Cinderland

by Amy Jo Burns

  Five Six Seven Eight

  We kept shaking, bopping as the music swelled.

  Nine Ten Eleven Twelve

  Here it came—the grand entrance that would never change.

  The dewy-skinned basketball boys tore through a sign hung in front of the locker room door and burst onto the court. The line of athletes swarmed around the girls, dazzling the crowd with their practice layups, jump shots, and rebounds. Each player had his moment of presentation to the adoring audience; he whipped off his warm-up pants and tossed them on the bleachers, some of the snaps left undone to assist with the theatrics. The boys shot and scored as the girls primped and pranced. This, a film reel of young dukes and duchesses performing at high court.

  7:56 p.m. The pep band slogged through “The Star Spangled Banner.” Up in the balcony, Yutes—the waifish school nurse—perched on a metal folding-chair throne, primed to scold any ruffian who forgot to remove his hat for the anthem. Heads bowed and children fidgeted until the final notes resolved.

  8:00 p.m. The two opposing centers met in the middle of the court. These were my favorite moments, the athletes itching to go like race-horses. They crouched; the whistle blew. The referee threw the ball in the air, and for a moment it suspended, a dirty orange orb that drew every eye to itself. (A moment here for Mr. Howard Lotte, who had once been that dirty orb that had lured the Mercury flock: where was he on this night, last Friday night, or the one before? Alone in front of his television just a stone’s throw from the high school, no longer permitted to attend any school functions? Surely, he entered no one’s thoughts but his own.)

  Someone from one team or the other snatched the ball and the point guard signaled the first play of the game. For quarters one and two, the eager cheerleaders were relegated to the bleachers. I sat wherever there was a spot, never on the end next to the players. Pete, now a key teammate, had worked his way to the front of the line. The time clock wound down as we offered a few cheers (RED HOT, our team is RED HOT), while someone banged a megaphone against the floor. A few of us performed a rather stout and underwhelming mount in the corner, one girl (a flyer, she was called) balanced on the bent thighs of two girls acting as the base. The flyer’s arms shot out at forty-five-degree angles as we shouted, “GO STANGS!”

  During practice earlier in the season, I had declined the opportunity to grace the top of the Mustang cheerleader mounts. I was afraid of heights. “Come on,” one of the veteran cheerleaders had urged me. “Don’t you wanna fly?” I did want to fly, but I didn’t dare. I knew that falling always came with it.

  At halftime, the girls rose to take center stage. The pep band started to play “Centerfold,” and the cheerleaders performed a local favorite, coined the “s” dance. Each year, the older girls taught it to the younger. The pep band popped out the loud notes as young, feminine hips gyrated to the tempo. Executed at every home game, everyone knew this was the “s” dance, and everyone knew the “s” was short for slut.

  Fans stood and stretched, kibitzed and milled. The girls began an eight-count step that started with hair tousling, as if washing soap suds from our wet manes. We completed it by bending over at the waist, parading our backsides to the visitors’ section. Picture me in the shower, the choreography demanded. Picture me bending over.

  But such seduction was never for the basketball boys, the boys who loved their mothers, met their curfews, and always put on wool caps before going outside. The boys who—at this very moment—sat one floor below in a damp locker room and listened to their coach. “This is your moment,” he told them. “You better go out there and take it.”

  Instead, the girls danced for a town made of ghosts. Fathers who used to sit in the locker room, years ago. Mothers who once performed the same “s” dance in the same uniforms. All of Mercury lapped up the display along with saccharine cups of diet pop and melting Hershey’s bars, the same town that had railed against seven young girls trying to protect their own integrity once their innocence was taken. The cheerleading squad was filled with Lotte’s former students, and we danced for the crowd, but would never even think of doing anything unholy in the backseat of a boy’s car. On every bleacher, there was at least one little girl who would grow up and fall in line, just as I had. She was one girl of many, many girls.

