Shallow Pond

by Alissa Grosso

  My head was spinning, and I wanted to march right into Annie’s bedroom and attack her with questions, but that wouldn’t be fair. She was exhausted. She needed her rest. And I needed answers. I squirmed restlessly in my chair, unable to get comfortable, unable to relax.

  I flipped idly through my notes from the hotline training. According to the schedule I’d jotted down, my first day of being on the phones was next week. That was too soon. I felt nowhere near ready. The notes I’d taken were sparse and not especially helpful.

  I came across the website I’d written down when the cop spoke to us. Turning on the computer, I typed the address in the address bar. I couldn’t remember what the site was supposed to be, but I realized as soon as the page began to load. It was the state’s Megan Law site. If you wanted to find out whether there were any registered sex offenders in your town, you typed in your zip code. So I typed Shallow Pond’s zip code. In the few seconds it took to load the results page, I thought about the possible suspects among Shallow Pond’s small population. The guy who collected the shopping carts in the parking lot at Mr. K’s had always made me uneasy. There was that older guy who always seemed to be at the library. He could be a sex offender.

  I had an image in my head of what a sex offender looked like, so when I saw the picture of Shallow Pond’s lone sex offender, I was surprised. I let out a little yelp, and then, because I didn’t know what else to do, I quickly flipped off the computer.

  Nineteen

  I debated turning the computer back on and retrying my search. Maybe there’d been some error, but I knew what I’d seen. His picture had been there, some sort of mug shot. How could that be a mistake?

  Why was he there? This time I did turn the computer back on. I returned to the site and typed in our zip code. I shut my eyes as the results page loaded, willing some completely different person to appear, or better yet, a friendly little message that said Hooray, there are no sex offenders in Shallow Pond!

  No such luck. I found myself looking at a horrible picture of Cameron Schaeffer. His name, age, and physical details appeared beside the photo. What was not there was any information about his crime. Was he a rapist? A child molester? Falsely convicted?

  With a chill, I realized that I’d spent the afternoon alone with him. I’d been together with him in his car. We’d been out there on the ice all alone for hours. Anything could have happened. Yet nothing had. Maybe that counted for something. If Cameron Schaeffer was such a horrible criminal, then surely he would have at least attempted something. Perhaps the fact that he didn’t proved he was reformed, or maybe not such a bad guy after all.

  “Babie!” I heard Gracie call. She was headed down the hall toward my room. I quickly snapped the computer off. Cameron’s mug shot had already burned itself into my mind.

  “You never gave the phone back.” Gracie walked right into my room without knocking. The phone was on the desk beside my now-dark computer screen. She grabbed it.

  “Wait, Gracie,” I said. I needed to tell her. She needed to know. I couldn’t keep something like this from her.

  “What?” she said. The friendly, laughing sister from dinner was gone. She was back to being her usual annoying self.

  “There’s something I want to talk with you about,” I said. I was stalling. I didn’t know how exactly to tell her that her boyfriend was a sex offender. It felt like the sort of thing I should break to her gently.

  “Can this wait? I’ve got a phone call to make.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. I was too relieved to be let off the hook.

  I didn’t sleep well. I kept having nightmares. Someone was chasing me. Every time this mysterious person was about to catch me I would wake up, my heart racing. I peered around my darkened bedroom, half-expecting Cameron Schaeffer to be lurking in the corner or crouched behind my door. I even turned on the light a couple of times in the middle of the night, just to be sure.

  I sleep-walked through school the next day, and Jenelle told me about fifty times that I looked like crap. I felt like crap, too. Maybe I wasn’t just tired; maybe I was sick. Maybe whatever Annie had was contagious. When school finally got out, I wanted to go straight home and crawl into bed, but I couldn’t. Instead, I walked all the way out to Mr. K’s.

  I found Gracie working one of the registers. She didn’t look pleased to see me. I stood at the end of her checkout lane while she rang up an order.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “In case you didn’t notice, I’m kind of busy.”

  “This is important. Can you take a break?”

  “Just took one half an hour ago.”

  “It’s about Cameron.”

  I saw the customer look up from her wad of coupons with a flash of interest. She obviously wanted to hear the latest gossip.

  “Stay away from him,” Gracie said. Her voice was like ice.

  “Actually, you’re the sister who goes around stealing other people’s boyfriends,” I said. I hadn’t gone there with the intention of being mean, but Gracie always brought out the worst in me.

  Gracie blushed, then turned to me, her eyes slitted in anger. I think if she hadn’t been at work she might have gotten physically violent. Instead, she read off the total to the now-flustered customer, who fumbled to get her money out of her wallet. Gracie shut off her light and told the guy who had already loaded about half a million cans of cat food onto the conveyor belt that she was closed.

  She led me over to the corner where the lottery machines were, looking around to make sure that no one was listening to us.

  “I don’t appreciate you coming here and bugging me at work,” she said. “This better be important.”

