Never Turn Back

by Christopher Swann

  “Susannah?” I croak. “Suzie!”

  No answer. Then a tap-tap-tap on the floorboards and a soft whine from the bedroom door. Wilson. “Okay, boy, coming,” I say, managing to put one foot on the floor while still lying flat on my back. The effort required to sit up almost undoes me, but I manage it. Wilson is delighted and prances around my feet while I try to imagine making it to the front door without puking.

  I shuffle down the hall and outside into a rose-red sunset, the kind where the clouds seem to be glowing from internal fires. Wilson investigates the yard, occasionally lifting a leg to mark his territory, while I sit on my front steps and endure being somewhere between drunk and hungover. Dimly I note that Marisa’s car is gone, although there are tire tracks in my front yard, raw gouges veering away from the driveway and then sharply back toward it. My car remains where I parked it, but now it sports a bright, jagged scar on the passenger door. Marisa must have keyed it on her way out. Uncharitably I think that maybe I should have let Susannah hit her with the poker. That reminds me that Susannah is gone too. Where did she go? And how?

  Wilson finally finishes, and after I take him inside and feed him, I see the Post-it note on the television: Gone running, coming back. I shouldn’t be surprised; when Susannah is pissed off, her reaction is to go exercise herself to exhaustion. And despite everything, I smile—only my sister would leave a note assuring me that she is gone only temporarily, that she is planning to return.

  I wander into the kitchen and see an empty fifth of bourbon in the trash can, which about makes me gag. I need to eat something, but toasting a bagel seems too complicated, let alone cooking dinner, so I settle for a dry bowl of Crispix and a cup of instant coffee.

  I’m chewing a mouthful of cereal and contemplating another cup of coffee when my phone rings. Susannah. I look around the den for my phone and find it on the table next to the front door. I don’t recognize the number, but Susannah constantly loses cell phones and gets new ones. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Ethan,” Marisa purrs in my ear. “Miss me?”

  I almost scream. Instead, I jab my finger at the phone, ending the call. Then I block the number.

  I’m on my way back to my bowl of Crispix when there’s a ding, like when my phone alerts me to a text. But it’s not my phone, which is still in my hand. Another ding. I slide my phone into my pocket and look around the den some more, checking under a Moby-Dick paperback on the coffee table, scanning the furniture. A third ding leads me to the sofa, where behind a cushion I find a newer-model iPhone encased in a pop-art-swirl OtterBox. I don’t even have to read the messages on the locked screen to know whose phone it is. But when I press the home button to see the texts, I almost drop the phone.

  The first text at the top of the list is from Mom.

  Ethan if u have my phone give it back

  I stare at the phone, the back of my neck crawling as the hairs stand on end. There are two more texts, also from Mom.

  I want my phone ethan

  PHONE BACK

  When I was a kid, my father let me watch Poltergeist on cable, and I remember the glowing vacuum closet and the killer clown doll and the other demonic things plaguing the family in that suburban house, but mostly I remember a slowly mounting sense of dread building up in me and finally crescendoing with the mom falling into the swimming pool with the corpses, sending me into fits of screaming. At the same time, I was utterly unable to turn away from the screen. I feel the same way now, staring at the phone in my hand.

  And then, after a few moments, I grow calm, let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, and bring my shuddering heartbeat down several notches. My mother is not texting me from beyond the grave. Instead, these texts are from Marisa’s mother, or more specifically from her mother’s phone. Marisa must be using her mother’s phone to text her own. Still, I look suspiciously at Marisa’s iPhone in its pop-art case. I am surprised she left her phone behind. Marisa’s phone is her lifeline. The thought that she was flustered or upset enough by our last encounter to forget her phone—and that she’s clearly angry that she left it—makes me feel a bit better.

  My own phone rings in my hip pocket, startling me. Shit. Did Marisa find another phone? Mine rings again, and I pull it out to see who’s calling. It says Archer (Work). I hesitate—is she calling me from school?—and then answer, tensing as if prepared to throw the phone away from me. “Hello?”

