What Mr. Mattero Did

by Priscilla Cummings

  “Claire—”

  “Hey. Hi.”

  “So did those police people show up at your house?”

  “Mr. Daniels and that woman?”

  “Yeah. They were here, too,” Jenna said.

  “It was kind of creepy, wasn’t it?”

  “No. It wasn’t creepy,” Jenna disagreed. “I mean, I just repeated what I wrote down at school. Didn’t you?”

  “Duh. Of course, I did. I mean, what did you think I did?”

  Pause.

  “Look, can you come over, Claire? My dad’s bringing a pizza.”

  “I don’t think so,” I told her. I didn’t want to eat pizza. Well, I did, but I couldn’t. You know, on account of my diet. “I already ate,” I told her. But typical Jenna, she would not take no for an answer.

  “Claire, you have to come over. I’ve got your backpack. You left it at school!”

  “But that was going to be my excuse for not doing my homework!”

  Jenna wasn’t laughing. Her voice got small. “Claire, please come. My dad is really upset about what happened.”

  “Yeah. My mom’s pretty angry, too. And can you believe Suzanne’s mother at school?”

  “Wasn’t that awful? Her mother is, like, so fragile,” Jenna said. “I just talked to Suzanne. You won’t believe what her mother’s going to do next.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t tell you unless you come over.”

  “I’ll call Suzanne myself.”

  “You can’t! Her mother won’t let her back on the phone!”

  “Jenna!”

  “Claire!”

  “Please come and I’ll tell you everything,” Jenna promised.

  Big long sigh. “All right.” I gave in. See? Jenna always got her way. “I’ll leave my mom a note.”

  Jenna lived about two blocks away. There is a sidewalk connecting our neighborhoods, mine with houses that are all the same except for which side the garage is on, and hers with town houses that all have cute little balconies but no garages. Exactly halfway there is a little bridge that crosses a drainage ditch between the houses and the town houses. Sometimes we meet there. But Jenna wasn’t there to meet me that day.

  When I got to her family’s town house, her father was driving up with the pizza they were having for dinner. He revved up the motor of his red sports car once before turning it off.

  “Hi there, Claire,” he greeted me through the open window.

  “Hey,” I said back.

  Mostly, Jenna’s dad is a pretty nice guy. Fit—very fit because he works out at the gym every day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him when he wasn’t wearing tight jeans with a snug white T-shirt tucked in. I think it’s his uniform, what he wears to work at a construction company or something. There’s always a hard hat in the back window of his little red car.

  “Awful what happened to you girls at school,” he said, slamming the door to his car with his foot because he had the pizza box in one hand and a big bottle of Coke in the other.

  I waited for him.

  “Guess you heard I busted that guy in the face for what he done,” he said.

  “Yeah, I was there,” I told him. But I didn’t say it with a big smile or anything.

  He grunted as he walked past me, like he was still angry. “Next time I’ll kill the son of a bitch,” he snarled. Turning, he pointed the bottle of Coke at me. “I’m not kidding, Claire. He touches one of you girls again, he’s dead.”

  See, this is the thing that scares me about Jenna’s dad. He has this incredible temper. You hear on the news about these wacko people doing crazy things, and I worry Jenna’s dad could be one of them. He’s a little bit scary, and I didn’t want to see Mr. Mattero get killed over this. I’m serious! So already, walking in, I was starting to get nervous.

  Jenna ran right up to me and gave me a hug. A big hug. “Thanks for coming, Cwaire.” She talked a little funny, and with a lisp, because she had her Crest Strips on. But she looked really nice. Her long hair was up on her head fastened with a scrunchie, and she had on these awesome, long, silver bar earrings that I had never seen before. They sparkled whenever she moved her head. Plus, she had cute pink rhinestones in all the other earring holes.

  Her dad popped open a beer really loud and pointed to the pizza box on the table. “You girls go ahead and eat.”

  “We’re not hungry, Dad,” Jenna said. Then she started giggling and put a hand up to her mouth because one of her Crest Strips was falling off.

