A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (23 page)

“And if it is true?”

Oh, God, if it was true that the headmaster of a school was fondling a twelve-year-old … at best he would leave town disgraced and unemployable. He could also be facing jail. “In this country we assume that people are innocent until they are proven guilty.”

“But if we assume that he is innocent, then that means that we assume that Faith is lying.” Erin wasn’t being a smart mouth; she was genuinely trying to figure this out. “And so we’re assuming that she is guilty.”

Having intelligent children isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Of course, I was assuming that Faith was lying. “You sometimes have to be able to hold two contradictory assumptions, knowing that one will be true and one won’t, but you won’t know which.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t tell if she understood. She stood up. “I think I do like your hair.”

“Thank you, dear.”

After she left, I called Chris’s number at school and left a message. “Please call me as soon as you can. There’s some fireworks that you need to know about.” If Faith really had only mentioned this to Elise, Brittany, and Rachel, and if they had only told Erin, then this might quickly be contained.

Once again—oh, silly me.

Even though I knew that
Chris got to school well before seven each morning, I wasn’t too surprised that the phone didn’t ring until after nine Monday morning. I hadn’t said that the message was urgent; he probably thought that I had wanted to talk about the fair.

But it was Erin. “Mom—”

Her voice was shaky. “Mrs. Marlent said that I could use her phone.”

This was so like a young teen. The mechanics of delivering the message were as important as the message. Figuring how to act independently was so new to middle-schoolers, and they had to think through each step—
which phone will I use
—that those logistics often took precedence over what they were actually doing. “I told the other girls that I told you—I instant-messaged them last night—and now Mrs. Shot has called them all into the middle-school office, and I don’t know what is going on, and I think it is all my fault.”

“Erin, it is not your fault. I will be right there. You either go back to class or stay with Mrs. Marlent”—she was the school nurse—“and lie down. I’ll go straight to the middle-school office and see what’s going on.”

I was still in my pretty new bathrobe so I pulled on the clothes that I had flown home in yesterday.

At school I parked in the fire lane and hurried up the steps to the middle-school office. Elise, Brittany, and Rachel were sitting in the outer office, their faces blurry and frightened. They jumped up, very relieved to see me. Someone they trusted was here; this time—unlike that night outside the bookstore—I was the rescuer. I hugged them. “It’s going to work out, girls. It’s going to be fine.”

They were so glad to hear someone say that. “But what do we do?” Rachel asked. “Mrs. Shot is saying we may have broken the honor code.”

They
broke the honor code?

“Tell the truth,” I said. “That’s what you should do. But don’t say anything until you’ve talked to your parents. You’ve called them, haven’t you?”

The girls nodded.

“Then wait until they get here. Tell them everything and then do exactly as they say.”

The middle-school secretary was sitting at her desk, checking the attendance reports, offering absolutely no comfort to the girls. I hated her for that. “Who’s in there?” I asked, nodding toward Mrs. Shot’s office.

“It’s a private meeting,” she said.

Through the window over her shoulder I saw Mimi backing her car into the last place in the fire lane. “Mrs. Gold is here,” I told the girls. “She’ll stay with you.”

I went to the door of the office.

“It’s a private meeting.” The secretary rose in her seat. “You can’t go in there.”

“Yes, I can,” I said.

There were four people in the room. Martha Shot was at her desk. She was sitting upright, her face controlled. She had put herself in charge. Chris was standing in front of the window. With the light coming from behind him, I couldn’t read his expression. Faith and Mary Paige were on the small sofa. Faith was sobbing noisily. Mary Paige, I noticed, did not have her arm around her. She was sitting forward, next to her daughter, but distant from her.

Chris should not be here. The school must have a procedure to follow when a student accused anyone—teacher, staff, other student—of inappropriate behavior, and surely the procedure did not begin by having the child immediately confront the person he or she was accusing. How unfair that would be to the genuinely frightened child.

“Mrs. Meadows, you’re interrupting something private,” Martha Shot said.

