by Emily Layden
Four weeks ago, the Hartford Courant broke a story about this place that we call home: A former student named Karen Mirro alleges that she was raped by an Atwater faculty member and that she furthermore faced retaliation for reporting the assault. Since then, Karen’s junior-year headshot has hung in the Heron room, tacked at the center of a corkboard we use for planning. It wasn’t hard to find: she lives in the yearbooks, where we’ll all live one day, frozen in time for future generations. In 1995, she had long, curly, honey-blond hair. She played soccer. She was a member of Spanish Honor Society and Key Club.
For a little while, we thought we could solve the mystery of Karen Mirro and whatever happened in the fall of her senior year. But the more we talked, the more we realized that we didn’t just want to know the specifics of Karen’s story. We wanted to know what would happen if it were one of us, in 2015. Would we tell? How would the school react? Who would they protect?
We’d been prepared to write a letter saying that—despite countless interviews and hours of research—we hadn’t answered those questions. We’d been prepared to say: this is the landscape, but our concerns are still hypotheticals; the best we can do is lay them onto one another and make an educated guess. But then we were told not to publish this issue. And that makes us wonder whether we understand more than we originally thought.
She reads it three more times, until she can recite it from memory. She recognizes the words as her own. She knows that she wrote them last night, during study hall, in a blind rage, when she couldn’t focus on her actual homework because she was too angry with Mrs. Brodie. Even now, she marvels at her own restraint, the rhythm at the end of the last graph, the gut punch in the kicker. Louisa has always loved a good kicker.
What’s funny, too, is that this piece isn’t even really how she feels. The self-righteousness of it almost makes her laugh, wildly, a kind of horrified outburst. If she was feeling self-righteous about anything last night—which she was—it was about Mrs. Brodie’s infringing on their free speech. She spent a half hour in the middle of writing that letter googling the First Amendment rights of student newspapers, spiraling deep into the bowels of legal journals whose language was so dull as to be rendered incomprehensible. The way in, she realized, was not through vague and lofty legalese but rather a tug on the heartstrings: as they’d learned in researching this issue, one in three women would experience some kind of sexual violence in their lifetimes. Shouldn’t Atwater, protector and defender and supporter of women, want its student body to know about this? Shouldn’t they want to educate a generation that could fix the epidemic?
That’s what she wanted the letter to communicate. And then somebody—not her, she was sure of it now—pulled the document from its file in the Heron shared drive, uploaded it into InCopy, finished the layout, loaded the whole thing into a PDF, and distributed it to the entire school.
She does not respond to any of the texts that pile up on her phone, the little red icon ticking ever upward: twelve unread messages, then thirteen, fourteen, group chats firing without her. Instead, she climbs out of bed, dressing quickly: tapered sweatpants, a T-shirt, a navy Atwater half-zip, the school crest in bright white curlicues above her right breast. It occurs to her that it’s probably cold out, on this late October morning, and wraps a chunky, cable-knit scarf in two loops around her neck. She grabs her phone and darts out.
She keeps her head down as she crosses the Bowl, too unprepared for the questions she knows will come: Did you see it? Did you do this? She has never broken a single Atwater rule—not one that counts, at least—but she knows that the truth is not enough in this case. She makes it all the way downstairs—through the side door of Schoolhouse, down the back stairs, past the sagging couches and the portraits of distinguished alumnae and the roaring lion, through the alcove beneath the fluttering birds and into the Heron room.
For some reason, Louisa is surprised to find it empty. She half expected—she realizes now, embarrassed, ridiculously—to find the culprit sitting there, at Mia’s desk, the completed file downloaded on the screen in front of her. But instead the room is empty, and it smells musty and like cold cement and the only lights are those that flicker from the computers and the scanner and the printer and the graying dawn that seeps through the ground-level window.
