Any Bitter Thing (18 page)

THIRTEEN

Three buses pulled into the flag circle and dispatched Monday morning’s load. Only a third of our students lived in town. The rest came in from Stanton, or from one of the townships flung like dropped beads along the haphazard outer edges of the county. To look at them you might not see the differences—Hinton kids acted like teenagers everywhere, influenced by
TV
—but differences did exist, often acutely felt. Some got dressed in the dark, wrestling their brothers for first dibs at a bathroom sink that ran out of hot water after twelve minutes. Some sipped pressed orange juice with their not-divorced parents in the oaken alcove of a restored farmhouse. Some slogged down a rutted gravel lane to wait for the bus in the cold. They knew who they were even when we didn’t, surging en masse into an entrance hall once used for punching timecards that, depending on the color, marked you as a line-worker or line-leader heading into the pigeonhole of your eight-hour shift.

I stood by the entrance doors, one hand on the wall for balance, as the kids surged through. “Andrea, third period, please,” I called as she whisked by, disappearing into a hole in the crowd.

“Did you hear me, Andrea Harmon?”

“I heard you,” came her voice out of the din. Glen Seavey was avoiding me, too, I noticed, but I’d left a note with his study-hall teacher to send him up during fifth period.

“Trouble with the Harmon girl?” It was Rick, who had also posted himself at the doors.

“Just the usual.”

Rick wasn’t hunting up anybody in particular—he reserved the power of the intercom for summoning his charges—but he’d taken to joining me for the morning bell. I softened his linebacker image, so he claimed, but in truth the kids didn’t seem to mind his end-zone baritone, his chunk-of-granite silhouette. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that he was there not to inspect the morning maraud, but to inspect me.

We’d reached the fourth full week of school—a mild time, my duties mostly confined to perfecting schedule adjustments, inaugurating study groups, separating teacher-student combos that bore early signs of calamity. The second bell sounded and I scurried to my office, where I found six kids waiting, one of them in tears.
Honeymoon’s over
, Jane telegraphed to me with her eyebrows. She sent the crier in first—Cassie Driscoll, who’d gained thirty-five pounds over the summer; our triage system, which we’d worked out over our six years together, was on go. The morning vanished; not until Glen Seavey swaggered in at the beginning of fifth period did I realize that Andrea hadn’t shown up for third.

“Sit down, Glen,” I said mildly.

“I’ll stand, thanks.”

I stood, too, though I still had to look up to eye him. I folded my arms to give my shoulders a better square. “She’s a little young for you, don’t you think?”

His long-lashed, pewter-blue eyes narrowed. “I thought this was about my history class.”

“Nope. It’s about tossing a young lady out of your truck and not having the good manners to throw her clothes out after her.”

He looked surprised, but only momentarily. “That’s none of your business.” Out of my jurisdiction, he meant. Not a school matter.

“She’s a minor,” I said. “Tm speaking to you as a citizen.”

He scowled at me. “She’s sixteen.”

“Fifteen,” I corrected him. “She skipped fourth grade. The girl you ditched in a downpour is the youngest student in the sophomore class.”

He leaned on my desk in a way that enraged me, his face close to mine. “What can I say? I like the smart ones.”

“I wish I could say the same for her.”

For a few electrical moments, we stared each other down. My leg throbbed, but I preferred the possibility of collapse to the aid of my cane at that moment. I was cataloguing the runins we’d had during his endless tenure at H-S Regional. This was year five; he’d missed the equivalent of a year and a half in various programs: drug rehab, behavior mod, two luckless stretches in private school, plus an expensive, sixteen-week evaluation program that failed to reward his parents with an explanatory syndrome other than Rotten Person. No doubt he was doing some cataloguing of his own, beginning with his first freshman year when I reported him to Rick for fighting. His parents—father a tax attorney, mother an ophthalmologist—had threatened the school with assault charges on the grounds that I’d ripped the cuff of Glen’s new shirt while detaching his fists from the ribcage of a freshman who played clarinet in the jazz combo. The suit never went anywhere, but the senior Seavey retaliated by running for school board and siding every time with the Cheapskate Bloc.

