Her Teen Dream (19 page)

* * *

After school, Karin waited at the curb for
Marilyn Chamberlain who had offered to give her a ride home. Lesley
had not offered, apparently willing to let her walk home for all
she cared. Karin hated that it had come to this between her and her
supposed best friend. She wasn’t sure if the mistrust and
alienation could ever be fully repaired even after things were
settled with the sexual assault charge.

When the car pulled up, Karin immediately
recognized it as Reese’s. He rolled down the window and leaned his
head over.

“Hey, Karin.”

“Hi, Reese.” She didn’t want to feel happy to
see him, considering the weird situation they were in. But she
couldn’t help it if she was still attracted to Reese and wished
things between them could go back to where they were before they
got out of hand at the party Saturday night. She could only hope
that he hadn’t misled her about his true nature when all was said
and done.

“Can I give you a lift home?” There was a
sincere quality in his tone that told Karin he was trying to meet
her halfway.

That wasn’t good enough in this instance,
especially since she knew her mother would kill her if she accepted
his ride.

“I’m riding with Marilyn,” Karin told
him.

“So change your plans and ride with me
instead.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.” She fluttered her lashes
at him.

He frowned. “Look, I wouldn’t hurt you,
Karin. I wouldn’t hurt Lesley either.”

“She says otherwise,” Karin stated, as though
he’d forgotten the serious allegation leveled against him.

“Yeah, I know what she says and it’s not
true.” Reese grimaced. “I’m definitely not a sex offender. Not even
close.”

Karin wanted to believe him. She knew that
desiring consensual sex and taking it by force were two entirely
different things. She would not make him out to be guilty
prematurely, but she also wouldn’t pretend that Lesley’s accusation
against him didn’t exist.

“Do you think Marcus could have forced Lesley
into doing something against her will?” Karin tossed at him with
more than mild curiosity.

Reese scratched his pate. “What are you
getting at?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” she asked. “We both saw
him and Lesley making out hot and heavy that night, leaving little
to the imagination.”

“So that doesn’t make Marcus a sex offender.
I seem to recall that Lesley was a willing participant in what they
were doing.”

“So do I,” Karin agreed. “But that doesn’t
mean it stayed that way. No means no—at any time.”

“I agree,” Reese asserted. “I still don’t
believe that Marcus forced Lesley to do anything she didn’t want to
do. But he’s not the one she’s accusing, is he?”

“No,” Karin acknowledged, which was what made
this so hard. Lesley had pointed the finger directly at Reese and
not her own boyfriend. Meaning Reese was either the person she made
him out to be or completely innocent of Lesley’s accusation. But
did that make Marcus guilty?

“I really don’t know what to think, Reese,”
she said frankly. “I do know that it wouldn’t be a very good idea
to have you drive me home—especially since Lesley lives next door.”
She remembered Edgar’s not so veiled threat against Reese. “Not to
mention my mother, who doesn’t want me anywhere near you right
now.”

“So I’ll drop you off a block away,” he
persisted. “Don’t do this to us, Karin. We can’t let something
that’s unsubstantiated and untrue do us in.”

“You’re right,” Karin said thoughtfully. “The
reality is things were already strained between us before
this.”

“So we’ll work it out.”

“Maybe,” she considered the possibility.
“But, for now, I think we need to cool things a bit.”

“For how long?” he asked impatiently.

“At least till we see where this goes with
Lesley and any charges you may face for...a sexual assault.”

Reese’s eyes blazed with anger. “This really
sucks. All I did was give
your
friend a ride home. After I
dropped her off, I was hoping I could talk to you. But your bedroom
light was off, so I left. Now it’s made my life miserable for no
good reason. I don’t want us to end over something that never
happened.”

Karin felt for Reese in that moment. She had
wanted him to come to her that night after their falling out and
apparently he had. Only something went horribly wrong along the
way. But who was at fault?

She saw Marilyn pull up behind him in her
stepfather’s Ford Explorer and felt almost relieved. Offering Reese
a faint smile, Karin said, “Well, it looks like my ride is here.
I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Is that a promise?”

