Testimony

by Anita Shreve

  I do not go home for Easter break, because it is too short a time to go so far. Silas’s family invites me to Easter dinner at his house. I have met Silas’s father at basketball games, but I have never seen his mother. Silas comes to the school to pick me up, and he is dressed in a shirt and tie. He tells me he has been to church with his family. I want to touch his shirt and his tie. I have on a dress that, when I sit in the front seat of Silas’s smelly car, I realize is too short. It rides up high on my thighs, and I know it is a dress that Silas’s mother will hate. For a moment, I think about running back into my dorm room and putting on a pair of pants and a top, but Silas is already making the turn out of campus and toward his house.

  My legs are cold in the car, because even though it is Easter, it is not spring. There is still snow on the ground, and I don’t even own a pair of panty hose. My dress is cotton and light blue. I thought it would be appropriate for Easter, but it is not. Silas reaches over and puts his hand on my bare leg just above my knee. I don’t know what he is saying with that gesture. Does he mean to make me feel better about the dress? Or does he just want to touch my skin?

  Maybe I’m wrong about the dress, because his mother is nice to me and talks to me in the kitchen. I think it is funny that within minutes after Silas and I arrive at the house, I am in the kitchen with the women, and Silas is in the living room with the men. They are watching a golf championship on television. Mrs. Quinney is baking hot cross buns. I have never known anyone who baked hot cross buns. She has made an Easter basket for me and hands it to me. I don’t know what to say. In my family, Easter has never been an important holiday. I haven’t gotten an Easter basket since I was eight years old. In the basket, tucked inside all the yellow plastic straw, are colored chocolate eggs that look like real robin’s eggs, even with the speckle. There are jelly beans and cookies that have been decorated to look like Easter eggs. I don’t know what to say. I give Mrs. Quinney a quick hug. Just like that. I didn’t plan it. Mrs. Quinney seems surprised, and then she smiles. After that, I am not nervous.

  Silas and I sit across from each other at the dinner table. I can see him over the centerpiece, which is a sparkly bunny with a hole cut in its back for flowers. I think Silas and I were not seated side by side because no one wants to say officially that we are a couple. I try to keep up with the conversation, but Silas catches my eye. Every time he does that, I forget what we are talking about. Every once in a while, Mr. Quinney looks at me and then at Silas, as if he is trying to puzzle out a clue to a mystery.

  After dinner, Silas announces that he and I are going for a walk. We put our coats on, and he takes my hand right in front of his parents and his aunt and uncle. He holds my hand all the way across the back lawn, which still has some snow on it, and onto a path in the woods. I am wearing a pair of Mrs. Quinney’s winter boots, which are slightly too big for me. They slip up and down against my heel. My bare legs are cold. I think about Mrs. Quinney wearing the boots, about how they must have walked into the barn where the sheep are kept hundreds of times.

  We slip and climb along the sloped path, Silas leading the way. From time to time, he looks back at the house. I can just make out Silas’s car through the bare branches. I think Silas is worried that someone is following us, but then I realize he is just trying to figure out the exact moment when we are out of sight.

  He stops on the path and waits for me to catch up to him. I am panting slightly. He laughs at me and tells me I’m out of shape. Silas hooks his arm around my shoulder and pulls me close. He kisses me. At first, the kisses are hard and a little frantic, and then they slow down and feel warm and hungry. I am hungry, too. I touch Silas on the chest, on his nice white shirt. He slides his arms inside my coat, and I can sense the heat of his palms through the thin cloth of my dress. We kiss for a long time, and when finally Silas breaks away, it’s as though he has taken a thin layer of my skin with him. I bend toward him and then have to rise up on my toes to keep from falling over.

  When we return to the house, I go immediately into the bathroom off the kitchen. In the mirror, my mouth is raw and swollen. The edges of my lips are blurred. I run the water until it is cold, and then I wash my face. I splash the cold water on my mouth again and again, and then I dry it with a towel. I look in the mirror. My mouth is still swollen, and it is perfectly obvious what Silas and I have been doing. But I have to leave the bathroom or people will wonder if I’m sick.

  When I enter the kitchen, Mrs. Quinney has her back to me, just finishing up the dishes. I realize I should have offered to help, but I didn’t. I say that to her, that I’m sorry we went off and I didn’t help her with the dishes. She turns around, about to say something easy, but the words get stopped up in her mouth. I can see that she is staring at my face. I think that she should not be too surprised — what does a mother imagine will happen when a teenage boy and girl go off together? — but it seems momentous just the same. Momentous. Mrs. Quinney did not imagine this. I can hardly breathe.

  “Silas is in the other room,” she says.

