Instead, I looked around my room. At my bookshelf full of horse statues and horse books. At my stuffed animals piled high in a net sling in the corner of my room. At the bureau where I stood every morning brushing and braiding my long hair. At the picture of my family on the wall beside the bureau, a picture taken the morning we played for everyone at church. I liked the picture because we were all holding our instruments, and we had big smiles and our arms wrapped around one another.
My eyes drifted downward, to the viola case propped against the side of my desk, notebooks and music piled beside it. I wrinkled my nose. It was a secret that I didn’t like playing viola. I only did it for my parents, especially Dad, because he wanted me to be part of the orchestra at school. I felt guilty about it because I knew how much my parents wanted me to play an instrument, like them—and like Song, who was so good on both the flute and the piano. I tried. I really did. But after flute, after clarinet, after viola, it hadn’t clicked. I didn’t love it the way Dad wanted me to love it. I felt so bad about it, but I was hoping by the time I got to high school, I could tell Dad the truth. I wanted to drop the music so I could put more time into the lit magazine and horseback riding.
But even that little secret seemed so trivial now, in the light of what had happened. In just a few hours, everything seemed different, even though nothing, really, had changed.
The phone rang downstairs. I got up off my bed and went to the upstairs hallway to listen. “It’s on TV?” I heard Mom say.
But no one in our house turned the television on that night. Still, there was no escaping from it. In the morning, a story appeared in the newspaper: MIDDLE SCHOOL MUSIC TEACHER ACCUSED OF SEXUAL ABUSE. The article said my father—Frederick Mattero, the music teacher at Oakdale Middle School—had been placed on administrative leave after three students accused him of sexual abuse. The article didn’t say that Dad denied it—or that the girls might have lied. It only said there was an investigation.
“It feels like someone kicked me in the stomach,” Cade complained.
Mom was quiet and walked around, setting bowls on the table, pouring cereal and juice and trying to get us to eat.
Dad sat looking stunned, in a chair at the table. The puffy redness around his eye had turned black and blue overnight.
“You ought to sue the guy who hit you,” I told him, feeling the anger rise up again. When Dad didn’t respond, I turned to Mom. “Really, why don’t they arrest that guy for assault or something?”
Mom raised her eyebrows. “You’re right.” She turned to Dad. “Fred, we should ask about that.”
Cade still frowned at the newspaper. “What am I supposed to tell people today?”
Like he was the only one who had to worry.
When his question went unanswered, he scraped his chair back and left abruptly, grabbing his books and his car keys from the counter, not even saying good-bye. It was so typical of my brother. He is so centered on himself.
The door slammed. Mom rushed after him. “Cade, are you working after school today? Cade?”
Dad still sat at the table. His elbows were on the table, and he had dropped his head into his hands so I couldn’t see his face. He hadn’t eaten, hadn’t said a thing.
It was really strange going to school without Dad. For the last three years we had gone to school together, leaving the house at exactly seven-thirty A.M. so we would be there at seven forty-five, fifteen minutes before morning announcements, time for Dad to unlock the music room, turn the lights on, and get ready for class.
“Melody, are you ready?” Mom asked, scooping up her purse from the counter and settling the thin strap over her shoulder. She had on her work clothes: white sneakers, khaki pants, a green polo shirt with the words GREENTHUMB NURSERY embossed on the front. Mom’s job kept her in good shape, and she always seemed so perky with her short brown hair curled under and tucked behind her ears, her little diamond studs sparkling in her ears.
“I’m ready,” I replied.
Mom had in her hand a letter my father had written. I assumed he had denied touching any of those seventh-grade girls. She was taking it into the main office at school when she dropped me off.
She looked over at Dad, who by that time had gotten up from the table and stood nearby in his bathrobe, a cup of coffee in his hands.
“Are you going to the police station?” she asked him. “To talk with that detective?”
Dad nodded.
“And what about the lie-detector test?” she asked.
Dad shrugged. He seemed lost. “I don’t know,” he said, glancing at me, then settling his eyes on Mom.
