Thousand Words

by Jennifer Brown

“Not much.”

  “Because she’s a bitch, Vonnie, and you’re going to have to choose between us.” I hadn’t really thought this over much. The words had popped out of my mouth without my meaning them to. But I was okay with it, because it was the truth. If Vonnie was going to be Rachel’s friend, then she couldn’t be mine. Like Mack had said, I deserved a better best friend than that.

  “Then I choose you. Totally,” she said, without even pausing to think about it.

  I felt like maybe I shouldn’t forgive her. Like I should put it off—make her sweat it out or something. But I missed her, too, and I wanted her back. Even if my eyes had been opened to how we weren’t the best friends I’d thought we were, we’d still been friends too long to not forgive each other. And I didn’t see how holding grudges was going to solve anything.

  “Okay,” I said. “I forgive you.”

  She smiled wide. “Thanks.” There was a beat of silence, during which I busied myself trying to ease crumbs out of my keyboard with my fingernail. “So the end of the world must be coming,” she said. “I’m dating someone.”

  “I know. I saw you two in the hall.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask how it’s going?”

  And I guessed that was something I admired about Vonnie: her ability to move on. To get past weirdness and awkwardness and hard feelings. She never needed to stew over things. She never needed to pick events apart and she would never, ever hold something over someone’s head. Apologize and move on. For her, life was nothing more than a series of phases. We were in the forgive-and-forget phase, and it was my choice to either play along or to fight it.

  “How’s it going?”

  She lounged back on her elbows, stretching her legs out in front of her. “Eh. He has bad breath, and you know how I can’t do bad breath. It’s like letting a dog put its tongue in my mouth. So the sex is definitely not happening. Because if his breath is that bad, I can’t even imagine what it must smell like when he peels his socks off.”

  I laughed. “Gross! But he’s cute. Maybe offer him some gum or something.”

  She made a face. “Too much slobber. I’ll probably just break up with him instead.”

  I shook my head. It was always so easy for Vonnie.

  “What about you, Buttercup? Any men in your life right now?”

  “Uh, definitely not. Maybe never again.”

  “Oh, please, you can’t swear off men forever just because Kaleb turned out to be a superdouche.”

  I shut my laptop and pushed it to the side, then stretched back against my pillow. “I saw him.”

  Her eyes got wide and she sat up. “No way. Really? I heard he’s, like, totally depressed now. I didn’t want to bring it up to you, but since you saw him… how does he look?”

  “He looks rough,” I said. “He’s changed a lot. Skinny, pale, dark circles under his eyes, that kind of thing. He apologized to me.”

  “For real?”

  I flipped on some music and pulled a couple of magazines out of my desk drawer. I tossed one down to Vonnie, like old times. “His lawyer made him do it.”

  “Figures. He’s a spineless weenie.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think this really messed up his life.”

  “Good,” she said. “Not to be mean or anything, but it’s his own fault. What he did was really uncool.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but I was feeling a little unsure. Yes, what Kaleb had done was his own fault, but on some level it was my own fault, too, right? I was the one who took the photo. I was the one who made that decision, and I was the one who stood in Vonnie’s bathroom and took off all my clothes. And I was the one who decided to text the photo to him. Had I not done those things, he wouldn’t have had the photo to send around. And it sucked for him to get that much fallout over something so foolish.

  “What about you? How’s community service going?” Vonnie asked.

  Mack’s face popped into my head. Community service had stopped being such a horrible sentence, and I guessed he was the reason why. “It’s okay,” I said. “There are some real interesting people in there, but there’s also this guy who’s pretty nice.”

  Vonnie perked up. “Guy?”

  I shook my head. “Not like that. He’s a friend. He’s been my only friend for a while now.”

  She ducked her head. “What’s he in for?”

  I shut my magazine. “What’s he in for? What are you, a TV cop? I don’t know.”

  Vonnie stopped, her hand holding a page in midflip, and gazed at me. “You don’t know? So he could be, like, a killer or something and you’re being his friend?”

  “He’s not a killer. They don’t sentence murderers to community service. He probably just messed up like me.”

  “If you say so,” she singsonged. “But I’d be checking it out if I were you, Buttercup. Before I got all buddy-buddy with him. The last thing you need is another bad guy episode.”

  She started talking about something she’d seen on TV, and I listened to her gab for a while, my mind wandering, and then we read each other articles out of the Q&A sections in our magazines, laughing at them like we always did, and I wanted so badly for this to feel normal between us. But it didn’t. People were moving on, and Vonnie had come back to me, and still I didn’t feel like everything was all right. There was something missing.

  “So my mom said something about a board meeting tomorrow night?” Vonnie asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. I don’t know much about it. My parents aren’t saying a lot about that kind of stuff around me anymore.”

  “My mom said they were going to talk about ‘the sexting issue,’ ” Vonnie continued, making air quotes with her fingers. “And that a couple of board members are calling for your dad to step down or be fired. Do you think he will?”

