“One of them is of her, right?” I managed to say this as if the weight in my stomach wasn’t threatening to sink me into the ground.
“Yeah. I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “But that’s why everyone found out. I mean, she’s the one who told Grames.” She got down off the bed and began wandering around the room, picking things up and setting them back down: the TV remote, a crumpled newspaper. She didn’t seem to know what to say.
I asked, “Why?”
“I guess people were, you know, kind of saying shit, and Ginger was like, ‘There are other ones,’ to defend you, so everyone would know.”
“Know what?”
“That it wasn’t, you know, you. I mean, that there was no way it was, I don’t know, what you wanted.” So much for my idea that as long as I didn’t try to arrest anyone, people would find me blameless. Sarah said, “Ginger was totally not okay with the one of her, either. And believe me, she didn’t want anyone finding out about that video. Or watching it.” She paused, while we both considered what horrible things that could mean. She bit her lower lip, appeared to be chewing on it for a minute. “But once she told, it was just so obviously his problem—”
Goth Sarah stopped the aimless pacing suddenly and began collecting clothes and things purposefully. “Do you want this?” she asked, holding up a can of tuna.
“Hell no.”
She tossed it across the room into the trash, sank the shot. “Three points!” she said, and then looked over at me as if to apologize. “Come. Get ready and I’ll take you home. People are falling apart without you.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “Because I’m such a pillar of strength.” But I stood up, went to find my shoes.
Sarah said, “I meant Sam.”
“Oh.”
“The Tappan jazz band is playing at the finish line of some charity run on Saturday, down on Main Street—Sam’s apparently drumming.”
I had to clear my throat again. “How is he?”
“The science fair was yesterday.”
“You’re kidding! Our glorious square Earth climate project! My mom really kept you in the loop,” I said. I felt joyful for a second and then, before I could even identify the emotion as happiness, was back to careening down a cliff toward my next thought. “Are people torturing Sam about me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think he’s a pretty confident kid.”
I went into the bathroom, pulled the rest of my crispy clothes off the shower curtain rod, where I’d hung them to dry, and shoved the whole pile into my backpack.
“Do you want to call your parents and tell them you’re coming?”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“What does that mean?”
“I drowned it my first night here.”
“I wondered if you were getting my messages.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Do you want to use my phone to call them?”
“No,” I said, “I’ll just see them.”
Sarah was standing still now, holding the Whole Foods bags she’d brought in one hand and my copy of The Bluest Eye in the other. She looked lost with her black dress, ruined tights, and newly light hair. I was happier to see her than I can express.
She saw me looking at her, tried to guess why. But I felt too tired to tell her I loved her, was grateful, to say any of the things I should have, even just “thank you.” We both stood there.
“Can I do anything to help?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I put my backpack up onto the bed, clothes still sticking out of it. “Could you jam the rest of this stuff in there while I go say good-bye and thank you to Bill?”
“Of course.”
I went out into the spongy, dingy hallway, thinking how it was the last time I’d ever see it, and how Bill might see it five hundred or even a thousand more times. I knocked on his door, two quiet knocks, one loud one. He opened it, in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
“I just wanted to stop by to say thank you.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“No, I mean, I wanted to thank you.”
“I thank you, too.”
“For listening to my story. That meant a lot to me,” I said. “More than I know how to tell you. You’re the only person I’ve told—”
“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “That was a good story.”
“And I also want to thank you for calling my parents, to tell them I was here.”
“That was right,” he said. “Your parents are good. They would need to know where you are, so they can find you if you have any trouble. They would need to know that. Or Sarah, your friend Sarah. Sarah would need to know. You have good friends. Sarah is a good friend. And your parents.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Thank you.”
I had this contradictory flash, of being unable to believe I might never see Bill again, and, at the same time, unable to imagine seeing him outside of the motel or this particular context, searing and horrific as it was. I felt my eyes heat up.
“You’re good, Judy,” he said, “very good. You’re a good friend, too. I like you very much.”
“I like you, too,” I said. “I hope it’s fishing season again soon.”
He turned and went into his room, came out with an ashtray from the motel, green glass with a jagged chip out of it.
“For you,” he said, and handed it to me.
As we headed out the front door of the Motel Manor, I heard my name. “Judy Lohden?”
I turned, scared, and the desk clerk was reaching under the check-in counter.
“Ms. Lohden,” she said again, gently, “I have something for you.” She pulled out an envelope and set it on the counter. Sarah grabbed it and handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” Sarah and the desk clerk both said.
I opened the envelope fast, carelessly, standing there. It tore down the middle and some business cards came spilling out onto the filthy rug. I bent down, saw the logos: Detroit Free Press, WPXD TV, M-live.com, ABC, Ann Arbor Observer. I stood up without recovering a single card and looked back at the desk clerk.
“These people—they were here?”
She nodded gravely. “I was told to have them call room 214.”
I looked down at the cards again.
“Thank you for that,” I said.
“Bill Tunner’s a real good guy,” she said.