“Fred, look,” Mom told him, “if you’re at all nervous, don’t do it, because the anxiety will skew the results and do more damage than good. Those tests, you know they’re not perfect.”
“Yeah, well, neither am I.”
I frowned, wondering what he meant by that. Mom stared at him.
“Well, for crying out loud, Mary,” Dad snapped. “How’s it going to look if I refuse to take the lie detector?”
Bad. It would look bad. We all knew the answer to that one. “Here, Mellie, you’d better deliver this,” Dad said, picking up his familiar blue planning book from the table and handing it to me. “I wrote out what we’re supposed to do today. Seventh-graders are practicing their recorders. Eighth grade is having an open-note quiz on the concert band.”
“Who should I give it to?” I asked.
“Just put it on my desk,” Dad said.
Suddenly, Mom had her purse off her shoulder and was scooping up the unfinished bowls of cereal.
“Stop, Mary,” Dad told her, trying to take a dish from her hands. “I’ll do that, I’ll clean up.”
Mom put the dish in the sink.
Dad touched her wrist. “What else am I going to do today?” Mom picked up her car keys again. “I do have to get going, Fred. I’ve got a huge shipment of impatiens coming this morning. Huge. And all that mulch. And I’m short one person because of Martha being sick.”
“Go,” Dad ordered.
But Mom began to cry.
Dad put his arms around her. “Come on, Mary,” Dad said softly. “You need to hold yourself together. For me—for all of us. You have to, or we won’t get through this.”
11
Claire
WHEN THE ALARM WENT OFF IN THE MORNING, I woke up with a rotten feeling. Kind of like hunger, only worse.
“Claire, time to get up,” Mom called sweetly.
Remembering why I felt so bad, I moaned and curled up into a ball, then stuck my hand out and pulled the blanket up over my shoulder. I could have stayed that way all day. I even thought about telling Mom I didn’t feel good, that I had, like, a sore throat or something. But I also wanted to find out what would happen at school. And I wanted to hear what went down with Jenna’s mom and dad after I ran home the night before.
My eyes flicked open. I hadn’t even told my mother I went to Jenna’s. See, when I got home, Mom and the kids weren’t back yet, so I destroyed the note I’d left on the counter. Why upset my mother any more? She didn’t want me with Jenna, and she’d go ballistic if she found out about Jenna’s mother being at that pilot’s house. She’d probably never let me back over Jenna’s again.
And yet it did all seem kind of strange. I rolled over on my back and put my hands up behind my head, thinking. I kept playing that scene over and over in my mind—how Jenna whimpered and asked for her mother. “Let’s call the airline. Maybe Captain O’Brien knows where Mommy is . . .” I mean, did Jenna know all along where her mother was? Did she plan that?
I wondered if Jenna’s parents would get divorced now. If that happened, then Jenna might have to move. It seemed like kids always had to move when their parents got divorced. And if Suzanne went to Catholic school—then I’d be all alone at Oakdale.
“Claire, come on, honey!” Mom called again, a little louder.
I pushed off the covers and hauled myself out of bed. Pulled up my sweatpant
s that were falling off and padded down the dark hall in my socks. The door to Corky and Izzy’s room was open, and in the dim pinkish light thrown by the cow-jumping-over-the-moon night-light, I could see a lump under the cowboy quilt that was Corky and how Izzy slept with one foot up against the side of her crib. Not very ladylike. I had to smile a little at that. All over again, I wished I could just stay home. Play games with Corky and Izzy. Read them stories and take them down to the playground. Anything to avoid all the crap I was surely headed for at school.
Reluctantly I moved down the unlit stairs, one hand against the wall to guide me. I could smell coffee before I got to the kitchen, where Dad was sitting at the table reading the newspaper and Mom was standing at the counter, mixing waffle batter.
They looked up when I walked in.
“You okay this morning?” Dad asked. He’d been pretty upset the night before when I told him what Mr. Mattero did, even though he didn’t go nuts, like Jenna’s father. Generally, my dad is pretty level-headed. Even with all of Corky’s problems, his food allergies, his autism, Dad didn’t get all bent out of shape the way Mom sometimes did.
