The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  “No, no, I’m fine, it was an accident,” Lauren said as Mom came close to peer at the bruise. “Don’t do anything, please don’t call anyone. Promise, Mom.”

  “I promise. It almost looks like a birthmark,” Mom said, caressing Lauren’s cheek. “There’s something beautiful about it.”

  “Oh my God,” Lauren said, and ducked under Mom and out of her chair, into the mudroom to find her backpack and head to the bus stop.

  By the time Lauren had traveled to school, done her locker, and sat down for homeroom, she had been asked so many times about her injury that she had a speech down by heart, so well practiced that she could riff and improvise on it, edit or remix it on the spot.

  “I can see you are admiring my black eye,” she said to Renée, who approached her with mouth agape. “But you should ask Danielle Sheridan how I got it.”

  Lauren’s whole body buzzed. The thrill of a good lie. Her head filled with fizzy soda. It wasn’t even a lie—it was a suggestion. Lauren could do the lie without telling it. Maybe this was the same thrill that Jeff Leidecki enjoyed every time he shouted muthafucka or the n-word on ski bus. And anyway, it was better that Danielle Sheridan got in trouble instead of her doofus little brother. Danielle had been way more obnoxious on ski bus than Sean ever was at home, and Sean hadn’t insulted anybody’s butt.

  “Ask Danielle Sheridan,” Lauren kept saying. The full name felt formal, correct, like an official grade-wide investigation was under way. She wasn’t exactly accusing Danielle Sheridan of anything. She was just granting Danielle Sheridan the right to tell her own story.

  Danielle happened to walk into homeroom at the worst time: as everyone else was settling into their seats, right before Mrs. Velasco called the room to order. Danielle walked in, and every head swiveled. Giggling, whispering. Somebody booed. An “EVERYBODY HIT THE GROUND!” from Gordie Garland’s corner of the classroom. Muffled laughter.

  “Did boxing class run late?” Jamie asked Danielle as she passed Jamie’s desk. Danielle smiled helplessly at no one in particular, trying to be in on the joke.

  Two periods later, earth science, Lauren sat at a back table with Shannon, Jeff, and Evan as Danielle approached. “Lauren, what is going on—” Danielle began, going to place one hand on Lauren’s arm.

  “Don’t touch her,” Shannon said, possessive, protective.

  “I don’t—how did you get hurt?” Danielle asked. Her doll’s face wasn’t crafted to show distress. Her cornflower eyes and upturned rosebud lips only knew a language of soft-spoken delight.

  “Do you remember thrashing around on ski bus like a crazy person?” Lauren asked. An even tone. Again, it wasn’t an accusation—it was a question, regarding an observable event with witnesses. Did Danielle remember? The question didn’t assume one answer over another. Lauren wasn’t lying. She was acting, she supposed, but she wasn’t lying.

  “But I didn’t—” Danielle said. “I never touched you.”

  Jeff squealed. “You just touched her,” he said. “Like five seconds ago, I saw you.”

  “You weren’t jumping up and down and messing around?” Lauren said. “Didn’t people see you? Weren’t you dancing to the N.W.A song?”

  “‘One Hundred Miles and Runnin’,’” Evan said. Backing up the story. These were bland statements of fact. Lauren didn’t single out Jeff or Evan as witnesses. They had to come forward on their own. No one likes to be put on the spot.

  “But I didn’t give you a black eye!” Danielle said. Her voice cracked. Her lashes blinked mechanically.

  A Baby Born doll, with nine lifelike functions and eleven accessories.

  “If you didn’t give her a black eye on ski bus,” Shannon asked, “then who did?”

  “I have no idea!” Danielle said, one tear spilling down her cheek.

  “So are you calling Lauren a liar?” Shannon asked.

  Shannon was enjoying this too much. She and Lauren weren’t even all that good friends.

  “No, I am not calling her a liar!” Danielle spluttered.

  Shannon was one of the first kids in school to get three-way calling at home. She liked using it with girls who were in a fight, but one girl wouldn’t know that the girl she was fighting with was listening in on the conversation. Shannon would probably call Danielle tomorrow but not tell Danielle that Lauren was there, too, on the other line, cross-legged on her bed, hunched over her phone, one hand clamped over the receiver to hide her breathing.

