Saturday 9:56 PM
Did you go home? WTF?
Saturday 10:14 PM
Omg text me.
Saturday 10:29 PM
Can’t believe you left me.
“What am I supposed to do?” Danielle asked.
“You don’t have to do anything. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I mean—I have finals next week. How can I go back there? Everyone thinks I have a crush on Kelsey. I’m going to fail all my classes and be a freshman dropout.”
I smiled in spite of myself, but I gave her a little nudge. “You have to go back, you know.”
“Keep my head up, you mean? Take the high road, and all that crap?” She sighed. “I don’t want to see her again.”
“You don’t have to see her again. You don’t have to text her back. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
Between us, her phone buzzed again, a line of text lighting up the screen.
Saturday 10:35 PM
Are you just never going to talk to me or what?
Danielle ignored the phone, turning it facedown.
“Besides, you have other friends.”
She snorted. “Last year I had other friends. Now I don’t anymore.”
“They’re still there, I bet.”
“I don’t know.” After a moment, she spoke again, her words muddled against her pillow.
“What?”
She rolled onto her back. “One of the guys said he knew I was gay because of my haircut.”
“One of the guys is an idiot, then,” I told her. “Actually, you look great with your hair this short. I like it.”
“Really?”
I kissed her on the cheek. “Don’t reply to her messages. Don’t do anything. Just get a good night’s sleep, and in the morning, we’ll see how you’re feeling about it. Is that okay?”
Danielle sighed, too emotionally exhausted to argue with my platitudes. I suppose she’d lived long enough to know that sometimes it wasn’t better in the morning. Sometimes, in fact, it was worse.
* * *
Sanjay Gopal worked quickly and Danielle’s picture was down by noon on Sunday. I know because I kept checking on my laptop, refreshing the page every few moments.
“I took screenshots of all the comments, too,” Gopal told me. “Some of them are clearly recognizable as our students, and I could call them in, make things a bit difficult.”
As a parent—as a human—I wanted to punish every kid who had written dyke and queer and some slurs I’d had to look up online to understand. But I had bigger concerns. “Can you call in Kelsey Jorgensen, too? She’s a sophomore, new this year.”
“Why? Is she involved somehow?”
“She was part of the group Danielle was with, and she was laughing and basically encouraging the rumor. She might have posted the picture, too.”
Gopal was silent for a moment. “Look, I know this has upset you, Liz, but there’s really no way to know where the meme came from. Your daughter posted the picture, and just about anyone could access it. You might want to consider changing her privacy settings.”
“I know Kelsey’s involved, Sanjay. Can’t you just call her into your office and talk to her? Put a little pressure on her and see what she says? Or at least give her a warning, let her know someone is paying attention?”
I could feel his hesitation, the weight of things he wasn’t saying. Most APs came and went, moving their way up the ladder, but Gopal had been at Miles Landers for five years now, and he was good at the job. The staff thought he was conscientious, and for the most part, students thought he was fair. This was the first time we’d connected on a personal level, and I knew he was thinking that I was just another crazy parent, making unreasonable demands and expecting impossible results.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Monday. I’ll call her in and see what she has to say.”
“I appreciate it, Sanjay,” I said.
* * *
Danielle did go back to school on Monday, but it was a different Danielle, her hair less styled, with only a bit of mascara and lip gloss. She wore a long sweater over her jeans and her beat-up pair of turquoise Converse.
“I’m proud of you,” I told her in the car. And I was—almost to bursting. It felt like a movie scene, minus the swell of uplifting music.
She shrugged. “I may as well get it over with.”
“You can come to my office anytime,” I offered. “If anything happens that you don’t like, if anyone says anything to you, then you can come right to me.”
“I’m not sure it would help my social status if I ran right to my mommy,” she said. “But anyway, thanks.”
* * *
Aaron came into my office at the beginning of fifth period lunch, the sleeves of his yellow Oxford rolled up to his elbow. He held one hand behind his back.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
“It’s a shitty thing, Liz. How is she?”
“I think the worst of it is over by now.” I gestured to his arm. “What’s behind your back? A bottle of Johnnie Walker?”
“Next best thing.” He brought his arm around, producing a cafeteria tray heaped high with the daily special. “I present to you, faux chicken.”
I grimaced.
“These nuggets represent your tax dollars at work, Liz. And personally, I hate the thought of my tax dollars ending up in a trash bin at the end of the day.”
I scooted a few loose pens and papers out of the way, and Aaron set the tray on the desk in between us. He’d brought a half-dozen sauce containers and proceeded to open them one by one, peeling back the thin plastic strips carefully, like a solicitous waiter.
I picked up a nugget, holding it to the light. “Do the kids actually eat these?”
“No, and that’s my point.”
We ate in silence. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until the first nuggets passed my lips. They were surprisingly good for food that was far removed from any kind of natural state. We ate in silence, picking apart the breading, chewing with great concentration.
“So, let’s hear it,” Aaron said.
I swallowed and took a swig from my water bottle. “Well, the worst part is that she’s convinced her friend Kelsey—the one you met at registration?—was behind the whole thing.”