I had never heard his last name before.
“Yeah,” I said. I turned to leave.
“Well, thank you for staying here, Ms. Lohden.”
“Please call me Judy,” I said. I turned to go.
“Good-bye, Judy.”
Goth Sarah and I walked out into the Motel Manor parking lot, where the light was so bright that I shielded my eyes like a blinded vampire. Sarah threw my backpack in the trunk, and then right before we got in her car, I asked her to take a picture of me, which she did. In front of the sign for the Motel Manor. Then we got in her car and drove away from the place forever. I felt, moving down Washtenaw toward the house I’d lived in my entire life, like I was about to arrive somewhere mysterious and meet myself for the first time.
Sarah must have called them while I was talking to Bill, because my parents were waiting outside when we pulled up, my mom at the base of the driveway, like she couldn’t even bear to wait outside the door or something, and my dad, calm and kind of old-looking, on the front stoop. Sarah stopped the car so I could get out where my mom was, and my mom hugged me so hard I thought she might squeeze the remaining life right out of me. When she held me out to look at me, her entire face was soaked with crying, and the parts weren’t even fighting each other. I guess this was a special occasion, or maybe now we’ll all do less faking it.
“I made lasagna,” was the first thing she said to me. Then she stood up and held my hand, led me into the house, said she had called Chad and told him I was coming home, that he wa
s at swim practice but was going to show up for dinner. I wondered if he’d bring Alice.
My dad kissed me hello and then looked at me as if he’d either forgotten what I looked like and was studying for a test about it, or had been starved for the sight of me. When he was done, he stood up and went to the car and got my backpack, which he and Sarah carried straight downstairs for quarantine in the laundry room. I sat at the table, and when Sarah reappeared from the basement she sat down across from me, and I thought how normal it was to be sitting there with Sarah. I turned to look at my mom, who had on green plastic oven gloves and was setting a sizzling pan on top of the stove. I could hear my dad puttering around in the laundry room underneath us. I thought how not normal it was that I’d been gone for so many days, how glad I was that Chad was coming. I folded my arms onto the table and rested my face on them. Then I heard Sam’s sneakers squeaking through the foyer, and I looked up, straightened my hair a little as he peeped around the corner into the kitchen. I smiled at him and he walked in, wearing orange cargo pants and a white T-shirt nine sizes too big. His hair was very short, and his face was tiny and pink, his neck white. He looked like a delicate lollipop.
“Hey, Judy,” he said, his voice all shy. Unlike my dad, he appeared to me to have gotten younger.
“Hi, Sam,” I said.
“Look,” he said, and he held his hand out. In it was an embossed medal: “Tappan Middle School Science Fair, Third Prize.”
“Great! Congratulations, Sam! That’s fabulous.” I stood up from my chair, and with our third prize as an excuse, squeezed him as hard as my mom had squeezed me.
As soon as I let him go, he went and got a chair, which he pulled up next to mine, unnaturally close. He sat down and put the medal on the table just as my mom arrived with his plate of lasagna.
“It’s for you,” Sam said to me, pointing to the medal.
“Really? You don’t have to do that. You should keep it.”
“I want you to have it.”
Then he leaned down and began gobbling lasagna so furiously that Sarah and I looked at each other and laughed. I put the medal around my neck.
After Sarah left, Chad arrived, without Alice, and the four of us sat at the table eating salad and more lasagna and garlic bread while Sam talked about the band, Chad about why he was breaking up with Alice (it was almost summer, they would want to see other people), and my parents caught me up on life at the Grill. Halfway through dinner, Chad was suddenly like, “Do you want to tell us what it was like to be away?”
“It was okay,” I said. “I really missed you guys.”
We all sat there, looking at each other. My mom appeared to me to be holding her breath. “Do you want us to tell you what happened here, sweetie? And at the hearing?”
I thought about it for a minute, shook my head slowly. “Not yet,” I said. “Let’s just have dinner, and talk about that stuff later. It’s okay.” I felt very grown up.
Chad smiled at me, nodded as if he understood. Sam reached across the table and spooned another heaping serving of lasagna onto his plate.
The funny thing about that dinner is that even though we didn’t talk about the hearing, or the Motel Manor, or even the horrible thing itself, for one of the first times ever, it genuinely didn’t feel like we were faking it. It was like we had decided to take the long, inevitable conversation slowly. To put it on hold for a moment while we sat back at the table together. I was grateful.
After Chad kissed me on the head and went back to his dorm, and Sam disappeared into his room, I went upstairs and lay on my bed, thinking about Meghan, looking forward to the conversation I knew we’d have when I called to tell her I was okay, fill her in on the Motel Manor adventure. My mom and dad followed me less than one minute later and sat down on the bed on either side of me. I sat up.
“Thank you for letting me stay there,” I said.
“It wasn’t up to us. You were very brave,” my mom said, deflecting. She looked over at my dad, cueing him.
