The Best Kind of People (11 page)

“I don’t buy that stuff anymore,” Joan said, picking up a package of frozen breakfast burritos. “Too many preservatives.”

“You do not want to have to shop or go out, just trust me,” Clara said, grabbing several bottles of wine and thrusting them at her chest. “You’re going to need these.”

“I’ll just break out the expensive wine in the cellar!” Joan laughed, a sudden inappropriate blurt. Phil Collins was singing on the in-store speakers. Something in the air tonight.

“That’s the spirit,” Clara said.

It started in the lineup. A woman in an orange and white maxi skirt ahead of them held open the local paper and said to her friend, “I feel sorry for the wife, you know.”

It was then that Joan realized the paper had reused the photograph of her from the awards ceremony. Underneath the photo the cutline read,
WOODBURY
’
S
WIFE
TOLD
POLICE
SHE
HAD
NO
IDEA
.

The other lady, in green plastic gardening shoes Joan could see as she stared down with her head bowed, replied, “She had to know. To know and to have not said anything, that’s worse than anything he’s done.”

Clara grabbed her hand and whispered, “Go to the car, I’ll pay.”

Joan wanted to kick the women. Her foot actually involuntarily fell forward. But she did as Clara instructed, pushing by them and breaking into a run after she got through the sliding doors.

They were mostly silent on the drive home, until Joan drew a heart in the passenger-side window and said, “Imagine the person you love and trust becoming a different person overnight. What would you do?”

“I’d want a bottle of Percocet, and a gun to go shoot him with.”

“I thought you didn’t like guns.”

“That’s why — I’m afraid if I had one, I’d use it.”

“You’ve never been married,” Joan said.

Clara frowned. “I’ve been in love,” she said. “I understand devotion.”

“Marriage is different.”

“That’s archaic.”

“Someone could be setting him up,” she said.

Clara pursed her lips, checking her blind spot before changing lanes. “Yes,” she said.

“George is essentially a very good person,” Joan said. “But that is one of those meaningless sentences. What is a
good
person? Under the worst of circumstances, who can say what we would do? For all we know, we might be the worst people on earth.”

“You’re not, Joan. You know that.”

Joan remembered what the woman in the grocery store said.

Joan was no longer a mother and a nurse and a person with her own history. She symbolized evil, and for that, people were not kind. That the front windows of her house were streaked with egg yolk said it just as plainly.

MONDAY AFTERNOON

SIX

SADIE WENT TO
school at the end of the day, unsure what to do with herself otherwise. Her mother and Clara went to visit her father at the police station and she didn’t want to go. The house felt empty and imposing, and she was afraid of the journalists buzzing around outside. Going on as usual might actually be comforting, even though she had to show her student
ID
to a police officer to get in through the front gate of her school, and the security guard was extra-thorough going through her knapsack.

She walked with sneakers squeaking out her presence on the polished hardwood towards the principal’s office, where the rules of high school dictated she acquire a note to explain her absence. Her right toe poked through her green cotton school socks. Everything felt askew. She’d never been to school this dishevelled, but like a lot of things that had mattered before, she had ceased to care about her appearance. The sixth-period bell rang as she neared the principal’s office. The hallway succumbed to bodies in plaid and green and white, suffocating with chatter and screams. The sea of uniforms shocked her as she minnowed her way towards the office, forcing her shoulder blades to kiss in an approximation of confidence. Eat or be eaten.

She said hello to Susan Taylor, who was standing at her locker applying hot-pink gloss in a tiny square of mirror. Susan, who normally greeted Sadie with a warm hug and a slug of gossip, half waved and scurried away as Sadie passed by. Mr. Solomon also ignored her, offering a mumbled hello but clearly reticent to look her in the eye. This was an enormous shift. She had known most of the teachers since she was a child. She also had the highest grade point average in school, with Jimmy behind her by a fraction of a percentage point. She had always been greeted with enthusiasm and respect. Simply put, Sadie was not treated the way other adolescents were treated.
I’m one of them now?
she wondered.
The regular young. Or maybe worse.