“Some friend, huh?” Aaron sighed. “I’ll never understand girls. Guys, we punch it out and that’s the end of it. Girls go for the jugular. Look, I know this probably isn’t helpful, but it could have been worse.”
“I know. It’ll die down, like any other rumor. The weird thing is, even though people are more accepting than ever, being gay is still the low-hanging fruit. I mean, this can’t be helping kids who actually are gay.”
“Right.” Aaron grabbed a tissue and took a swipe at his chin. “Now, I have zero experience with the whole parenting thing. My cat causes me very little trouble, as you know. But, Liz, if there’s anything I can do...”
“There is, actually.”
“Really? Because that was just a standard consolation phrase.”
I laughed. “Jerk. I was just thinking—maybe you could call Danielle in sometime, just to see how she’s doing.”
He nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
There was a short rap on my door and Jenn popped her head in a few inches. “Liz? There’s someone who wants to talk to you. A Mrs. Jorgensen? She doesn’t have an appointment, so if you want me to tell her—”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “Give me just a minute.”
Aaron tipped the rest of the chicken nuggets and the empty sauce containers into the trash can, and I straightened the top of my desk. Sonia Jorgensen was here? For the first months of the year, she hadn’t even taken a turn brin
ging Kelsey to school. She’d been in Raleigh for a convention on Back-to-School night, and to my knowledge she’d only set foot on campus for registration. Gopal, I thought.
“Excuse me,” Sonia said, passing through the doorway at the same time as Aaron, who left with a sympathetic smile. Instantly, I felt like I always did when I saw Sonia—horribly underdressed. She wore a silk blouse and pencil skirt, smart three-inch heels. She held a buttery leather briefcase by its handle. Her gaze swept over my room—dusty binders, stacks of memos that should have been tossed a month ago, Post-it notes affixed to half the surfaces—before coming to rest on me. I had the feeling that what I’d seen of her at The Palms had only been a polite veneer, but that pretense was gone now.
Sonia dropped her briefcase onto the chair Aaron had vacated. “You accused my daughter of spreading rumors on Twitter?”
I stepped behind her to shut the door. In the lobby, I caught Jenn’s raised eyebrows. “Did Mr. Gopal call you?”
“No, Liz, my daughter called me. In tears. Apparently she was called into the assistant principal’s office for cyberbullying. I was on my way to the city, but I had to cancel my appointments and drive all the way back.” This, clearly, was what she found most upsetting about the entire situation.
I stared at her. “I never used the word bullying, but yes, I do believe she knows something about what happened. It concerns our students, so that’s why the assistant principal is involved.”
“Our students?” Sonia repeated. “We’re talking about our daughters. This could have been kept between you and me, and we could have chatted it out over coffee.”
I cleared my throat. “Actually, it doesn’t involve you and me. It mainly involves Danielle. Did you see the comments on that Twitter account?”
Sonia shook her head. “I only just learned about this. But Kelsey told me there were some horrible comments. I’m very sorry about that. I don’t know why you would think Kelsey had something to do with this, though.”
I had to plant my hands firmly on my desk to steady myself. “She mocked Danielle. That night, in front of the other kids in their group. She was humiliated. I found her crying in the bathroom.”
“I’m sure Kelsey didn’t mean anything by it. After all the things she’s been through...”
I waited, but she dropped the thought.
“Try to see this from my daughter’s perspective, Liz. If everyone thinks her best friend is gay...”
My throat felt tight, as though I were in the throes of an allergy attack.
There was an incredible pettiness to her, I saw now, a lack of empathy, a myopic shortsightedness. The world began and ended with Kelsey. It was a fitting attitude for The Palms; maybe it was written into a homeowner’s manual somewhere, like a commandment: Thou shalt look out for thyself first.
That’s not the worst of it, I wanted to tell her. That’s only the beginning of what your daughter has done to my family.
I remembered what Sonia had said about the other students at Ashbury. She would never be convinced that her daughter had been in the wrong. She would always be the victim. I gave her the fake smile I’d perfected at The Palms, the smile-through-it-all, the smile down my nose. “Maybe you’re right, Sonia. Maybe my daughter just has too many issues. It’s probably best that they don’t see each other anymore. I wouldn’t want Danielle to be a bad influence on her.”
Sonia was quiet. Her posture had gone rigid, her face red.
I stood again and moved around the desk, opening the door for her. “I’ll be sure to let Danielle know,” I told her. And then in a voice loud enough to attract Jenn’s attention on the other side of the foyer, I added, “Thank you so much for coming in, Sonia.”
I thought I detected a slight flinch, a small crack in the armor that was Sonia Jorgensen before she turned and walked toward the outside door, the points of her heels smacking against the tile.
PHIL
After Thanksgiving, Kelsey was everywhere—hitting balls on the tennis court early in the morning, her short white skirt billowing up to the tops of her thighs. She was driving herself to school now, so sometimes she skipped first period to have breakfast in the clubhouse. If she could touch me, she did—her leg grazing mine, her arm brushing against me. She straightened my collar, fixed my hair. Once, she bent down to tie my shoe.
