A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (24 page)

“Mary Paige’s not making any sense,” I said. “How could it not be adversarial, unless Faith is going to say it didn’t happen?”

“Of course, Mary Paige’s not making any sense,” Blair said. “She found out about it this morning just like the rest of us, and Faith won’t say a word to her, either.”

“I bet,” Annelise said, “that Faith rushed in and blurted this out to Martha Shot, and now Mrs. Shot’s taking it to the bank. Faith probably has no idea what to do.”

“She could tell the truth,” I said.

But none of us thought that that would happen anytime soon.

Mimi and I picked up our purses to leave. Annelise spoke. “Lydia, I owe you a huge apology.”

“For what? I’m not going to let Mary Paige blame me, but I don’t see that anyone owes me an apology.”

“No, it’s not for this, but for everything that’s been happening with the girls all year.” Annelise tugged at the neckline of her oversized sweatshirt. “Look at today. Mary Paige called me, not Blair or Mimi—”

“You’re the only one home,” I pointed out.

She waved her hand. “No, you’ll see when they get home and check their messages. She called me first. She thinks of me as the weakest link among us, the one she can most easily manipulate.”

It was a little hard to know what to say in the face of such an obvious truth.

“I think about times like the photos and her dropping off Faith at my house early. She was counting on the fact that I wouldn’t fuss about spoiling your plan.”

“But you didn’t know what my plan was.”

“Not that day, no, but at other times it was as if she and Faith were looking for the low part of the fence, and it was me. I don’t think I’ve been a good friend.”

“If we come across to the world as being fenced in,” Blair said realistically, “then people are going to look for the break. That’s what people do.”

“And I,” Mimi said, “clearly never took this seriously enough. A couple times this year Bubbe said that Faith was a troubled, power-hungry kid, but I didn’t see it as anything more than playground politics.”

“But ever since that night they went to the movies in Bethesda,” Annelise said, “Elise has been avoiding Faith. You have to wonder if Faith knew that the girls were slipping away from her and so she told them this ‘secret’ to put herself in the center again.”

“I wish Rachel had had more sense,” Mimi sighed.

“I’m sure she will next time someone tries to manipulate her like this,” I said.

“It’s good of you to say that because Erin certainly suffered the most from Faith’s need to be popular.”

“No,” I said, “Chris is going to suffer a whole lot more.”

Jayne Reynolds, the chair of
the board of trustees, was in Chris’s office long before Monday’s school day was over. The board had decided that they could not ignore Faith’s accusations, that no one should ever automatically assume that a child is lying. The board put Chris on paid leave and asked him to leave the grounds immediately.

No one from the board interviewed Faith. None of the members were trained at questioning adolescents, and the lawyers among them knew that the last thing the police would want was well-meaning adults asking young victims a lot of leading questions. So the board was acting on Mrs. Shot’s report of Faith describing “kissing and fondling,” but none of
“that,”
which people assumed was Faith’s lingo for genital contact.

But had Martha Shot’s questions been leading? That’s what I wanted to know. Faith might not be the only person to blame here. But Jayne Reynolds was an alumna, Martha Shot was an alumna, and apparently that counted for a lot more than I thought it should.

The repercussions of Chris’s suspension were immediate. The kids in the high school were furious. The senior-class prank was planned for Friday and apparently Chris’s presence was required. Without Chris, the prank—and no one outside the class seemed to know what it was—would make no sense.

At the end of the school day Mrs. Shot called the Rosens, the Golds, and the Bransons, asking them not to send the girls to school on Tuesday. Mrs. Shot was, Mimi reported, trying to avoid calling it a “suspension,” and kept giving her what Mimi called this “girls’ school mumbo-jumbo” about no, not technically, but wouldn’t it be easier for all involved? After all, hadn’t they broken the honor code by failing to report what Faith had told them?

No such command had been issued to Faith. No one said anything to her about not coming to school. Someone was wanting to protect her; her grandmother’s name was on the gym.

