What Mr. Mattero Did

by Priscilla Cummings

  “Claire, what’s wrong?” my mother yelled.

  I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter. I was so afraid.

  But if I took a step, I had to tell.

  22

  Melody

  MRS. DANDRIDGE BROUGHT ME HOME from the stables the afternoon I tried to attack Claire Montague. Before I got out of the car she told me that no matter what Claire had done, it didn’t give me the right to lash out. “I don’t blame you for being angry, Melody,” she said. “We all get angry. And I know these are extraordinary circumstances, but no one ever resolves anything by fighting.”

  I nodded. I told her she was right. I knew she was right. But I resented Mrs. Dandridge for being so reasonable. I vowed to myself that I would never ever return to the stables.

  At home, I walked in and calmly told my family what had just happened.

  Cade was impressed. “All right!” he cheered, trying to give me a high five. I thought I detected the trace of a smile on Mom, too, although she averted her face quickly and didn’t say anything, just asked me to help her set the table.

  Dad opened his arms to me. But I didn’t want to hug Dad. I pretended I didn’t see his outstretched arms and rushed out of the room, saying I needed to take a shower.

  The next day I stayed home from school again because Mom thought I should have a day to cool off. I arranged for Liz to bring me a book I needed, as well as homework assignments. But it was Annie who knocked on our door.

  I was surprised.

  “May I come in?” Annie asked.

  I hesitated, but I opened the door all the way for her.

  Annie stepped into our front hall and handed me my grammar book with its bright green smiley-face cover. “Your homework’s in there. It’s in the book.”

  I saw the assignment sheets sticking out of the pages.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Melody, look,” Annie said. “Whatever happens, I just want you to know how sorry I am for not going to your house that night, and for my parents. For them not letting me go—and then not answering the door when your dad knocked on it. They were wrong. It’s just that they were scared.”

  “Of what?” I asked.

  Annie shook her head. “I don’t know. None of us knows. But we feel bad about it. We’re really sorry, Mel.”

  I sucked in my breath. If her parents were sorry, then why weren’t they here apologizing, too? We caught each other’s eyes, looked away again.

  “Look, I won’t stay,” Annie said. “I just wanted to tell you that.”

  I fumbled with the book in my hands, bit my lip, looked at Annie, and then looked down. I was still disappointed in her. But I was glad she had come, too.

  Annie left, and softly I closed the door. But I watched from the long, narrow window in the foyer as she walked down the sidewalk to her mother’s car. And I kept watching, even as they drove away.

  Odd how things happen. Another five minutes, and Annie would have been there when the police pulled up.

  Each time Detective Daniels had come to see us previously he was in an unmarked car. But this time it was a regular cruiser. So I wondered if this was it. Was this the moment they would arrest my father and take him to jail?

  Suddenly, in a panic, I rushed out the back door to get Mom, who was pulling at the Virginia creeper in the ivy. “Mom, the police are here!”

  She dropped a handful of vines on the lawn, and we walked back in quickly, Mom taking off her garden gloves and brushing at the loose dirt on her jeans.

  At the front door, we could see Detective Daniels coming up the walk. Mom opened the door before he even had a chance to knock. Right away, he saw the scared look on my mother’s face.

  “Relax,” he said, holding up a hand as though to stop us. “I’ve actually come with some good news this time.”

  Mom, still clutching her garden gloves, put a hand on her heart.

  “You did? You came with good news?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He smiled at us both. “Is Fred here?”

  Mom seemed paralyzed, so he turned to me. “Melody, is your dad home?”

  “Yes—I’ll go get him,” I offered, rushing off while Mom led Detective Daniels into our living room .

  When Dad, Cade, Mom, and I were all seated in the living room, Detective Daniels rubbed his hands together and nodded at my father. “You’re off the hook, Fred. One of the girls confessed. A second one confirmed it. We haven’t gotten in touch with the third one yet, she’s living out-of-state now, but there’s no doubt in my mind she’ll change her story after she’s heard what the other two had to say.”