  How quickly our town will return to its droll routine of high school pageantry after Mr. Lotte’s scandal is tied with a firm bow. But the year of Mr. Lotte’s investigation feels like the longest year in Mercury history, and we swear time passes more slowly here than it does anywhere else in America. Just when we get wind of new trends like hyper-color T-shirts and slap bracelets, the rest of the country has already moved on to a new fad. By the time of Lotte’s August sentence hearing, the town has grown impatient. He’s pled guilty out of the kindness of his heart, so can’t someone wrap this up already? Don’t you know that peewee football season is just around the corner, and where there is peewee football, there must be peewee cheerleaders, decorated in itchy wool sweaters and bright rhinestone studs in newly pierced ears? There are future Mercury stars and starlets in the making here, and the clock is ticking.

  Almost a year after he first confronted Mr. Lotte, Mr. Tierney takes the stand. He doesn’t reveal what he said to Mr. Lotte on his front stoop that day, nor what Mr. Lotte said in return, only that he was “unsatisfied with his explanation.” What was a father to do? Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, Mr. Tierney waited three days and three nights before deciding to speak. In less than a week, he’d become a Mercury prophet set to deliver a message no one would want to hear.

  Mr. Tierney is a bit of a small-town legend himself. Lithe and wiry, he once worked in the Juniper steel mills before they closed and he began a second career in education. He’s almost super-human, though more in the manner of Peter Parker than Bruce Wayne. Town lore insists Mr. Tierney once fell off his own roof while cleaning the gutters, only to stand straight up, crack his back, and climb back up to finish the job. He built his own garage, mows his expansive lawn early in the day, and you can count on him to say exactly what he means.

  “There was only one choice,” he says from the stand during his testimony. “If we didn’t come forward, it would send a message to Aria that, if violated, you count your losses, run, and let others fend for themselves.”

  Though his son Simon will grow into an athletic dynamo in a few years and rescue his parents and sister from being known only as “that family” that started this whole thing, for now Mr. Tierney thinks of his daughter.

  Aria told the truth as she was taught. Her reward has been interviews with three government agencies, necessary but very painful. Aria has been confronted both in and out of school by classmates, accused of lying and being a troublemaker. She has spent nights awakened by nightmares about Mr. Lotte and fears of reprisal. Our family has been treated as criminals, shunned, ridiculed and accused of conspiracy. For what? For taking the appropriate, lawful steps to stop a very real danger. We didn’t make the decision to prosecute but only supplied facts to the respective authorities.

  I have been told that the offenses were not serious enough to be of concern, that they were exaggerated. Some may think touching private parts under all clothing is not that bad, but they weren’t sitting up nights with a weeping, trembling ten-year-old child. One person even suggested that Aria suffered more going through the legal system than at the hands of Mr. Lotte. When she lay awake unable to sleep, her words were fear of Mr. Lotte and anger at what Mr. Lotte had done, not of the legal system.

  His final words resound with the common sense that Mercury in all its hysteria has thrown overboard. “This is not an anti-Lotte issue,” Aria’s father says. “This is a pro-child issue.”

  After Mr. Tierney concludes and another parent testifies, Layne Richter’s mother takes her turn speaking on her daughter’s behalf. She is the wife of a church elder, and though most of the people in town know who she is, they’ve never heard her voice.

  “I don’t know if I c
an be heard,” she says after she’s sworn in. “I know I speak softly.”

  Though we aren’t there to see her on the stand, there’s one thing we know—her eyes are a vision no one in the courtroom will be able to forget. They are the bluest blue, an original-sin-blue, the kind that reminds us how far we’ve fallen. Her words do the same.

  “This situation has pitted friend against friend, teacher against colleague, Christian against Christian, and perhaps most sadly, child against child.”

  Child against child. Is that the cost of keeping a secret, paid by those who told the truth? It’s a penance that makes us sick to collect, and like little, dainty dogs, we return to our vomit.

  The town, the insidious perpetrator that Mr. Tierney and Mrs. Richter address, will never be put on trial, never be brought to justice, and will never make amends. And why should it? These are just girls, after all. We’ll bounce back. We’re young, for now. Besides, an entire town hasn’t come to judgment since the days of Moses and the Old Testament. The difference between Nineveh and Mercury is singular: Nineveh repented when Jonah delivered his message, and Mercury did not.