“Yes, I am. Because this should not be happening, and it needs to stop right now.” The trophy wife was again a lawyer. “If an accusation has been made, then no one should say another word. Not one word. Chris, go back to your office and get a lawyer this minute. And Mary Paige, take Faith home and do the same.”

“Get a lawyer?” Mary Paige looked up at me, surprised and defiant. “Why do I need a lawyer? My child has been abused. I don’t need a lawyer.”

“Yes, you do. If she has been abused, then you need someone to speak on her behalf.”

“I’m her mother. I will speak on her behalf.”

“And if she hasn’t been, then you may get sued off the face of the earth.”

“Lydia, I would nev—” Chris was about to say that he would never do that.

I wouldn’t let him talk. “Everything about this meeting is wrong.” I looked at him, putting every ounce of our relationship in the look.
Trust me. I know what I am doing. Get out of here now.

He levered himself away from the window and walked out. I followed.

The girls were gone, and the secretary sat there, still typing. She did not look up.

I caught up with Chris. He was vibrantly angry, his body like a tight guitar string.

How well did I know him? Ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there. Other than that one evening at Blair’s I had never seen him off of the school campus.

I knew him well enough. “I know you didn’t do this, but this is ugly.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“Why were you down at that meeting? You shouldn’t have been there.”

“I know that … at least I did once I knew what it was all about. Mrs. Shot called me and said I had to come down to her office immediately. She sounded so urgent that I came right away. Then I kept hoping that the girl would stop crying and tell the truth. Or at least tell me what she told Martha. I don’t even know what she said I’d done.”

Erin’s version of the story with its middle-school girl emphasis on love and kisses was such hearsay that I didn’t repeat it.

“Martha wants me to leave the school grounds immediately,” Chris continued. “She’s taking an Alexander Haig ‘I’m in charge here’ attitude, and she’s acting as if she believes Faith.”

“The thing is, Chris, we are all obligated … not necessarily to believe her, but at least to listen to her—”

“Listen to her! What the hell is there to listen to? She’s just crying.”

Once again I remembered all my books on raising teenaged girls. They talked about how girls cry when they know they are in a corner. Whenever anyone tries to get an “alpha girl” to account for her behavior, she starts to cry, and everyone, even the kids she has been mean to, ends up comforting her.

“I had spent extra time with her,” he acknowledged. “I knew that her unhappiness was causing problems for other kids.”

Namely my daughter. “Do you have a lawyer? I can call someone at Jamie’s firm, but if this goes beyond today, you should find a firm that doesn’t have any connections to the school community.”

He ran a hand over his face. “I can’t believe that this is happening. Lydia, I have been so careful. I’ve had no private life at all this year. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of what I wanted to accomplish here … and then to be accused like this …”

He was a man of character, offended, wounded, and outraged by this challenge to his integrity. I followed him into his window-lined office and closed the door. I told him to call Jayne Reynolds, the chair of the board of trustees, and I used my cell phone to call Jamie’s firm. I didn’t know the main number, so I called Jamie’s own line, and his secretary immediately connected me to the managing partner. He said that one of the partners would call Chris back in ten minutes.

Chris was still trying to reach Mrs. Reynolds. I put my phone back in my purse. “While you’re waiting, get out your calendar and start listing every single contact you’ve ever had with the girl. Dates, times, door open or shut, everything that you’ve got.”

“I can do that.” It was clear that he was relieved to have something to do.

“And don’t leave school unless the lawyer tells you to. Martha Shot is not in charge. The board of trustees is.”

I went back to the middle school. Mimi was in the hall, waiting for me. She had found Erin in the nurse’s office and had sent all the girls back to class.

“Martha Shot wanted me to take them home. ‘It will be so disruptive to have them in class,’” Mimi mimicked Mrs. Shot at her simpering worst. “But forget that. If the school is going to suspend them, then it needs to follow procedures.”

“Why on earth would they be suspended? What did they do wrong?”

“That’s hard to figure, but both the secretary and the principal told them that they had done something wrong. I wonder if Martha and her cohorts see this as an opportunity to get back at Chris for the changes he’s made. I’ll bet all the alumnae line up with Martha. Do you think Chris’s worried about that?”