For two years, Louisa has always found her answers in this room. When she didn’t have any friends in her first few weeks at school, she joined the Heron. Feeling far away from her parents, her relationship with her own mother strained by miles and misunderstanding, she learned to rely on Ms. Doyle. Knowing that she lacked leadership skills and that she would need them for her college applications (and for life, after that), she lobbied to become coeditor, slowly taking on more and more responsibility for the paper during her sophomore year, nurturing her friendship with Anjali so that she, too, would advocate for Louisa’s promotion.
Maybe it’s for these reasons—in combination with some deep-seated belief in her journalist’s ability to sleuth it out—that she begins to tear apart the room. She rifles through the stacks of pages they’d accumulated in research—photocopies of yearbook entries, printouts of the Courant story, ripped sheets of loose-leaf scribbled with random notes, saved and set aside just in case. She reads and rereads again the notes on the whiteboards, looking for any new additions or changes to their outline. She logs in to one of the desktops they keep for layout, searching wildly for digital footprints.
She can see that the file was last saved at 11:32 last night, but she has no way of knowing who did so. (Surely there is a way, but Louisa—a writer who wants to major in English, whose ability to fix a glitch on her iPhone extends to turning it off and on again—has zero computer skills beyond those required for daily life.) And anyway, wouldn’t the culprit have been savvy enough to log in under someone else’s name?
What if it was her name? How would she prove that it wasn’t her?
* * *
It would be a vast overstatement to say that even one-half of Atwater’s students read the Heron. The staff does its best, issue in and issue out, to promote their work, making announcements at school meetings and distributing new issues far and wide, leaving piles of them in every dorm common room and scattered on the tables in the dining hall and in Avery and in the lounges in Trask. They post flyers in the bathroom stalls—PICK UP YOUR COPY OF THE HERON—and locker room mirrors and on every single bulletin board they can find. But the only people who read it seriously—besides the devoted alumnae in the Heron Facebook group, where Mia always posts the PDF—are teachers and friends of the staff and maybe some weird loner outsiders like Leah Stern and Gretchen Myers.
All along, it turns out, the solution was to envelop the paper in scandal.
Breakfast is dominated by the leak. Girls huddle in pairs and threesomes around the dining hall, reading and rereading. The first two classes of the day are usurped entirely by the issue, which everyone—thanks to Louisa’s letter—knows was not supposed to be published. There is a renewed run on the yearbook archives in the library during morning break, this time not for the chance to size up Karen Mirro herself—that happened after the Courant article; they all know her blond curls and soft, round face—but to find and appraise the women whose letters are included in Hitomi’s Opinion section (“LET KAREN MIRRO TELL HER STORY,” ALUMS SAY). They want to know what kinds of bodies these reasonable-sounding voices inhabited, as if a person’s high school headshot could cement or undermine their authority. Stephanie Vandenburg, who wrote that “Karen has a right to finally be heard,” was the prettiest. Amy Fishkin, who said “Atwater’s commitment is first and foremost to the safety and well-being of its students,” had short, dark hair, and looked thirty in 1995. Heather Hawkins—“the school has a duty to operate with transparency”—wore overalls.
The faculty are told to ignore it, but compliance with this mandate depends on the individual. The young teachers—the ones who want to be cool, who want to be liked, like Ms. Ryan and Ms. Daniels a
nd Ms. Trujillo—all let their students run away with their gossip.
In Spanish I, Ms. Trujillo tries to engage with her students: “Are you worried about sexual assault?” she asks.
She’s met with shrugs and raised eyebrows until Tessa DeGroff says, “Probably eventually we will be, just like we’ll be worried about accidentally getting pregnant and cervical cancer,” after which Ms. Trujillo leaves the girls to themselves.
* * *
But Louisa Manning doesn’t know any of this, because she hides in the Health Center under the guise of a migraine through third period. Normally Louisa is not one of those students who exploits the weary kindness of the nursing staff, but she figures that if there is any day to engage in some light manipulation, the day she has been framed for insubordination against the Head of School is one. Finally, during lunch, she makes her way back to her room, where she plans to get changed and then find Ms. Doyle and try to explain.
