My parents exchanged another look. I could tell they didn’t believe me. It didn’t occur to me until later, much later, that they were worried I was in shock—and that they were probably right.
I thought the press would get tired of sitting outside my house for hours on end. I was wrong. Not only did they not leave, but their ranks seemed to swell. More vans pulled up, and more reporters and photographers climbed out, carrying heavy-looking cameras and clutching paper cups of coffee. Some of the reporters stood off to one side, holding microphones and speaking directly into the camera. I didn’t have to wonder what they were saying—all I had to do was turn on the television, and I could hear them updating the viewers on what they knew of the story. There were also reporters stationed at Andrews Prep, interviewing students and even a few parents. Most of those interviewed expressed concern; very serious allegations seemed to be the favorite sound bite. However, a few of my students did go on camera to defend me.
“There’s no way Ms. Parker would ever do something like that,” Amanda Franklin said. Amanda was a painfully shy sophomore—she was overweight and had terrible acne—and the bravery it must have taken for her to speak out on live television reduced me to tears for the first time that day.
But despite the scattering of support here and there, I had, overnight it seemed, turned into the town harlot.
“When it comes to these sorts of allegations, I believe a person is guilty until proven innocent,” one of the interviewed fathers said, his jaw tight and his eyes flashing with anger.
I recognized him. It was Xander Lawrence’s father. I’d had Xander in class last year. When he came down with mono, I’d stopped off at the Lawrences’ house to drop off the books we were reading in class so that Xander wouldn’t fall too far behind. Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence had seemed genuinely grateful at the time, thanking me over and over again.
“I’m horrified,” a mother I didn’t recognize said from behind the wheel of her Lexus SUV. The reporter was interviewing her right in the middle of the car line. “We trust the school to protect our children, and then we find out a child molester is teaching them.”
Child molester. The ugly words hit me like a gut punch.
“It will all blow over,” Dad said soothingly. He had taken the day off from work. He probably had no choice, I thought. The press would just camp out in his waiting room, scaring away all of his patients.
“You think so?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “The boy’s parents said they had no plans to press charges, right? Not,” he hurried to add, “that there are any grounds for the allegations in the first place.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. It’s my word against Matt Forrester’s,” I said bitterly. “And you heard that father. I’m guilty until proven innocent.”
“I can’t believe that after the ten years you’ve worked there, that school wouldn’t back you up,” Mom said hotly.
I shrugged. “I guess I see their point. What if it was true? Even if they couldn’t prove it, wouldn’t it be irresponsible of them to let me loose around kids again?”
Just saying this out loud made me shudder. My dad saw and hurriedly refilled my coffee cup.
“No,” he said firmly. “What’s irresponsible is ruining someone’s life when there isn’t a shred of evidence against that person.”
“Well…” Mom said. “Lucy’s life isn’t exactly ruined.”
“No, of course it isn’t,” Dad said quickly.
“I mean, thirty-four million dollars,” Mom said. “That much money could buy a lot of happiness. Think of what she could do with that much money.” My mom suddenly inhaled sharply and turned to face me, her eyes gleaming almost maniacally. “Lucy!”
“What?” I asked, startled.
“You could build a shelter! A no-kill shelter! The Humane Society doesn’t have the funds to keep all of the stray dogs and cats indefinitely. But you could!” she announced triumphantly.
I stared back at my mother, utterly speechless. What could I say? Her dream of a no-kill shelter was a noble one. And of course I wanted to use this money to do something meaningful. But building an animal shelter—that was my mother’s dream, not mine. And as much as I didn’t want to disappoint her, I also wasn’t ready to commit to such a huge project. My life had been turned so upside down, I was just barely managing to keep on top of brushing my teeth. My dad seemed to sense what I was feeling, for he quickly stepped in to save me.
“Kay,” he said gently. “This is Lucy’s money. We can’t pressure her on how she should use it. She’s under enough stress as it is.” He nodded in the direction of my street, where the unrelenting press was clearly audible.
“But Lucy loves animals,” Mom protested.
“Of course I do. And of course I’ll donate some of the money to your rescue organizations,” I said quickly, hoping to mollify her. “But I haven’t thought through…I just…I don’t know what I want to do yet.” Suddenly I felt incredibly tired and overwhelmed. It seemed to take all of my energy to keep my head up. I sat down heavily on the sofa and pressed one hand to my forehead.
“Sweetheart, are you all right?” Mom asked. She rubbed circles on my back, the way she used to when I was a child.
“It’s a lot to take in,” I said faintly.
“You should talk to a financial adviser,” Dad suggested. “Someone who can keep the money safe for you until you decide what you want to do with it.”
“I have an appointment with a financial consultant next week.” I looked at my dad. “Mel O’Donnell recommended him. I hope you don’t mind that I called Mel without speaking to you about it first.”
“Of course not. It’s exactly whom I would have asked,” Dad said approvingly. “I shouldn’t have worried. You’ve always been a sensible girl. Now if it was Emma…” He looked at my mother.
“Oh, dear. Emma.” Mom shook her head. “Wait until she hears about this. She’ll be after you to fund the Wedding of the Year. I wouldn’t be surprised if she tries to book Madonna to play at her reception.”