SADIE WAS IN
the accelerated academic program, a group of well-regarded students who, barring a stint in the eating disorder wing or a trip to rehab for Adderall addiction, were all heading to prestigious universities. They operated as a separate microcosm within the school’s structure, mostly taking classes in their own wing on the west side of the building. They ate lunch in the student government lounge, because naturally they were the student government. There was an adjoining library, funded by her grandparents and now several corporate donors, with gold-rimmed antiquarian books and a long oak table. There was a small room with a rich red velvet couch and imposing desk, a room of unknown purpose when the school was built in the 1800s as a private college. This was their quiet contemplation room that they could book with Dorothy in order to have complete privacy while writing essays. Most of the time, though, they used it as the make-out room. No one knew this because it was assumed that the nerdish spent their time preoccupied only with cerebral issues. It was possible, while on the third floor of the west wing, to be in complete ignorance of the activities occurring throughout the rest of the school, and out of the watchful disciplinary eyes of authority.

Most of the accelerated students in the upper grades were students of George Woodbury. He taught applied physics, chemistry levels one and two, and one ninth grade science class in the regular stream. Sadie was able to take an independent study for physics, because it would have been too peculiar to be his student.

She nodded as Dorothy, who was peeling back a container of yogurt, pointed Sadie towards the open door of the principal’s office. Sadie poked her head inside.

“Hi, I need a note to get back to class and I was told I had to come see you?”

“Have a seat, Sadie,” he said, and motioned towards the blue leather chair where students sat when they were getting disciplined or told bad news about a dead relative.

He had wispy greying-blond hair that fell below his ears and a face with subtle acne scars along his jaw. He was thin in a way that one assumed was his genetic destiny but still made his bones appear out of place. It occurred to Sadie that she had never really looked at him in the face for very long before. They regarded one another for a few seconds. He had several empty coffee cups on his otherwise empty desk.

“I’m worried about the stress you’re under, because of what has happened,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“And how is your mother getting along?”

She shrugged.

“I think you should see Mrs. Caribou,” he said, reaching for a permission slip that he tore from a pink stack on his desk. Mrs. Caribou was the flaky guidance counsellor, whom her father once referred to as a Jungian hack. Students always made fun of her matching cotton-knit sweater sets. If you got out of line in any way, the solution was to see the counsellor, just as celebrities go to rehab any time they misbehave. Sadie had never had to see her. Everyone she knew who had experienced the pleasure essentially described it as a digging session to ensure you had no plans to shoot up the school.

“That won’t be necessary.”

“I’m requiring it,” he said, writing out her slip and handing it across the desk. When she didn’t take it, he thrust it impatiently in the air with a stabbing motion and she grabbed it.

“Dan,” Sadie said. He bristled at his first name. “I’ve known almost every teacher at this school since I was in diapers. I’ve been to your summer cottages. I’ve seen you and coach Johnson drunk on tequila and singing ‘Hotel California.’ Don’t pretend I’m just some regular student with a criminal father.”

Dan paled. “Sadie, you really don’t sound like yourself right now. I don’t appreciate the tone that …”

Sadie folded the piece of paper in half and then quarters and slipped it into her blazer pocket.

Dorothy appeared in the doorway. “Sadie, darling,” she said, “your father isn’t a criminal. We have all loved your dad for a long time, and we will continue to support him through this.” She dipped a spoon into her yogurt, holding it aloft while waiting for Sadie’s reaction. Sadie stared awkwardly until Dorothy finally put the spoon in her mouth.

“Dot, we can’t say that,” said Dan in a stage whisper. “Don’t put ideas in her head. This is a complicated legal situation.”

Dorothy scraped her spoon along the bottom of the container and smiled wide, the kind of creepy clown smile you got from dental hygienists when you were a scared toddler. A Valium smile, Joan would have called it. “Your father has done so much for us at this school, and in this community. There is such a thing as innocent until proven guilty in this country, and I for one will not just stand by and watch someone we love get assassinated by the perverts in the media.” Dorothy stormed out and went back to her adjoining office. When Obama was re-elected, Dorothy had cried for most of the day.