“You’re nineteen years old, Glen,” I said evenly. “An adult, legally speaking. A charge of statutory rape isn’t out of
the question. And I might add that consent is entirely beside the point in the eyes of the law.” I set my face carefully, as if I had his best interests at heart. “I’d hate to see you go to jail just for being stupid.”

“What did she say to you?” he snarled, all pretense gone now, the well-sculpted knot of his jaw seizing up. His lips were perpetually flushed and pliable, an Elvis sneer that certain girls predictably found enthralling. He had a pseudo gang he ran with, five or six head cases with hip-hop pretensions and tricked-out cars—except for Glen, who drove a Blazer. He wore army fatigues, a gaudy gold disk around his neck, and his left forearm was permanently marred by a tattooed snake entwined around the words
BORN NAKED
. The thought of Andrea Harmon in that Blazer with him made me sick.

“She didn’t have to say anything, Glen. I found her where you left her.”

His eyes picked me over. “There are two sides to that story.”

“I’m sure there are,” I said, flipping through his student file, my sole weapon of intimidation. “However, in a Maine court, your side won’t hold much with a judge.”

“Really,” he said. He looked amused, which launched a fresh shot of adrenalin through my percolating bloodstream. “Who presses charges, Andrea’s dog?”

Not the dog, no, and not Andrea’s mother, and sure as hell not Andrea.
“I
do,” I said.
“I
press charges.
In loco parentis.
Look it up.”

He blinked first. “You’re supposed to be the student advocate. I’m a student. You’re supposed to—advocate.”

“You’re special, though. You’re the exception that proves the rule.”

“Fuck you,” he muttered.

I stalked past him and flung open the door. “Don’t mess with me, Glen,” I said. “That’s your only warning.”

He slipped out, in a waft of nicotine and marijuana, leaving me seething. Jane peered around the doorframe. “You all right?”

“Just ducky,” I said. “I adore that kid.”

Jane studied me for a minute, hands on hips. “You’ve got two waiting,” she said. “I’ll shoo them off.”

I shook my head. “Bring ‘em on.”

They kept coming—with the notable exception of Andrea, who avoided me all day—and before long Jane was packing up in that secretarial-school way of hers that drenched the end of each day in an unmistakable, if misleading, sense of order. First she covered her computer with a plastic sleeve, tugging the sides all the way down; then she watered her plant; then she swiped her desk with a damp cloth and straightened the ink blotter. She put on her sweater, gathered up her purse in exactly the same way she did every afternoon. It pleased me to watch her, though she was eyeing me in that new way. “Good luck tonight,” I told her. Mondays she bowled with her husband in a league in Lewiston.

“Thanks.” She hovered in the doorway.

“What are you waiting for?”

“I’m not waiting,” she said. “You need anything?”

“Jane. Get.”

“Remember when Alice Fernald came back too soon after her hysterectomy and then ended up being out for the whole semester?” She gave her gloves a crisp pull at the wrists. “There’s no law that says you have to stay just because you came back, Lizzy.”

“There isn’t? Are you sure?”

“All right,” she said, slipping her purse strap over the crook of her arm. “See you tomorrow.”

Then it was just me in there, and the sounds from the building—the far-off squeak of sneakers in a practice, the buses
huffing out of the circle, a door slamming here, a chair moving there. My phone rang. “Lizzy?” Rick said. “Got a minute?”

I crossed the hall to his office, where the walls fairly clanged with plaques, for Rick had coached seven different sports in his twenty-five years at H-S Regional, including a one-time shot at a rugby team with six kids.

“Statutory rape?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “In
loco parentis?
What the hell’s gotten into you?”

I sat down in one of his famously coming-apart chairs. “I take it Glen Seavey made a complaint?”

“Glen
senior,”
Rick grumbled. “Glen H. Seavey,
Esquire.
I’m surprised the phone didn’t catch fire.”

“I meant to let you know. I’m sorry. One of those days”

“It was one of those days on this side of the hall, too.” Rick wore short-sleeved shirts year-round, and the sleeves strained against his biceps as he lifted both hands to the top of his head, showing two robustly sweat-stained armpits. “And where were you,” he said, “where were you when Mr. School Board shows up? On the other side of the building engineering some kind of goddamn group hug.”

I relaxed a little, realizing he wasn’t angry. “Study Circle,” I corrected him. “We don’t hug unless we’re studying American diplomacy.”

