The Swallows

by Lisa Lutz

“What’s our play here?” Mick said.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” I said.

  All of the victims retreated to the showers.

  Adam looked up from his phone. “Let’s get some yogurt up here,” he said to no one in particular. Although a few boys did begin running down the hall.

  “Thanks, Ford,” said Mick. “We’ve got it from here.”

  There’s nothing quite like being summarily dismissed by a student. I left. What was I supposed to do, wash their dicks for them?

  I was back in my apartment maybe five minutes when Witt showed up.

  “Was that screaming or celebrating?” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s over now.”

  Witt delivered a large envelope.

  “My father asked me to return this to you.”

  I looked inside. It was my manuscript, with comments scribbled in the margins. I glanced at the first note.

  Physical description a bit pat, no?

  I’d asked Leonard Witt for his thoughts; I thought he might send me an encouraging email, maybe a blurb, not a marked-up manuscript, like I was back in an MFA program.

  “Notes from the great Len Wilde,” I said. “How thoughtful.”

  “Those are my notes,” Witt said, cold and smug.

  I couldn’t figure out why she was looking at me like I’d just committed a felony or installed a hidden camera in her room.

  “You read it?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you think?” I stupidly asked.

  “Your story bears some uncanny similarities to Stonebridge.”

  “All writers are thieves of reality. You know that.”

  “I don’t care that you can’t come up with a plot on your own. Okay, I care a little. But my main gripe is that the boys trusted you enough to tell you what was going on. Did it ever occur to you to say something?”

  “Say what, exactly? Stop getting blowjobs? I don’t think that advice would have gone over very well.”

  “Fuck you, Finn,” Witt said.

  Her father was the wordsmith, not her. She left after that. I was glad to see her go.

  I must have been blinded by the aura surrounding the cruel muse, or the celebrity of her father, or the mere fact that there aren’t many options for a grown man at Stonebridge.

  Alex Witt was predictable, prudish, and a complete bore.

  And she looked like a backwoods hick with that hideous tooth.

  Gemma Russo

  Tegan really took one for the team. She’d scarfed down half a loaf of bread before Mel suggested she drink a glass of milk.

  “I’ve always hated spicy food,” Tegan said when her mouth finally cooled off.

  Tegan and I decided to tell Emelia that night. We showed her Adam and Nick’s Dulcinea scorecards, rating her “performance.” She didn’t cry, which surprised me. Tegan told her what Hannah had done to Nick.

  “It should have been me,” Emelia said.

  Emelia didn’t say anything for the rest of the night. She went to bed. In the morning, when I woke up, she was taking scissors to her beautiful hair. She chopped her long tresses right to the scalp. I asked her why.

  It made her sick reading what Adam had written about grabbing her ponytail.

  Tegan said that rapists often look for victims with long hair. It makes them easier to control. Tegan took the scissors next.

  I knocked on Amy Logan’s door and asked to borrow her clippers. She always has a clean buzz on the left side of her scalp.

  I had Emelia shave my head. I loved the feeling of running my hand over my buzzed scalp. I felt so clean and so free. Emelia asked me to do the same to her. Then Tegan did. We couldn’t stop touching each other’s scalps.

  “I feel amazing,” said Tegan.

  Kate and Mel dropped by the room after that.

  “Oh my God,” said Mel, gaping.

  I thought she was going to tell us we’d gone crazy. But she sat down in the chair.

  “My turn,” Mel said.

  Mel had more hair than any of us. It was thick and wavy and so shiny.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Fuck yeah,” she said. “Do it.”

  “May I?” Tegan said, taking hold of the clippers. “I haven’t had my turn yet.”

  I can’t remember the last time Tegan and Mel had a direct conversation.

  “I’d be honored,” Mel said.

  Tegan turned on the razor and made a clean stripe down the center of Mel’s scalp.

  “No turning back now,” I said.

  “I’m next,” said Kate.

  It was an awesome moment of solidarity. Although, in retrospect, I wish we’d put down a sheet or done it outside, because we never, ever could clean up all of that hair.

  But nothing could beat that morning. I remember feeling so powerful when we walked down the hallway of Headquarters. Five furious women with buzz cuts.

  We could feel their fear.

  No one felt like a victim anymore.

  Ms. Witt

  Gemma, Mel, Kate, Emelia, and Tegan walked into my class with shaved heads. The other girls huddled together, touching the scalps of their leaders. My first thought was that they were deliberately desexualizing themselves, demonstrating their opposition to the contest. It also just looked badass.

  I asked to speak with Gemma in the hall. I told everyone else to take a seat.

  “You want to feel it?” Gemma said proudly.

  I felt her soft-sandpaper scalp.

  “Wow.”

  “It feels amazing in the shower,” she said.

  It was the happiest I’d ever seen her.

  She told me about the comments on Emelia’s scorecard and that Emelia was the first to chop off her locks.

  “People can surprise you,” she said.

  I agreed.

  Keith had asked me to meet him after class at the greenhouse. He’d carved a sign out of reclaimed wood. It read GRAHAM GREENEHOUSE. He hung it above the door.