I laughed. That would be just like Emma.
“I should pay for her wedding, though,” I said.
“Absolutely not,” Dad said, so sharply that Mom and I both looked at him in surprise.
“Why not?” I asked.
“We’re her parents. We’ll pay for her wedding,” Dad said stubbornly. “I don’t want you wasting your money.”
“Dad, it’s a lot of money. One wedding isn’t going to make much of a dent in it.”
“No. I want you to save that money for something important. Something meaningful,” he said.
I could tell from my mom’s wistful expression that she was still envisioning a state-of-the-art animal shelter with my name blazoned across the front.
“You’ve been given a rare opportunity, sweetheart,” Dad continued, his brown eyes intent on mine. “The chance to make your life whatever you want it to be. Please don’t squander it.”
“Okay, Dad,” I said. “I won’t squander it. I promise.”
My dad smiled at me. Relief transformed his face, making him look years younger. I tried to remember when his hair had gone from brown with touches of gray to gray with touches of brown. I didn’t know why it was so important to him to pay for Emma’s wedding—or, perhaps, why it was so important to him that I didn’t pay for it. But it started to dawn on me that this money was going to complicate every area of my life.
After my parents finally left, I started to prowl around the house, feeling caged. I couldn’t go out, not with the press surging around. And I couldn’t use my phone. When the reporters weren’t calling, tying up the line, random strangers were getting through and leaving messages on my answering machine. Some called to request investment money. They had an invention that would make us both rich and just needed the seed money to get started, or they knew of some land for sale in Texas that was guaranteed to be oil-rich. Others had sad stories of sick children and unpaid hospital bills. One woman tal
ked at length about her little girl who was on the transplant list for a new heart, until she broke down sobbing in the middle of her message. I wrote down her name and telephone number and decided that when I met Peter Graham, I’d ask him the best way to go about helping some of these people. Maybe he would know how to sort those who were in real need from the shysters.
More disturbing were the threatening messages I received.
“They should lock people like you up and throw away the key,” one intoxicated woman slurred over my answering machine.
And then there was the creepy man whose low voice caused the hair to rise on the back of my neck: “I heard you like little boys, you filthy little slut. Just you wait, you’ll get what’s coming to you.”
After that, I unplugged the phone.
Luckily, no one had yet tracked down my cell-phone number. Probably because almost no one had it; unlike my cell-phone-addicted students, who practically lived with their phones pressed to their ears, I kept mine only for emergencies. The night the story broke, I used it to call Maisie.
“Hey,” I said when she answered the phone. “So what’s new with you?”
I expected her to laugh. Instead, she said, her voice strained, “Lucy. Are you okay? What the hell is going on?”
“A little of this, a little of that,” I said, still trying to keep up the joke, hoping she’d play along. When she didn’t say anything, I said, “Maisie?”
“I’m here. I just—Christ, Lucy, I don’t know what to say. This is all just so…”
“Surreal,” I supplied.
“Yeah. Surreal. Did you know reporters have been calling my house?”
Guilt squeezed my heart. While I knew I couldn’t control what the reporters did, and it was bad enough that they were permanently camped out in front of my house, it was even worse to know that they were harassing my friends. “I’m so sorry about that,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I’m sure it’ll die down. But the thing I don’t understand is…why, Lucy? Why did you do it?”
“What? I thought—” I stopped and swallowed. My throat was suddenly painfully dry, as though I’d swallowed a fistful of sand. I took a sip of water and began again. “I thought you said you didn’t believe Matt Forrester’s accusations.”
“I don’t!” Maisie said, her voice sharp and spiked with…what? Indignation? Outrage? Anger? And if it was anger, then whom was she angry with? Matt Forrester—or me?
But then she continued. “I meant, why didn’t you tell me you won the lottery?”
“Oh…that. I don’t know, exactly,” I said. It sounded feeble to me. And apparently to her as well.
“I thought you trusted me,” Maisie said flatly.
“Of course I trust you! God, Maisie, you know that,” I said. Color flared hot in my cheeks, and I shifted uncomfortably on my seat. Harper Lee, sitting next to me, gave a grunt of displeasure at being disturbed. She shifted her round, sleek body so that she was again slumped against my hip and let out a deep, martyrlike sigh.
“Then why didn’t you tell me? I’m assuming that’s where you went last week on your mysterious out-of-town trip.”
“I had to go to Tallahassee to claim the money,” I said.
“And that was, what? Five days ago? How many times have we talked since then? And you didn’t think of maybe throwing out the news that you’d won ninety million freaking dollars?”
“Eighty-seven million dollars,” I said automatically. “And it was only thirty-four point four after taxes and my opting for a one-time payout.”
“Oh, only thirty-four point four,” Maisie said sarcastically.
“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’ve been in—” I didn’t want to say shock. It sounded so dramatic, as though I’d suddenly turned into a Victorian-era woman taking to my bed with the vapors. “I’ve just been trying to absorb it all. I wasn’t purposely keeping it from you. I just wasn’t ready to talk about it.”