  “Dad, that’s great!” I exclaimed, jumping out of my seat.

  Mom put one hand over her mouth and the other on Dad’s shoulder.

  My father seemed stunned. He took in a big breath. “Finally,” is all he said.

  “What happened? What did the girl say?” Mom wanted to know.

  “Was it Claire?” I asked, sitting back down.

  “Yes, it was Claire,” Detective Daniels confirmed. “How did you know?”

  Mom, Dad, Cade, and I glanced at one another and smirked.

  “Mellie almost tackled her yesterday,” Cade said.

  Detective Daniels raised his eyebrows at me.

  “But I didn’t hurt her or anything!”

  “Well, who knows?” he said. “Maybe that was the turning point. Although there were other things, too, that came out. Something involving yet another girl.” He didn’t elaborate on that, but he did fill us in on all the sordid details of the girls’ conspiracy, how they plotted to tell the lie just to get out of Dad’s class and how Jenna thought the attention might bring her mother back, even though she never told the other girls that it was part of her motivation.

  “Then it sounds as though two of them just went along with the lie to get out of Fred’s class,” Mom reiterated. “But why?”

  “Bored? Who knows? In their eyes, it was a friendship thing,” Detective Daniels replied. “They figured they’d get a study hall instead of music.”

  “That’s it?” Mom asked, incredulous. “They were bored?”

  Detective Daniels shrugged. “Sometimes that’s all it is.”

  My mother covered her eyes.

  “Claire is a very sad and contrite young lady,” he went on. “She didn’t realize how much their lie would hurt so many people.”

  “But why did it take her so long to say something?” I asked him. “I mean, she saw me at school every day. She had to know how much we were hurting!”

  Detective Daniels disagreed. “I’m not sure she realized that, Melody. Kids that age—even your age, sometimes they don’t look much beyond themselves. I’m no psychiatrist, but from my own experience I can tell you this: some of them just enjoy being the center of attention and the reason for all the fuss.”

  “But for all those weeks?” I still didn’t understand.

  “Well, once they lie they feel they have to stick with it or else risk getting into even bigger trouble,” he tried to explain. “Eventually, if they have a conscience, it’ll bother them—or one of them. All it takes is one. That’s why we kept going back to these girls, interviewing them again and again to see if there were any discrepancies in their stories. Especially in a case like this, where your dad passed the lie-detector test.”

  “You make it sound as though this happens all the time,” Mom said. She was holding Dad’s hand.

  “Too often, if you ask me,” the detective replied. “One in five cases of alleged sexual abuse in our county turns out to be false.”

  We were all quiet for a moment.

  “What happens now?” Dad asked.

  “From here I go to Oakdale,” Detective Daniels said. “I’m sure they’ll be in touch, but I assume you can go back to work immediately.

  “As for the girls,” he continued, “we’ll file charges against them for making false statements to police. They’ll go to juvenile court and most likely have to perform some community service. The
y may be kept on some sort of home detention for a while, too, where they can’t talk on the phone or be with friends during the week. I can’t be sure, but the judge may even order them to sit in a jail cell for the afternoon, just so they know what it’s like. So they know where they almost put you, Fred.”

  Less than an hour later, Mrs. Fernandez sat in our living room, urging Dad to return to school on Monday, telling him how much he had been missed, how eager she was to have the band practicing again.

  Dad’s stunning answer was loud and clear: “Thanks, Helena,” he said. “But I won’t be returning to Oakdale.”

  Mrs. Fernandez wouldn’t accept it. “Fred, you have to come back! You’re a great teacher! You can’t let these girls destroy your career!”

  Dad almost laughed. “Well, they pretty much took care of that. Any trust I had in those kids is gone.”

  “Fred, please. Think this over. Promise me you will take a few days to think this over.”

  Dad did not respond.

  Mrs. Fernandez sighed. “I feel as though this is my fault. That all of us in the school system bend over backward to educate these kids about what kind of touching is appropriate, and what’s not. We encourage them to come forward if they suspect something is not right . . . and yet look what happens.”