Mimi always saw conspiracies in everything, but she might have a point now. “I think it’s safe to say that he is worried about everything,” I answered.

“He’s right to be. I hope this doesn’t get into the
Post.
”

“Don’t we all?”

I asked her where Blair and Annelise were. “Didn’t the girls call them?”

“Oh, they’re both at home, ready to kill. One of the embassies is having some kind of morning event, and there are three limos blocking their street, not a driver in sight. I was about to go pick them up.”

We decided that there was no reason to have them come to school now. We would meet them at Annelise’s. So Mimi and I got our cars and entered the neighborhood from a different direction, parking on a street parallel to Annelise’s. We cut through the side yard of a family who had kids in the high school and entered Annelise’s through her back door.

We had called to say that we were coming so Blair was already there and Annelise had coffee ready. Blair was dressed for the day, but Annelise was in leggings and a sweatshirt as if she had been on her way to exercise.

“I’m assuming that we all believe Chris,” Blair said. The others were nodding.

“But what exactly is she accusing him of?” Annelise asked.

“No one knows,” I said. “Apparently she told Martha Shot and won’t repeat it to anyone else. Erin used the word
kissing,
but she got that secondhand from Elise.”

“Our girls will be able to tell us what she said to them,” Blair said, obviously a little disconcerted that Brittany hadn’t said anything to her while Erin had come almost immediately to me. “But that won’t tell us what she said to Mrs. Shot.”

“What will happen if she just goes on crying?” Mimi asked. “What if she won’t say anything to anyone? How does that play out legally?” She was the only one of us who wasn’t a lawyer.

“I don’t think any of us know much about this kind of law, but no one will charge him with something just because she told Mrs. Shot that it happened,” Blair answered. “So legally it will be in limbo.”

“Which means,” I added, “he can’t defend himself.”

“That sucks for him, doesn’t it?” Mimi said.

I nodded. “Career-endingly so.”

“So what do we do?”

Naturally everyone’s first concern was her own child. We needed to find out exactly why Mrs. Shot thought that Elise, Rachel, and Brittany had broken the honor code. Then we would think about how to help Chris.

“Excuse me for sounding completely self-centered here,” Mimi said, “but I’ve got a caterer delivering eighty chairs and ten tables this afternoon and thirteen million pounds of food tomorrow. What am I going to do about this dinner?”

I had forgotten about that. Mimi’s dinner for the start of the school’s Capital Campaign was supposed to be tomorrow evening.

“I suppose you need to talk to Jayne Reynolds.”

“I hate that woman,” Mimi said. Jayne was almost a caricature of a girls’ school alumna.

“You’ll hate her more before this is all over,” Blair predicted.

We talked about the dinner for another fifteen minutes, saying absolutely nothing of any use. Mimi decided to go home and see what the caterer’s contract said about penalties for cancelation. We had gotten up to leave when the phone rang. Annelise waved good-bye to us as she went to answer it. Blair went toward the front door. Mimi and I were headed out the back door when a Kleenex box whacked Mimi in the back.

Annelise had wanted to get our attention without speaking, and the Kleenex box was the closest thing at hand. She had been able to grab Blair’s arm. “It’s Mary Paige,” she mouthed when we had turned around.

Quietly we all sat back down and listened while Annelise said things like “that seems a little premature on our end” and “that probably does seem like a good idea.”

And then she said, “I think that the only way you can blame Lydia is if Faith was trying to recant.”

Blame me? Blame
me
? What had I done?

“No,” Annelise was saying, “if Faith is telling the truth, then, of course, no one expects her to back down, but she is going to need to speak. I know it will be hard, but she will have to.”

Annelise brought the conversation to a close, which was not like her.

“What is she blaming me for?” I asked as soon as Annelise had hung up.

“That everything has become adversarial, that lawyers are going to be involved … but she does like your hair, by the way.”

My hair? In the middle of all that drama in Mrs. Shot’s office, Mary Paige had noticed my
hair
? None of my friends had noticed the new cut. They were looking at it now, but I waved my hand, making it clear we could talk about my hair at a later date.