Dan looked down at his desk in a defeated fashion. “You can go, Sadie. I’m sorry you had to witness such unprofessional behaviour.”

“Again, Hotel California, Dan.”

“This is hard on all of us, and we want to support you and your family until the courts determine what to do.”

It sounded like a line, and like he couldn’t wait to get her out of the office. She could see that he wanted her whole family to move away so he could stop thinking about it.

“Anyway, you should start attending your advanced physics class with your father’s replacement. Overseeing an independent study is not something we can ask of the new teacher, so you should be in room 306, okay?”

She nodded and exited the office, standing in the deserted main hallway.

“We’ll be in court tomorrow,” Dorothy called out when Sadie passed her door. “I’m organizing a large group of supporters.”

Sadie didn’t know what to say about this. Dorothy reached into her pocket and pulled out a postcard and handed it to her. It read
Men’s Rights Under Attack
on one side and
Just Because You Regret It Doesn’t Mean It’s Rape
. There was a website at the bottom. Sadie made a face and handed it back.

Dorothy furrowed her brow. “Keep it. What’s happening to your father is a symptom of what is wrong with young women today. Men are victimized, and no one cares. Does that sound right to you?”

“I guess not,” Sadie mumbled. She curled the card up in her hand and shoved it in her kilt pocket before making her exit. She was expected in room 306, a class of about fifteen gifted students. She was second-last to arrive, making it just before Alison the pothead who smoked between every class, claiming it was for her
ADHD
. The teachers knew and didn’t say anything. Sadie sat in the front, pulled out her peppermint lip balm, and applied it carefully in her pocket mirror, mostly for something to do. She and Amanda had made the lip balm together one afternoon in the winter, using essential oils and shea butter melted in the microwave. She saw others watching her in the mirror’s reflection while she pursed her tingling lips, trying to look unbothered. It’s any other day. Act like it’s any other day.

George’s replacement arrived, a dotty-looking bald man in a bad brown suit. He wrote
Mr. Taylor
in serial-killer script on the blackboard and moved the portable table with the laptop on it to the side of the room with a flourish, as though pushing aside the idea of interactive technology. He removed his suit jacket, which only served to confirm the pit stains Sadie knew would be there. She turned to look at her classmates, and they were almost all leaning forward like a pack of leopards getting ready to circle and attack from all angles.

In the middle of the teacher’s mumbling introduction, Jonathan Moore stood up abruptly and cleared his throat. Jonathan was understood to be a kind of genius, socially isolated but seemingly uninterested in high school in that way anyway. If he’d had any proficiency in art, drama, or English, he would’ve matched Sadie’s grade point average. George thought him exceptional, which was saying a lot considering he never spoke that way about his students. In public he would claim, “You can do anything you want to do!” and the students would smile bright, beaming tooth-filled symbols of their inner confidence. He considered it part of his job description to instill the anchors of self-esteem. At home he was more disparaging, admitting most kids weren’t bound for greatness but conceding there was a kind of greatness in choosing to be ordinary as well.

George and Jonathan would often have lunch together on the courtyard grass. Jonathan, who normally skirted the edges of the halls, lit up around her father. It was well known that he was a scholarship student who lived in an apartment above the Mac’s Milk Mart with a disabled, housebound mother and a father who liked to sit on the back balcony and shoot at any pigeon or squirrel that dared to approach his Ford Explorer.

“This is bullshit. Mr. Woodbury was the best teacher in this whole mediocre school full of privileged assholes, and now we have to deal with you? Mr. Woodbury has been slaughtered by some gossip perpetrated by some fucking cheerleading sluts. This is not fair! You cannot even compare!”

The sub slammed his hand on the desk. “I won’t tolerate that kind of language in my class. I understand the situation with Mr. Woodbury has been very stressful, and no doubt you are all feeling … so much … right now,” he stammered, his brow growing sweaty. “But I will not tolerate this language in my class,” he repeated, as if it were the language that was the problem.