  “And when she was done beating up Lauren, she called you fat and ugly, Shannon,” Jeff said as Evan bayed beside him.

  Sometimes Shannon would telephone a boy and girl who were rumored to like each other and conference them in without saying anything, not even hello. If you lucked out on the timing—if both of them answered on the first or second ring—each would think the other had made the call; they wouldn’t know a third person was involved at all, or not at first. Shannon called these “crush calls.”

  “No!” Danielle wailed. “I didn’t say that about Shannon! I did not!”

  “What is going on?” Mr. Philbin asked. “Evan, stop acting like a hyena. Danielle, what is wrong? Do you need the nurse?”

  That’s what all the male teachers always said when a girl at Mayer Middle School was crying. Do you need the nurse?

  “No,” Danielle said, looking back and forth between Lauren and Shannon.

  “Then sit down, Danielle,” Mr. Philbin said.

  Shannon wore an ominous smile. “She will be destroyed,” she whispered to Lauren, leaning across the table. “We will crucify her.” She’d gotten that line from a movie about high school. If Mom heard Lauren saying that, she would want to wash her mouth out with soap—Mom wouldn’t do it, but she would threaten it.

  Lauren watched Danielle’s back, two rows over and one seat up. She could tell Danielle was crying. Just then Lauren remembered Sean’s bag of frozen peas, left underneath her bed. They would be a thawed lump right now, puddling into the baseboard. Hopefully the ceiling wouldn’t leak. Danielle’s head was bowed and her shoulders were shaking. It was all so easy it was boring. It was embarrassing.

  Now Jamie and Jeff were off to Kent, a bookish place with a strong Model United Nations team and a famous novelist among its alumni; Shannon and Evan to Knox, which was nicknamed Jox. Kelly to Catholic school; Renée to Nichols, the private school near the Albright-Knox art gallery—Mom spoke of Nichols like it was a kingdom visible from a misty distance, a castle behind a fortified moat. Bethune was only a mile away from their house by road, and closer if you cut through the yards, out of the subdivision where the Brennans lived and through two more: first the rich one, where O. J. Simpson and Ahmad Rashad used to rent a mansion with a pool and tennis court and now where first-generation Indian and Korean and Jewish doctors lived, and then the “more modest” one, as Mom would say, where second-generation Irish and Italian and Polish factory foremen and secretaries and schoolteachers lived in one-story houses with one-car garages, extra bedrooms in the basements.

  Although Lauren didn’t know other kids at Bethune, with the exception of Danielle, some of the teachers knew her: the old-timers who had been there since the school opened, back when Mom and Dad had been part of the first graduating class. Both the chemistry teachers, all three of the gym teachers, almost the entire English department. Once in a while they’d call Lauren by Mom’s name, or stare at Lauren like they didn’t know what year it was.

  “Brennan—any relation to Pat Brennan?”

  “I taught your mother, didn’t I? Jane?”

  “You’re Jane Thirjong’s . . . little sister? Oh, right, pardon me.”

  Mom and Dad loved to go on and on about their days at Bethune, like they were on a talk show, because they liked to remember when they were young.

  “Open-plan learning, they called it,” Dad said.

  “Very few interior walls,” Mom said. “You didn’t really have classrooms.”

  “You had basically one huge room.”

 
; “No desks, just sofas and big tables.”

  “The idea was to mix up the grade levels and subject areas and just have a whole Free to Be . . . You and Me situation.”

  “Sort of a hippie hangover from the sixties. We can have the Summer of Love all school year long.”

  “Oh, and no carpets, do you remember that? No noise insulation whatsoever.”

  “But the teachers rebelled. They stacked up filing cabinets as makeshift walls.”

  “And milk crates.”

  “They stole them from the cafeteria loading dock.”

  “Mrs. Norris brought in all those hand-painted floor screens, what do you call them?”

  “Chinoiserie.”

  “Yeah. I read the Federalist Papers under those things.”

  “Treadwell stole thirty desks out of the basement that they’d already sold to a parochial school in Lackawanna.”

  “Oh yeah, of all the teachers Treadwell was the ringleader.”

  “Treadwell,” Mom said, shaking her head. “Easiest A in the English department.”

