What Mr. Mattero Did

by Priscilla Cummings

  There was no motivation to practice without him. Leaning over, I flipped open the viola case on the floor at my feet and settled the instrument inside. I would have been very sad to know at that time what I know now. That the night Dad played the cadenza from Peter and the Wolf was the last time I ever heard him play his clarinet.

  That same afternoon I was scheduled to volunteer at the barns again, so I went upstairs to change. In my room, I scrutinized a shelfful of horse statues. Each one was special and had been a gift for either my birthday or Christmas. I cherished every one. But really, what was I going to do with them all? I picked out a gray horse that looked like Misty, the horse little Alexander was supposed to ride, and set it on my bureau to take with me.

  Downstairs, I found a small plastic bag for the horse and dropped it inside. I had it with me and was walking out the door when my brother burst through and brushed past me.

  “Cade!” I exclaimed when I saw his eye, all red and swollen. “What happened?”

  He took the stairs two at a time with me right behind him.

  “Were you in a fight?” I asked outside the closed bathroom door.

  The water was running. I heard him moan.

  “Cade, do I need to get Dad? Answer me!”

  Slowly, the door opened, and Cade looked at me while holding a wet facecloth over his eye. It was weird, the way it was in almost the same place as where Dad was hit.

  “I was in a fight,” he mumbled. “But you don’t need to tell Dad.”

  “Is your eye okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “What happened?”

  Cade pushed past me again, but I stayed right behind him, all the way down the hall to his room, where he sank down on the end of his bed.

  “Cade, tell me, or I’ll go get Dad.”

  “All right . . . all right.” He gave in. “This kid, you don’t know him, he picked a fight. Called Dad a bunch of names. I tried to ignore him, but he kept coming after me.”

  “Where were you? In school?”

  “After school. In the parking lot.”

  When Cade took the facecloth off, I winced.

  Cade actually grinned. “That kid? He looks worse than I do!”

  “Oh, Cade . . .”

  “Do me a favor, Mellie, will ya? Don’t tell Dad.”

  “Don’t you think he’ll guess what happened?”

  Cade pressed the cloth back against his eye. “I don’t know. Probably. But he already feels bad enough.”

  It was getting to be a burden, feeling bad for Dad. I went downstairs to put some ice in a Ziploc bag and gave it to Cade. Then I closed the door like he asked and taped up a note: DON’T FEEL GOOD. TAKING A NAP.

  It was tough, agreeing not to tell Dad. But I knew the truth would come out eventually. It always does.

  The only good thing that day happened at the barns. Alexander actually came up to Misty and touched him on the nose. It was a quick little pat. But you could see how proud Alexander was of himself—and how surprised he was at the softness of Misty’s nose. For a minute, I thought he might even let us help him into the saddle, but suddenly he turned and dashed back to his mother, where he clung to her legs.

  I walked over and told him what a good job he’d done. “Maybe next time you can sit in Misty’s saddle,” I suggested, kneeling beside him. “In the meantime, Misty and I want you to have this.”

  Alexander peeked out at me from under one of the arms he had wrapped around his mother’s legs.

  I showed him the horse statue. “Here, you can take it home,” I said.

  With one small hand, he reached out and took hold of the horse. When I let it go, he pulled the horse away quickly and held it close to his chest.

  “It’s very kind of you, Melody. Thank you,” his mother said.

  But, as I said, it was the only good thing that happened that day.

  When I got home, I took one look at Cade and Dad quietly standing in the kitchen with their arms crossed, and I knew that Cade had told him about the fight at school. He had to explain that eye somehow. Then, a few minutes later, Mom arrived, walking in with Detective Daniels, who told us the three girls at school were standing by their story.

  “Not one of them has deviated or retracted a thing,” Detective Daniels said.

  Poor Dad. He was just so beaten down already.

  “You’re not going to file charges, are you?” Mom asked, a painful look consuming her face.