  “It is,” I said. “It’s very important. I think you’re in danger.”

  “In danger? In danger of losing my job because of my irritating little sister, maybe.”

  “No,” I said. I thought about that idea of breaking the news to her gently. That wasn’t going to work. “It’s Cameron. He’s a registered sex offender.”

  “What?” I expected her to be incredulous, but I didn’t expect her to start laughing like I’d told a hilarious joke.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “I had to look something up for school, and he’s on the Megan’s Law site.”

  “Cameron is not a sex offender.”

  “But he’s—”

  “Look, I think I would know if I was dating some sort of criminal, okay? I’m sure this is all Daddy’s fault.” I tried to think of a way my dead father could be involved in this. “He hated Cameron, you know that, right?” Gracie said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I recalled what Cameron had said about the two of them not getting along.

  “Well, he probably filed some sort of complaint against Cameron when he was dating Annie. It’s the sort of thing Dad would have done.”

  “But Cameron had to have been convicted of a crime to be on there,” I pointed out. Gracie shook her head.

  “Drop it,” she said. “And don’t go shooting your mouth off about this to anyone, okay?”

  It was on a public website for anyone to see, but perhaps Shallow Pond’s rumor mongers were not that tech savvy. I nodded and watched Gracie storm off back to her register, shaking her head as she went.

  I wondered if she could be right. If Dad had filed some sort of fabricated charge against Cameron, maybe he had gotten in trouble for something he’d never done. It made sense and I found myself buying the idea, because some part of me still believed that Cameron Schaeffer was more than just some guy that Annie had dated—that he was indeed my father, messed up as the whole thing was.

  “You look lost. Let me guess—you forgot your shopping list.” I recognized the voice and felt myself blush. Zach stood beside me, a pair of shopping bags in his arms.

  “I was just here to see my s
ister,” I said.

  “Well, in that case, I was going to make a pit stop for pie on the way home. Want to join me?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  A few minutes later we were sitting once again in a booth at the diner, a plate of pie before Zach and a chocolate milkshake in front of me. It felt so natural sitting there with him. It really was like I had known him my entire life. I felt like I could say anything to him.

  So I blurted out, “You’re so much like my sister.”

  “She wears more makeup than I do,” he said. “Also, I don’t think my giggle is quite so high-pitched.”

  “Not Gracie,” I said. “My other sister, Annie.”

  “I haven’t met her yet. So, is she particularly manly or am I very feminine?”

  “What I mean is, the way you’re kind of like a grown-up even though you’re still a kid—how you do your own grocery shopping and live on your own and everything. Annie pretty much raised me single-handedly even though she was still a kid when I was born.” I didn’t tell him about my conviction that Annie was my real mother. Maybe I wasn’t ready to share everything.

  “How is she doing? She’s the one that was sick, right?”

  “Yeah, she’s better. I mean, she’s still sick, but she seems to be doing better.”

  He nodded and shoveled one last giant piece of pie into his mouth. I watched as some of the filling missed his mouth and slid slowly down his chin. He wiped it off with his napkin, his mouth bulging with pie.

  “That old-flame situation still going on?” he asked.

  “I guess,” I said. Cameron’s mug shot popped into my head. “It’s strange. All these years I always thought that he was the one who dumped her, but yesterday he told me she

  was the one that broke up with him.”

  “You two spend a lot of time chatting?”

  “I went ice fishing with him,” I said. I knew it sounded weird, but it all made sense when you knew I’d been

  convinced that Cameron was my father. Of course, Zach lacked the benefit of that knowledge.

  “Huh,” Zach said. He nodded as he considered this. He pushed his empty plate out in front of him. “So that’s what you had to do yesterday after school.”

  “Yeah.” Why did Annie still act interested in Cameron if she was the one who’d broken up with him? Maybe I’d misunderstood Annie’s reaction; maybe she wasn’t interested in Cameron. “I just don’t get why my sister would break up with Cameron.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Cameron said she had someone else, but I can’t remember her having any other boyfriends.”

  “Maybe she just decided the guy was a jerk,” Zach said. He sounded sort of pissed off when he said this. Did he know something about Cameron that I didn’t know? Maybe he’d looked at the Megan’s Law site. Oh my God. What Zach said finally sank in: Maybe she just decided the guy was a jerk. Not just any old jerk—a rapist jerk. What if it wasn’t my father but Annie who’d filed the complaint against Cameron? Maybe the way she’d acted when she found out about Cameron’s return was nervousness—the kind of nervousness that’s actually fear. I couldn’t believe I’d been so blind, but it all made sense.

  “I need to go home,” I told Zach.

  “Well, okay. I’ll drive you.”

  “Right now!” I said. I shouted a bit in my excitement.

  “Was it something I said?” he asked.

  “Yes!” I realized this came out sounding all wrong. “No, I mean, what you said made me realize something.”

  “Right, okay, well, let me just pay for this.”