  “Treadwell was at Woodstock. Speaking of hippie hangovers. You can see his hairy butt in a Life magazine spread, Lauren,” Dad said.

  “It sounds like a big, loud mess,” Lauren said.

  “Sure, but it didn’t feel like it, because we didn’t know anything else,” Dad said.

  “You’re lucky to be going there, Lauren,” Mom said, “because after that big, loud mess you’ll be able to concentrate anywhere, under any circumstances. It will serve you well when you go to college.”

  “Why?” Lauren asked.

  “Well . . . your dorm room might be noisy when you’re trying to study.”

  “But then I could just go to the library,” Lauren said.

  Mom hesitated.

  “Couldn’t I?” Lauren asked, and stopped because she felt herself going mean. It could just hang there in the air that Mom didn’t actually know what she was talking about, because Mom never went to college. Lauren was in high school now—the time was over for doing easy, embarrassing things.

  Bethune felt pasted-together, low-stakes. Nobody could even agree on how to pronounce it. “Rhymes with buffoon,” Dad said. “BETH-yoon,” Mom said, or sometimes “BETH-un.” Mr. Treadwell insisted on “Beaton,” which he said was the Scottish pronunciation, although the school was named for a lady from Buffalo, an architect. Bethune had a sense of “make do,” as Mom would say. Lauren liked this. Important things happened at Kent and Jox, and the most important things of all happened at Nichols, because parents paid a lot of money for their children to go there.

  “Well, usually it’s their grandparents paying it,” Dad said.

  Lauren was tired of danger, tired of the tightrope feeling of middle school. Nothing dangerous or thrilling could possibly happen at a school attended by, for example, Paula Brunt. On their first day at Bethune, Lauren nodded hello at Paula as they walked into first-period biology class. They had attended the same schools since kindergarten but not interacted much. Paula was sour and ungainly, wide-hipped and flat-footed, dark hair in a blunt bob. She tended to have one close friend at a time. Lauren and Paula smiled at each other walking into second-period Speech & Communication class, tried to ignore each other walking into third-period Global Studies class, and burst out laughing when they discovered they’d been assigned the same fourth-period English class. By lunchtime, they shuffled wordlessly toward the same empty table in the sunken pit of the cafeteria.

  Lauren didn’t have to account for herself with Paula. None of their interactions had any danger to them—there was the sourness, yes, but nine years of proximity to Paula had made the sourness familiar, almost comfortable. She was steady and pleasingly boring. Her house, in one of the “more modest” subdivisions slightly farther north, looked like the house on Roseanne. You opened the front door, and inches away was the couch and the TV, and you sat down and watched the TV. There was even a crocheted throw over the back of the couch, like on the sitcom. Paula’s mother was a nurse. She went to bed extremely early or extremely late, depending on the shift she’d been assigned at the hospital. Paula’s father worked nights as a foreman at the brass factory, and he, too, was often at home sleeping or eating at odd hours, or he was in his pajamas when the rest of the world was dressed and out. They were quite lovely, as Mom would say, Mrs. Brunt especially so, usually offering Lauren something to eat, but they were too absorbed in trying to cycle their bodies into waking or sleeping rhythms to do a lot of chitchat. Their house was always tidy, but gray and cramped in a way that couldn’t be fixed with a deep housecleaning or a paint job or a new piece of furniture.

  Lauren liked it there because the Brunts’ house had an intelligence of its own, orderly and near-silent, requiring no evident enforcement of rules and no meaningful adult supervision. The intelligence of the house might have had something to do with why Paula was the only person of Lauren’s age, to Lauren’s knowledge, who said she had had sex, more than once, with different boys. The boys didn’t talk about it, or else they did and Lauren just didn’t know—and Paula didn’t have a “reputation” like some girls did, maybe because she was not someone the boys would brag about. It was mean to think that, but Lauren knew it was true. Somehow, something about Paula told the boys that she was available. Pheromones had nothing to do with looks. Maybe Paula was practice, like Kelly had seen her friends as practice. There was a power in that, and Lauren wondered if Paula resented that her power had to be concealed. There were boys as old as seventeen, boys one year away from college, who wouldn’t acknowledge Paula if they passed her in the hallways but who, she said, had been inside of and on top of and beneath her. She had watched them lose their senses, and they had lost their senses because of her. When Lauren thought about it she forgot to breathe.

