“If I wasn’t to blame, then neither were you,” Diana said fervently. “I think what really woke me up to what lousy parenting I was doing was realizing that Misty was trying to avoid upsetting me.” She regarded Laura with dismay. “My daughter’s job isn’t to protect me. It’s mine to see that she’s safe and happy.”
She gave Laura a plaintive look. “Is she now, do you think? Safe and happy, I mean?”
“Not entirely,” Laura said candidly. “It was tough for her today. She stayed behind when my class ended. She told me the kids were whispering behind her back. I tried to convince her that will pass, but she’s not quite ready to believe it when all the evidence is to the contrary.”
“I tried to tell her the same thing this morning,” Diana said wearily. “She wanted to stay home from school one more day. Maybe I should have let her.”
She looked so lost, Laura patted her hand. “Don’t second-guess yourself. I think sending her to school was exactly the right thing. A few days off last week was understandable, but longer would just have made coming back that much harder.”
“That’s exactly what I told her,” Diana said.
“The whole staff kept a very close eye on things today. There may have been a few whispers which unquestionably upset her, but no one was openly ganging up on her. We will stay on top of this, Diana. I promise you that.”
“Thank you,” Diana replied, then straightened up, her expression determined. “Now, tell me what I can do to help you with Mariah Litchfield’s vendetta. Whatever you need, consider it done.”
“Thanks,” Laura said. “Just be there for the rally on Saturday. I tried to convince Misty to say a few words about this experience. I think it might help her to reclaim her self-esteem if she feels she’s in charge of her life again and can speak out to help others who are being bullied. You could encourage her to do that, if you agree.”
Diana nodded. “I do agree. Bullying needs to have a face and a voice. Who better than Misty, if she feels up to it? I won’t push her, though. I can’t do that.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Laura said. “She’s a great girl, Diana. You and your husband have done a wonderful job with her. She’s smart and ambitious, and there will come a time when this will just be a small, unfortunate blip in her life.”
“I hope so,” Diana said. “Teenagers take things so seriously. Everything’s life or death to them. It scares me when I think how easily a good kid’s life can be derailed by an incident like this. This could so easily have turned into a tragedy.”
Laura understood her distress. “But it didn’t,” she reminded Diana. “Misty has a lot of support. She’s going to be fine.”
Unfortunately, even as she spoke the confident words, she worried she might be tempting fate just a little.
* * *
After a frantic week of preparations for Saturday’s rally on the town green, by Friday Laura was exhausted and stressing out. J.C. took one look at her when he picked her up and shook his head.
“We’re skipping the football game,” he announced, his jaw set determinedly as he anticipated an argument.
She gave him a halfhearted one. “We can’t,” she protested. “I should be there, if only for appearances’ sake. Besides, you love going to the games. And we promised Cal and Maddie we’d meet them there.”
He handed over his cell phone. “Call and tell them we’re not coming,” he said. “You need a break from everything related to that school, if only for tonight.”
She frowned at him. “When did you turn so bossy?”
“It’s a tactic I usually reserve for my most stubborn patients,” he admitted. “It seemed appropriate tonight.”
“I’m not some six-year-old who won’t take her cough syrup,” she grumbled, but she did make the call to Maddie.
“J.C.’s apparently made other plans for tonight,” Laura told her, then listened, a smile breaking across her face. “Yeah, that’s what I told him.” She glanced pointedly at J.C. “No, he hasn’t told me how he’s planning to entertain me, but it better be good.”
She was grinning when she disconnected the call.
“I suppose Maddie had a few ideas about how I should keep you occupied,” he said. “It seems she usually does.”
“Oh, yes,” Laura said. “Mostly X-rated.”
J.C. chuckled. “I could get behind that. How about you?”
“I’m not so sure yet. I’m a little annoyed by your presumptuousness.”
“No, you’re not. You’re relieved not to have to sit in the stands and listen to the people around you taking sides.”
“Okay, yes,” she finally conceded. She regarded him curiously. “Are you as shocked as I am that there are people who actually believe Annabelle’s punishment was too harsh?”
“Sadly, no,” he said. “I’ve dealt with a few of them in the office since this happened.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope. It never ceases to amaze me how some parents can fail to take something like this seriously. One father, who brought his son in for a shot, then berated him when he cried, said kids these days need to toughen up. He says we’re raising a generation of sissies.” He shook his head. “Just the kind of message an impressionable boy needs to hear from his dad.”
“How old was his son?”
“Four,” J.C. responded wryly. “Guess you can’t start too young with the stoicism in some circles.”
“Good grief. What did you say?”
“That life has plenty of hard knocks that can’t be avoided, but children deserve to be protected and kept safe from this kind of nonsense for as long as possible or at least until they’re old enough to know how to handle it.”
“How did he take that?”
J.C. shrugged. “He was the third parent of the week to threaten to take his child to another doctor.”
Laura regarded him with dismay. “J.C., I’m so sorry.”
“Why? Because I spoke my mind and some idiot couldn’t take it? That’s life, too.” He gave her a chagrined smile. “Fortunately Bill thinks we’ve got too many patients as it is. He figures being abandoned by a few of the impossible ones isn’t a huge loss.”