Her room, though, is already occupied.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Anjali bolts up from where she’s been lying, legs outstretched and wrapped at the ankles, on Louisa’s half-made bed.
“Health Center,” Louisa grunts.
“Seriously?”
Louisa shrugs. Anjali waits.
“So?”
Finally the orb that has sat lodged in Louisa’s throat bursts. She has always been a silent, steady crier—a weeper rather than a sobber—but the release of the tears that stream down her cheek is no less profound. She feels like she can breathe again, like the fact of her suspicions confirmed—that it certainly looked like she did it, even if she didn’t—is so much better than the wondering.
“I mean, you can’t cry about it!”
“I didn’t fucking do it,” Louisa says, quietly.
Anjali blinks. “What?”
“I didn’t do it. I know it looks like I did it because you and I are the most likely suspects and that’s my editor’s letter in there, but I didn’t do it! I wrote the letter after our meeting with Mrs. Brodie when I was angry just as, like, I don’t know—a way of processing!”
“Dude. I know you didn’t do it. Mia did. She already turned herself in. Ms. Doyle has been looking for us—she told me to come find you.”
Snot channels into the groove above Louisa’s lip. “Mia?”
Anjali leans back. “I know, man.”
“I just—I never got the impression that she cared all that much about the Heron.”
“Me neither. But, the more I think about it, the more it sorta makes sense—she’s a little edgy, you know? And she’s butted heads with Admin before over stuff she does with Flawless.” ***Flawless—with three asterisks, just like the Beyoncé song—is Atwater’s feminist club. “She can be a bit of a crusader. Plus, I just don’t know who else would be competent enough in layout to get it done that quickly.”
“Huh.” Louisa nods, thinking it over. Something doesn’t fit for her. “So … is she kicked out?”
“Of school? No, no way. I mean, I don’t know, but they won’t kick her out for this. It’ll just make everything worse, you know? But she’s off the Heron, so that sucks. We’ll have to find someone else who can learn InDesign in, like, four weeks.”
Louisa nods again. Anjali has had a jump start on processing this revelation, but for Louisa it still feels like whiplash. “When does Ms. Doyle want to see us?”
“ASAP.”
“Okay. Um, give me a minute? I’ll be right back.”
“Sure,” Anjali says, returning to her phone.
Mia’s room is downstairs and down the hall, at the end of the second floor in a long and narrow single that requires all the furniture to be stacked on end, her bed wedged in the back corner, her desk at the foot of her bed, her dresser in the front of the room next to the door. Mia is exactly where Louisa expected to find her, seated at her desk, one foot on her chair with her knee tucked beneath her chin, scrolling Reddit.
“Hey,” Louisa announces her arrival.
Mia turns in her chair. “Oh, hey.”
Louisa leans against the doorframe, not clear whether she’s invited in, unsure if she even wants to stay.
“I just…” She didn’t have a plan. “Why did you do it?”
Mia cocks a head to one side, so that her long dark hair falls from its place behind her ear. “I don’t get a thank-you?”
“Mia, you put my letter in there. Everyone on staff knew I wrote that, so everyone thought I did it.”
Mia’s jaw drops, her eyes widen. She hangs her head and massages her scalp, then pushes her mess of modelesque straight hair back away from her forehead. “You didn’t do it.”
“What?”
“I only told Ms. Doyle I did it.”
Suddenly it clicks for Louisa, who drops her shoulders, curving her vertebrae into the jamb. “You thought I did.”
“Yeah.”
“Why would you do that for me?”
Mia shrugs. “I just figured the paper needed someone with enough balls to send an email from an account named ‘Brodie Hates the First Amendment.’”
Louisa laughs in spite of herself, in spite of the moment.
“Plus, the paper doesn’t really matter to me all that much. No offense or anything.”
