Here Lies Bridget (16 page)

“Probably. I waited a few days, you know, to see if things would die down, but the rumors are all over the place. You must see the problem I’m faced with here, surely.”

The headmaster waited, and I felt irritated with him for being so condescending.

“Well, of course, that can’t happen, I realize that. But what do you expect me to do?”

“John, I’m not able to keep on a staff member if he or she has become involved with a student’s parent. Especially when it hasn’t been kept quiet, and it’s such a small school as this.

Even more especially when it’s a high-profile student. And let’s face it, you haven’t been here long, you don’t have any tenure or reputation to speak of. Maybe things would be different if you’d been here longer.”

“But

I

haven’t
been having an affair, I hardly know the woman!” Panic rose. “I realize how it must look, but you can’t do this to…me…you can’t just…”

“Look, I know how frustrating this must be, John…”

Mr. Ezhno thought about his words carefully before speaking, so that they didn’t come off as “nuh-uh!”

“Listen, Ransic, this isn’t ethical and you know it. You 1 3 6

P A I G E H A R B I S O N

know Bridget Duke, and you must see that this is an act for attention, or something else. I just can’t believe you’d fire me because of the lie of a contemptible little girl like that.”

The headmaster looked like he was concentrating as he stared down at the pen he was fiddling with. He set it down.

“John. My hands are tied. I’ve had parents call in already, worried about how this is affecting students and equality in the classroom. With Bridget’s father being, well, who he is….

do you know who her father is?”

“Yeah, I watch ESPN,” Mr. Ezhno spat, thinking irritatedly of the expensive sports package he’d just bought for his brand-new TV.

“So then you know that he’s powerful.”

A horrible thought slipped into Mr. Ezhno’s mind. “Donates a lot of money to the school, does he?”

A minuscule hesitation gave Mr. Ezhno the validation he’d feared.

“John, he’s going to be furious when and if he finds out about this. And beyond the Duke family, the
school’s
reputation is at stake here. This is a prestigious institution, and this kind of unprofessionalism just will not f ly.” He looked earnestly at Mr. Ezhno. “I know that there’s a chance this isn’t the case, but I have no way of
really
knowing that. It might have been different if no one else knew, maybe there would have been time for a meeting or something like that. But the problem is that, at this point, it’s common knowledge even if it is a fabrication.”

Mr. Ezhno’s heart was still racing. Only now he was feeling something I’d felt before, too. The feeling that the pin had been pulled on a grenade and nothing could be done to stop it from exploding.

Just as Mr. Ezhno was standing to leave and his thoughts 1 3 7

turned toward resentment of me, I felt the rush of leaving his mind.

“How did that
happen?
” I asked Anna, as soon as I could see again. I now felt my own frenzy as strongly as I’d felt Mr.

Ezhno’s. “I never said he was, like,
doing
stuff with her!” I concentrated and things began to come back to me. “I said some things that…I guess they could have sounded that way…”

I thought of my poorly chosen words. Like how I’d said I had to see him five days a week.

I winced as I remembered my conversation with the headmaster. Now that I thought of it, I’d had no clear segue between talking about Meredith’s imaginary lover and talking about how much I hated the parent-teacher conferences.

I looked at Anna, who was still watching me with that same blandly compassionate look on her face.

It was like she knew what I was thinking.

“But I didn’t mean to do any of that,” I insisted. “I just wanted to…get out of the office…” I heard my weak words, which so obviously didn’t pass as an excuse. “But I didn’t say anything to anyone else, I’m completely sure of that.”

I was glad to say this honestly. I thought carefully and decided that I truly hadn’t said anything to that effect.

The expression on Anna’s face, however, said otherwise.

“I think things will become clearer after our next journey,”

she said lightly.

I nodded, unable to do much else, and looked down the f loor.

Now it was time to squeeze into the Carfagni Mary Jane shoes I’d admired for so long.