  In truth, I didn’t like to think about it. I didn’t like to think what it would mean for our family. We couldn’t live off Mom’s paycheck. And what would Dad do with himself? He loved his job. He would be devastated.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It sucks. My mom says there’s going to be a lot of people there. She said it would be really humiliating for your family. If I were you, I’d make sure I was nowhere near that meeting, Buttercup.”

  “That’s probably good advice.”

  Vonnie stayed until we could hear Mom rattling around in the kitchen.

  After she left, I wandered downstairs to see if Mom was making dinner, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what Vonnie’s mom had said about the board meeting: it would be humiliating for our family.

  Mom was making soup, an apron wrapped around her work clothes, her reading glasses tucked up in the nest of her graying blond hair. Her eyes looked tired, and it seemed like there were more lines around them than there used to be. I bellied up to the cutting board and began chopping the carrots she had laid out.

  “Was that Vonnie?”

  “Yeah. She stopped by.”

  “I haven’t seen her in ages.” Mom sounded distracted.

  “We haven’t really been talking all that much lately. But it’s fine. We’re still friends.”

  She glanced at me. “Well, I suppose that’s good, then.” She continued to stir, and I started chopping a celery stalk.

  “How’s work?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s…” Mom said, and trailed off. She didn’t turn around or ask why I was asking or do anything to make me believe she wanted to continue talking about it.

  “Are people… you know… did people at your school hear about… stuff?” I scooped the celery chunks into my hands and dropped them into a bowl, then drove the knife into an onion.

  She paused, and then said, “I’ve had a few parents upset.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She turned and leaned her back against the stove. “Ash, don’t worry about it. They were trouble parents to begin with. The kind that complain about everything.”

  I put the knife down. “Upset how? What do you mean?” I repeated
.

  Mom closed her eyes, and I was struck with how worn down she looked, like if she stood that way for too long she’d fall asleep. Slowly she opened them again. “I’ve had a few parents pull their kids from the preschool. They don’t think I can set a good example because of the trouble you got in. It’s really not that big of a deal. We’ve got a waiting list to fill those spots, anyway.”

  I felt like I should say something. Like I should comfort Mom, or apologize. But nothing I could say could undo what had happened. It was like the fallout over what I’d done would never stop.

  After a few minutes, the soup began bubbling and Mom turned to stir it again, and I went back to my chopping. I supposed we’d said everything there was to be said about the subject.

  “Are you going to the board meeting tomorrow night?” I asked.

  “Yes. But I’ll have time to pick you up from community service and bring you home before then. That way you won’t have to be there.”

  The board meetings were always held in the Central Office building, right upstairs from room 104, and I’d been wondering if maybe I should skip community service and come home. I definitely didn’t want to be stuck in a crowd of the same people who’d said such horrible things about me online and in the media. I did not want to be there to see my dad’s work, and life, become a shambles. No way.

  “Do you think Dad is going to step down?”

  “I don’t even know if Dad knows what Dad is going to do at this point,” Mom answered, and her tone told me that was all the conversation she wanted to have on the subject, so I closed my mouth.

  We finished putting the ingredients into the pot; then Mom covered it and lowered the heat to let it simmer for a while. The smell was familiar and homey to me. It made me think of being a little kid, of being safe and warm and cozy, of having family dinners together with Mom and Dad, all of us talking about our days.

  But I knew that now the smell was just that—a smell—and that Mom and I would exchange meaningless pleasantries over dinner, and Dad would come home late, grab a drink, and eat in stony silence. Nobody wanted to share what their day had been like because we all wanted to forget it.

  As if we could.

  DAY 29

  COMMUNITY SERVICE

  I was on edge when I showed up for community service the next day. The building seemed to be buzzing. A police car sat out front, which hardly ever happened, and I guessed someone had summoned the police to help keep order that night. The thought scared me a little.

  Truth be told, I didn’t really want to be there at all, and I almost faked a stomach flu to get me out of it. But in the end, I knew that the sooner I got through my community service, the sooner this could all be over with, and the sooner I could try to get my life back. Winter break would be coming up before long, and I had a distant hope that the time off would give everyone a chance to forget and move on to the next big scandal and that I could start a whole new semester like nothing had ever happened.

  But what if they didn’t? What if I remained the big topic forever? I tried not to think about the fact that I had a whole year to go after this one was done. The thought was too depressing.

  I was the first one to arrive, and Mrs. Mosely looked up from her book when I walked in.

  “I wasn’t sure if I’d see you today or not,” she said.

  I placed my paper on her desk. “My mom’ll take me home before the meeting starts.”

  Mrs. Mosely eyed me over her reading glasses and then took them off and let them hang on the chain around her neck. “Ashleigh, I think you need to know, I’ve never had someone come through my program with your… problem.”

  Great, I thought. I’m an anomaly. And I have a problem. That makes me sound like a porn addict. Mrs. Mosely continued. “I know a lot of kids send a lot of texts and nothing ever comes of any of it. You are not the first girl in the world to send a risqué photo of herself to her boyfriend. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded, staring down at my shoes. The conversation was beginning to get uncomfortable.

