by Zack Smedley
“So what I’m hearing is, this is a big ol’ CYA maneuver,” Dad says. (CYA—Cover Your Ass.) “Am I getting warm?”
“Mr. Turner—”
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s a hell of a magic trick,” he continues. “The local media chucklefucks throw some fairy dust, yell ‘abracadabra,’ and suddenly—poof!—you’ve all disappeared up your own assholes.” He claps his hands to his face, feigning wide-eyed wonder.
“This whole thing has had its peaks and valleys,” Principal Graham says, even-tempered. “We gathered a lot of information except the name—”
“Oh, oh—that’s all you missed, is it? There’s the ringing sound of success.” Dad unclicks his pen against his knee. “Other than THAT, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you enjoy the play?”
“I understand you’re frustrated—”
“If I have to hear one more time that you’re just as upset as we are,” he says, “I will physically leave.”
She tries to placate him by getting into the boring logistical stuff: the fact that the findings won’t be public and that guidance counselors are available anytime if I need them. She explains that the report will be stripped of any identifying info, then sent to the State Board of Education and General Assembly, and eventually its data will become part of a larger report for two congressional committees. All this mess reduced to a few numbers and components for colored bar graphs.
“But this won’t be a part of Owen’s educational record in any way,” Mat With One T adds.
“Why would we care about that? He’s a month away from graduation,” Dad snaps. “As is, by the way, his attacker. A competent administration would be slapping the guy with an indictment, not a diploma. He’s in your database; he’s in this building, and I seem to be the only person left in the room who feels that should make him easier to apprehend than goddamn D. B. Cooper. So I’m not leaving here unless, and until, you can answer me: What else are you going to do about this?”
“What I’ve just told you is the extent of what we can do,” Principal Graham says. “Protocols are in place for how we do our job—”
“I’m not telling you how to do your job; I’m telling you how everyone else does theirs, and asking you to do the same exact thing. If the state police were taking the lead on this, they’d take the mind-blowing step of continuing their search until the guy is caught. But you’re telling me if we ask for the same effort and accountability from the folks actually in charge of the students, teachers, and chaperones who were a part of the incident, all we get is the investigative equivalent of smacking a pipe with a wrench?”
“Mr. Turner, what more would you have us do?”
“For starters: Don’t set down the wrench.”
“To be frank—this is coming from the powers-that-be. I know that’s not what you’d like—”
“What I’d like is at least one idea that the powers-that-be didn’t yank right out of their rear ends. We’re dealing with something that only gets reported one out of five times,” Dad says. “You all are doing a wonderful job of demonstrating why.”
Principal Graham doesn’t make eye contact with me, but I know the part she isn’t saying: that they can’t do anything more to help me if I’m not going to tell them who it was.
She says, “If you want to file an appeal, that’s an option—”
“Oh, more red tape—yeah, perfect. I need that like I need assholes for eyeballs.” Dad climbs to his feet. The dismissal bell rings over the loudspeaker. He opens his mouth again when there’s a knock on the door.
Mom peeks her head in.
“So sorry I’m late,” she says.
“Don’t be.” He wrenches the door open and gestures for me to follow him. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Dad,” I say, antsy. He’s tearing his way out of the admin wing, declaring, “I can’t be back there right now.”
In the front lobby, students are emptying out all around for their buses. I’m horrified to spot Austin, Vic, Beth, and Lily gathering near the far bench. At first they all wave, but their smiles peel off when they see the circus spilling out of the front office: me, my mother, Principal Graham, and Mat With One T, all chasing after the raging bull known as my father.
Mom swats at his shoulder, stopping him. “What’s going on? What’s the school doing?”
“The school,” Dad says, “as a consolation prize for our pain and stress, is handing us a big ol’ heaping bucket of fuck-all. They couldn’t find anything, so they’re giving up. Whole thing’s a wash.”
“They’re what? Oh, come on—”
“No no no, if you think about it, it makes sense, okay,” Dad says, slapping his hands together. “See, when they started this whole goat rodeo, they were on the right track. Granted it was only to cover their rear ends, but still… . They accidentally got something right. So naturally the Board of Education stepped in to make sure a thing like that never happens again.”
His voice is thundering halfway across the lobby. I tug at his sleeve. “Seriously, can we talk about this somewhere else?”
“Yeah, come on, let’s—” Mom starts to say, but then Principal Graham steps up.
“Steve, please, let’s go back inside,” Principal Graham says. You know things are out of control when she looks panicked. “I understand you’re disappointed, so why don’t we—”
Dad bursts out into an empty, joyless laugh. The hallway chatter softens.
“Okay.” He decapitates the air with his hand. “Just so you’re aware—first of all, I can’t tell you how unimpressed I am by the customer service routine right now. Talk to me like a person, please. I don’t need hand-holding, I don’t need the dog-and-pony show; I just, just need action. I need you to do the thing you’ve been mandated to do by the Department of Education, the DOJ, the OCR, Titles One through Nine, Pennsylvania state law, and me.”
People are staring.
