The Drowning Girls
Page 17
“The first ones are just the usual crap,” Aaron said.
MLHS Stories @ Miles Stories—39d
Where all of ur friends turn on you for ur mistakes.
MLHS Stories @ Miles Stories—3d
Where the Asian girls disappoint their fathers.
“It’s the grammar that offends me most,” I murmured—although that wasn’t true. It offended me that this site existed, that someone spent their time spreading such useless and hurtful things.
“So, it goes on...” Aaron scrolled through the posts, about five a day. “Oh, yeah, and there’s this one.”
MLHS Stories @ Miles Stories—9h
Where a girl gets fingered at lunch everyday and thinks no one sees.
“That’s it,” I told Aaron, over his shoulder. “We’re never eating in that cafeteria again. Promise me.”
“Keep reading,” he said grimly.
MLHS Stories @ Miles Stories—9h
Where a freshman “accidentally” sends a nude pic to her brother.
MLHS Stories @ Miles Stories—8h
Where the hottest girls have the most messed-up teeth.
MLHS Stories @ Miles Stories—8h
Where the seniors smoke pot in their cars and spray this nasty-ass lemon scent to cover it but everybody knows.
I kept reading, wincing. It was like verbal diarrhea, a constant spewing of hate and gossip. And then I came to the one he’d wanted me to see.
MLHS Stories @ Miles Stories—7h
Where a sophomore hottie has sex with her 37yo neighbor and wants more.
I steadied myself with a hand on Aaron’s desk.
“Yeah, so there’s that little gem to worry about,” Aaron said, tilting the screen away from me. “That’s really the highlight. Or—lowlight, I guess.”
I cleared my throat, which was suddenly parched, my tongue coated with pumpkin pie. “What are you going to do?”
Aaron said he had already emailed Sanjay Gopal, the assistant principal in charge of discipline, and Gopal had told the other APs by now. Dick Blaine, our principal, had been briefed via email. “’Course, I don’t know what we can do about any of it. Twitter isn’t going to shut down the account over a few anonymous rumors, and whoever this yahoo account owner is, he’s probably protected by the press shield act or something.”
I nodded, trying to recover. It felt as if I’d been punched in the face. “Any idea who it’s talking about? The sophomore, I mean.”
Aaron shook his head. “Please. As much as I like to think I have my finger on the pulse of this place...it’s pretty vague. Disturbing as hell, but vague. Plus there are plenty of hot sophomores.”
I mock-punched his shoulder.
He laughed. “Well—seriously. I bet ninety percent of this stuff is just posturing, anyway. At least, that’s what I tell myself. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to keep my faith in humanity.”
I stood up, heading for the door.
“Hey,” he called after me. “You’re sticking around for that AP Bio meeting after school, right?”
“Yeah. Unless Streeter volunteers to go in my place.”
“Are you kidding me? He’s in the home stretch now. Probably planning to hibernate until May 22.”
I gave him a weak smile. Dale Streeter had been threatening to retire every fall for years, but by spring he always backed out. Somehow, this entitled him to “mailing it in” for as long as I could remember.
I paused in the lobby, steadying myself. Near my office door, a senior was hovering, binder clutched to her chest.
“Mrs. McGinnis?” she asked, the final syllable of my name rising into a question. “I heard there was a new Ag department scholarship?”
I summoned a smile, ushering her inside my office. I had the scholarship form on my desk, and while we chatted about the qualifications, I tried to force down my thoughts, the nononono racing through my brain. The sophomore hottie, the 37yo neighbor.
All day, beneath the in and out, the rush and flow, there was a heaviness in my stomach, as solid as a mass. Aaron was right—there were other hot sophomores. There were surely other neighbors. But we’d celebrated Phil’s thirty-seventh birthday the week of our move to The Palms, and the specificity was unnerving. A neighbor.
He’d denied knowing anything about the underwear. He’d told me that I’d misunderstood what I’d heard outside his office door. Those things were both plausible. Yet it had been weeks since Kelsey had been in our house, and my suspicions had never fully disappeared. The mere suggestion had proved too strong.
It was like that old party game: try not to think about the pink elephant. Think about anything except a pink elephant. Don’t even concern yourself with the pink elephant. And then inevitably all you could think about was the pink elephant.
I couldn’t not think of my husband and Kelsey Jorgensen.
Phil had stayed home over Thanksgiving, the house to himself. He’d been surly with me over the weekend, withdrawn and moody. Something must have happened.
Had Kelsey been around for Thanksgiving, too? Had she been in our house, in my bed? A picture came, unbidden—Kelsey’s fingers spreading through his chest hair, Phil’s grunts in her ear. If she’d been in my bed, she’d been in my bathroom, too. She’d sat on my toilet, bathed in my tub, dried herself off with my towels. She’d pawed through the odds and ends of my makeup drawer. She’d used my hand lotion, laughed at the jar of my wrinkle cream.
I’d seen her getting out of Tim’s car this morning, just before the tardy bell, wearing her standard tiny skirt over black leggings. I hadn’t thought to ask her if she’d had a nice Thanksgiving, if she’d had a good time fucking my husband.
