tactics will not work with this group. We are not ordinary students,” Jonathan muttered.
Madeleine Stewart, who normally never spoke in class, stood up and turned towards Jonathan, arms crossed. “Jonathan, you don’t, like, know the situation. I know you’re grieving the loss of your mentor, but you have to consider how many students got hurt. This isn’t some trivial debate about cheating on a test. This is a lawsuit, and it took a lot of guts for those girls to stand up after what happened and try to make it right. That took guts.” Sadie wondered if it took the kind of guts Madeleine wished she’d had. This made her stomach turn.
“America is the most ridiculously litigious country. We sue someone for breathing on us. It is not meaningful!” Jonathan’s voice was robotic, monotone, but forceful.
Sadie’s hands began to tingle. A brief swirl of vertigo overtook her. She felt as though she was an ambassador from some appalling country, forced into the job and now having to defend where she came from. As Jonathan started in again, Sadie got up and walked out. As she walked, the room got quiet. She couldn’t stand to hear another person debate whether or not her father had done any of the things he was rumoured to have done. She didn’t want to hear him defended. She didn’t want to hear him torn up either.
If only she could have the privilege of believing him entirely. What kind of person, what kind of ungrateful daughter, doesn’t believe her own father? She had never doubted him before. She never thought he was anything but moral and civilized. She wasn’t even sure what those words meant. But if someone puts the possibility of something terrible in your head — and people around you believe it — you can’t go back to thinking it completely inconceivable. The possibility is there whether or not you choose to believe it, and you can’t go back to not knowing that the possibility exists.
in the third-floor girls’ bathroom, Sadie sat on the wooden window ledge holding a copy of The Crying of Lot 49, open to the same page she’d read eleven times. Of all the students in the building, it had to be Amanda who walked in. Amanda had been in accelerated classes but had dropped down to regular stream last year after a series of emotional breakdowns from the stress. She still came upstairs to skip class, especially when Sadie had her independent study, because she knew the area wasn’t monitored.
“Sadie, fuck man, you’ve been avoiding me,” she said, one hand on her hip, the other pulling a pack of Marlboros out of her uniform skirt. “I know your dad’s a fucking perv and all, but you don’t have to act like I’m dead.”
Sadie laughed. “He’s not! I don’t know.” She curled her book in her palm, looking at Amanda through the cylinder. “God, I just feel so terrible about … your sister.”
“The bitch has never been so popular. Mom is letting her stay home for like the next week or two if she wants, and she can eat whatever she wants and we’re like not allowed to get mad at her ever, and we all have to go to therapy.”
“But is she okay?”
Amanda shrugged, lighting her cigarette. Sadie opened the bathroom window wide, propped it open with her math textbook, and stepped away so Amanda could blow the smoke outside. She hated second-hand smoke.
“I was reading some statistics?” Amanda started, her voice going up at the end of her sentences. “It is very rare that people lie about stuff like this. People just want to think they do, but why would they? Why bring all that scrutiny on yourself? It’s not as though victims get justice most of the time.”
A girl walked in, glaring at Amanda for smoking. They held eyes for a few seconds.
“Problem?”
The girl rolled her eyes and entered a stall, coughing dramatically.
Sadie stayed silent, rolling and unrolling the paperback.
“Of course, I already fucking know that, right?” Amanda continued, ignoring the girl but pushing the end of her cigarette into the green chipped paint beside the sink and running it under water. “Anton Chevalier raped me at that party last year, and everyone knows it. The whole party knew it — half the party fucking witnessed it. But do I get to stay home from school? No. Did I have to see him in gym class every Wednesday? Yeah. Does he have to go to jail? No. You can’t throw a fucking rock around here without hitting some kind of rapist. It’s like you have to be fifty years old in order for it to really matter.”
“You could’ve gone to the police,” Sadie offered, as she had the day after the party. Sadie had even sent an anonymous note to the police department on Amanda’s behalf. No one did anything. It had been the first time in Sadie’s life that what was good and true and fair didn’t seem to matter.
“Right. ‘So, how many wine coolers did you drink, Miss Mitchell? And we have several boys willing to share how many blow jobs you gave in the senior girls’ bathroom in the ninth grade.’ And then Dr. Chevalier would talk about Anton’s exemplary grades. My life would have been over in even more ways than it already was. Not fucking worth it.”