“Good for Bill Townsend. That’s just about the first totally admirable thing I’ve ever heard about him.”
“He’s not the complete jerk some people think he is,” J.C. said, feeling compelled to defend Bill. “Cheating on Maddie the way he did and parading his pregnant girlfriend around town was wrong, but no one is sorrier about that than Bill is. It cost him everything. He realized way too late that he was still in love with Maddie, but by then she was with Cal. His girlfriend recognized that he’d never truly love her the way he did Maddie and left him to move back to Tennessee with their child. His relationships with each of his kids has suffered. I’m not suggesting that he’s some kind of a saint, just that he paid a heavy price for his mistake.”
“I guess I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective,” Laura admitted.
“I doubt those Sweet Magnolia friends of yours would encourage that slant. From what I hear they’re loyal to their own and not very forgiving of anyone who messes with them.”
“They are that,” Laura confirmed. “When I first moved here, I didn’t make a lot of friends outside of the other teachers at school. Being around the Sweet Magnolias, thanks to getting to know Annie, Sarah and Raylene on the fall festival committee, has been a real eye-opener. I envy them those deep, lifelong friendships.”
“I thought they’d made you one of them,” he said. “Obviously they consider you a friend.”
“They do, and it’s incredible to have their support, but they have all that history together. I’ll never have that. With no siblings and my parents living in the Midwest, I don’t have one single person around here who knows my whole history and can talk about shared experiences from the past. Having that is such a blessing.” She hesitated, then added, “Not that there aren’t some parts of my past I’d just as soon forg
et. And some, I fear, that will never leave me.”
Eager not to dwell on the child she’d never know, she studied him. “What about you? Who knows your whole life story?”
“My life story’s not that interesting,” he said. “And there’s a whole lot of it that’s best left in the past. Now, then, how about a quick dinner at Rosalina’s before the game crowd pours in? Seems to me pizza or pasta are great comfort foods. I’m pretty sure it’s the aroma of all that garlic that does it.”
She gave him a knowing look. “You’re not getting off the hook that easily, J.C. The second you hedge about your past, you only make me more curious. However, since I am starving and pizza sounds great, we’ll postpone my inquisition until after dinner.”
He grinned at her. “If I play my cards right, you will have much more intriguing things to focus on by then.”
She chuckled. “Okay, that could work, too.”
* * *
Laura had to admit she’d given very little thought to Misty, tomorrow’s rally or even J.C.’s secretive past during the course of the evening. J.C. had done an excellent job of distracting her. Time and again, in fact.
But now, stretched out next to him in his king-size bed, she yawned and propped herself up on one elbow. “Okay, my turn,” she said lightly.
He gave her an amused look. “Seems to me you’ve had a few turns already, but okay,” he said, reaching for her.
“Not that,” she said, playfully slapping away his hand before it could start working its magic once more. “I want to hear about you. Just one thing I don’t know will do for now, but it better be good. You won’t get away with telling me you hate broccoli or love mystery novels.”
“Boy, you’re setting the bar awfully high. I usually don’t talk about the important stuff until the fifth or sixth date at least.”
“Fifth? Sixth? Date? Chance meeting? Who’s really been counting what’s official and what’s not?” she asked blithely. “Talk to me.”
J.C. rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. For several minutes, she thought he might not speak at all, that she’d overplayed her hand.
“You know the biggest secret in my past,” he said eventually.
“About your wife sleeping with your boss,” she said. “I know that shaped your attitude toward women and relationships, but it didn’t define who you are, J.C. Not entirely, anyway. I don’t think anybody is shaped by just one event.” Since he obviously wasn’t volunteering information, she decided to probe for what she really wanted to know. “What were your parents like?”
“They were—are—basically good people. We don’t have a lot of contact anymore.”
Laura frowned at the admission. “Why is that?”
“We just don’t. People grow apart, at least we have.”
“Are your parents still living in the town where you grew up?”
He shook his head, his expression guarded as if he feared she might keep digging until she hit on some truth he didn’t want to reveal. That only encouraged her to press on.
“Where are they?”
“My mother eventually left home, permanently, I mean. She left more than once chasing after some man or another before that. I thought I’d explained about the cheating. Anyway, she traveled all over, but she eventually moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, to be closer to her sister. My father’s in Tampa.”
Laura frowned. “But you didn’t grow up in either Florida or North Carolina, did you?”
“No. I was raised in Charleston.”
She struggled to put the pieces together from the tidbits he was revealing. “Are you not close to your mom because she left your family?”
“That’s part of it, I suppose. I saw what her leaving that last time did to my dad. It broke his spirit. The going and coming home had been terrible enough, but knowing it was final, that she was never coming back?” He shook his head. “He was never the same after that.”
“Which makes you stronger than your father,” Laura said. “Losing your wife didn’t break you.”
“No, it just left me bitter and determined to avoid all future entanglements,” he said wryly, then glanced at her. “Until you. Somehow I couldn’t resist you. I’m still trying to figure that out. How’d you sneak past all those well-honed defenses of mine?”