Of course, while she might be protected by her background and her mother’s maiden name, our girls were protected by us and our fierce obsession with them, by our money, and by the rottweilerish legal talent we could access. In the face of the threat of immediate legal action, Mrs. Shot had to acknowledge that oh, no, of course, the dear girls hadn’t been suspended, and if they wanted to come to school, of course, they could.

But first the three girls needed to speak to the police. Accompanied by their parents and a senior member of Mimi’s husband’s firm, the girls gave statements. They had witnessed nothing. All of them were clear about that. It was simply that Faith had told them things.

The girls had been told that they would probably be asked what Faith had told them. Brittany Branson was able to be extremely specific about what she had been told and exactly when she had been told it, consulting a list that she had written on a piece of saffron-colored graph paper. She got very evasive when asked why she could be so definite. In fact, she started crying in a way that made everyone very concerned. Why was she so distressed? Was she lying for someone? Had she been abused herself?

Finally she admitted that she kept a diary. Her headache specialist had told her to keep a log of what happened before and during her migraines, and she had started keeping a full-fledged “who liked whom in the sixth grade” diary. When she had been told that she would need to be specific, just as children raised by wolves do whatever it is that wolves do, she, with a lawyer for a mother, had consulted her private records and drawn up a summary from them.

But she had never told anyone that she kept a diary; she didn’t want anyone to know, not ever ever. “I’m going to go home and burn it so that Mom can’t read it.”

So then she had had to endure a lecture about the destruction of evidence. As a result she was now not only mortified because she had had to reveal a secret, but she was also traumatized at the thought that her diary was going to be subpoenaed. The resulting migraine was the worst that she had ever had.

Following their session with the police, the girls went to school, Brittany staying long enough to be marked present once and to throw up twice.

I held down the fort at Mimi’s house, helping to get ready for the Capital Campaign dinner that evening. As big as the caterer’s cancelation penalty was, Mimi and her husband Ben still thought that the dinner should be postponed, but Jayne Reynolds and the lower-school, middle-school, and high-school principals wanted the dinner to go on. “The school is not just about one person,” Mrs. Reynolds said.

No, to them the school was about the alumnae population. How they would love it if they could prove that they didn’t need Chris.

The turnout for the dinner was great. Everyone—except Chris—came and they stayed and stayed, but for all the wrong reasons. They wanted to gossip. They certainly didn’t want to be solicited about donating funds to a school currently in chaos.

Originally Chris, and only Chris, was going to speak to the dinner guests. He could be trusted to keep things short. But in his absence, everyone spoke. Jayne Reynolds spoke, and the principals of the three schools each spoke. All of them said exactly the same thing. And they went on and on and on. Chris would have spoken for exactly nine minutes. By the time the principal of the lower school stood up, people had been speaking for forty-seven minutes, and the lower-school principal was known to be the most long-winded of the bunch.

I was standing next to a high-school mother who was on the board because she was a professional fund-raiser. She was ashen. “This was why we hired Chris,” she whispered to me. “This same old girls’-school pitch isn’t working anymore.”

She was so angry that she was shaking. “This has done years of damage to major-gift fund-raising. Years. That girl can have no idea what she has done, not just to Chris, but to the school.”

Fourteen minutes later the lower-school principal was still speaking. Another board member eased up to my companion and whispered something to her. I looked at her expectantly.

“Fasten your seat belts,” she said. “It’s going to be in the
Post
tomorrow.”

I woke up the next
morning before the paper arrived and so I went online to read the article … and it was just awful.

Of course, everything in the article was true. The board had indeed immediately suspended Chris. That was a fact. The school’s public position was noncommittal, wanting to work through the process, hoping that it would be as brief as possible. That too was a fact.

The board couldn’t come out and say that they were behind Chris 100 percent even if they were. They just couldn’t. For so long people had not listened to children. Children had to have a voice.

But this one was lying.