“Still,” Sadie said gently, “we should be sticking up for each other, right?”
“Girls fuck each other over on the daily, Sadie.”
“Yeah. You never told your mom, did you?”
“No, and now I can’t ever. Can you imagine? It would kill her.”
Sadie leaned into the mirror and was surprised to see she hadn’t even attempted to put on any makeup this morning.
“Anyway, I’m sorry you’re a social pariah right now.”
“It seems selfish to worry about my own concerns, considering all that’s going on. I just can’t wait to get out of here. Be an adult and never come back.”
“Amen, sister.”
They linked arms and pushed their way through the girls’ bathroom door, heading towards the lockers at the end of the hall. Melissa Greer and Teresa Brock paused in the process of putting up a poster for a school dance, stopped talking, and stared at them. As they passed, they heard the whispers. Sick. Her own father. Trash.
“Mind your own business, you cunty bitches!” yelled Amanda.
The poster see-sawed through the air to the ground.
sadie left through the front entrance, but paused on the landing when she noticed Dorothy with a group of parents and teachers at the front steps that lead to the school’s exit, blocking her way out. They were all wearing T-shirts that said True Love Waits, from the Abstinence Club. The fabric was stretched over their frumpy blouses and dresses, making the message hard to read. She bumped into a woman she surmised was a reporter at the top of the front steps with a photographer.
“We’re trying to teach our girls to value their virtue,” Dorothy was saying to the bewildered-looking reporter.
Sadie stood behind the reporter, hiding for a moment. She wore bright red tights and had thick black bangs, and she rolled her eyes to a fey photographer trying to take their photo. “This is just so tacky for a private school,” she mumbled to him while writing a Tweet on her phone. “Is there a new breed of wealthy redneck now?” Sadie was squished in so close behind her she could smell her strawberry perfume and read everything she typed. She didn’t want to make a noise and be noticed, but she couldn’t turn around and go back inside.
The photographer snapped some photos, Sadie ducking her head down before he stopped to scroll. “Let’s just file this and jet. I need a decent coffee.”
The reporter looked up and locked eyes with Sadie as she snuck by them, trying not to draw attention to herself.
“Hey,” she started softly, nudging the photographer with her hip to get his attention. “Are you by any chance the daughter?”
Sadie pushed her way down the stone steps and through the crowd of Dorothy’s minions who’d begun their ascent.
>
“Can I just ask you one question? No photos, just one question!”
Sadie started running and jumped on her bike as if the school had just exploded.
seven
andrew decided to take a two-week leave from work. He called the office from where he lay on the dock after seeing Stuart. They were understanding — he knew they would be — but he still felt guilty. Now what? What was logical? What was right? A dock spider popped up between two of the planks of wood. He stared at it as though daring it to move close to him, and it did. It touched his leg before he was rattled enough to pull off his sandal and snuff out its life.
He dipped his sandal in the water and scrolled to Jared’s name in his contact list, where he was listed under ice for In Case of Emergency — Partner. He paused, pressed Details and scrolled through all the photos they’d sent each other over the last few months, then pocketed his phone again. If he invited Jared to come to Woodbury Lake, he would close up shop and be there in a matter of hours, selflessly preparing healthy meals, doling out hugs, taking care of everyone. His presence would make the calamity real and feel more than temporary.
The lake was choppy, no boats making their rounds. He pulled out the phone again and sent Jared a text. I miss you. It was both sincere and meant to keep him at bay for a few more hours.
It didn’t feel like the right time to start integrating Jared into life in Avalon Hills, not when everyone was still in crisis mode. The house, however large, felt full of people and pressed tight with anxious energy. Sometimes it is easier to be alone in these situations. Having Jared there would mean Andrew would have to answer the question “How are you holding up?” truthfully.
He went back inside when he knew his mother and aunt would be gone for at least an hour. He made a strong pot of coffee, unable to get the picture of Alan Chambers bragging about his children out of his head. In New York you could be in your thirties, living an exciting life, and not be seen as a failure for not having a family. In Avalon Hills having children was just what you did if you stayed in town. Most of his graduating class hadn’t stayed, of course. They’d gone on to be lawyers, policy-makers, congressmen, researchers, journalists, and doctors. A few of his theatre buddies had had small parts in television shows or films. The handful who remained were mostly from the public school.