Phones are out.
My legs are made of stone.
“Let’s go,” Mom urges Dad. She turns to the others and says, “He and I should go.”
“Please accept my personal apology,” Principal Graham says to her, unflinching but more urgent now. Dad stiffens.
“Are you—that’s—holy shit.” He takes a half step back, looking her up and down. “For eight hours a day, we trust you with our child. Then I find out he gets attacked—sexually assaulted—under your care, and I’m told to let you fix it on your own. My job was to trust the process, and your extremely simple task was to find out which of his classmates did this. Instead, what happens? You all roll up the clown car, put my kid through hell—he’s spent five of his final eight weeks of high school getting an extremely public vivisection—and now we’re sitting here with bad ideas, bungled execution, and a grand total of no fucking results. And given all of that, your best possible version of an acceptable response is to say, Hey, don’t get too worked up, because we found a lot of information … except for the one thing we needed to fucking find?!” He gapes at her like she’s grown an extra head. “No, I don’t accept your personal apology!”
I want to melt through the ground.
Dissolve. Disappear. Disintegrate.
Instead I stay right here.
Here.
People watching and people listening and people recording.
Not everyone, but most of them.
(Shitshitshit.)
Then I hear it from across the lobby. The nightmare chatter. Surreptitious exchanges between my classmates. “Is that him?”
“Oh shit, I think that’s him.” “Wait, hold on … it was a guy?”
My classmates are saying it to each other softly, but it’s all I hear. It drowns out my father, who’s now being physically led out of the front lobby by my mother, and Principal Graham is barking at everyone to go to their buses, and I’m tearing out the front door of the school—not following my parents but splitting off as far away as I can get. I hear people calling after me … lots of them. Mom. Principal Graham. Lily.
I keep running.
It’s drizzling and mucky out—I don’t care. I sprint around the side of the school until I hit the fence bordering the football field, leaning back against it and sliding to the ground.
Soon Lily is standing on the other side of the parking lot, about the same distance as on the day I broke my arm. This time, though, she’s staring at me with a face I’ll never forget: It has the rest of our story written all over it, and there’s nothing left but anger and endings.
TWENTY-TWO
LILY STARTS RUNNING AS FAST AS SHE CAN TOWARD the football field—right past me. I climb to my feet, wiping the wet mulch off my butt as I chase after her.
“Do not fucking follow me,” she warns, but she slows down enough that I catch up to her.
“Lily, come on, let’s just talk. Let’s talk!”
“God!” She grabs my wrist, dragging me toward the bleachers until we find a dry patch under them. Garbage is littered all around our feet. She backs away from me so we’re almost ten feet apart, facing each other like we’re stepping into a cage match.
“Tell me right now: Is it you?”
I bullshit her: “Who?”
“Holy shit.” She clamps a hand to her mouth, shaking her head. Her huge, shocked eyes are fixed squarely on my face. “It is you.”
“Listen to me—hey, listen.” I snap at my bracelet, my fingers fumbling. My whole body shakes; my mind is in damage control mode, but every page inside it is blank. Finally I manage: “I’m not the one who told the school. Okay? I swear; I didn’t want this to get out—”
“Well, you told somebody!” Her hand drops. “Who’d you tell? Austin? Vic? I swear, if the entire group has been covering this up … oh my God.”
Lily starts to pace, arms tucked close to her chest—the same thing I do when I feel cornered. She looks disoriented, like she just woke up somewhere strange.
“No, I didn’t tell them; no one’s been lying to you—”
“You have, dude!”
“I didn’t want this to get out.” I repeat it like it helps somehow. I grab my own head—everything inside me feels upside down. “The only person I told was this one guy, and I barely even knew him—”
“Are you kidding me?” She gapes. “You never said a word to me, but you went to someone you barely knew and said—”
“I promise, it’s more complicated than that—”
“—on that note, what did you say, exactly?” She looks me up and down. “Let’s talk about this.”
“I don’t feel like going back over the specifics—”
“Wh—wow.” Lily shakes her head again. “So after a month of lying about this—talking to a stranger about it without saying a word to me—you don’t want to go over it the first time it comes up because you don’t feel like it?”
Thunder rumbles in the distance, rolling off the treetops. I put my finger to my ear to adjust to the noise. My boiling panic is re-condensing into irritation, anger—I want to fix things, but I’m getting fed up at the web Lily is spinning.
“Just so we’re clear,” I snap at her, in a harder voice, “I tried to talk to you about it.”
“What does that mean? When did you ever once say something about this?”
“Right after it happened!” I try to pace, but there are only a few inches of dry space to my side, so I just shift my weight.
“Right after?” she asks. “Really? So what time of the night was that?”
“Okay, it wasn’t right-right after, but on the bus ride home the next day!” I stab a finger in her direction. “No—do not tell me you don’t remember that.”
“So … okay. Let’s recap.” Lily clenches her arms together, staring at the wet ground. “You were there on the trip, the—thing—happened …”
“The thing?”
“—after it happened, you hung out with me, with everyone, for the rest of the night, right? And you didn’t say anything!”