  “I don’t want to, Mrs. Mattero. Not with him passing the lie detector.” He looked at Dad. “We’ll give it a little more time, Fred, but if they stand by their story, I want you all to know I might not have a choice.”

  17

  Claire

  AT ALPHONSO P. DECKER MIDDLE SCHOOL I made a fresh start. Let me tell you, it was a relief to put the past behind me.

  Nobody knew me at Decker. They didn’t have a clue that I was one of those three seventh-graders at Oakdale who had accused their music teacher of sexual abuse. As far as they were concerned I was just a regular girl. At least I hoped that’s how they saw me. A regular girl, but kind of shy, maybe—and thin. Thin with brown hair and a new fake leather jacket and a sense of humor. I mean, you had to have a sense of humor to wear double SpongeBob Band-Aids, right? (But I was worried I had an infection on my finger by then and didn’t want Mom to know.)

  Anyway, Decker is like twenty-five minutes from my house, so every morning I went with Dad when he left for work. It was sort of nice starting out the day with my father. He works for a company that makes medical-technology software (how boring is that?), so there’s not much we can talk about there. Instead, we talked about me, about the classes I took and the kids I’d met. We even hit on what I wanted to do that summer, and I surprised myself by blabbing away about how we ought to go on a family trip somewhere. “Instead of just the beach, which we always do, why don’t we, like, go see something? Maybe the Grand Canyon? Or that place in Florida where you swim with the dolphins?” Man, I have always wanted to do that. Dad seemed interested. He actually said he’d talk to Mom.

  At Decker, I was pretty quiet. But I tried harder. I took notes and listened in class. I still wore the same kind of clothes, but my mother put her foot down on makeup. “Be more outgoing,” she preached, “instead of depending on all that eye goop to make an impression.”

  Not that I totally listened. I mean, I did sneak a little eyeliner to school in my pocket. But I also tried to smile more at kids.

  I don’t know. Maybe it kind of worked because my second day at Decker, this girl came up behind me while I stood petrified by that huge cafeteria full of strange faces. “Hi, Claire,” she said. When I swung around, there was this really cute girl with long brown hair and a fantastic smile.

  “Hey,” I replied warily, wondering how she knew my name. I mean, she didn’t look psychic or anything.

  She lifted her eyebrows. “I’m in your English class.”

  “You are?”

  She chuckled. “Math, too.”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you. So many kids and all—”

  “It’s okay. Don’t apologize.” When she blinked, it looked like she had on cucumber eye shadow.

  “I was new earlier this year,” she said. “I know the feeling.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  I’m not sure, but I think she had on lavender mascara—that and the green eye shadow made a nice combination.

  “Look, do you want to sit with me?” she asked. “For lunch?”

  I squeezed my shoulders together and lifted them. “Sure,” I said.

  The girl’s name was Phoebe. And she changed everything.

  I never knew anyone named Phoebe before. It was a funny name, I thought. It sounded funky and old-fashioned, but kind of cute, too.

  At first, I wondered why she was paying so much attention to me. It was a little like when Jenna first came to Oakdale and cozied up to Suzanne and me, and I wasn’t so sure now of how g
ood a friend Jenna had turned out to be.

  But as the next couple weeks went by I stopped being so suspicious because—this is really incredible—Phoebe and I had so much in common! Like we were the oldest of three kids in our families, we were born in August, and our favorite movie of all time was Lord of the Rings. Plus, we both had younger brothers with special needs. I told her all about Corky and his allergies and how my mom thought that made his autism worse. And she told me all about Greggie, her little brother with attention deficit.

  “We ought to get them together,” I said.

  “Can you imagine?” Phoebe replied. “It would be a disaster!”

  I laughed, only I don’t know why because it wasn’t funny, not really. Poor Corky, he didn’t have any friends at his kindergarten—not a single one—because normal kids didn’t have the patience for him. They didn’t know how smart he really was, or why he stood there watching them while he rocked side to side on his feet, or why he didn’t say anything when they asked him what his name was because some weeks he just plain didn’t talk.