  I laughed, too. And we ran upstairs to her room.

  “Oh my God! You got it!” I exclaimed.

  Jenna pulled the strips off her teeth and picked up a beautiful red-and-black-striped top from her bed. She grinned like a spoiled brat. We’d seen that shirt together at the mall, at Abercrombie & Fitch, the week before, but it was so incredibly expensive none of us could afford it.

  “Mom got it for me,” Jenna said, waggling her eyebrows up and down.

  “Oh, I hate you. I love that shirt!” I snatched it away from her and sat on the edge of her bed. No question I was envious. I’d been thinking of asking for that shirt for my birthday.

  “Look what else she got me.” Jenna picked up a small brown leather purse from her bureau. It wasn’t a shoulder strap, but the kind lots of girls were carrying around now. It was cute.

  She put the purse down and kind of bounced into a seat beside me on the bed. “So,” she said, cocking her head, “do you want to hear what happened to Suzanne?”

  I didn’t even get a chance to answer.

  “Girls! Come and eat!” Jenna’s father hollered from the stairwell. He had a really loud voice, like a Marine sergeant or something. We jumped to our feet and scooted downstairs.

  In the kitchen, we watched as her father tilted his head back and took a really long drink of beer. You could see his Adam’s apple moving up and down when he swallowed. I wondered if he was going to chug the whole can at once. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Go ahead. Eat,” he told us.

  “But I don’t want to yet,” Jenna tried to tell him.

  “Eat!” he ordered.

  Something about the way he said it. Quickly, we pulled out stools at the kitchen counter and sat down. Jenna opened the pizza box, and each of us took a slice while her father walked into the family room and turned on the TV.

  Jenna handed me a napkin, and I started picking pieces of mushroom off one piece of pizza. Even though I’d had that hot dog, I was still hungry. I was always hungry. But I just ate the mushrooms.

  “So what did Suzanne’s mother do?” I asked in a low voice.

  “Um . . .” Jenna held up a finger—she had just polished her nails blue—because she had a mouthful. “You won’t believe this.” She swallowed and leaned toward me. “Her mother is putting her in Catholic school.”

  I sucked in my breath. “Are you serious?”

  Jenna nodded, and the long silver earrings swung back and forth catching the light. “I’m not kidding you. I don’t even think she’s going to be at school tomorrow.”

  “You can do it that fast? Change schools?”

  Jenna shrugged. “I guess. I told her she was nuts. I mean, she’ll have to wear one of those dumb little kilts.”

  I put a hand to my mouth because I felt awful for Suzanne. She hated skirts.

  Suddenly—incredibly—it was on the evening news! We could hear it! A report about us! About three girls at Oakdale Middle School telling officials what Mr. Mattero did. The reporter, a woman in this low-cut sweater, but with a really butch haircut, stood outside of our school, right beside the outdoor sign that said PTO BOOK FAIR FRIDAY. She didn’t say our names, she just said three girls had come forward and accused “Frederick Mattero, a music teacher at the school for the past eleven years . . .”

  Jenna and I couldn’t believe it. We slid off the stools and moved into the doorway to the family room, never taking our eyes off the television. I pulled on the ends of
my braids. The reporter pointed to the front door of our school, like Mr. Mattero was going to come out or something. “It happened here, at Oakdale Middle School,” the reporter said. “The teacher has been suspended with pay until an investigation is complete.”

  Jenna’s dad blew the air out of his cheeks and belched. “Don’t worry, that guy’s gonna be sorry big-time for what he did,” he muttered. He stomped back to the kitchen and popped open another can of beer.

  We sat down on the couch together, Jenna and I. And that’s when she started whimpering. “I wish Mommy was here. Can we call Mommy?”

  Her father came out of the kitchen. “Yeah. Yeah, of course we can. We can call your mother. He frowned. “Where is she, you know? She in San Diego?”

  Jenna shrugged. “You’ll have to call the airline.”

  Her father slammed an address book onto the counter and flipped it open. He picked up the cell phone and punched in a number.