  My principal looked at us sadly. “Sometimes they don’t think through the consequences, you know? They’re kids—” She held her hands palm up. “And sometimes they’re just plain . . . goofy.”

  Mom nodded, but her lips were pressed together, and neither she nor Dad said anything.

  “Try to talk some sense into him, Mary,” Mrs. Fernandez begged my mother as the three of us walked back to the front door. “We need teachers like Fred.”

  “I have to leave that decision to my husband,” Mom replied. She put her arm around my shoulders. “You have no idea what he’s been through these past several weeks. No matter how many apologies there are now, there is no changing what happened. No going back in time. He’s different now. We all are.

  “And I’m not sure,” Mom told her, “that we can ever put back what those girls took away.”

  23

  Claire

  AT FIRST, THEY DIDN’T BELIEVE ME.

  “You lied about Mr. Mattero, Claire. Surely you can understand why we’re a little doubtful about this.” Detective Daniels looked me in the eye when he said that, and I didn’t blink. Afterward, he took careful notes. And I spelled Phoebe’s name for him.

  “You have to do something right now,” I urged him, “because Phoebe may not even be safe tonight. You’ve got to believe me! Part of the whole reason why I am telling you the truth is that I want someone to help her.”

  “We will,” he assured me. “We will send someone right away.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and a funny noise came out of my throat. I cried a little. I guess because all that time had gone by, and I didn’t realize what a bad thing we’d done and how much I’d hurt the Matteros—and my own family, too.

  Poor Mom. She started crying, too. And after she’d been so good about it, like when I first told her we needed to talk.

  I had waited until we got home from the pool, until Corky and Izzy had eaten and were in bed, before I said anything to her. Finally, when Mom and I were alone in the kitchen, after we got the dishwasher going, I said to her in a pretty calm voice: “Mom, you need to take me down to the police station. Either that, or you need to let me invite that detective to our house because there is something really important I have to tell him and you and Dad.”

  Her eyes got big. “Claire, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I need to talk to Detective Daniels. And to you and Dad.” I handed her the little white card with the detective’s phone number on it.

  I worried that maybe Mom thought it was something else—like maybe she thought Mr. Mattero had abused us even worse but I’d never had the guts to tell her. She looked scared, but she knew it was important. I don’t know, since I changed schools we’d been able to talk more to each other. All that time driving home from Decker, maybe—plus she liked Phoebe. Whatever it was, she didn’t get hysterical on me the way she might have before. Instead, she put a hand up near her throat, but she went right over to the phone and called Detective Daniels.

  Thank goodness he was at the police station that night. He said he’d be right over. He drove up at almost the same time as my father.

  After we were all sitting down at the kitchen table, my parents on either side of me, I took a breath and told them straight out. I said, “What Mr. Mattero did, what we said he did? It was all a lie.”

  Mom gasped.

  “What?” Dad cried.

  Detective Daniels handed me a pad of lined paper. He asked me to write it down for him, and I did.

  After I finished and handed the paper to Detective Daniels, Dad pushed his chair back and looked at me. “Why?” he asked. “Why did you girls do this, Claire?”

  I shrugged. “ ’Cause Jenna asked us to.”

  On the other side of me, Mom sat quietly. She had stopped crying.

  “Because Jenna asked you to,” Dad repeated.

  I couldn’t look at him. I stared into my lap. “We were friends, and she asked us to do it. Plus, we just kind of wanted to get out of Mr. Mattero’s class because it was kind of slow and none of us was into music all that much.”

  “It had to have been more than that,” Mom insisted. I could feel her staring at me. “Jenna was up to something, wasn’t she, Claire?”

  I shook my head. “No. I mean, yeah, it was Jenna’s idea and all that. And I guess she wanted to get back at her mom, or get her mom’s attention or something—because her mom was seeing that other guy. But we didn’t even know that stuff about Jenna’s mom in the beginning. Mainly we did it because she asked us to and we were friends. Suzanne and me and Jenna—we three didn’t have any other friends at Oakdale. We never thought it was going to hurt a whole bunch of people.”