  Geoff

  As headmaster of Avery Academy, I believe the matter was handled in a manner that exacerbated the difficulties for the school. I have tried, over the past two years, to repair the considerable damage that was done, but this has been an uphill battle. The maelstrom of media attention, plus the various ongoing lawsuits, have made this nearly impossible to put behind us. When January 21 rolls around in about a month’s time, there will be a phalanx of media trucks parked on the quad, and reporters will be interviewing every student willing to talk to them. I can tell you right now how those stories will begin. “On the second anniversary of the Avery Academy sexual-assault case . . .” Contributions to the school are down, applications are down, and our yields are way down. Had Mike Bordwin not attempted a cover-up and not forced the boys’ confessions without benefit of parental or legal counsel, and had we handed the boys over to the police immediately, we would not be in this mess. Well, there would have been a mess, but it wouldn’t be of this magnitude. Before, one could point to the behavior of one or two students. By the time Bordwin was done, there were questions of integrity from the top down.

  Although we didn’t know it at the time, portions of the footage had been posted on the Internet as early as Monday. The quality of that footage was very poor, for which I have to be a bit thankful, but I have no doubt now that a number of students had seen excerpts. One might have expected someone of Silas’s or Rob’s integrity to have come forward with this information, but who knows how one will react when confronted with such humiliating evidence?

  I spoke to Kasia Gorzynski on the afternoon of January 24. She told me she had been asked by Bordwin not to reveal the existence of the tape, and that he had locked it in his safe. I was told that the tape had been confiscated by Arlene Rodrigues, a dorm parent, who had walked into a room where three boys were viewing the original on a television screen. When I spoke to her later that same afternoon, she informed me that Bordwin had extracted the same promise of silence from her. We spoke a bit about the impossibility of containing such a story, and we determined together that I would speak to Bordwin myself, which I did immediately after hockey practice. At that time, I coached the varsity hockey team.

  Unable to find Bordwin at his office, I walked round to his house. He answered the door.

  “Geoff,” he said, looking not at all happy to see me. Or possibly he was simply exhausted. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Have a seat. Meg is at a meeting. Can I get you a drink?”

  I declined. This didn’t seem a conversation one should have while drinking.

  He led me into a sitting room I had been in often. He took the wing chair, and I sat on the couch. “I’ll cut to the chase,” I said. “I understand you have a tape in your possession.”

  “I do,” he said, shifting his position in the chair. “It’s locked in the office safe.”

  “It’s my impression that a number of people, students and teachers alike, know abo
ut or have actually seen footage culled from the tape,” I said. “Bits of it, I think, are already on the Internet.”

  Bordwin blanched. “I was afraid of that,” he said.

  “I think we need to address this straightaway,” I said.

  Bordwin was silent a moment. “I’ll have the three boys come to my office first thing in the morning,” he announced finally. He paused. “I’ll confront them with the evidence and inform them that they’ll likely be expelled pending a hearing on Friday.”

  The Disciplinary Committee was scheduled to meet on Friday afternoon, which it does every week to review school infractions. “We might be on thin ice here,” I said, hitching myself forward. “Not informing the police could be construed as conspiracy to cover up the incident.”

  “I firmly believe that this should remain an internal affair,” Bordwin said, having regained his color. “We owe it to the boys to hear from them first before we inform the police, if we do so at all. Once this becomes public knowledge, we’ll be hounded by the press. We haven’t had enough time to properly assess the situation.”

  “But don’t you think, given the number of students who may know about the tape, that it’s already public?” I asked.

  “Public within the school is not the same as public,” he argued.

  “Have you talked to the parents of the girl?” I asked.

  “I intend to speak to the girl first thing in the morning.”

  “You want me to take care of it?”

  “I can handle it,” he said.

  I didn’t know at the time that Bordwin planned to extract written confessions from the boys. I can’t positively say that he did, either.

  We talked for a bit about how astonishing it was to discover Silas Quinney and Rob Leicht on the tape, that one would never have guessed they would behave in such a manner.

  “You were at the dance, weren’t you, Geoff?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “You mentioned excessive drinking, as I recall.”

  “Did I use that word?” I asked. “Excessive?”

  “I believe you did. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, I made a notation of that in my files. I could print out a copy for you tomorrow if you’d like.”

  I wondered if it was Bordwin’s intention to pin the blame for this fiasco on me. “Although I am dean of students,” I reminded him, “I was not responsible for that specific dance myself. If you recall, Asa Troy was in charge that night.”

  “Wouldn’t you agree that the dance was the responsibility of all of us?” he asked, employing a smug tone I had seldom heard him use.

  I stood. “I think we’ve said all we need to say about this matter.” Bordwin nodded, and I left the house.

  I never really warmed up to Bordwin during his tenure at Avery. I will admit that he was a good fund-raiser — he had exceptional skills in this arena — but I always felt that he failed to set a high moral standard at the school. He was not a natural leader, he was not an enthusiast, he did not actively seek to bring out the best in the students. I always felt that he was a little too comfortable with the status quo. The school needed someone to set challenges for both the students and the faculty, but Mike Bordwin was not that man. I have always thought that the board acted too hastily in giving him the permanent post, but as I was also in competition for the position, I could not really complain. After the legal and media chaos that followed the arrest of the boys for sexual assault as well as Bordwin’s resignation, it was felt by the board that I was the best person to handle the school, and I was offered the job of headmaster. A number of the members of the board said that giving me this post was long overdue.