C H A P T E R T E N

I found myself in the girls’ bathroom at school, looking into a mirror at Michelle’s ref lection. Her eyes were watery and red. Her face was the same color, with a tinge of purple to it. I watched her adjust herself, wiping away the mascara that had run beneath her eyes.

After looking around to be sure she was the only one in the bathroom, Michelle turned to the side with one hand on her stomach and stood up as straight as possible. I was surprised to see how narrow she was, but even more surprised by her thoughts, which said otherwise. She looked critically at her lower stomach, which came out a fraction of an inch more than the rest of her toned tummy.

“Gawd,” she muttered to herself. I watched incredulously as she found pretend f law after pretend f law on her body.

My torso’s too thick,
she thought, trying to suck in the portion beneath her ribs. She looked concave.

And she had a thought that stunned me.

I know that if I lose any more weight I’ll look too thin, but maybe
I want to look too thin.

I yearned to be able to communicate with her, to tell her how stupid that was, and that “too thin” wasn’t a good thing, 1 3 9

that it was more of an insult than anything else, but I was powerless.

The bell rang, and she hurried to put a breath mint in her mouth. Taking a second to give herself a final, critical once-over in the mirror, she left the bathroom. She felt embarrassed to be walking the halls. She felt like everyone was going to see her for what she was, whatever that might be. There was a word Michelle was avoiding in the back of her mind. One she couldn’t seem to bring herself to say or admit.

She walked into the women’s locker room and headed toward the locker I’d made her choose next to mine.

“
There
you are, God, since when are you late? You’re probably just late because I need to talk to you. Judging by
my
luck.” I watched myself complain, chewing on the Bubblicious gum from my purse.

Michelle sighed as she asked, “Why, what’s up?”

I took off my earrings as I launched into my story about how completely unfair it was that Mr. Ezhno was even allowed to teach. I complained that he obviously hated kids anyway, so why was he even teaching?

I thought self-consciously of the optimism he’d felt on his first day and felt sad.

But the Bridget in the locker room carried on with her bitching.

“I

was

seriously
only thirty seconds late. And it wasn’t even my fault! It was his be
loved
Meredith’s fault.” I could feel that Michelle knew, just as I did, that I’d been later than just thirty seconds. Michelle formed a response in her head. One where she asked how it could have possibly been Meredith’s fault.

Ultimately, she changed her mind and went with the easy answer that wouldn’t start an argument.

I got the feeling that this happened often.

“Yeah, that sucks.” Michelle started to pull on her shorts, 1 4 0

P A I G E H A R B I S O N

looking at her thighs. To me they looked so thin they were on the verge of cowboy legs, but she seemed to see sausages. She pulled them up to her hips, and felt self-conscious of her hips, which she was convinced were spilling over the waistband.

They aren’t,
I tried desperately to tell her from my impotent place inside her mind. That’s just what it looks like when something’s not the right size! Feet don’t fit into shoes that are too small, for example—I thought of the Mary Janes—and that’s just because they’re not the right size. But the only thing Michelle heard from me was my thoughtless observation.

“You know, you should really buy new shorts this year.

Those are getting a little tight on your hips.”

I cringed and wished I could take it back. It came off as insulting, which I really hadn’t meant it to be.

Michelle looked at me and watched with envy as I pulled on my waistband, which was huge on me.

“Mine, on the other hand…” I said, like it was a huge burden. I thought wearily of how many times I’d acted like a good thing was tiresome. Like in mandatory chorus class in middle school, where I’d said I couldn’t sing from my stomach because my abs were too tight. And when I said that I couldn’t wear some pairs of sunglasses because my eyelashes pressed against the lenses from being so long.

I was surprised that Michelle didn’t seem angry with me.

In fact, her only thought was that she was jealous. She didn’t want to have to think about her waistband anymore.

“Okay, so what happened when you came in late?” she asked, and then went back to trying to stretch out the pants so that she could still get away with wearing size small. When she wore a small, it meant she was a small, dammit. If she moved up to a medium, it would mean she wasn’t small anymore.

It would mean she’d gotten bigger.

1 4 1

The other me, oblivious to the thoughts in Michelle’s head, continued bitching.