  “Ethan? It’s Teri Merchant.”

  Her calm, professional voice wipes my mind like a blank slate. “Oh,” I say. “Um … hi. How are you?”

  “I wanted to check in with you,” she says. “I understand you stopped by my office yesterday after school? Jean said you wanted to talk with me.”

  At that moment I realize I’m still wearing my gym clothes from this morning and that I smell like a ripe alcoholic. “I … yes, I did,” I say. “I mean I do. Want to talk. Actually, that’s a great idea.” I’m babbling. Focus, asshole. “In person would be better,” I say. “I mean, not now.”

  “No, tonight isn’t great,” Teri says. “How about tomorrow afternoon? Say, four o’clock? My office?”

  “That’s perfect,” I say. Tomorrow is Sunday, but the sooner I can talk to her about Marisa, the better.

  She pauses. “Are you okay, Ethan?”

  I nod. “Yeah, fine,” I say. “I mean, I have some family stuff going on. My sister is in town.”

  As if I’ve conjured her with those words, through my front window I see Susannah running up the driveway in her workout gear, arms pumping, knees jackknifing, her face red with exertion and running with sweat.

  “That’s good,” Teri says. “It must be nice catching up with her.”

  Susannah almost makes it up the driveway before she staggers, weaves into the front yard, and pukes all over my lawn.

  “It’s wonderful,” I say into my phone.

  * * *

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, I walk into Teri’s office ten minutes early, but Teri is already there, sitting behind her desk. So are three other people. I stop just inside the doorway. Coleman Carter stands off to the side as if trying to blend into the woodwork—he looks about as conspicuous as a boar in a bowling alley. A white-haired woman in a black dress and severe-looking glasses is bending down to speak to a third person in an armchair. When the woman straightens up, I see the person in the chair is Byron Radinger, Archer’s head of school.

  “Ethan,” Teri says, and the other three turn and look at me. “Come on in. Shut the door behind you.”

  In my head, unbidden, I hear Uncle Gavin’s voice. You’ve walked into it.

  Then I shut the door behind me and cross the room to stand by the chair in front of Teri’s desk.

  “Thanks for coming in,” Teri says.

  “Of course,” I say. “Thanks for meeting with me. I …” I clear my throat. “I wasn’t expecting everyone else. Hello, Byron.”

  “Ethan,” Byron says, standing and shaking my hand. He’s a patrician guy from an old family in Charlotte, an East Coast prep-school kid now running a prep school himself.

  Coleman smiles at me, but it looks a little sickly. I smile back, then glance at the third person.

  “This is Deborah Holt,” Teri says. “She’s the school’s attorney.”

  Don’t tell her a single word more than she needs to know, Uncle Gavin insists in my head.

  “Mr. Faulkner,” Deborah Holt says. Her handshake is firm and dry and perfunctory. We all sit.

  “Ethan, before we begin,” Teri says, “please know that everyone in this room—myself, Coleman, Byron, Deborah—is your friend.”

  My heart freezes in my chest for a moment before it resumes pumping. That is the kind of statement someone makes just before he—or she—cuts your feet out from under you.

  “I know that, Teri,” I say.

  Teri glances at Byron, who nods as if acknowledging his own cue. “Ethan, we’ve received some disturbing information about your teaching and your behavior in class.”

&nb
sp; The skin on my back crawls. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t—what’s going on?”

  Teri turns her laptop around so I can see her screen. “This is your class webpage, isn’t it?” she says.

  I peer at her screen. “Yes,” I say.

  Teri clicks the Assignment menu. “Is this an assignment for your AP English class?”

  I bend forward to read more closely:

  Creative writing assignment: Write about a situation in which one person wrongs another. Like, for example, maybe you were dating someone, perhaps even sleeping with them, and then that person breaks up with you, and it turns out that person has her own history of trauma—a parent badly injured in a car accident, say—and might not even be stable herself. How would you react? Length: 700 words, typed and double-spaced.