  “All is right with the world,” I said.

  God, I’d never been more wrong.

  Keith was watering plants that already looked dead. I told him that the girls had broken down the Darkroom and exposed the contest. I told him that the worst was over. He asked, “So why are the girls still chopping down trees?”

  He showed me a map of the woods where the bulk of the arboreal assault had taken place. He said Linny had made it. Next to each felled tree, she’d put the name of the responsible girl. She thought they’d want it memorialized.

  “Please talk to them,” Keith said. “There are least ten downed trees. Ignoring the environmental angle, they’re using an ax. Someone will eventually get hurt.”

  Later, when I asked Gemma about it, she said that it was either the tree or someone’s head.

  I remember those last two weeks before winter break with disturbing clarity.

  In my classroom, the girls and boys now sat on different sides. No one even whispered, for fear that the other side might hear them. Gemma told me they were done fighting; they’d won. She said it was over. It wasn’t over.

  I let the class work independently, knowing they would use that time to text or scheme. I remember, at some point, Adam Westlake raising his hand.

  “Why’d you leave your last school, Ms. Witt?”

  “I was ready to move on,” I said.

  “Funny,” Adam said, “I heard it had something to do with a cinema project.”

  It felt like spiders were crawling all over my body. I never could make my mind up about him. But then I knew. He took the video or, at the very least, he ordered it.

  Later that day I received an email from Primm:

  To: Alex Witt

 
From: Martha Primm

  Re: meeting

  I have a question for you. Please come see me at your earliest convenience.

  Messages like that get under my skin. Ask the question in the message; don’t present a future conversation as a cliff-hanger. I didn’t go to Primm when summoned. She found me cleaning out my classroom in preparation for the break.

  “There you are,” she said.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Did you get my email?” she said.

  “No,” I lied.

  I don’t know why, but it felt right.

  She walked over to my desk and perched on one butt cheek. Then she sighed and looked at the ceiling. I was tempted to walk out of the room during her dramatic pause.

  “What’s on your mind, Primm?”

  “Something has been brought to my attention. I know you’ve been teaching for a few years. And I’m sure you’ve learned many lessons of your own. But, as a counselor, I would be remiss if I did not remind you that students, especially at this age, are so easily influenced by authority figures. Things we say can be misinterpreted. Therefore, we have to be the adults in this relationship. We must be unimpeachable.”

  “If there’s a point to this lecture, you need to get to it in the next thirty seconds,” I said.

  Primm’s lips pursed, taking the shape of a rotting piece of fruit. I kept telling myself to breathe, which I did in spurts.

  Primm opened up her bag and pulled out a folded piece of craft paper. She laid the blowchart on my desk.

  “This was brought to my attention recently. It’s my understanding that you are the original author.”

  “What about it?” I said.

  “Decisions about sexual behavior should be discussed between students and their parents. I think we need to have a dialogue about appropriate conduct with students.”

  “Dialogue is code for lecture. And you’d have to pay me at least a year’s salary to listen to you talk.”

  I grabbed my coat and bag and walked to the door.

  “If you refuse,” Primm said, “I’ll have to write you up.”

  “For what? Discouraging blowjobs? Or telling you to go fuck yourself?”

  To my deep satisfaction, Primm was speechless. Unfortunately, she was also motionless.

  “You can leave or I can lock you inside. Up to you,” I said, jangling my keys.

  Eventually Primm got to her feet.

  “To be continued,” Primm said, as she made her ridiculously slow exit.

  Norman Crowley

  I remember the first time I saw them. They were walking down the hall together. Bald, proud, angry. The boys didn’t laugh when they saw them. They’d never been quieter. You could feel their fear.

  The girls didn’t look like girls anymore. They looked like warriors.

  At first the editors just seemed kind of stunned. Gabe thought things had gone awry starting with Adam’s whole courtship strategy. Nick, on the other hand, behaved like the Englishman he was and took a step back.

  “I don’t want to get involved in your bollocks. It’s all before my time,” Nick said.

  Jack kept going on about all the girls’ menstrual cycles being in sync and how we had to wait them out.

  Usually it’s Mick and Adam who are in sync. Mick was the face of the operation, but Adam was the one behind the scenes, greasing the wheels. Adam liked to play the nice guy, to make the others be the brutish ones. I was always curious why Adam entered so few names in the Darkroom or Dulcinea. But now things were different. The girls had taken a sledgehammer (or an ax) to his entire world, and they showed no signs of letting up.

  Adam wasn’t hiding behind his dimples and pink shirts anymore. He couldn’t prove I’d helped the girls, but I saw how he looked at me. He was waiting for me to fuck up. What he’d do after that, I didn’t know. I was still helping Gemma and Mel. I changed their identities in my phone to Tom (Gemma) and Jerry (Mel). It wasn’t a great cover, especially since I’d often forget which was which. “Tom” wasn’t satisfied with just shutting down the Darkroom or exposing the Dulcinea Award—she wanted to know where it all began. She asked me to see if I could identify the original Hef. MadMax may have inspired the Darkroom, but the first Hef created the Dulcinea Award. I was able to access old chat-room data and discovered the very first reference to Dulcinea was associated with Hef’s previous screen name. I didn’t tell Gemma right away. I texted Jonah and asked him to meet me at the greenhouse.