  I watched Jenna. She had stopped whimpering instantly and was all eyes on her father. Behind Jenna, on the side table at the end of the couch, was a framed picture of her parents all dressed up for a party. Her mother was really beautiful. Thick blonde hair. Perfect skin. Really good makeup. Not to mention a perfect figure. Jenna was like a miniature version of her.

  “Yeah, this is Bob Cartwright. I need to get in touch with my wife, Elaine. Elaine Cartwright. You know what flight she’s working?”

  Jenna and I couldn’t hear what the airline was telling him. We only heard her father’s side of the conversation.

  “She’s working—of course she’s working. She left yesterday, and she’s not due back until Friday . . . yeah, yeah, you’re darn right, buddy, you’d better check again . . . What do you mean she’s off until Sunday?”

  Jenna’s father flashed a look over at us. Jenna sat up. I heard her take a breath.

  “Are you sure?” His eyes flashed, but his voice grew oddly quiet. “Yeah . . . I hear ya.” He clicked off the phone, and, slowly, he settled it onto the counter. A lot of thoughts must have been racing through his mind.

  In this incredibly calm voice, Jenna made a suggestion. “You could call Captain O’Brien. I bet he knows where Mommy is.”

  Her father narrowed his eyes at her. A really cold, hard stare that gave me the shivers. “O’Brien? What, that pilot?”

  Jenna nodded, and honest to pete, you could see the red creeping into her dad’s face.

  Her father slammed the address book onto the counter and flipped it open again. He punched in more numbers and started marching back and forth in the kitchen. I sat there—stupid, naïve me, curious if that pilot guy knew where Jenna’s mom might be since she wasn’t working a flight like she’d told everyone.

  “Yeah, hi,” Jenna’s father said into the phone as he turned his back on us. “This Tim O’Brien? This is Bob Cartwright. Look, there’s, ah, been an emergency here with our daughter, Jenna, and I’m trying to find Elaine. You know where she’s at? . . . Jenna’s all right, yeah—well—well, actually, I don’t know. They took her to the hospital, which is where I’m headed. Look, it’s real important for me to find Elaine. If you have any idea . . . sure, yeah, sure I’ll hold on . . .”

  Jenna glanced at me and bit her bottom lip. She looked really scared.

  Suddenly someone was back on the line with Jenna’s dad. He walked away from us into the dining room with the cell phone at his ear. “Elaine? Is that you?” he asked. “What the hell are you doing at O’Brien’s? What the hell is going on?”

  At that point, we got up from the couch. Jenna started making her way down the hall toward the stairs to her room.

  But I found my way out the door and ran all the way home.

  10

  Melody

  I STAYED LATER THAN USUAL AT THE BARN, slowly measuring out grain and making sure each horse in each stall had three squares of hay. When there were no more chores, I returned to Nova’s stall and gently clucked to her. She turned around, still munching on her hay, and came over to the door so I could stroke her nose and say good-bye.

  It was dusk by the time I left, and I didn’t want to cut through the pasture. Instead, I took the long way home: down the winding dirt driveway from the stables to a longer, gravel road, which led back to the main road and our neighborhood. But even then, I scuffed along, wanting more time to think, but not knowing what to think, and so mostly torturing myself with thoughts of the worst that could happen: the school firing Dad, the police putting him in jail. I did not actually think these things would happen, understand, I was just doing worst-case scenarios in my head.

  By the time I crested the hill on Bellevue Avenue, it was dark. I saw that my brother was home ahead of me. His car, a beat-up Toyota my grandmother gave him, was parked on the street out front, its windows down and one tire looking mighty soft. Sometimes Cade worked after school at a video store and didn’t get home until almost nine, but I could never keep track of his schedule.

  Seeing the soft yellow lights on inside the kitchen window, I figured Cade knew by now, too. He had a pretty quick temper; I wondered how he was taking the news.

  I plucked the evening paper out of the azalea bushes, where it had been tossed, and walked in to see my family sitting around the kitchen table with several Chinese food takeout cartons, unopened, in front of them. Cade was frowning and had picked up a wooden chopstick, which he slowly tapped on the open palm of one hand.