“Mattero. Who is this guy?” Dad had asked after Corky and Izzy had been put to bed. We let him eat the supper Mom had kept for him in the microwave before breaking the news to him. Then we talked about it while we all cleaned up, Mom doing the dishes, Dad drying the pots, and me putting the rest of the food away.
“He’s my music teacher,” I told him.
“Mattero. Mattero. It’s familiar. Wasn’t there a piece in the paper a little while back, about the band at your school going to some big contest that they’ve won for like nine years straight?”
“Probably,” I said.
“I think so. I think that’s the guy,” Dad had decided. He leaned in close to Mom and took a wet skillet from her soapy, gloved hands. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” he asked her, “what that slime bag was doing on all those band trips out of town.”
Mom waved a spatula at me. “Claire, honey, you don’t look like you’re awake yet.”
I guess I must have been standing there in the kitchen like a zombie.
“You okay?” Dad repeated, more intently. He was already dressed for work, with a tie and everything—even though it seemed like he just got home.
“Yeah. I’m all right,” I said, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table and squinting from the overhead light. But that wasn’t exactly the truth because I wasn’t all right. I was worried about what happened at Jenna’s house, and I wasn’t feeling so good about us telling Mrs. Fernandez what Mr. Mattero did. I mean, maybe we just shouldn’t have said anything because now Suzanne had to go to another school.
I sat cross-legged on the chair and checked out the fingernail on my left hand. It was still sore, and you could tell I’d bitten down on it too far again. I curled my fingers around it and then pulled over my hands the long sleeves of the oversized T-shirt I’d slept in.
Usually, there was something nice about being up this early with my parents, which was the only time I had them both to myself. But that morning, I felt mixed up—and a little scared.
Mom set a plate in front of me.
I groaned. “Mom, you know I don’t want waffles.” Not just because waffles are fattening, but because the quinoa waffles she made always gave me a stomachache. I think because of the sparkling water she used to make them. She had to though; Corky was allergic to yeast.
Just then I realized the little braids I wore to bed would make my hair superwavy. No way was I going to school like that. Not even a few squirts of that antifrizz stuff was going to save me.
“I need a shower,” I announced. “I’ll take, like, a yogurt with me.” Yogurt wasn’t bad. Only like a hundred and twenty calories, the low-fat kind.
Mom had long ago given up arguing with me over food. Which was good. She handed me a cherry vanilla and a spoon.
On the bus, the kids were buzzing with gossip about what Mr. Mattero did, the fact that he wouldn’t be there, and guesses about who the three girls were who reported him.
“Did you see it on the news?”
“It was in the newspaper, too.”
“My father says he’s not allowed at school anymore . . .”
“I’ll bet one of those girls is Mandy. Yeah, she’s such a slut. That one with the green hair?”
Suzanne wasn’t on the bus that morning, only Jenna. But we didn’t sit together. We never do in the morning. Bus is too crowded after my stop, and she gets on two stops later. I didn’t talk to anyone. I spent the entire bus ride scraping the rest of the purple nail polish off my fingernails with the top of a Bic pen and thinking about Suzanne, how she would have to wear a kilt and go to Catholic school. She was so shy, and with her inhaler and her braces and her so-so complexion and all, it would take her years to make a new friend. And just when us three had such a good thing going.
Poor Suzanne, I thought, shaking my head. It didn’t seem fair. She was the one who didn’t want to say anything. “It’ll just get us in trouble,” she kept warning in her whiny voice. But Jenna had already decided we had to say something. I rolled my eyes. I mean, I loved Jenna. She was cool and fun and all that, but I really had to wonder what it was going to be like, just her and me at Oakdale.
At school, Jenna caught up to me in the hallway. But even then, with the noise of slamming lockers, whoops, laughs, and bits of conversation, I kept hearing those same questions. “Do you know who it is?” “What did he do?” “Did you see it on the news?”