Wednesday night I spoke to
Jamie on the phone, giving him a quick, unemotional account of what was happening. I didn’t make too big a deal of it. He was in the middle of presenting his case, and he couldn’t let himself care.

“That sounds bad,” he said, but his voice was flat.

“Yes.”

One-word answers aren’t my style, and he knows it. “Oh, God, Lydia, I’m sorry. Of course it must be much worse than I can imagine, but I feel so distant from you and the kids. I’m still trapped in this nightmare, and I can’t see anything else.”

“I know that it is much harder on you than it is on us,” I said.

He paused. I rarely talked about how his professional commitments affected the rest of the family. I probably worried too much about turning into my mother, whose mission on earth was to make sure that other people understood what they were doing wrong. As a result, I hadn’t said things that should have been said.

And it wasn’t that Jamie was doing something
wrong.
But his choices had consequences. If he wasn’t going to be here, we would develop into a family that didn’t need him to be here.

“You know I’m never taking another case like this, don’t you?” he said.

“Jamie, I completely respect that you believe that right now.”

“What are you saying? That you
don’t
believe me?”

“I don’t believe you or disbelieve you.” I was in my careful-lawyer mode. “You aren’t in a position to deal with anything except the present.”

I had thought a lot about what Bubbe had said Sunday. Did I want Jamie to be my friend? Of course, I did. But you can’t teach someone how to be a friend if he is never around.

The police had tried to
talk to Faith on Tuesday and then again on Wednesday. She wouldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t say what had happened, she wouldn’t say what she had told Mrs. Shot had happened. She wouldn’t say what questions Mrs. Shot had asked her. She sat with her head down, staring at her hands. By Thursday the newspaper reported that unless the girl was willing to speak to authorities, there was little that the law enforcement community could do.

Chris was now being represented by a firm with no connection to the school. The youngest, least threatening-looking female associate from that firm showed up at Blair’s house, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, looking for all the world like a baby-sitter, not an attorney. She read Brittany’s diary in her presence, verified all the dates, and compared it to everything Chris had been able to produce. She then sealed the diary in a manila envelope, had Brittany sign her name across the flap, and took custody of it, protecting it from unreasonable search and seizure by Brittany’s mom.

Nothing in the diary had any legal weight, of course, but Brittany’s record of what she had been told apparently underscored that this was Faith’s fantasy. The timing of the alleged encounters never meshed with Chris’s actual and easily verified schedule, and the specifics of the allegations described behavior more consistent with a teenaged hero in a Young Adult romance novel than with that of a grown man.

The tide was turning. The members of the board of trustees now realized that they had suspended Chris based on their chairwoman’s version of Martha Shot’s version of something a child would not repeat.

Several of the history teachers junked their curriculum and started teaching about the Salem witch trials, focusing on the dangers of false accusations. The school community was charged with a poisonous energy. I was getting fifty or sixty e-mails a day about the matter. At our final meetings of the various Spring Fair committees, people would talk and talk and talk, and go home dispirited and weary. A feverish excitement was exhausting everyone, draining life and spirit out of the school.

I couldn’t seem to get anything done. I would get the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, but before I would wipe the counters, I would go put a load of laundry in the machine and never get back to the counters. When the mail came, I read the church bulletin, but didn’t enter anything on my calendar. I had to leave the bulletin on the kitchen counter so I wouldn’t forget about it, and then it disappeared. I emptied out our bin of unmatched socks, lined the socks up on the ottoman in the sunroom, but then never finished pairing them, so they lay there on the ottoman for days. I went through the magazine pile, checking the tables of contents to see if there was something I wanted to read. I carefully set the ones with interesting articles aside and left them on the kitchen table for two days. Then I got sick of looking at them so I dumped them in the recycling bin along with the others. I couldn’t seem to finish anything.

I had never been like this before. I had never let housework take over my days. I had always been quick and disciplined about the domestic chores. But I was addicted to this school crisis. Every hour or so I had to stop what I was doing and check my e-mail.