  Paula was familiar and unknowable at the same time. She had taught herself a wordless language of looks and gestures, the secret history of how bodies fit together, an animal knowledge of scent. She knew what other people wanted and they didn’t even have to tell her. There was a thrill and a danger in what she knew that Lauren didn’t.

  It is not so different over here, Paula seemed to say. It may be strange now, but soon you will know what I know.

  Bethune’s teachers appeared ready to accept Paula as a fellow member of their adult world, as they already did with some of the senior girls, like Abby Yoon and Claire Finnerty. Abby was probably going to be valedictorian and probably going to get into Harvard, and now she wanted to direct the fall play and she would probably get to do that, too. She worked hard and happily at things that apparently came very easily to her—debate team, first-chair violin—and her teachers regarded her as a minor celebrity, their gazes blushing and parental. Everyone thought that Claire—class treasurer, writer of award-winning poems, Seven Sisters–bound—was a shoo-in for homecoming queen, but then she wasn’t even voted onto the court, and it was a minor scandal. It showed that a lot of people at Bethune didn’t like her, maybe because she used words like ersatz and perspicacious in regular conversation and looked exactly like Jessica Lange, but the snub also made her seem less perfect and therefore more vulnerable, and that made her even more likable among people who liked her already. Mrs. Bristol, the hardest A in the English department, brought up Claire’s exclusion from homecoming court in a class discussion on the theme of jealousy in Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton—Mrs. Bristol didn’t mention anyone by name, but everyone knew what she was talking about.

  It was the English teachers who loved Abby and Claire best of all. The English department was its own little fiefdom: no core requirements, no quizzes, no non-negotiable due dates, freshmen and seniors mingling in the same classes. All the teachers had tortoiseshell glasses and season tickets to the Buffalo Philharmonic, half of them with subscriptions to The New Yorker and half to The New York Review of Books so they could share around the table in the English department office, which was really just a bunch of carrels arranged in a semicircle. The men
in tweeds, the women in floral blouses and peasant skirts. The English teachers didn’t call on Abby or Claire or Paula so much as they chatted with them in the midst of class while the other students watched. This was especially true of Mr. Smith, the new guy. Midtwenties, youngest teacher in the department by a decade or more. Round hazel eyes, silky dark hair that curled just over the back of his collar. Sometimes he wore a sport coat, like his department elders, but mostly tucked flannel shirts, jeans, Converse sneakers. It was like he had grown out of being a student but not quite grown into being a teacher. Mr. Smith felt low-stakes, too. Just out of teachers’ college—there was no way he knew what he was doing. He could spend half a class period dissecting a half-dozen lines of one poem, just going back and forth among Abby and Claire and Paula, not even trying to open the discussion out to the whole class. One day the four of them had some in-joke going about “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” on the part about the cliffs “that on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion.” Without raising her hand, Lauren asked if Mr. Smith ever used to live in Tintern Abbey. The four of them laughed, but Lauren didn’t understand why the question was funny.

  “How come you almost never call on Lauren in class?” Paula asked Mr. Smith. The top of her voice sounded like sympathy for Lauren, but the bottom of it was making an inside joke.

  Mr. Smith winked at Paula. He said, “Eh, she knows I know how clever she is.”

  It was Paula who told her that Mr. Smith lived alone in a one-story brick house in the “more modest” subdivision next to the Bethune campus. Behind his back, Paula called him “the emancipated minor” and, occasionally, “the man-child,” even if she did laugh at all his jokes.

  Mr. Treadwell, still the easiest A in the English department, was coming close to retirement, and he was handing Drama Club over to Mr. Smith. Mr. Treadwell liked Noël Coward and Oscar Wilde—he did productions full of arched eyebrows and curlicue sentences. Characters holding unlit cigarettes in long silver holders from the Mélange thrift shop on Elmwood Avenue. Mr. Smith wanted to do the midcentury American tragedies: Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams. Plays with yelling and boozing and monologues. And cigarettes, still, presumably. For the 1991 fall play, he chose Miller’s All My Sons.