Karin thought about it. Knowing that they
would still have to see each other, if only at school, she said,
“Yeah, it’s a promise.”

Reese smiled at her wearily and drove
off.

Marilyn seemed to be the one person at
Elmwood High who had nothing to say about Lesley or Reese,
preferring instead to talk about the girls’ indoor track team in
preparation for the outdoor season. For once, Karin actually
enjoyed hearing about the track team, as it took her mind off other
things.

“I was clocked at 15:83 for the 100 meter
run,” bragged Marilyn during the drive. “But I think I can do a lot
better.”

“Who am I to argue with that?” quipped
Karin.

“You can do better, too. I know you can.”

“Don’t even start.”

“Not saying a word.” Marilyn smiled broadly.
“Except that the Coach is still looking for someone who can
complement the team in a big way.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Karin said, knowing
that her window for trying out for the team this year was closing
fast. Right now she had far more pressing thoughts on her mind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

At the dinner table, Karin felt like she was
in a morgue. Her parents, like her, were caught up in their own
worlds. But she had no doubt that their thoughts all merged into
one and it centered around Lesley and Reese. For her part, Karin
was thinking about the cold shoulder she had seemed to get from
Lesley at school, as though she were her enemy. Yet, at the same
time, she sensed her friend’s vulnerability and fear about the
situation. She only wanted to help Lesley, if she could. But would
Lesley let her?

Then there was Reese. Karin knew he was
hurting, too, no matter how things went down with him and Lesley.
She didn’t believe he was a bad guy, even if they hadn’t been on
the same page Saturday night. But could he have tried to take
advantage of an intoxicated Lesley afterwards? Was Lesley even
sober enough to be able to determine what had truly happened?

Not lost on Karin was the possibility that
Lesley had been protecting the true culprit of an assault in
fingering Reese...such as Marcus. But why?

“Well, I’m glad Lesley decided to talk to you
to some extent, Karin, but there are still more questions than
answers,” her father said. “Pass the beans, honey.”

Karin did so while responding
contemplatively, “I think Lesley’s just going through a lot right
now and needs more time to come to grips with it.”

“I’m sure that Shelly’s got a lot a do with
Lesley not being too forthcoming about this serious accusation,”
Josephine said. “She’s always been too overprotective of that girl.
I just hope she gets her some help when this is over.”

“Lesley’s not crazy!” Karin defended her.

“I never said she was, sweetheart,” her
mother stated. “But she’s obviously been put through some sort of
trauma—real or imagined—and will need some counseling to deal with
it.”

Deep down inside Karin knew her mother was
right. If Lesley had been sexually assaulted, making sure that
justice was served against her perpetrator was only part of the
recovery process. She would need to speak with a sexual assault
counselor and probably someone in the mental health profession,
too.

If Reese really was a sex offender, he would
also need therapy to acknowledge what he did and get treated for
it, Karin thought. Of course, that would be in addition to whatever
criminal penalties he faced.

But what if the assault hadn’t really
occurred? What if Lesley made it all up or deliberately implicated
the wrong person? These were possibilities that troubled Karin and
couldn’t be ignored altogether. Cheryl had suggested that Lesley
and Marcus had gone all the way. Had they? Or maybe Marcus drank
too much and, instead of attacking Jayne’s house, turned his
violence towards Lesley.

“Karin—I’m talking to you!” Her father raised
his voice.

She snapped back to attention. “Sorry, what
did you say?”

“I asked you if you know of any reason why
Lesley might have accused Reese, other than that it really
happened?”

Karin fluttered her lashes musingly. “Not
that I can think of.”

She didn’t want to mention Lesley’s alleged
sexual escapades. Not when it was strictly hearsay at this point.
Not to mention it could have a rippling effect, so that they
eventually found out just how close Karin had come to losing her
virginity to Reese.

“Isn’t Lesley dating Marcus Payne?” Greer
asked attentively.

“Yeah,” Karin admitted. “So what?”