“Okay, but—you shouldn’t get in trouble for something you didn’t do. We’ll tell Ms. Doyle it wasn’t either one of us.”
Mia laughs, and Louisa has the embarrassed feeling of not getting the joke.
“Right now, I’m probably just looking at getting kicked off the paper. They don’t want to make a bigger deal out of this than they have to. But if I say I lied to cover for someone else? You know how this place feels about honesty.” Mia rolls her eyes as she says it, as though the truth is such an overrated thing. “I could actually get in real trouble. And then Linda Paulsen would launch a full investigation of the paper. It’s easier this way. Plus, like I said: you want this person on your staff, whoever she is.”
When Louisa was younger—right at the cusp of old-enough-to-know-better—she begged for a little sister. When asked what she wanted for Christmas and birthdays or for gifts held aloft as bribes for various elementary accomplishments (completing a season of rec soccer in Shadyside, for entering and winning the school science fair, for doing her first and only piano recital), Louisa always, always said: a baby sister. She watched her parents have conversations in low voices at the kitchen island; she saw how they exchanged glances in the front seat of the car. She knew that although her family was a unit of three, that her parents, too, were a unit, separate from her. It was crushingly lonely.
She’s never asked her mother why they stopped at one kid; she has no idea if there were miscarriages or IVF or even if her pregnancy with Louisa was notable in any way. She knows now, at sixteen-almost-seventeen, that people have reasons. But she never quite outran the desire at the core of the ask: someone to have a private world with; someone to tell her secrets to.
“Who do you think it was?” Louisa asks.
Mia tilts her chin up, cradling it in an open hand, picking absentmindedly at a tiny scab of a zit near the back of her jaw. “No clue,” she says, finally.
The Heron staff is too small to be cliquey, but it’s a random enough assortment of girls that their relationships for the most part exist only in their basement lair. For two years, Louisa has thought of Mia Tavoletti as not serious enough for her, a little too much trouble.
Maybe she was wrong, she thinks now, although she knows it’s too late to matter. Maybe they could have been friends.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: Oct 25, 2015, 10:38 P.M.
Subject: Call for Alumnae Letters
Dear Ms. Doyle,
I do not expect you to remember me: I was a student in your eleventh-grade American Literature class in 1994–95, but not a very good one (at least per Atwater’s standards). I’m happy to report that I pulled it together a bit at Skidmore, and
then went on to get my MSW at NYU. I live in the Hudson Valley now, where I work as a school counselor at a small independent day school. I have a daughter, Penelope, who just turned three.
I’m reaching out because I am aware that you are the faculty adviser for the Heron, and it came to my attention just recently that your students are seeking alumnae input for an upcoming feature on Karen Mirro. I hope that I’m not too late, as I would very much like to contribute.
Karen was a close friend of mine: We were both artists, and became good friends our sophomore year when we worked on set design for the musical. We roomed together as juniors, and lived in adjacent singles in Whitney for the first semester of our senior year. Although we had common interests, I suspect we were really drawn to one another because of our shared apathy for academic achievement.
Shortly after returning to campus for the start of our senior year, Karen told me that she was dating an older man. She said that she could not tell me who because he was married. I never questioned the authenticity of her story, and I am embarrassed to admit that I never cautioned her against such a relationship, either. I was seventeen (Karen had turned eighteen that August), and it was thrilling to me.
Karen often left Whitney after lights-out to rendezvous with this man. One morning over breakfast in early November, she told me that things had gotten “a little weird” the night before. I asked her to elaborate, but for the first time she wasn’t as willing to give me all the salacious details. I remember her shrugging, speaking in fragments, and tugging the cuffs of her sweatshirt down over her knuckles. I patted her on the shoulder and said—and the memory of this has only sharpened, my own inadequacy seared into my brain—“he probably had a fight with his wife.” Three weeks later, she got caught smoking in the woods with Heather Hawkins, who’d never so much as cheated on a vocabulary quiz. You know how the rest of the story goes.