  I never saw Phoebe again. She was in and out of my life, just like that. She wasn’t at school the next day, or the next week. Finally, I heard from another friend of hers that Phoebe’s mother had taken her out of school because they had to move back to Kentucky for an emergency. Mom called Detective Daniels to find out if that was true, and he confirmed it. He told us that Phoebe and her family had moved. But her stepfather did not go with them.

  The kids in the swim club don’t know what happened to Phoebe. They thought it was really weird the way she disappeared. “What kind of family emergency?” they kept asking. On the bus, on the way to swim practice, while we ate peanut M&M’s, I was tempted to make up something to cover for her, but I caught myself. What I said was, “Sometimes people have to move right away and there isn’t even time for good-bye.”

  I know that we’ll be punished, Suzanne and me—and Jenna, too, even if she is in a different state. But I’m ready. Nothing that happens from here on out can be worse than what I’ve already been through. Hiding the lie was a lot worse than coming forward and telling the truth, I’ll tell you that.

  Plus, the whole thing has made me appreciate my family. We definitely talk more, especially my mom and me, even if it’s just while we’re making dinner or, like I said, in the van coming home from the pool with Corky and Izzy asleep in the backseat.

  I love my parents for not holding what I did against me. That’s not to say they weren’t mad at me for what I did! No way. I spent a lot of time alone, in my room, but it made me smarten up. I mean, I’m definitely starting to eat normally because not only do I feel better, but I can think better, too! I’m swimming—and this is actually funny, my finger got better from all the chlorine.

  I don’t know, I am who I am, and there are kids at Decker who actually want to be my friends. Although I guess we’ll see what happens to that after I go to juvenile court . . .

  Suzanne and I aren’t allowed to see each other right now. But I hope she feels relieved, the same as me. I will always remember
that it was Suzanne who really didn’t want to lie in the first place. It didn’t feel right, she kept saying. Man, I wished I’d listened.

  I wrote a letter to Mr. Mattero and to Melody, too. I told them how sorry I was that they had suffered. I asked Melody to please reconsider being a volunteer at the horse barns. But I know that letter wasn’t enough. How could it be?

  “It’s over now,” Mom keeps telling me. “Put it behind you and get on with your life, Claire.”

  “Yeah, it’s over,” I agree and tell myself. “It’s over.” Maybe if I say it enough times I’ll believe it.

  On the other hand, maybe I finally learned to recognize what’s right and what’s wrong, and so maybe I’m smart enough now to know that it will never be over. Because what Jenna, Suzanne, and I did in the seventh grade at Oakdale will always be part of who we are, and who we become.

  It’s really weird, but sometimes I can step back from it and, like, look into the future and actually feel a little bit good about it. Am I a totally heartless, evil person to say that? No, I don’t think so. It’s just that if none of this happened, well, for one thing, no one would have ever known about Phoebe.

  Plus, besides that, it has, like, changed me into a different person. A person who will never be pushed around again by someone like Jenna. A person who knows it’s not who you hang out with, or how skinny you are, or how you do your eyes that matters, it’s who you are inside. I made a mistake, yes, but because of it, hopefully, I’m a little bit better person.

  To thine own self be true. I don’t ever want to be uncomfortable in my own skin again.

  And that is the honest truth. Totally.

  24

  Melody

  I REALLY WANTED DAD to return to teaching, to show everybody how those girls didn’t ruin his life. But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t go back to Oakdale Middle School. Mom got him a job at the nursery instead, where he heads up a landscape crew. He drives a red pickup truck and works with three Hispanic men delivering mulch, mowing lawns, trimming bushes, and fixing sprinkler systems. He says he enjoys being outside all the time, and he likes his coworkers. Dad’s teaching them English, and they’re teaching him Spanish. They keep telling Dad how lucky he is, to live in a country of so much opportunity and wealth—and freedom of speech.