It was like an itch that needed to be scratched, a facial tic I couldn’t control. Spend five minutes helping a student, check the Twitter feed. Answer a phone call, pop back on to Twitter. Reply to an email... MLHS Stories hadn’t posted anything new, but more and more users had favorited and retweeted the post, presumably students from their classrooms, the bathroom, the lunch line, the hallways. MLHS loved its scandals. The replies were typically callous. Haha your mom, one said. Another read kiss my 37yo ass. The most popular comment had been retweeted a dozen times: Did you slip him a Viagra first? Lol. The words burned in my brain, an endless loop. The sophomore hottie. The 37yo neighbor.
I decided to leave as soon as school was over. Phil was in San Jose for a meeting at Parker-Lane, and I could search the house without him there, looking for evidence. That was what I needed—proof. A stain on the sheets, another piece of clothing left behind. Without proof I would look as stupid as I had the night of our fight by the pool, my accusations easily dismissed and defended. I don’t understand, Phil would say, looking at the Twitter feed. This is supposed to be me? Where does it say my name?
Jenn spotted me packing up my tote bag and poked her head into my office. “Did you forget about the AP Bio meeting? It’s starting in five minutes.”
I groaned, dropping my bag. With my thoughts in such a jumble, I had forgotten my promise to Aaron. “No, I’ll be right there.”
* * *
The meeting ran long—AP teachers tended to be long-winded, and AP parents vocal complainers. For the next hour, I sneaked glances at the overhead clock, a sturdy, industrial piece of equipment that was nonetheless an hour off six months out of the year. Danielle was waiting in my office when I returned, and I hurried her out to the car. Traffic on 580 was backed up, a nightmare of commuters all trying to get home to their families. As we inched along, I kept thinking about how this would go, what it would mean if it were true.
For one, Danielle and I couldn’t stay at The Palms. We couldn’t stay with Phil. It would be back to the single life—a condo, if we were lucky something with a patch of grass. We’d done it before. It was our normal, actually—The P
alms and everything that came with it had been an aberration. But Danielle and I would be okay. We’d been here before. We’d squeak by financially. I’d make sure she kept her grades up, applied for every scholarship.
“Mom!” Danielle squawked, snapping me back to reality. I’d nearly missed our exit. I braked, my blinker on, waiting to merge into an oncoming stream of traffic.
“What is up with you?” Danielle demanded.
“Nothing,” I croaked.
“So you’re just acting crazy for no reason?”
I didn’t answer.
“Fantastic,” she muttered.
We made it home by six—not enough time for a thorough search. Danielle closed her bedroom door, and I preheated the oven for a frozen lasagna before racing upstairs. I pulled back the covers to study the sheets, then got on my knees to peer under the bed. Nothing. There was nothing out of place in the bathroom, but then there wouldn’t be—I’d given it a good scrubbing yesterday, wiping away all signs of Phil’s bachelor life, and all evidence, if there was any.
Maybe downstairs, then. I studied the couch cushions, the rug in front of the fireplace we’d never used. What was this, CSI? I had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it, of me on my hands and knees, searching for a blond hair that might have been left anytime during the summer. Then, as if pulled by a magnet, I approached the dining room. Phil had been using it as his makeshift office, since we ate all our meals in the informal nook off the kitchen or at the peninsula itself, our elbows on the granite. Back in July, I’d scoured the internet for something the right scale (seating eight to ten people) at a decent price (impossible), and we’d ended up putting a folding table from Costco in there instead. That table was spread with papers, which I thumbed through now—a report from a contractor, a bill for a cement mixer. There was a map of The Palms, marked precisely with little red Xs at the locations of the security cameras. He’d been monitoring those cameras ever since Danielle and I returned, as if he were a prison guard watching for unusual activity from the inmates. Then I spotted his laptop, slim and silver, in the middle of the desk. Why hadn’t he taken it with him? It seemed like the sort of thing that would be needed for an all-day meeting.
I sat in his chair—a folding chair, temporary, like everything else about our lives—and lifted the lid.
This was where the proof would be. There would be emails, photos, a chat room history. The internet was where people lived their lives, where they kept their secrets. Somehow, people always thought they could keep their dark deeds hidden, that they were smarter than the others who had failed before them. They were clichés, the Tiger Woodses and Arnold Schwarzeneggers, the men who thought they could keep it all under wraps.
I took a deep breath and entered Phil’s password: SFGiants#14. The Giants were his adopted team, rewarding him in the past decade with three World Series titles. His password, updated each year, reflected that allegiance. I hesitated before hitting the enter key, but I needed the proof.
The display jiggled, notifying me of an incorrect login.
I tried again, varying the strokes. No capital letters. All capital letters. Maybe he’d needed to change a password for one reason or another, so I tried some variations of his favorite players with their jersey numbers. Passwords had become ridiculously complicated lately, with about seven different requirements that made them almost impossible to remember, let alone guess.
Still, I tried it—variations of Kelsey’s name, of Phil and Kelsey’s names together. It felt like proof on its own. He knew my password, but suddenly his was a mystery?