Close-up, there was something repulsive about Kelsey Jorgensen. It was only at a safe remove—when she was stripping in my backyard, or flouncing past my window—that she was exciting.
I’d begun to dream about her, too. When Liz rolled over in bed, I woke in a cold sweat, sure it was Kelsey next to me. If the house made a creaking noise, I thought it was Kelsey coming up the stairs. It helped if I took a sleeping pill, bringing myself to a numb state, almost incapable of dreams. But I would wake up with a memory of her lips on mine, my fist around a clump of her hair. I punished myself by throwing on jogging clothes and running fierce early-morning laps on the walking trail. As if I thought I could sweat her out.
I widened my search for attorneys—Palo Alto, San Jose, Santa Rosa. One of the lawyers I met was an ethics professor at Stanford. He seemed almost delighted by my problem; mine would probably be a case study for a future course. He steepled his fingers in front of his face, delivering a summation. “So it’s a clear case of obsession, then. The subject being a minor and the object being a—well—virile adult male. It’s an interesting predicament to be sure. And you’ve never so much as touched her, never done anything that could be construed...?”
I shook my head, forcing down the memory of grabbing her by the arms in the hallway outside Danielle’s bedroom, not mentioning the touch of her lips on mine in my office. I’d told him about her appearance in the backyard over Thanksgiving, leaving out the fact that I hadn’t wanted to look away. I cleared my throat, driving out the image. “My concern is that if I come forward, everything I say can be interpreted another way. Kelsey’s smart. She’s—calculating. She knows how to work things to her advantage.”
He smiled. “Well, that is the worry, isn’t it?” When he didn’t call after two weeks, I knew he wouldn’t take the case.
I met with two other attorneys and one, Jacob Fitch, accepted me on a two-thousand-dollar retainer. Every time we spoke, I imagined him calculating the minutes in quarter-of-an-hour increments—fifty dollars here, a hundred dollars there. I sent him all my files, downloading everything onto a flash drive and delivering it in person to his office in Moraga. Yet I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t just a huge sleazeball. He didn’t seem to believe in my innocence—but then, I didn’t, either, not since the moment Kelsey had kissed me inside my office. He replayed our conversations with a smile on his lips and a sort of delighted twinkle in his eye.
“What do you want to do with this?” he asked me in the beginning. “Press charges of your own? File a restraining order?”
“I just want it to go away,” I told him.
He nodded. He alluded to a previous career in corporate law; he knew what a scandal like this could do. When he said out-of-court settlement and gag order, I heard hush money and guilty, guilty, guilty.
Jacob advised me to avoid her, then—to stop gathering evidence, to stop giving her opportunities. But I found it was easier to play along, to let her sit in my office one afternoon rather than be ambushed by her the next. I could control the situation that way.
In early December, she told me about Winter Formal. I’d already heard about it at home from Danielle, and I’d voiced a concern that Liz had ignored. Once the decision had been made without me, the rest was only detail. All that was required of me was to open my wallet.
“Here’s my dress,” Kelsey said, showing me a picture on her phone. It was red, emblazoned with thousands of tiny sequins and skintight, but of course, it was chaste compared to what I’d seen of her.
“Do you have a date for
the dance?” I asked, trying not to let too much hope into my voice.
She had to stand to slide her phone into the pocket of her jeans, revealing a flat stomach still tanned from the summer, the tiny elliptical sphere of her navel. “Are you volunteering?”
“Not at all.”
“Really? It would be fun. A limo ride, a fancy dinner, slow dancing. We could get a hotel room at the end of the night.”
I shook my head. What she was describing was a high school boy’s dream, an all-American experience. Why was she here, when she could have been hanging out with a boyfriend after school, making out on her bed and pretending to complete math homework? “So you don’t have a date? Why not?”
She rolled her eyes. “With one of the idiots at my school?”
“They can’t all be idiots.”
“Yes, they can.”
“Isn’t there a—I don’t know—captain of the football team or a class president or just some cool guy with a guitar?”
She leaned forward. For once she didn’t look sexy, just angry. “They’re just boys. They haven’t been anywhere and they don’t know anything. And the sex?” She let the question dangle in the air before answering it. “Boring.”
I dodged the bait. “But eventually, that’s what you’ll want. Isn’t it? Those guys will grow up. They’ll mature. I was the same way in high school.”
She didn’t answer.
“I mean, you’ll go off to college—”
“Stop it,” she said.
“No, really. You’re an attractive girl. Some guy is going to spot you walking across campus, and before you know it—”
“I said stop. I’m not going to college. I’m not interested in any college boys.”
“Not now, maybe.”
She stood up. “What don’t you get? I practically throw myself at you.”
Not practically. “But seriously, Kelsey, long-term. This is just a—”
“Don’t you tell me this is a phase.” Her voice was dangerously shrill.
I glanced at my closed door.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “After everything I’ve done for you. In the end, you’re still picking that bitch over me.”
The Drowning Girls Page 19