“Right,” Maisie said. Her voice was flat again. It made her sound cold and distant, like a different person from the warm, funny friend I’d known all these years. “Or maybe you were just worried that I was going to hit you up for some money.”
“What?” I said blankly. “Of course I didn’t think…Maisie, you’re being—”
“You wouldn’t have even known to buy a lottery ticket if I hadn’t told you about it,” Maisie burst out. And now her voice was so full of self-righteous fury that I could feel a small flame of anger suddenly lighting within me.
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.
“It has everything to do with everything,” Maisie said, spitting out the words as though they tasted bitter in her mouth. “It should have been me!” She wasn’t yelling, but her voice was much higher than usual and edged with steel. “I should have been the one to win that money!”
“What are you saying?” I asked quietly. “You think you deserve it more than I do?”
“Well, don’t I? After everything that Joe and I went through to get the twins? And that on top of my student loans! We’re up to our eyeballs in debt. We can’t even afford to hire a babysitter so we can go out to dinner on a Saturday night,” Maisie fumed. “Do you know how much it’s going to cost to put two boys through college? Not to mention the cost of private school, since the public schools around here are all crap, as you well know. We needed that money more! And, yes, I do think we deserved it more!”
After she finished, we were both silent for a moment. I listened to her breath, ragged and angry, and tried to swallow back my own mounting fury. I knew Maisie wasn’t being rational, that she couldn’t really believe that I’d won the lottery just to piss her off. It wasn’t Maisie saying these things—it was just an inner demon, summoned up by fear and stress and anxiety, that had broken loose inside her and temporarily taken over her body.
But at the same time, I was the one who had the press camped outside my house beyond the police barricade. Weirdos were leaving threatening messages on my answering machine, and I was suddenly reviled by everyone in town. Surely my need to have my best friend be understanding and supportive was greater than her need to shout at me. And knowing this, the anger that had flickered inside me suddenly flared up, burning hot.
“It’s not my fault you’re having money problems,” I said, and in my anger my voice rose to a near shout. “It’s not my fault you had a hard time getting pregnant. My winning the lottery wasn’t some sort of cosmic fuck-you aimed right at you, Maisie. So stop being so self-centered!”
That was when Maisie hung up on me. I stared down at my cell phone, which was flashing the message CALL ENDED.
“Damn,” I said, dropping the phone onto the coffee table. And then I closed my eyes, pressed my fingers against the lids, and wondered when—if—my life would ever return to normal.
Seven
ELLIOTT SHOWED UP THE NEXT DAY. SOMEHOW HE man aged to talk his way past the police—his driver’s license still had our shared address on it, I realized—and was able to walk right up to my front door and ring the doorbell while the press grouped back on the sidewalk and shouted questions at him. I peered out the window, and then, seeing who it was, I cracked the door open just as far as the security chain would allow.
“What do you want?” I hissed.
“Lucy! Thank God! Let me in.” Elliott peered at me through the crack, his long, narrow face anxious.
“I don’t want to see you.”
“Lucy…please. I need to talk to you.”
“I’ve already said everything I have to say to you. Unless you want a few choice words on what exactly I think of you. You know, words like rat bastard piece of shit and cheating ball of pus. You get the general idea.”
“Look, I’m sorry. It was a huge mistake. Huge. I think I…I must have panicked about how serious we were getting, what with moving in together and everything,” Elliott said.
The one good thing about the tidal waves of fury that kept lapping over me was that I was pretty s
ure it meant I wasn’t in shock anymore. I closed the door, fumbled with the chain, and then threw the door open, ready to expend some of that fury at my asshole of an ex-boyfriend. In my blind rage, I’d somehow momentarily forgotten that the press was camped out in front of my house and that I looked like hell. I’d managed a shower that day, but I was wearing my oldest and rattiest sweats and had my hair scraped back in the ponytail favored by depressives everywhere. The reporters pounced.
“Lucy, do you have a comment?”
“Lucy, would you like a chance to tell your side of the story?”
“What does your boyfriend think about the allegations against you?”
They roared out their questions and pointed their cameras at me. I snaked one arm out, grabbed Elliott by the wrist, dragged him into the house, and slammed the door shut behind him. And then I turned on my ex-boyfriend, even angrier at him than before, if that were possible. While it wasn’t exactly his fault that I’d let my guard down and allowed the press to get me on camera, he hadn’t helped matters either.
“Wow. This is insane,” Elliott said, running a hand nervously through his hair. “How long have they been out there for?”
“Two days.”
“Do you need anything? Or do you want me to go out there and tell them to go away?” Elliott asked.
I laughed without humor. “It doesn’t work. My dad tried that yesterday.”
“And this is all because of what that student said about you?”
“Yes. Well, that and my winning the lottery.” I folded my arms over my chest and stared coldly at Elliott. “That is why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“No! Of course not. I just wanted to check on you,” Elliott insisted.
“Mission accomplished. Now you can leave,” I said, turning toward the door.
“Wait. That’s not all. I also wanted to talk to you,” Elliott said. He reached out, presumably to touch my arm, but the look I gave him made him think twice about it. His hand dropped limply to his side.
“I don’t have anything to say. It’s done. It’s over. We’re over. There’s no point in discussing the details,” I said.
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