  That first day Phoebe and I ate lunch together, we sat down and while I took the apple out of my backpack, Phoebe zipped open an L.L. Bean lunchbox that had an enormous pile of food in it: a turkey and cheese sandwich on whole-wheat bread and little zip baggies full of carrots, orange sections, potato chips, and cookies. She even had a yogurt—the custard kind—and a carton of chocolate milk! I am not kidding, Phoebe ate more at lunch than I ate in an entire day. And she wasn’t fat at all. Not a lick!

  When she saw me staring at her food, she blushed. “I get so hungry,” she explained. “But after school I swim, and I would never make it if I didn’t have the energy.”

  “You swim? What, is there a swimming pool or something in this school?”

  “No. But the swim center isn’t far away,” Phoebe said. “We take a bus. It’s more like a club than a team, really. You should join.” She bit into that enormous sandwich. “Do you swim, Claire?” she asked around a mouthful.

  “Oh. Yeah. Sure, I swim, and I like to and all that, but I’ve never been, like, on a team before.” Meanwhile, my mind was spinning and doing all these incredible calculations. I knew that swimming for one hour burned four hundred calories—so two hours would be twice that, right? And eight hundred calories was awesome! It was no wonder Phoebe could eat a big lunch.

  “You should come. You should try it,” Phoebe encouraged me. Imagine, I thought, eating all that food and staying skinny. “I will,” I promised her. “I’ll talk to my mom.”

  Over lunch (I stuck with my apple, but I accepted half of a half of one cookie) Phoebe told me all about herself. How her parents got divorced and then how her mother had just been remarried to a guy she didn’t like and how, because of his job, they had moved here from Kentucky.

  I knew she expected me to tell her my story, too, so I had to think fast. I couldn’t tell her what really happened because she wouldn’t want anything to do with me. Instead, I told her I had lived in North Carolina. I knew a little about North Carolina because of my cousins who lived down there.

  Phoebe seemed surprised, but then she said, “Cool. We went to the beach once in North Carolina.”

  I took another mouse nibble on my cookie. “We lived more inland,” I said. “This town called Greensboro.”

  Phoebe kept eating. Waiting for me to say more, I guessed.

  “You probably wonder why we had to move up here.” I watched Phoebe open her yogurt. “My dad’s job,” I said. “He got hired by a software company in Washington, D.C.” I knew she wouldn’t ask questions about that ’cause nobody understands what my dad does.

  “It’s sad, leaving your old school, isn’t it?” Phoebe sympathized.

  I shrugged like no big deal. “Not really. There were a lot of hicks down there. And now we have a new house so that’s kind of fun.” I started to describe the house that Suzanne lived in, but then I thought, yikes, what if Phoebe came to my house one day? Then she’d know I didn’t have my own bathroom and all that exercise stuff in the basement. So I kept to the facts on that one. Before returning to class, we traded telephone numbers and e-mail addresses and that night, after Phoebe got home from swimming and had dinner, we checked our math homework online.

  We ate lunch together the rest of the week, and I wove together quite a story for Phoebe about who I was. Too bad there wasn’t a creative writing class in the seventh-grade at Decker. I bet I could’ve aced it.

  At home, I was turning over a whole new leaf, too. I did my homework before I turned on the television. And I took care of Corky and Izzy every afternoon so Mom could take a walk. Plus I let her teach me how to make Noah bread, which is the only kind of bread Corky can eat because there’s no wheat in it. We also made some ice cream for Corky one night—ice cream with potato milk! It wasn’t bad either.

  I really missed Suzanne, who’d gone to the Catholic school. I wondered if she had to pray a lot and go to religion classes. But I wasn’t allowed to talk with her or with Jenna.

  I tried not to think about Mr. Mattero or his daughter Melody. I guess I figured that things would just go away once I had left Oakdale Middle School. That people would forget about it—and just get on with their lives.