“Maybe the why and how don’t matter,” Laura said. “Sometimes fate just steps in.”
“Maybe, but fate has a way of being unreliable. It can take things away just as quickly as it brings them into your life,” he said, an edge of cynicism in his voice that suggested he still didn’t entirely trust what was going on between them.
“Do you still think I’m going to abandon you?” she asked.
He shrugged. “It’s always a possibility.”
Laura felt the pain behind that admission. She wondered how much time it would take before he believed in her, in them. Or, because of his mother’s treatment of his father, would he always have this nagging doubt that would hang over their relationship and keep it from flourishing?
* * *
Misty stared at the words she’d written earlier and wondered what on earth she’d been thinking when she’d agreed to speak at tomorrow’s rally. How was she supposed to stand in front of all those people and reveal the shame she’d felt at the terrible things Annabelle had posted online about her? Getting through it had been hard enough. Reliving it in public might be more than she could do.
Her mom, Ms. Reed and even her dad had agreed, though, that talking about it might give her some kind of catharsis or something. As much as she trusted all of them, she thought they were being a little optimistic. Nothing was going to make her life better, not until she could go away to college and forget all about Serenity and Annabelle and stupid Greg Bennett.
She hadn’t told a single soul—not even Katie—that Greg had been more and more persistent now that Annabelle wasn’t in school to catch him trying to hook up with Misty. He’d cornered her in the hallway half a dozen times during the week, making her squirm with his disgusting suggestions about what he’d like to do to her. Thankfully all the teachers seemed to be hanging out in the halls between classes and after school. Whenever one of them had moved close, Greg had taken off, his smirk firmly in place. He was such a jerk! She still couldn’t believe this whole mess had happened because Annabelle, who was otherwise pretty smart, hadn’t recognized that.
Once more she looked at her notes for tomorrow, then crumpled up the paper and threw it in the trash. It landed right there with her first dozen attempts. When her cell phone rang, she grabbed it, relieved to have an excuse to take a break. She saw Katie’s name and smiled as she answered.
“Boy, am I glad you called,” she told her friend. “I’ve been trying and trying to write something for tomorrow, but everything I put on paper seems stilted and stupid. I’m thinking it’s a bad idea for me to try to do this.”
“No, it’s not,” Katie said. “If anything, it’s more important than ever.”
Something in Katie’s voice alarmed Misty. “What do you mean?”
“There’s something online. I’m not sure who posted it, but it was somebody from school. I spotted it on my page and when I looked around, it was all over.”
Misty felt her heart actually sink in her chest. “How bad is it?” she asked.
“Pretty bad,” Katie said.
“More pictures?” she asked, a catch in her voice. Those had been the worst, most degrading of everything Annabelle had done.
“Uh-huh, and not like last time,” Katie said, her voice filled with sympathy. “These are worse, like they came from some porno site or something. There’s no way anyone could believe they’re you, but that’s what it says.”
Tears leaked out of Misty’s eyes as she managed to whisper, “Where?”
“Go to my page. I wanted you to see them before I printed them out for Helen and Ms. Reed. Then I’ll get Kyle to take them down. I called him to come home from school as soon as I saw this. He’ll be
here any minute and he knows how to pull stuff like this down. I’ve already posted a message about how phony they are and how disgusting the person is who put them up.”
Misty knew that wouldn’t be enough to stop the circulation of the pictures, though. This kind of thing could take on a life of its own. She was probably lucky someone hadn’t decided to take it a step further and fake a video. Even a post that was taken down in minutes could go viral.
Her hands shook as she logged on to her computer and went to the social-networking site. One glimpse of the pictures made her gag with disgust.
“Oh, Katie, don’t let Kyle see them,” she pleaded, figuring this would just about doom that secret crush she had on Katie’s brother. It wasn’t much of a crush, because he was older and didn’t even know she was alive. Unlike Katie’s other brother, Ty, who was this major sports superstar, Kyle was quieter and a bit of a nerd. But he had a wicked sense of humor that made Misty laugh. “Please, Katie. I’ll never be able to look at him again.”
“Misty, it’ll be okay,” Katie said. “Kyle was as furious about this as I am. The minute I told him, he said he was heading home. He knows this isn’t you and, most of all, that it isn’t your fault. I pity whoever did it, if he figures out that part.”
Misty was surprised it wasn’t obvious. “It wasn’t Annabelle? You’re sure?”
“Not unless she’s started some other page and online identity. Her old page is completely gone. I checked there first. I don’t know enough about technology to figure out where this started, but maybe Kyle will.”
“How am I supposed to even show my face tomorrow, much less speak?” Misty asked wearily.
“You’ll do it because you aren’t going to let these idiot bullies win. If you need me to, I’ll stand on that stage right beside you. I can get some other kids to do the same thing. We’ll present a united front, so everyone knows you’re not in this alone.”
“I know you’re trying to help, but the truth is I am alone,” Misty told her, feeling utterly defeated. “That’s my name linked to those awful pictures, not yours or some other girl’s. No matter how many times I tell people it wasn’t me, that image will stick in everyone’s head.”
Catching Fireflies Page 24