  Mike

  The interview with the young woman, whose name he had learned from a quick perusal of the student directory, had been harrowing. In the flesh, across from his desk, she had looked extremely small and confused. At first, she didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. Then she admitted to having been in the room. She may or may not have had a drink. She appeared to know nothing of any compromising tape and was shocked to hear of its existence. She wept. And yet all the time she sat across from him, Mike felt that something in her was tightly coiled beneath the surface. He wasn’t certain he trusted that observation, however, because he had not, during the entire interview, been able to erase the images from the tape, which kept superimposing themselves upon her small frame. He had his own level of confusion. She altered her story so often that Mike thought he had lost his way within her labyrinthine tale. In the end, all he could do was send her back to her dorm and ask her to think about the night in question prior to their speaking again in a few hours. He thought she understood that he and she would together call her parents.

  Frazzled and with a sense of dread, Mike waited for the boys, whom Kasia had summoned. Silas’s mother — Anna — would find the tape scarcely credible. He could not imagine her sitting in front of a television, watching the sexual offenses involving her son, without being heartbroken. He knew he should make an effort to call her about the incident and the fact that he had summoned Silas to his office. He would beg her not to watch the tape. Kasia interrupted his thoughts by poking her head inside the door and reporting that Rob and J. Dot were on their way but that Silas could not be found. Mike tried to hide his enormous relief. “Keep looking,” he instructed her.

  Almost immediately there was a tentative knock on his door. Rob entered the room but wouldn’t meet Mike’s eyes. Nor did he ask the headmaster what the matter was, all of which convinced Mike that Rob had guessed the agenda. Mike noted that the boy was nicely dressed in a royal-blue polo shirt, smartly tucked into his chinos, which were belted. He had his baseball cap in his hand.

  “We’ll wait for J. Dot,” Mike said, employing the nickname that he knew the students used for the basketball player. Rob briefly closed his eyes. “We haven’t been able to locate Silas as yet,” Mike added.

  Rob nodded. It was all Mike could do to keep himself from blurting out the questions he personally wanted answered. Why? What were you thinking? He wondered if Rob knew he had seen the tape. He wondered if Rob himself had seen the tape. Mike thought it would be unimaginably difficult to watch oneself in a sexual encounter with others in the room.

  Because the door was open, J. Dot strode right in. J. Dot, who pushed the dress code to the limit with his shirt tucked behind only his belt, the rest hanging sloppily over his pants, the pants themselves riding a good inch or two lower than Rob’s. The two boys did not speak to each other, nor did they make any kind of eye contact. J. Dot took the chair beside Rob’s.

  Mike saw no reason to delay getting right to the point. He did not want this meeting to last one second longer than it had to. He told the boys he had seen the tape. Rob winced and bent his head. J. Dot had the gall to ask, “What tape?” Rob shook his head at the question.

  “The tape in which the two of you are having sex with an underage girl,” Mike said.

  “I’m not aware of any such tape,” J. Dot said.

  “I have the tape locked in my safe,” Mike said. “I’d be happy to have a TV brought in so that we could all view it together.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Rob said quickly, as he shot J. Dot a sharp glance.

  “What the hell were you doing?” Mike asked, his anger seeping out at last. “Do you know the age of the girl you all had sex with? She is fourteen. Fourteen. Are you aware that in this state, sex with a minor is called sexual assault, a crime that can lead to a jail sentence?”

  Rob still would not look at the headmaster. J. Dot leaned back in his chair in what struck Mike as an inappropriately casual pose. “It was her idea,” the boy said. “You ask her. She’ll tell you. She came right for us.”

  “And you did what?” Mike asked. “Did you gently steer her away? Did you make sure she got back to her dorm safely? No, it would appear that you took full advantage of a girl too young to know any better.”

  “She knew better,” J. Dot said.

  �
��And how do you figure that?” Mike asked.

  “You’ve seen the tape,” J. Dot said, acknowledging the very thing he had just denied knowing about. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re both in a lot of trouble.”

  The boys did not turn to each other.

  “And another thing,” Mike said. “I want to know the identity of the person behind the camera.”

  Again, there was silence in the room.

  “OK,” Mike said. “We’ll do this the hard way.”

  He pulled two sheets of lined paper and two pens from his top drawer. “I want signed confessions,” he said, “unless you want the tape shown at Friday’s Disciplinary Committee meeting. I want details, I want names, I want times, I want specific amounts you had to drink. I want it all, and I want it now. No one will leave this room until I have two full confessions in my hand.”

  “Are you going to call my parents?” J. Dot asked.

  “Yes,” Mike said.

  J. Dot’s body hit the back of the chair hard, as if he were outraged. “What do my parents have to do with it?” he asked.

  “I would think that they would want to know their son has been expelled from school.”

  “But I’m my own person now. I’m nineteen.”

  “Precisely the problem. I want you to write down everything you can remember about that night and then sign the document. I will put the confessions in the safe with the tape. On Friday, I will present only the documents to the members of the DC. You should both be in attendance, in case there are any questions.”

  “What about Silas?” J. Dot asked, looking around the room. “Where is he?”