“Basically, he sent me to the office with this totally stupid note talking about how I’m some kind of menace. Oh! And he said something about me distracting other students who were
trying to pay attention.
It was so stupid. So then I had to wait for, like,
ever,
with three of Winchester Prep’s Least Wanted.

Are you even listening, Michelle? Or are you just going to rip your pants trying to make them fit?” Michelle had hardly been getting stressed out about my story, but thought she’d heard everything I’d said.

“Oh, sorry, go on. I was listening.”

Michelle watched, feeling ashamed, as I sighed and looked condescendingly at her.

“So, finally I go in, right, and then I’m about to be super nice and just say something about how I promise not to be late anymore, and how homework’s been hard lately, and then Mr. Ezhno actually
called
the office…” I carried on.

“Seriously?” Michelle gave out the generic response, hoping it would satisfy me.

Apparently it did.

“Seriously. So I knew I was going to have to think fast, and really all I wanted to do was to get out of there, right?

So I start talking about how Meredith’s always got this ‘male guest’ over.”

Michelle stared fixedly at her waistband in an effort to not look surprised by what I was saying. She thought quickly, trying to remember if I’d ever said anything about a male guest before.

But I carried on.

“I just complained about how she and Mr. Ezhno were always meeting and stuff, and how he was like in
love
with 1 4 2

P A I G E H A R B I S O N

her, and how everything he does is because of that. And how they’re totally doing it.”

“Wait, what?” Michelle asked. She’d been paying attention, but was worried that this situation was something she was supposed to already know all about.

The whistle blew, and I rolled my eyes.

Michelle spent the rest of the class trying to ask me what I’d meant back there in the locker room, without revealing that she may not have been listening very well.

As soon as gym class ended and Michelle no longer had to hear me complain about Meredith, she dashed off to find Jillian. When she finally found her, she pulled her out the side doors of the school, saying it was an emergency and they needed to talk.

Jillian’s eyebrows wrinkled with concern as she told Michelle to spit it out; her heart couldn’t take the suspense.

“Jill, do you ever remember Bridget talking about something going on between Mr. Ezhno and her stepmom?”

Jillian’s eyes widened, “No! What are you talking about?”

Jillian tugged on Michelle’s arm to sit down at one of the picnic tables dedicated to the graduating class of 1989.

Michelle looked around to be sure no one was listening.

“Well, I’m not really sure
what
I’m talking about. We were in gym class, and she was complaining about Mr. Ezhno—

that’s his name, right, your Tech Ed teacher?”

“Yeah, go on,” Jillian responded, looking eager.

“Okay, so she’s talking about how he sent her out of the classroom today, and about how she was sent to see the headmaster and everything. And I’m not really sure how she got from one point to the other, but somehow she started talking about how she told Ransic about the affair Meredith’s been having with Mr. Ezhno.”

1 4 3

“Omigod,” Jillian said, her fingertips over her mouth.

“Right? So then, I didn’t really want to ask her what she was talking about, so I just acted like what she said didn’t surprise me, or whatever. She said stuff about how he’s in love with her stepmom, and like that’s why he acts how he does.”

Jillian was nodding her head as she followed the story. Michelle kept going, surprised that Jillian didn’t know anything either.

“So then, I’m listening to it all, trying to think of an explanation for what she’s saying or trying to think of how I must be misunderstanding her, when she says this—are you ready?”

Jillian looked like she was about to explode.

“She said that Meredith and Mr. Ezhno are ‘totally doing it,’” Michelle quoted. I watched Jillian’s face.

“So then that’s it? Well, then, no buts about it, I guess, she’s totally confirmed it. That is
so weird.
”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Between what I had told Ransic myself, what I had also told Michelle and then what I had confirmed to Jillian the next day, I’d gotten someone fired and destroyed my own reputation.

It really was
all
my fault.

“But we can’t say anything,” Michelle said quickly.

“No, definitely not. But maybe I should ask her if what she said to you was true,” Jillian said, thoughtfully.