  So, like I said, that first week at Decker I was feeling pretty good about things. The second week I felt even better. I paid attention in class and was really nice to everyone, especially Phoebe. We even hooked up one day at the mall and went to the pet store to play with the puppies, and I hadn’t done that in ages (Jenna always thought it was too babyish). Hey! And get this—we had lunch in the food court: chicken nuggets dunked in honey, waffle fries, coleslaw—a roll. We even had a chocolate-chip ice-cream cone at Maggie Moos for dessert.

  It was soooooo incredibly good, and even if we had walked around the mall enough to burn up about a thousand calories, I still felt guilty. “I can’t believe I ate all that,” I moaned, chucking the end of my cone into the trash.

  Phoebe elbowed me. “But Claire, you’re so skinny! And you know, if you went swimming with me, you could eat what you wanted every day!”

  She wasn’t giving up on me—she really wanted me to join that swim club of hers. I was seriously thinking I’d try it.

  Almost three weeks had gone by, and Phoebe and I were getting to be really good friends. She slept over my house three different times—she actually asked me two of those times if she could—and we had so much fun. We watched all three Lord of the Rings movies. We painted our nails. And we did silly things I hadn’t done in years, like Spirograph with colored pens and Twister, which was nuts. One night, we even hauled out my old Barbies from a box under my bed and dressed them up, just for fun. Another time, Phoebe asked me to trim the ends of her hair, so you know she must have trusted me like a whole lot.

  Everything was kind of moving forward.

  Then along came Jenna to spoil it all.

  18

  Melody

  JENNA CARTWRIGHT. Claire Montague. Suzanne Elmore. I knew their names by heart now. And I hated those girls. Hated them.

  I dreaded going back to school. But after missing so many days, I had to return. Mrs. Fernandez had sent home a note offering to give me a transfer to another school if I was too uncomfortable. But Oakdale Middle School was my school. It was where my dad taught. It’s where my friends were! I couldn’t just give it up.

  At least one thing made my return easier: the news that two of the three girls had gone to different schools. Suzanne to a Catholic school and that girl, Claire, to another public middle school somewhere in the county.

  Still, Jenna was at Oakdale. And Annie was there, too, constantly trying to get my eye and hanging out by my locker. Maybe I shouldn’t say “constantly” because after I completely ignored her a few times, she gave up. Most of my other friends welcomed me back. Jane gave me a hug. Liz and Noelle saved me a place at lunch. And no one said anything—or threw food.

  But as time went by, it became more awkward, inste
ad of easier, to be at school because Annie and I had the same friends. Some days, I didn’t even go to lunch, but just walked the halls, or sat in the library and thumbed through a magazine. I stopped going to the lit magazine meetings, and the one time I took out my notebook to work on a poem, all I did was stare at the empty page. I even faked being sick so I could stay home on Crazy Hair Day. I was not in the mood for it.

  The bruise on Cade’s face faded, like Dad’s. But the pain of how and why it got there in the first place never went away, not for any of us. It’s just that we all dealt with it differently. My brother simply shut himself off. Whenever he was home, he stayed in his room with the door closed and his music on. He was even allowed to take his dinner up there.

  My mother worked. Fourteen hours a day and weekends, too. Spring was the nursery’s busy time, with so many people planting and getting their gardens ready. Every day, Mom came home exhausted, with dirt under her fingernails and the smell of mulch clinging to her clothes. She made dinner and then—here’s the really strange thing—every evening she went out in the backyard and pulled weeds as though she were obsessed.

  We had a huge backyard, all of it bordered with ivy, and in the past year a vine called Virginia creeper had invaded and practically taken over. The task of pulling all the weeds out by hand seemed overwhelming, especially since the creeper twisted itself around the ivy vine. You had to practically sit down and untwist the bad vine from the good vine before you could pull it out. Even Cade couldn’t believe what Mom was attempting. “It’s like taking truckloads of water out of the ocean,” he observed one night, shaking his head as we watched our mother. “Why bother?”