  I was only half done with my milkshake, but I knew I couldn’t drink another sip. I practically sprinted out of the diner while Zach paid, only to pace around until he got outside. During the short car ride to my house I could barely sit still.

  “Listen,” Zach said in a serious tone. “I know you don’t really like me, and I get that you are trying to be nice to me because you feel bad for me or whatever, but it’s okay. You can be straight with me.”

  “What?” I said. Really, my head was spinning so much I could barely understand what he was saying.

  “I guess you must think I am completely annoying.”

  No, I didn’t think anything of the sort. “That’s not true,” I said, but we’d pulled up in front of my house and I had to talk to Annie. “I have to go. And no, you’re not annoying.”

  I got out of his car and looked back at him with what I thought was a sweet smile as I shut the door. Then I sprinted up the stairs.

  Annie was on the couch when I walked in. The television was on, and I couldn’t tell for sure, but it didn’t look like I’d woken her up.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “He raped you, didn’t he?” I said. The words burst out of my mouth, where I’d been holding them in for the past few minutes.

  “What?” Annie asked. Her already-pale skin looked like it had grown even paler. She looked like someone whose dark secret had just been exposed. It was true.

  “He raped you, and that’s why you never left home.”

  “Why … ” Annie began, but seemed to reconsider and said instead, “Where did you get this idea?”

  “It was something Zach said.”

  “Zach?”

  “A friend of mine from school,” I said. Annie looked confused. Confused and scared. “I mean, Zach didn’t say anything about rape,” I went on. “I figured that out from the Megan’s Law site. Well, and yesterday Cameron told me you were the one who broke up with him.”

  “You were talking with Cameron?”

  “Yes, I was talking with Cameron. And if you want to know why I was talking with Cameron, it’s because no one in this family ever tells me anything! So, yes, I went ice fishing with some rapist all because my stupid family can’t tell me anything.”

  “Cameron’s a rapist?”

  “You don’t need to deny it,” I said. “He’s a registered sex offender. His picture is on the Megan’s Law site.”

  “There has to be some mistake,” Annie said. “Cameron is not that sort of person.”

  “But he raped you!”

  “Cameron? Babie, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I’d been so sure. That look on Annie’s face—she’d looked so scared—but now she just shook her head at me like I was the crazy one.

  “Well, then what’s he doing on the Megan’s Law site?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It must be some sort of mistake.”

  “Why did you break up with him, then?”

  “It was a long time ago,” Annie said with a sigh. “I really don’t feel like getting into this now.”

  “He said you said there was someone else. Is that true?”

  “Yeah,” Annie said, and she got a sort of far-off look in her eyes. In a faint whisper she said, “There was someone else.”

  Twenty

  “So, I don’t even know if I should bother asking you this,” Jenelle said as she stood beside my locker, “but Shawna and I are going to go look at prom dresses this afternoon, and if you want to—”

  “It’s February,” I pointed out.

  “Do you have any idea how long it takes to find the perfect dress? Plus, if you wait too long, there’s nothing but crappy ones left.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have something I’ve got to do.”

  “Oh my God, Bunting, it’s like you completely hate us all of a sudden.”

  “I don’t hate you,” I said. I closed my locker and tried to get my lips to curl into what I hoped was a warm and friendly smile. Beyond her, I could see Zach and Meg walking down the hallway together. They looked awfully close to one another. Were they holding hands? I squinted, but there were too many other kids in the hallway blocking my view.

  “Who is he?”
Jenelle asked.

  “What?” I said, snapping back to reality.

  “This guy you’re sneaking around with?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh come on, what are all these mysterious things you’re always having to do? Danielle Roberts swears she saw you riding in a car with Cameron Schaeffer the other day, but I told her it must have been Gracie she saw. Unless perhaps he’s going for the complete set.”

  “Don’t be disgusting,” I said. “And I’m not sneaking around with anyone. I have to go do something for my volunteer thing.”

  “Honest?” Jenelle asked. The fact that she had to ask bothered me. Had we really reached the point where she no longer believed the things I said?

  “I swear,” I said. I immediately felt bad. While I did have to do something for the volunteer job, I also had an ulterior motive.

  I had to wait for a little while in the police station’s uncomfortable vinyl-covered chairs. Officer Hantz was out on patrol. I suppose it was a bit of a relief to find out how little activity there was in the Shallow Pond branch of the Regional Police on a typical weekday afternoon, but it wasn’t like I’d ever feared for my safety in this town. I think I would have traded a little of my security for a little less boredom.

  He walked right past me when he came in, until the receptionist in whispering tones let him know I was there to see him. He turned around to look at me with a slightly puzzled smile, and in a burst of words I explained that I was one of the volunteers at the hotline.

  “You’re here for the background check? I’m sorry they didn’t explain it better. You didn’t need to see me directly. Anyone here could have helped you with that.”

  “So, you can’t do it?” I asked. I tried to make my voice sound deflated and pathetic. I probably didn’t need to worry about trying so hard.