“Well, a fat lot of good it did
me
today.”

I shifted to avoid pinching my legs on the cracked vinyl. “I’m sorry, Rick. Really.”

“So,” he said. “Andrea Harmon, in the surprise of the century, decides to act like a delinquent and gets caught with her panties down.”

I gave him a look but didn’t say anything.

“Then the big, scary guidance counselor, singlehandedly and with zero legal standing, informs Glen Seavey, the son of a son-of-a-bitch
tax attorney
, that she’s going to get his ass hauled
down to the crowbar hotel.” He spread his arms the way he sometimes did with the kids. “Is that it? Do I have that straight?”

“More or less. Yeah.”

Rick sighed. “Do me a favor, Lizzy. Next time you hatch a plan like this, run it by me first”

I scanned the appalling clutter of his desk and realized I’d just added to the mess.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t give a shit about Glen Seavey. I don’t care if that meachy bastard ditches every course he’s taking, come June I’m going to gift wrap a diploma, stick it up his ass, and boot him out the door.” He rocked back in his chair, which made a cheap cracking noise. “But you can’t tell a kid you’re going to sic the law on him, Lizzy. Especially on something that happened out of school, reported secondhand by a notorious liar. You were way out of line on this. You know that. Right?”

“Right. I know that.”

“And you know that your gal is sitting in detention right now because she was lounging in Glen Seavey’s lap at lunchtime and Irene Ratclef had the nerve to ask her to move?”

I didn’t say anything.

“So, I’ll handle the Seaveys. I don’t know what the hell you were thinking.”

I leaned forward. “I was thinking that he stands in my office with his hand stuck in his pocket, and I don’t like it one bit. I was thinking that he makes his women teachers’ skin crawl. I was thinking that Andrea got out of that obnoxious, over priced, overbuilt
vehicle
of his about four seconds from a rape.” I gripped the wobbly arms of the chair. “I was thinking of a little payback for every miserable kid he’s victimized since he was old enough to throw a punch.”

Rick rubbed his hand over his thinning hair. “I know this kid, Lizzy. I’ve seen a dozen just like him over the years—no more than a dozen, though, and believe me I’m grateful for small
mercies. If he were haunting the girls’ bathrooms then yeah, we could do something. But what am I supposed to tell his father? That the loosest cannon in the sophomore class did a song and dance for her guidance counselor about needing a lift?”

“It wasn’t a song and dance.”

“You had no business picking her up in the first place.” He looked at me. “This is rookie bullshit, Lizzy, and I have to tell you I’m standing over here on my side of the hall scratching my head.”

I didn’t say anything for a while—I certainly didn’t say anything about visiting Andrea’s mother in the middle of the night. Instead, I sat there, fiddling with a tuft of stuffing that I’d picked out of the chair’s split seam. “My fuse is shorter now, Rick. I can’t seem to let anything stand.”

“I get that,” he said, “I do. But forget the Seaveys. I’ve been fending off the Seaveys since the day their precious little criminal set foot in my school. This is just one blip on a screen that’s full of blips, all right? My real concerns lie elsewhere.”

“What?” I looked up. “You mean me?”

He came around the desk to my side, and sat on a sheaf of papers. “Can you see why I might be getting the feeling that you’re not all the way up to it?” he said gently. “You want sick leave, you got it. I’ll go over to the super’s office right now and sign the damn form myself.”

“I don’t want sick leave. Who told you I needed sick leave?”

He crossed his arms.

“Mariette?” I asked.

“Mariette says you’re fine.”

Good old Mariette. “Jane, then. She can’t stop mother-henning me.”

“You’re crying in there, Lizzy,” Rick said. “In the middle of the day.”

“Not for long,” I said, mortified. “And not often. Jane told you that?”

“Not just Jane.”

“Then who?”

“You hear things,” he said. “From the kids”

“The kids?” I sat up, stunned. “What things?”

“Nothing bad,” he hastened to say. “More like, oh, like an unusual abundance of empathy, even for you.”

“Is this about Josh Wilkes? His
mother
died, for crying out loud.
You
try adjusting a schedule while this poor motherless kid is sitting there right in front of you pretending his entire universe isn’t in the process of being sucked into a black hole.”