“I was acting off! No, no—you can’t tell me I was being my usual self. Something was off! I was quiet; I didn’t talk—”
“I thought you were just on edge because of coming out,” she says. “I’m sorry I assumed, but you can’t blame me for that. You just can’t.”
“You laughed at me.” More anger licks at my insides as I step closer to her. “No—when I tried to talk to you about it on the bus, and tell you something happened, you laughed at me.”
“I thought you were … kidding around, or something! You were being weird and kept saying things ‘went wrong’ and you were like, barely coherent—”
“Yeah, that wasn’t a clue—”
“I’M SORRY, okay!” Lily balls her hands into fists, her wet hair sticking to her face. “I’m sorry I was confused, and zoned out from being on the bus for two hours, and didn’t understand what you were saying—”
“I was trying to tell you I’d gotten hurt. All I needed you to do was listen to me—”
“That’s not fair, O; not remotely fucking fair—”
“Jesus Christ—”
“Yeah, you can say that again—”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
“You try to talk to me about something once, then you never bring it up again—”
“What about later that week? Hm?” I take another step closer to her—I can’t believe her version of this is so different than mine. No way is this her earnest, unironic take on how things played out. “A few days later, during spring break, I specifically said I needed to talk to you about something, and you immediately changed the subject. You knew, Lily, you fucking knew—”
“I KNEW? Are you for real?”
“You didn’t know exactly what I was going to say; but you knew it was bad shit that we needed to discuss, and you didn’t want to hear it, so you avoided it. God forbid I steer the conversation for once.”
“So, what … you tried to bring it up twice, then dropped it forever?”
“Hey, at least I tried!”
“Try hard-er!”
“What for?” When I see the look on her face, I hold up my hands. “I’m really asking. I wanted to talk about it; I tried twice, but when that didn’t work, I decided to drop it and move on. That was my decision. I should be allowed to forget about it, keep it to myself, whatever—”
“YOU TOLD THE SCHOOL!”
“No I didn’t! You are not hearing me—I didn’t.” I smack my own hand. “I told someone else, who told the school, then about fifty-seven other things happened—”
“Do you have any idea—Owen—”
“What?”
“—do you have any idea how little difference that makes?” She shakes her head at me, her eyes on fire. “All the students know now, the police know now; me, Beth, Austin, Vic, and half the graduating class got interrogated; the local paper wrote a story about you; meanwhile I’m sitting in the dark for all of this, and after I learn about it, you’re seriously going to stand there and think it’s important to point out that you weren’t technically the one who hit send on the report?” She glares at me, openmouthed again. “Let’s not even get into the fact that I had to learn about this from a tantrum by your dad, more than a month after you’re claiming this happened—”
“Okay.” I cut her off, shaking my head. “Stop.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I mean it.” I hold out both hands, fighting the urge to explode. “Stop doing that right now.”
“Doing what?” Her mouth is open in a half-laugh, half-WTF expression.
“Talking about a thing that happened to me like it may or may not have happened to me. This isn’t Schrödinger’s cat; it is not up for debate.”
“It is.”
“Stop.”
“It is!”
“I SAID TO STOP!”
TWENTY-THREE
March 10th—Senior Year
Journal:
I’m not sure how to start this.
This isn’t something that I want to write down, but I think it
’s impor
I remember it started with the crimson light in the window.
It was hours after I’d come out to everyone, and I was laying in my dorm bed cuddling with Lily. She’d snuck over and Austin was out for a walk with Beth, so it was just her and I. The room was almost pitch black, but the fiery red light from the library roof reached through the window so it was spilled all over the bed, highlighting both our torsos.
I remember squeezing her, and her squeezing back.
I remember she said, with a smile in her voice, “I’m really proud of you for today.”
I remember thanking her, and kissing her, and us making out with all our usual fun and familiar noises. We fell back onto the pillow, facing each other. Then she reached down to rub over my pants, and I shook my head. “Not right now,” I murmured.
I remember her asking if it was because she smelled or something, and I assured her it wasn’t—I was just exhausted, and in more of a cuddly mood than a sex mood, and I hadn’t brought condoms, and I wasn’t comfortable taking clothes off when Austin could be back any second. Lots of offhand reasons.
I remember the relief I felt when she said that was fine, and we went back to kissing and laughing together.
Then, the chill of her fingers on my bare chest as I realize she’d unbuttoned my shirt.
“Hey,” I said softly, in a dude, come on voice. “Stop.”
I remember her pointing out, in her usual teasing manner, that we didn’t have to keep our shirts on to make out. I remember I started to fidget, so she grabbed my wrists to calm me and told me to relax.
I remember the pressure on my chest.
The red light in the air.
Lily on top of me.
TWENTY-FOUR
THE WIND WHIPS RAIN UNDER THE BLEACHERS ONTO both of us, splashing our skin. Lily steps back.
“You need to stop yelling,” she says, digging her heel into the mud. “You’re not being rational right now, O; do you get that?”
“You raped me.”