  “I’ve had kids come through here for drugs, for assault, for all kinds of things. I had one girl come through here because she had been caught plotting to kill her mother. Can you believe that? Good student, no drugs, got in with the wrong crowd and next thing she knew she was getting arrested. A murder plot, Ashleigh. But I have never had a girl come through here because she got seen naked. I want you to know that. Your case is unusual because… it’s unusual. Do you follow?”

  I nodded, though I didn’t really follow what she was saying at all. I already knew that my case was unusual. It didn’t make me feel any better, and it didn’t get me in any less trouble. And I just wanted to go to my computer and work.

  “And if I were the district attorney, I might think twice about calling it anything other than unusual,” she said. “Child pornography is a pretty serious label.”

  Didn’t I know it. I often stayed up at night wondering how I would someday explain this to important people in my future. Look, before you ask me to marry you, you should know that I distributed child porn when I was in high school…. Yuck.

  Mack walked in, followed by Darrell and Angel, who were giggling over something they were looking at on Angel’s cell phone.

  Mrs. Mosely put her glasses back on and closed her book. “No cell phones in the room, please. You know the rule.”

  “But, Mose, you gotta see this. It’s hilarious,” Darrell said, whipping the cell out of Angel’s hand and bringing it to Mrs. Mosely’s desk. Even though I knew they wouldn’t be stupid enough to show Mrs. Mosely the text of my photo, I still felt instant nervousness at the words “you gotta see this,” as if they were. I took the opportunity to slip away.

  “Hey,” I said, sliding into my chair next to Mack’s.

  “Hey.”

  He navigated to whatever page he was looking for, slumped back in his seat, put his earbuds in, and began speed-clicking the mouse.

  My pamphlet was almost done, and I printed out a sample copy, then slid my chair back and stood up to retrieve it from the printer. For some reason, as I passed behind Mack, a movement on his computer screen caught my eye.

  “What are you…?” I asked, leaning over his shoulder to see the screen, but stopped short. Animated army guys ran around on his screen, simulated bullets flying as they aimed and shot at some incoming airplanes. “A video game?”

  Mack immediately stopped clicking and leaned forward, pushing the power button on the monitor to shut it off.

  “Shhh!” he hissed at me, his eyebrows twisting up into an angry knot.

  “A video game?” I repeated, not really caring if anyone heard me or not. Kenzie flicked a glance over at us and then went back to whatever she was saying to Angel, shaking her head as if we were pathetic.

  “Shut up, would you?” Mack said through gritted teeth.

  I stood up straight, crossed my arms. It didn’t make sense. We were all working, putting in our time. You didn’t get out of here without having some work to show for it, so how was Mack ever going to get out if he was spending his time playing video games? “Does Mosely know? What are you going to do when it’s your turn to show off the stuff you made? What are you in here for, anyway?” All the questions I’d been careful not to ask were coming out in a torrent.

  He turned and looked me right in the eyes. His skin was dry and there were pimples around his hairline and his curls clung to his forehead in a clump. There was a flush on his smooth, jowly cheeks, as if he was embarrassed. “This is my business,” he said in a low voice. “Step off.”

  “Fine,” I said, and reluctantly moved toward the printer. “Don’t expect me to cover for you, though. Eventually she’s going to figure this out.” I couldn’t help wondering why she hadn’t already.

  He let out an angry breath and flicked his computer monitor back on.

  We worked silently side by side until Mrs. Mosely cleared her throat and announced that it was time for a break. Everyone
stood up and darted down the hall to stretch their legs, check their phones, do whatever it was they wished they were doing when they were in the classroom working.

  I lingered behind in the hallway, watching Mack head down to the candy machine like always. I was pretty sure I was the last one he wanted to join him. Instead, I pressed my back against the wall and waited for break to be over.

  “Excuse me?” a little old woman called, coming down the stairs, pressing a cane to the floor between each step. “Do you know where the board meeting is going to be held?”

  Mrs. Mosely rushed over to her and grasped the woman’s elbow. “I’ll show you,” she said, and they disappeared up the staircase, one slow step at a time.

  I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. People were arriving for the board meeting. I started to feel really nervous, like they would all recognize me as I snuck out of here with Mom. Like they would all be looking at me, talking about me, gossiping about how I was probably here to do my community service for what I’d done to their poor little sons and daughters. What I’d done to them. Ridiculous.

  More than anything, I wanted Vonnie to come in through the ground-floor door and be my hero. Secret me out like a movie star avoiding the paparazzi. Right now. Steal me away and whisk me to someplace where the Chesterton news didn’t reach. I needed a friend.

  I heard a rattle right next to my ear and my eyes flew open. Mack stood there with a box of Dots. He shook them again.

  “Dots,” he said.

  I reached up and took it. “Thanks.”

  “Where’d Mosely go?”

  We both tore open our boxes. I tipped a Dot into my hand; he poured a mouthful directly into his mouth. “Took some lady upstairs.”

  He nodded. “The board meeting.”

  I was surprised he knew about it. “Yeah. They plan to make my dad resign.”

  “He shouldn’t. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  I sucked on the Dot, rolling it around on my tongue. “Some people would disagree with that statement. According to them, I have ruined their children forever. And he allowed it to happen. Or something like that.”