He cleared his throat. “So, Judy, honey, there were some decisions that we had to make for you while you were—clearing your head.” I liked this, clearing my head. I wondered if it had been part of what my mom told him to say, or that was just the part about “decisions,” and the clearing-my-head thing was his own way of living with my having run away from them.
I nodded, waited for him to continue. He asked, “Do you want to have that talk now, about what happened, before you go back to school?”
I didn’t. Not yet. But I knew they did, and didn’t want to make them feel bad. “Can we talk about it after I sleep for a while?” I asked. “I mean, maybe tomorrow or something?”
“Of course,” they said in unison.
Then my mom handed me a white envelope. “This came today,” she said. “I thought you might want it right away. And as for talking about the last two weeks—everything you’ve been through, and everything that’s happened here—just tell us what you want to know and when, and what you want us to know. Let’s all just be as direct as we all can from now on.”
“Okay,” I said. “First I want to read this letter.”
She kissed me and then took my dad’s hand. “We’ll leave you to it.” They walked out, closing the door quietly behind them. Later that night, I would press my ear to the vent and listen to them strategize about when to tell me that they were the ones who had pulled the plug on criminal charges. How were they going to explain that I would have been put through a hellish carnival of a trial, made public, ruined? Whether to tell me that they had, in their hearts, wanted positive endings for all of us, that ruining anyone’s life, even the boys’, wasn’t their goal. They decided to wait until I asked.
But before I even pressed my ear to the vent or heard anything, I read his letter. It was on computer paper, typed. Even in the first moment of ripping that thing open, I wished it were a yellow legal page, anything homemade, with his handwriting on it, a card or something. But there it was, printed:
Dear Judy, This is not the first time I wanted to go back in time and take back something bad that happened. But there’s no way to undo the things that happen. There is also no way for this letter to change things. But I want to apologize to you formally. I am very sorry for what happened, more sorry than I can say in a letter like this. Maybe someday I can try to explain how I could have been part of what happened. I hope I can. I hope you know I cared about you, and I’m sorry for what happened. Yours truly, Kyle.
Only his name was handwritten, like he was an executive signing a letter his assistant had typed or something. Yours truly? I held the signature up to my face and breathed in, but it smelled like nothing, not even paper or ink. Cared about you, past tense. I folded it back into the envelope and put it in my desk drawer with the lock, where I also had my copy of the DVD.
That’s when I went to the vent to listen to my parents strategize. They were so relieved to see me intact and have me home that I’m too embarrassed even to record the maudlin things they said to each other about their love for me. But I was glad to hear all of it, even the long, predictable session about what I could handle knowing and when to tell me everything. Just the feeling of my ear against the floor was so familiar I could have sung and danced for joy.
Instead, I took a long shower, brushed my teeth, put my moon-and-stars pajamas on, and slept for eleven hours in my own bed—without having a single dream.
When I walked in, the place felt different. Maybe because I’d been gone, or didn’t remember accurately what it had been like before I left. My parents had wanted to drive me, to come in with me, to take me straight to the office for what I was certain would be an unbearable debriefing with the “administration,” one they insisted we would need to have. I told them I wanted to go alone the first time. So the morning after I got home, my dad showed me the raised pedals in the car and sent me to school on my own. It was the first time I had ever parked in the D’Arts parking lot myself.
Inside, a rush of cool a
ir greeted me, and then the smells, both familiar and strange, normal and yet so specific to D’Arts that they seemed rare: Lysol, cafeteria food, chlorine, sawdust from the tech room behind the theater, scent of wood sets being built, paint, sloppy joes, books, other kids, shampoo, lotion, toothpaste, sweat. I thought of Kyle for a minute, his hair and the warm smell of his skin. I walked by the first-floor teachers’ lounge; someone had burned microwave popcorn in there, maybe yesterday. I saw Mr. Luther sitting on a couch, grade book in his lap. I kept walking. All the murals were in place: zebras, Greek goddesses, tigers, teenagers.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked to my locker, enduring the heads that turned as I went. My locker was just as I had left it: woven strands of lanyard still twisted and colorful, glass beads in place. It wasn’t like one of those movies where a kid gets cancer and when she comes back to school, everyone has shaved their head in solidarity. I mean, no one had put Mylar balloons on my locker or welcome signs or anything. And since I didn’t know yet who those other videos were of, I didn’t have any specific company for that misery, except Ginger, and that hardly made me feel less lonely. When I opened my locker, it had the same library book and metal smells, the same pictures of me and Goth Sarah and Molly in our Halloween costumes, one of Sam dancing in our living room, and another of Chad and Alice and me and Sam from the night of the senior voice concert.
I looked down and saw that someone had stuffed some notes in the vertical crack of the locker. I picked up the first one and unfolded it.
Judy L! You are our favorite hot freak. Stand up, smile at whoever’s looking at you, and we’ll see you in American lit. If your day totally sucks, we’ll skip the afternoon together. Meantime, tell anyone who fucks with you to fuck off or Molly (almost BROWN belt! Yah!) will kick their ass. xoxox, S&M (get it?).
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