  No one seemed to notice me. Dad was staring at the edge of the table.

  “The school has a policy, Cade,” Mom was explaining quietly, opening her folded hands in front of her. “Anytime a teacher is accused of anything, not just touching a student, that teacher has to be put on leave while the allegations are investigated.”

  “Who’s investigating him?” Cade asked.

  “The school, the police. A detective called a while ago and asked if Dad would go down to the station and answer a few questions tomorrow.”

  Cade rolled his eyes. “So how long will he have to stay out of work?”

  “I don’t know,” Mom said.

  “And what about the girls who accused him?” Cade demanded. “They’re a bunch of liars! So they just go to school? Like nothing happened?”

  Neither one of my parents responded right away. Dad lifted his head. “There’s nothing else we can do right now.”

  When Cade brought his two hands down, I thought he was going to break that chopstick in half.

  “We just have to wait and see what happens,” my mother continued. “Your father wrote a statement denying everything. I’m going to drop it off with Mrs. Fernandez tomorrow morning.”

  Cade threw the chopstick down and leaned back in his chair. Angrily crossing his arms, he looked at Dad. “That’s it? You’re just going to stand by and let those kids call you a pedophile?”

  “That’s enough, Cade!” my mother yelled, breaking her calm facade. “Stop it right now, do you hear?”

  “Mary!” my dad stopped her. “Take it easy.”

  The room fell quiet. Mom covered her face with her hands. She hates to yell. It absolutely takes everything out of her when she yells.

  Even knowing this, in the vacuum of silence following her outburst, I dared to ask: “What’s a pedophile?” I had an idea, but I wasn’t sure.

  Surprised, they turned to look at me. Mom uncovered her face, and Cade uncrossed his arms. His eyes flicked from Mom and then to Dad, who got up and left.

  “A pedophile,” Mom explained, her voice flat, “is somebody who abuses children.”

  It was an awful night. None of us even ate dinner. I was the one who opened, then closed, those little cartons of Chinese food and stacked them in the refrigerator. While Mom and Dad sat quietly in the family room, I fed the cat, took the garbage out, and wiped off the counters. After that, I couldn’t think of anything else I could do to help, so I stood in the doorway watching them watch each other. Finally, Mom noticed me and said, “Mellie, do you have homework?”

  I n
odded and left. I had some sentences in Spanish to translate, an English grammar quiz to study for, and some reading in social studies. Up in my room I undid my long braid, took a shower, and changed into pajamas. Then I piled the books I needed on my bed and sat cross-legged behind them. Harmony jumped up and nuzzled my elbow, then laid across my open Spanish book. I let her stay.

  “I forgot,” Mom said a few minutes later, after sticking her head in my bedroom door. “Annie called while you were at the stables. She said to call back, that she would be home all evening.”

  “Thanks,” I told her. I had promised Annie I’d call. And anyway, we always touched base sometime after school. Lots of times we studied over the phone or online. But I didn’t even want to talk to my best friend. I didn’t want to have to explain what had happened. In part because I really didn’t know. I didn’t feel as though I had all the facts.

  I opened my grammar book, but my eyes glazed over and I ended up examining the bottom of my foot, picking at a piece of dead skin.

  “Oh, and by the way, Melody,” Mom said, startling me when she reappeared. “We all talked about it before you got home. We decided that if Song calls from the university, we won’t say anything. She’s working on a term paper that’s due next week, and this would be terribly distracting.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, although it seemed a little unfair to me that Song wouldn’t have to worry like the rest of us.

  I propped up the pillows behind me, pulled out the folded grammar worksheet that needed to be finished, then read and reread the instructions several times: Circle the correct pronoun and describe its function in the sentence. But my mind kept wandering, composing its own sentences. The girls made up a story to get him in trouble. He was surprised when they reported him to the principal. Social studies. I’d try social studies instead. But after lifting and positioning the heavy book on my lap, I couldn’t even open it.