“So where was he when this supposed attack
occurred?”

“I don’t know, since I wasn’t there when it
supposedly happened.”

Josephine peered at her daughter. “Did your
leaving the party early have anything to do with a quarrel between
you and Reese?”

“No!” she insisted maybe a little too much.
“I told you, I wasn’t—”

“I know what you told me,” her mother cut in.
“I’m just not sure I believe you.”

“Why not?” Karin tried to play innocent,
feeling guilty in the process. But she didn’t want to get into this
any deeper than she had to.

Her mother deflected the question and stayed
on the offensive. “If something happened with you and Reese causing
you to walk home, we need to know. Your father has agreed to help
Reese only because he’s your boyfriend. But if circumstances are
there that call into question his attitude and temperament after
you left the party, keeping it to yourself won’t be good for him,
Lesley—or you.”

“Your mother’s absolutely correct,” her
father said supportively. “I need to know
everything
that
happened at that party between you and Reese. It could go a long
way in his defense against this sexual allegation. Not to mention
determining his guilt or innocence—”

Why does this have to be so hard? Karin
thought, wanting to cry. Her loyalties were divided between two
people she cared deeply for. Turning on one or the other would be a
major betrayal of sorts, when she didn’t even know the facts. But
saying nothing could be even worse if it meant getting Reese off
the hook or charging him for something he never did.

“All right,” she said with a sigh. “Reese and
I had a fight, sort of, at the party and I left.”

Her father’s brows twitched. “Fight about
what?”

“Just a little disagreement, no big deal,”
Karin tried to downplay it.

Her mother’s mouth hardened. “It is a big
deal if your little disagreement caused him to go after your best
friend.”

“Reese wouldn’t have,” Karin said weakly,
beginning to doubt her own words as much as she stood by them.

“So what was the disagreement about?” her
father demanded.

Karin sucked in a deep breath. The last thing
she wanted was to go down this path with her parents of all people.
But she had been backed into a corner and Reese’s credibility as a
person and as her father’s client was at stake.

“Well, he just wanted to go a little further
than I did,” she stammered.

Josephine regarded her angrily. “You’re
telling us Reese tried to have
sex
with you, Karin? Where? I
thought this was a party you went to?”

“It was. We were just fooling around a little
in a room. But so were Lesley and Marcus...and Cheryl and Jeffrey
Jamison.” Karin added quickly, mainly to try to lessen what she and
Reese were doing. “It’s what kids do at parties these days.”

“It’s not what
you
do, young lady,”
her mother argued.

“We didn’t do anything wrong!” She defended
their actions as best she could.

“Then why did you leave?”

“So we wouldn’t do
anything
wrong,
Momma,” Karin snapped. “I left so nothing would happen.”

This silenced her mother for a moment.

“Well, that was a good thing,” her father
said thankfully. “I still wish Reese hadn’t put you in that
position. We’ll deal with that later. Right now, I’d like to know
what his state of mind was when you left him alone.”

He wasn’t very happy, Karin knew, but she
would hardly say that made him ready to jump Lesley’s bones. Not
unless he was prepared to go through the bigger, probably stronger,
Marcus, to do it.

“Reese was fine,” she told him. “He
understood my position.”

Her father looked less than convinced. “Had
he been drinking?”

“He might have had some beer, but he wasn’t
drunk!” Karin recalled Cheryl saying that Reese always liked to be
in control of what he was doing. Meaning he couldn’t use
intoxication as an excuse for sexually assaulting someone, if it
happened. “Reese even offered to drive me home, but I chose to
walk.”

“Well, that was the least he could do after
trying to pressure you into having sex.” Greer’s hard eyes were on
her. “Maybe Reese went after Lesley as the next best thing?”

“You don’t know that, Daddy, and neither do
I. The whole thing could be some sort of misunderstanding.”

“You don’t accuse someone of sexually
assaulting you as a misunderstanding, Karin,” her father said.
“This doesn’t mean Lesley’s accusation can stand on its own merits.
That’s what we need to find out.”