  When I arrived, I saw Ms. Primm circling the building, peeking inside. The last thing I needed was another Primm intervention. I took cover. When Jonah showed up, I threw a rock at his feet to get his attention. He casually walked over to me.

  “Dude, why are you crouched in the bushes?”

  “I don’t want Primm to see me,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because the last time I saw her, I had to tell her I was gay.”

  Jonah rolled his eyes, like that was no big deal.

  “Who hasn’t?”

  We continued our conversation under the cover of the trees. It was dangerous for Jonah to be seen with me. Up until now all he’d done was quit the editorial board. No one knew he was a true dissenter.

  Besides, I didn’t see Jonah taking any of those guys on. At least not yet. Jonah avoided confrontation whenever possible. We were the same that way, really. We just wore it differently. On me it looked like a pair of parachute pants.

  I opened my laptop and brought up a screenshot of a message thread between Jonah’s brother, “Bagman,” and “LongJohn” where Bagman first mentions Dulcinea and suggests they start an unofficial contest and build it into the Darkroom site.

  “What is this?” Jonah said, glancing at the screenshot.

  “Your brother started the Dulcinea Award,” I said.

  “No,” said Jonah. “The original Hef was Edwin Silver. He and Jason were tight, but…”

  “I looked at the archives from the locker room site,” I said. “LongJohn was Edwin Silver. It looks like your brother and Edwin started the Darkroom together, but Dulcinea was Jason’s idea. This is the first mention of it anywhere.”

  “Nah. Really?” Jonah said, like I’d just told him his cat had died.

  “Was Jason super into that book Don Quixote or something?”

  “Jason read the sports sections and that’s all I remember.”

  Jonah sat down on the dirt and rested his head in his hands. He didn’t know. Or maybe he kind of knew but wouldn’t let himself know for sure.

  “I just want all of this shit to end,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  Announcements

  Good morning, students of Stone. It is Monday, December 14, 2009.

  So, this is a first: I just put my own suggestion in the suggestion box. Let me read it to you: There are an alarming number of trees being chopped down for sport. Look, if you were making paper or in dire need of firewood, I’d get it. But you’re just chopping the trees down and leaving them there. Someone could trip over one. I consulted with Coach Keith and he insists that lumberjacking is not a new PE elective. Any student caught assaulting campus vegetation will be expelled, no questions asked. And please, please return all of the axes. Anyone caught with a Stonebridge-issued tool will be charged with grand larceny. I am very serious. What? Hold on.

  [inaudible]

  Correction: Expulsion and arrest are not necessarily inevitable; however, there will be repercussions. Okay? [inaudible] Dean Stinson concurs with that last statement.

  Once again, the use of axes and the assault on trees will not be tolerated. Looks like it’ll be a warm eighty-two degrees with no shortage of sun.

  Gemma Russo

  We all had our own tipping point, when what we thought we had known, the rules we’d bought into, changed. When angry
turned to feral.

  For Tegan it was a list, a computerized printout of all the other girls who had been with her guy.

  For Emelia, it was being duped. Believing that someone had held her in esteem, only to discover what he really thought of her.

  For Hannah, it was her bad marks and knowing she was going to lose.

  For Mel, it was all about the data, the massive effort involved in turning us girls into letters, numbers, ranks, and codes.

  For Kate, it was the photo seen around the school. Her punishment for trusting a friend.

  And for Linny, it was the loss of her innocence. But Linny was ahead of the curve, a savage and warrior long before the rest of us.

  But the other girls, they weren’t done. Taking an ax to a frail tree was merely a Band-Aid, incapable of stanching their ever-increasing rage. They needed more. They needed to spackle the craters that each humiliation carved out of their souls.

  My trajectory took a different route. It was more like a light switch toggling on and off until the circuit blew.

  Norman Crowley

  There will be blood.

  Adam Westlake actually used those words. I never noticed what a drama queen he was, not until the girls started laying siege to his kingdom.

  Maybe Adam always knew I was a turncoat. I have a lousy poker face. Maybe he finally got proof; maybe he didn’t. By the time everything blew up, proof didn’t matter. Someone had to pay.

  It was late when Adam, Jack, and Mick burst into my room. We keep the door locked, and I didn’t hear anyone messing with the bolt. They got a key somehow. Mick shook Calvin awake and told him to sleep in the lounge. My roommate staggered out, bleary-eyed. Later, I heard that Calvin knocked on Jonah’s door and told him something was going down. I always meant to thank him for that.

  At first, Adam was friendly, in that sinister mobbed-up kind of way. Maybe he’d re-watched Scarface to get into character. He sat down on my bed, put his arm around my shoulder, and asked me what I’d done.

  I denied everything. I told him that the girls had hacked the Darkroom, all of it, on their own. He shook his head in disappointment, like the way your father does when you tell him you don’t want to go hunting over the weekend.