I was surprised, but Jenna seemed like she was in a good mood. Her lips kind of curled up, and she was looking around. Like it was cool to have everyone talking about us.
“Hey there,” she finally said to me.
We walked a ways. “What happened after I left last night?” I asked her. “I mean with your dad?”
Jenna’s good mood took a dive. “Oh, man,” she moaned. “My father was really, really mad.”
We stopped, and when I looked at Jenna close-up, I could see that she had dark smudges under her eyes, like she hadn’t washed off her mascara. But she had on those same silver bar and rhinestone earrings, which were really pretty, and her hair was wrapped up, secured in a giant tortoiseshell clip, and she had on some kind of new pink lipstick. I felt my heart drop a little. Even when Jenna was tired, she looked great.
“My mom’s coming home today,” Jenna said in a low voice, but I don’t know why because no one was listening. “My parents are gonna talk. But don’t tell anyone, okay, Claire? Don’t tell anyone about what happened last night. Do you promise?”
I nodded. “Sure.” The great thing about us three is that we could trust each other with stuff we said. Suddenly, I realized I needed to put an elastic in my damp hair. “Will you hold these books for a minute?”
After Jenna took the books, I raked my fingers back through my hair to make a ponytail.
“I knew my mom was at that guy’s house last night,” Jenna went on.
“You did?”
“Yeah. She’s been seeing him for months. And he’s married, too!”
I studied her while I pulled my hair through the elastic. She really looked disgusted. I was surprised she hadn’t told us about that guy before.
“He sounds like a real loser,” I said, reaching into my sweatshirt pocket to get two barrettes, which I snapped in place on either side of my head, to hold back my growing-out bangs. I was also thinking that Jenna’s mom was partly to blame for this, too, but I didn’t say that out loud.
Jenna grew angrier. “Yeah. He’s a freak. I hate him! And I don’t want him to break up my family!”
I took my books back. “Then you did the right thing, Jenna,” I sympathized. “I mean, your dad had to know sooner or later, right?”
We never got beyond that because just then we saw some girls pointing at us, and Sabrina Coster, this eighth-grader we know from our old school, came over. “It was you guys, wasn’t it?” she demanded. “My friend, Stefanie,
she said she saw you in the office yesterday with Mrs. Fernandez.”
My eyes flicked to Jenna. What did she think? Because it wasn’t clear whose side Sabrina was on. Her voice had a nasty edge to it.
Jenna lifted her chin. “Yeah, it was us,” she acknowledged. I’m telling you, Jenna is not afraid of anyone. “It was a bad thing what Mr. Mattero did.”
Sabrina narrowed her eyes. “We’re going to miss the band competition next week now. We’ve been working for it all year.”
Jenna widened her eyes at me, as though to say, Do you believe this?
“We may not even get our money back if we don’t go,” Sabrina said.
Jenna turned on her. “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
A couple of other kids had stopped to listen.
“It was you?” one of the boys asked Jenna.
Jenna flashed her eyes at him but didn’t say anything.
The boy came closer and smiled at her. “Man, you had a lot of guts to go in there and tell Fernandez.”
“What did he do?” another girl interrupted after pushing her way through the crowd. I recognized that girl from my gym class. “What did Mattero do?”
Jenna’s head swung from the boy to the girl and then back to the boy.
“He’s weird,” another girl piped up. “One time, he gave me a detention for, like, nothing, and I had to stay after school. Just him and me in the band room.”
“Yeah, and once me and Kristen were in there practicing flute,” another joined in, “and he asked us to stay and help him clean up. We didn’t though. Uh-uh. I remember—I had to go to my brother’s wrestling match.”
While they were all putting in their two cents’ worth, I stepped back from the crowd while keeping an eye on that girl, Sabrina. She fixed her cold little beady eyes on me, too, and kept staring, even after she got pushed to the edge of the crowd. I lost sight of her, but then the next thing you know she was, like, right in my face. “I think you’re a bunch of liars,” she accused icily.
What Mr. Mattero Did Page 7