  I stare at the screen. Marisa, I think. My mouth is the Sahara—I would kill for a glass of water. “When … when was that posted?” I ask.

  “Yesterday,” Teri says. “Twelve nineteen PM, to be exact.”

  About an hour after I found Marisa in my house wearing Susannah’s T-shirt. I read the assignment again, confusion giving way to anger. “That’s not mine.”

  “But it’s on your class website,” Teri says.

  “I didn’t post that. I didn’t write that.” Then a thought hits me. “Is this still up? Are students seeing this?”

  “Coleman took it down as soon as he saw it,” Teri says. “This is a screenshot.”

  I look at Coleman, who clearly wishes to be anywhere but here. “When?” I ask.

  He frowns. “When—?”

  “When did you take it down? How long was it up?”

  “Yesterday,” Coleman says. “Around three thirty.”

  “Ethan,” Teri says, “have you received any emails from students about it?”

  “I didn’t check my email this morning,” I say. “Look, this assignment isn’t mine. It’s … weirdly inappropriate—”

  Byron leans forward in his chair. “Do you often assign students creative writing exercises like this?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “Not like this.” I look around at everyone. “What else is wrong?”

  Deborah Holt raises one eyebrow a millimeter but otherwise doesn’t react. Everyone else looks uncomfortable.

  “What makes you think something else is wrong?” Teri asks.

  “Because my employer said he had received disturbing information about my teaching and my behavior in class,” I say. “This can’t be it.”

  Teri turns her laptop to face her, taps some keys, then turns it back around. Now the screen shows a Twitter page. The handle is EthanF8 and there’s an old Archer yearbook photo of me as the profile pic. Below that I read a post: Getting my students to write creatively ha ha #prepschooltrouble #ArcherSchoolATL. It’s dated one day ago.

  “I’m not on Twitter,” I say.

  Coleman stirs. “Ethan—”

  “This isn’t mine,” I say.

  Byron says, “The faculty handbook says teachers will not friend or engage with students on social media.”

  “I’m not even on social media,” I say. “I mean, I have a Facebook account, but I don’t go on it hardly at all.”

  Teri says, “You’ve got students responding here, Ethan.”

  I look at the Twitter page and see that the post has comments.

  LOL Mr Faulkner crazy assignment from scubadood, which is apparently Mark Mitchell’s Twitter handle.

  You know it, EthanF8 responds.

  Is this real? asks ChristyNewmanCheer.

  TMI, writes Solomon_Sarah.

  EthanF8 replies: Life’s hard, girls—get a helmet.

  “Marisa,” I say.

  “What?” Coleman says.

  “Marisa Devereaux,” I say. I look at Teri. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. We dated, and then I broke it off, and she reacted … badly. And now she’s doing this.”

  “You’re saying Marisa did this?” Teri says. “That’s a serious charge, Ethan.”

  Well, it’s a good fucking thing we have a lawyer here, I want to say, but I manage not to. “I didn’t write any of these,” I say. “Even if I had a Twitter account, I wouldn’t post this. And even if I did, I sure wouldn’t tag Archer in it. Come on, Teri. This … this isn’t me. You know me.”

  Teri presses her lips together and pulls open a desk drawer, removing a file folder and putting it on her desk. She flips open the file folder, and inside is my grade book. My name is neatly printed on the cover.

  “Where’d you find that?” I ask. “I was looking for it in my office on Friday.”

  “Someone turned it in to us,” Teri says.

  “Was it Marisa?” I ask. “Did she take—”

  “It was a custodian, Ethan,” Teri says. “He found it on the floor near the senior commons.”

  I sit back. “Oh,” I say. That’s not good. While this is just a hard copy of the grades I post into our website, it’s still bad that it was found where students could have seen it and potentially read all of my students’ grades. “I don’t know how it got in the senior commons, but if I … dropped it there or left it, I’ll take full responsibility.”

  Teri gives me a look I can’t read, then flips open the grade book. Inside, between two pages, is a photograph. I bend my head to look more closely. It’s a picture of a woman, naked from the waist up. I recoil. “What the hell?” I say.