  Audition

  IN LATE SPRING OF MY SOPHOMORE YEAR, Simon appeared on my periphery. When I noticed him sliding his eyes toward me when I walked past his physics class, door open, him seated in the last row (“You looked good in those Levis,” he later told me), I only let my glance linger a moment before moving on. Even if I wanted him, I could never say it. This was how girls auditioned for boys in Mercury: you strutted, you smiled, and you pretended not to care.

  Despite his eye wandering in my direction, everyone in town knew that Simon had always loved that year’s homecoming queen, Cara Richter. Though he tried to conceal it, everyone still knew, just like everyone knew which basketball ref wouldn’t officiate Saturday night games because he was a Seventh-day Adventist, or that throat cancer had rendered the town dentist unable to speak above a whisper. During routine checkups, he scolded his patients when they reciprocated his soft tone. “You don’t have to whisper just because I do,” he would say. We were just trying to be polite.

  Simon was also known for being a king of grand gesture, and the first I experienced was on Cara’s behalf, not mine. Cara’s younger sister Layne had become a close friend of mine in the past year since I’d lost Nora and Pete. In their absence, Layne had appeared, somehow implicitly aware of how lonely I was. If anyone understood what it felt like to suddenly find herself alone, it was Layne. It was as if her daring to speak the truth about Mr. Lotte had imprinted kindness on her, an ability to sense the innate needs of others.

  When word of the allegations against Mr. Lotte first broke, many of the townsfolk busied themselves by foretelling what would become of the girls who had dared to speak out. They’d be lost, surely. Outcasts. Drunks. Sluts. Jezebels. Now, five years later, not one of their predictions had come true. Instead, Layne was no longer bound by the secret she didn’t know we shared, the same secret that still threatened to shrivel me from the inside out.

  A year older and a starter on the girls’ basketball team, Layne didn’t see me much outside of Sundays at Pure Heart Presbyterian. I was drawn to Layne’s quiet strength. She wasn’t weak, and she wasn’t proud—Layne embodied everything I felt I was missing, or perhaps still had burning inside me that was desperate to find an escape. Just by befriending me, she had finally taught me it was possible for one girl to save another, instead of always turning her back.

  When I arrived at Layne’s house on a Saturday afternoon in late April, all was dark and silent. I crossed the lawn, dotted with a few leftover leaves from last fall. I rang the doorbell and Rilo, the family dog, yelped from somewhere inside. I peered through the glass into the dark foyer where a piano sat, pressed against the side of a staircase. I’d never heard her play. Once so eager to exhibit, most of the girls in town didn’t play piano anymore. When I sat at the piano bench, I felt like an impostor, but not because I didn’t know how to play. It was because I hadn’t told the truth.

  When Layne came to the door, she leaned past me and inspected the sparse oncoming traffic.

  “Quick,” she whispered. “Come inside.”

  I followed her into the house, creeping through their front room and the kitchen before we huddled on the loveseat in their family room. The television blipped in the corner. The house smelled as it always did, the faint scent of freshly baked Communion bread.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Layne leaned in. “Simon is waiting for Cara in her bedroom.”

  “Her bedroom?” The birth of a new fantasy simmered beneath my skin. I could picture it—returning home to a darkened house and entering my bedroom to find a benevolent intruder. Things like that never happened in Mercury.

  “What’s he doing up there?” I asked.

  “He’s going to ask her to the prom,” Layne whispered. “Isn’t that romantic?”

  I nodded. The moment turned too hallowed for speaking. Simon was directing the show this time, and I, for once, was a member of the hushed audience.

  Layne and I watched the muted television as we waited for Cara to return from volleyball practice. The back of my neck tingled as I imagined the scene about to unfold. An unsuspecting Cara would slog up the stairs toward her bedroom. When she crossed the doorframe and tossed her bag on the floor, she’d notice a pair of men’s flip-flops next to it. Her gaze would rise, her pupils adjusting to the afternoon light streaming in from the window. Simon’s expectant face would overtake her vision, his head of thick hair appearing golden in the shafts of light. She’d take a step back, look behind her, and furrow her gentle brow.