I didn’t hear Danielle come down the stairs, and I didn’t see her until she was right in front of me.
“What are you doing on Phil’s laptop?”
“I’m trying to pull up a file I need,” I said, brushing off her accusatory tone.
She came around the side of the table, and I assumed she was going to cut through the dining room to the butler’s pantry we only used as a passageway to the kitchen. But instead, she swung around the end of the table and said, “Mom.”
I followed her gaze to the laptop, to the screen that notified me of an incorrect password. I closed the lid. “It’s not what you think.”
She said, “I don’t even know what to think,” and left the room.
* * *
I went to bed early that night and pretended to be asleep when Phil came in. He read for a while next to me, turning pages slowly and deliberately. It was a biography of John Adams, and he’d been reading it halfheartedly for months, a page or two a night, but it disgusted me now. It felt like an act—a child molester pretending to be a normal human being.
Molester.
I’d been dancing around the word, not allowing my mind to go there.
Because there was another piece to the puzzle, too. I was an employee of a public school in California and therefore a mandated reporter. The law didn’t require proof; it required reasonable suspicion. If you suspected a minor was being harmed (even, yes, a minor like Kelsey, who was aggressively sexual and quite possibly a willing participant), it had to be reported. And as a mandated reporter, I couldn’t do so anonymously. I couldn’t put their names out there and stand behind vague details. I would have to give my name.
Try it out, Liz, I told myself. Imagine saying I’m Liz McGinnis and I’d like to report an inappropriate relationship between a thirty-seven-year-old man and a sixteen-year-old student at my school. His name? Phil McGinnis.
I would have to say what I suspected and why. I’d be criminally liable if I had even the faintest suggestion and didn’t report it. The procedure was a phone call to the county welfare department or the police, followed by a written report within thirty-six hours. I’d made those phone calls before and filled out the forms; we had a stack of them at work, and each year I’d conducted a brief professional development training for the rest of the staff on the process. Last year, I had a junior girl in my office, and when she’d bent over to pick up a piece of paper, I’d spotted a bruise on her back where her shirt rose above her jeans. Something about it had nagged at me, and I’d made the phone call. It turned out that she had an abusive older boyfriend, one who served a few months in jail as a result.
But this was my husband.
You don’t know anything for sure, I reminded myself. It’s all rumor and innuendo. It looks bad, but it can’t be true. Phil would never.
Then, just as fast, the pendulum swung back, and I remembered that first day Kelsey had come over, when her bikini top had become twisted in the pool.
Of course he would.
But there was no way I was going to make that phone call and put our lives in jeopardy without absolute proof.
* * *
I began to watch Phil closely, tracking his movements the way he was tracking the movements of everyone else in The Palms. I left school as soon as I could each afternoon, drove faster on the way home, and popped into his office unannounced. Kelsey was never there, but somehow he always looked guilty, as if one of his hands had been pinched in the cookie jar. He was traveling to San Jose more often for meetings with Parker-Lane, sometimes leaving his laptop at home. I kept track of his mileage, and it roughly checked out.
“Why all the meetings?” I asked.
“Oh, we’re in an expansion phase,” he said, an answer too vague to be useful.
We occupied the same space, but I’d begun to think of us as separate entities, roommates for the sake of splitting expenses. In the first week of December, the three of us went to pick out a Christmas tree and we carted it home, where it stood in a bucket of water, leaning against the back of the house. A week later, Danielle asked when we were going to decorate the tree, and Phil and I looked at each other. Apparently both of us had other things on our minds.
We were waging a cold war, our sole battle over Danielle’s plans to attend Winter
Formal the Saturday before the end of the semester. Danielle had made plans to go with a large group that was splitting the cost of a limo, a group that included Kelsey Jorgensen. I was inclined to allow it, since I would be chaperoning the dance anyway, and would be able to keep an eye on her. Weirdly, it was Phil who was adamant that she was too young, that she didn’t need to be out so late.
“It’s a high school dance,” I reminded him. “She is a high school student, after all.”
“I don’t like it,” he said, but I overrode him, as I’d done only a few times before. It was part of a new pattern of dismissing his opinions, discounting his advice.
The week before Winter Formal, I drove Danielle to the mall in Pleasanton and lurked outside the fitting room while she tried on dress after dress. She wanted a picture of herself in each one, and I dutifully obliged, snapping shots while she posed with a price tag dangling from her underarm. Another girl from a different high school was in the dressing room at the same time, and I struck up a conversation with her mother while we waited for our daughters, bemoaning the cost of the dance tickets, the dinner beforehand, the dress and shoes and hair and nails.
Meanwhile the other girl emerged from her dressing room in a white dress with strands of beaded fringe. Even under the fluorescent lighting she was stunning, the fringe shimmering like liquid metal. While she tried to convince her mother of the price tag, Danielle settled on a sleeveless black dress with a low back, one everyone else had passed over on the sales rack. “You look beautiful,” I told her, and she rolled her eyes but smiled at her appearance in the mirror. I snapped her picture, getting into the spirit of it now. She was beautiful, even wearing a pair of socks, her hair pulled back by a headband.