  “That was my reaction as well,” Byron says.

  I stare at the picture. Whoever the woman is, the picture shows her torso, from midthigh up to her neck—there’s no head, so no face. It’s not Marisa; that I know. It looks like it might be a selfie, given the angle—a digital photo printed on regular computer paper. “You … found this inside my grade book?” I say.

  “Yes,” Teri says.

  “I didn’t take that picture,” I say. “I’ve never seen it. And I sure as hell did not put it in my grade book.”

  Teri looks at me steadily. I gaze back. It’s not me, I think.

  “I believe you,” Teri says.

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Byron makes a displeased sound.

  “I believe you,” Teri says again, but now she glances at Byron before looking back at me. “But I’m afraid that’s not enough.”

  “Not enough for what?” I ask.

  “Ethan,” Byron says, “the school needs to conduct an investigation into this. I’m putting you on leave, with pay, effective immediately. If we determine you had nothing to do with any of this, you will be welcome back with open arms. But in light of this troubling evidence, I’m afraid I have no choice but to ask you to stay off campus until such time as we determine you can return.”

  * * *

  I GET INTO my car and rest my forehead against the steering wheel. I’ve been suspended from my job. A job that I love and am good at. Because of Marisa. I slam my fist down on top of my dashboard, then swing my arm and whack the passenger seat, causing my car to rock slightly. I start flailing, kicking the floor, nearly breaking off my rearview mirror. For a few seconds, I must look like I’m engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the interior of my Corolla. When I punch the steering wheel and the horn gives off an alarmed bleat, I’m startled enough to stop, my breathing ragged and heavy.

  My phone rings. It’s my home number—Susannah.

  “Do you need me to come rescue you?” she says.

  “Meeting’s over,” I say. “Marisa fucked me.”

  She pauses for only a second. “Well,” she says, “technically that’s true—”

  Rage floods me, a white-hot neon light. “Shut up, Susannah,” I say. “She fucked me. She stole my grade book and put a picture of a naked girl in it and dropped it where someone would find it. She opened a goddamned fake Twitter account in my name and posted crazy shit. The school’s put me on leave, Susannah. I’m going to lose my fucking job because of her.”

  I hang up and throw the phone at the passenger seat, where it bounces off and hits the dash
before dropping to the floor. I want to sob, I want to scream, I want to lie down and go to sleep and wake up to find this was all just a nightmare that’s now over. Instead I close my eyes and will my heart rate and my breathing to slow down, and once they do I start the car and drive away.

  * * *

  AT HOME, I find that Susannah is gone. No note on the TV this time, or anywhere else. Her duffel bag is still here, so there’s that. She’s gone to ground to hide, which she always does in times of crisis. Wilson does a happy dance around my feet, and I take him outside to poop and pee, and then he sits on my lap, allowing me to rub his belly.

  Marisa’s phone pings from the coffee table. I brought it out here earlier. I knew she would text me.

  Heard from school yet?

  #Fuckyou

  You still need to give me my phone back

  Hellooooo

  Must be sad knowing your job is on the line

  I don’t respond. She’s angry enough that engaging with her at this point would be like provoking a snarling dog. I do, however, take pictures of these texts with my own phone. Document everything, my dad said once. He was talking about banking, but it’s good advice here.

  Another text.

  I’m going to eat your heart.

  Jesus, now she’s quoting Much Ado About Nothing. I take a picture of that one just before another new text pops up.

  You should check out Twitter

  I hesitate, then take a picture of the text before it vanishes on her locked screen, like each of the texts before it. Then I go onto Twitter and search for EthanF8’s account, where I find this new post, dated forty-one minutes ago:

  Someone sent me a naughty picture omg what do I do?

  Acid churns in my stomach. I know what picture she’s referring to. The one in my grade book. And knowing Twitter, I can guess what’s going to happen. Sure enough, Ethan F8 has a number of responses:

  Post it

  Post that pic

  “Naughty” how?