  He’d extend his hand, holding a single rose, and pose his question. She’d accept, both the rose and his offer. Then he’d whisk past her, telling her he had somewhere else to be, as all bad boys did.

  Afloat in my own imagination, I jumped at the squeak of the front door. Layne squeezed my arm. Silent, we watched each other as we listened to Cara’s feet tap up the steps.

  Layne and I could hear nothing as we waited. Was Simon still up there? I pictured him again. Was he standing or sitting? Leaning against the vanity, the mirror showcasing the muscles in his back?

  After a few minutes dragged by, sound returned. Cara bounded down the steps, through the kitchen and into the family room, red rose in hand.

  “Simon really knows how to make an impression,” she said, flopping on the couch.

  Unable to contain myself, I finally spoke.

  “Dude,” I said. “Dude.”

  “Fer-rill,” Layne added.

  “Is he still here?” I asked.

  “No,” she sighed. “He left.”

  Simon had been so close, but I’d not seen him come or go. No evidence of his presence, aside from the rose, remained. Layne and I regarded Cara from the loveseat as she unmuted the television. It wasn’t envy I felt, but awe at the magic in her that had inspired such romance.

  Desire for Simon, this peculiar phantom, overtook me. I told myself it didn’t matter that he wanted someone else, that in time, I could change his mind. Everyone in Mercury was so guarded, but not Simon. He was in love with Cara, who didn’t love him back, and still he didn’t care who knew. In Simon, I found the kind of unabashed openness that I wanted for myself. I hoped someone with his bravery could expel the fear that crippled me, the one thing I had to conquer if I had any chance of getting out of Mercury.

  Simon made his first move during the last week of school before summer break. Each year, the school newspaper released a special edition dedicated to the graduating class. An integral part in the ritual of senior departure, the issue operated as last rite for those bound for a better place, another place, or the same place.

  The paper included a feature titled “the senior wills” where the departed bequeathed their belongings to those left behind. Like many of Mercury’s customs, these soliloquies obeyed unspoken rules. In bestowing their few belongings, seniors turned regular items to talisman
s: matchbooks, pom-poms, car keys. Never any rings, necklaces, or heirlooms—nobody liked a showboater. Those weren’t the things that mattered anyhow.

  A few well-worn bequests:

  1. The Inside Joke

  —To Meredith, I leave a trip to the porta-potty on Station Road.

  —To Bobbers, the blue chair in Mr. Ellis’s science class, and a pen to go with it. Hee hee.

  2. The Maudlin Goodbye

  —To Tim, every bit of deep-down confidence you need to realize what an incredible person you are. Keep spreading your light.

  —Abby, cherish these years. Don’t let them slip through your fingers. They disappear too quickly.

  3. The Backhanded Gift, aka The Sneaky Sideways:

  —To Shelley, my boyfriend’s phone number, since I heard you wanted it.

  —To Chet, another year in remedial math. I hope you pass this time.

  4. The Minimalist Approach

  —I leave nothing to no one.

  An odd quiet spread throughout the halls of Mercury High School on the day the teachers dispensed the year’s final issue during the last period of the day. Students lolled at lockers, some crouching, seeking cover. Pages turned, eyes scanned, mouths grinned. Part of the high came from devouring the issue, hunting for your own name in print, perhaps uncovering a long-concealed crush. I hadn’t expected anyone to leave me anything.

  Simon and I hadn’t interacted much beyond delayed glances in the hallway and my hand brushing his while passing the offering plate on Sunday morning. Hungry for details about him, I read Simon’s will first. I squeezed the handle of my locker when I saw Simon had reserved a sincere moment for me:

  To Amy Burns, I leave nothing because you are perfect the way you are.

  My body felt aflame and my skin flushed as the kids around me pulled from their trances. Lockers slammed shut, voices called to one another. The rush I felt rivaled the one I had when I learned I’d been chosen to be editor of the school newspaper the following year. My stomach contracted, my fingers went cold. Perfectly crafted into an almost compliment, Simon’s statement had a live edge, so that when given, it cut a little, too. I read it over and over later that night, dissecting it and putting it back together again.