Touch (10 page)

The thought of it makes me so mad that I want to
help Joan win this case. I want the school to pay.

I spend the first twenty minutes of the session looking at my watch.

“How’s school?” Doctor Atwood asks.

“Fine,” I say.

Then there’s a ten-minute silence, for which Dad and Joan are paying.

At the end of it, Doctor Atwood says, “Are you going to tell me what’s in the envelope?”

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s a paper I have to hand in for school. I thought I’d check it over while I was waiting for you.”

Doctor Atwood looks at me. I hope the expression on her face doesn’t mean she’s learned to tell when I’m lying.

“About what?” she says. “What’s the paper about?”

“
The Scarlet Letter
,” I say.

“How appropriate,” she says.

“Outrageous, right?” I say. “How typically insensitive to make me sit in a class where the kids are discussing
that
book, of all the books in the world.” I’m so offended by the thought—because now I’m the shunned
Hester Prynne, the one the whole community thinks is a slut and maybe even a witch—that I almost forget I’m lying. It takes me a moment to remember that we’re actually
not
reading it for school. I read it last year, in Wisconsin, when it was still safe to read a story like that and not take it personally.

I’d rather think of
The Scarlet Letter
—as I recall, Hester was a lot better than people gave her credit for, and in fact she was a really good person who just made one mistake—than think about the photo inside the envelope: supposedly my head and my boobs, and definitely my name, on the wall of the girls’ bathroom. I don’t want Doctor Atwood to ask how it makes me feel, as if the answer isn’t so obvious she could figure it out herself. Though maybe I would like to ask her what she thinks of a stepmother—an adult—who gives her stepdaughter a copy of a nasty drawing of herself and tells her to show it to someone. Even her shrink.

“Actually,” Doctor Atwood says, “it’s the perfect book for a person in your situation to read. It makes you realize how often the whole community can be
wrong, and how crucial it is for the individual to believe in herself and her basic goodness and—”

I say, “Can I ask you something?”

“Within limits.” Doctor Atwood gets annoyed when I interrupt her.

“What would you call someone who believes that if she drives a certain kind of car, the whole world will worship her and want to
be
her and want to drive the same car she drives?”

“An American,” says Doctor Atwood.

“Ha-ha,” I say. “Very funny.” Which it is, sort of.

Then she asks, fake-casually, “What kind of car?”

“A Volvo SUV,” I say.

“I see,” says Doctor Atwood. She thinks, then says, “Maisie, I’m not sure that it’s going to be productive for you to ask me to judge your stepmother. I’m on your side, as you know, and I’ll do anything to help you get along better with Joan, but—”

“Okay, okay,” I say. “Forget Joan. New question. What do you call a person who thinks she’s the only human being in the world and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks or who they really are, and she just wants
everyone to be like her?”

Doctor Atwood is all smiles today. This one is an I-give-up smile. She knows I’m still talking about Joan. “Technically speaking, I suppose you’d call a person like that a narcissist. You know who Narcissus was, don’t you, Maisie?”

“Sort of,” I lied.

“Better brush up on your Greek myths, dear.”

“Wait a second. I like Greek myths. Okay. Wait. Wasn’t he one of those people who got turned into a plant?”

“A flower, actually,” says Doctor Atwood. “And why?”

“I forget.”

“Because he couldn’t stop looking at his own reflection in the water.”

It takes me another few seconds before I say, “I get it.” And now a smile breaks over
my
face. Doctor Atwood is totally onto Joan. It makes me feel I can tell her more than I’ve been revealing. But still, I’m not ready to trust her with anything important.

I say, “So what do you do if you happen to have somebody like that in the family?”

She considers this for a while, then says, “You try to be sympathetic. You try to get stronger so that person can’t hurt you. And you do everything in your power not to become like that.”

“Good answer,” I say.

It’s the Saturday after I found the drawing of myself and “forgot” to show the picture to Doctor Atwood. It’s one of those good news–bad news days. The good news: No school. The bad news is the danger that Joan will insist on taking me to the mall.

In fact, Joan has my whole day planned. There
is
a trip to the mall. A little shopping. Then two hours of what she calls “Joan time,” which basically means
ditching me and Josh at home and going to the gym, or maybe to get her nails done, or her hair streaked. Josh and I are supposed to read in the living room and promise we won’t move.

Then, at three, Dad’s getting off work, and we’ll split up into our real families: Joan and Josh, Dad and me. Dad and I will do some father-daughter-bonding thing. Go grocery shopping. Big deal. Or maybe we’ll go to an afternoon movie, which would be okay except that it makes me think that this is the low point to which my teenage life has sunk. Two trips to the mall on Saturday, each with a different adult.

It’s the usual torture with Joan. We’re not just going shopping, which would be bad enough. But it’s worse. We’re supposed to be having
fun
, with a free side order of self-esteem-building for me.

After Joan tells Josh, a million times, to stay where he is and not go anywhere and not talk to any strangers until we pick him up, we drop him off at the video arcade. You’d think Joan might be more paranoid about cutting loose a nine-year-old kid in a mall full of perverts, but the difference between the way Joan treats
Josh and the way she treats me is that she actually lets Josh do things that might make him happy.

The arcade would make
me
happy, compared to shopping with Joan. But it wouldn’t make me
that
happy. It’s a place I used to go with Chris and Kevin and Shakes. I’d just as soon avoid it now. If I was going to run into them, that’s probably where it would happen. I’d get there just in time to watch the three guys showing off on the machines while Daria and her stupid friends looked on and made admiring coos and squeals. I tell myself it’s too early for kids to be here. But I’m still on edge.

Joan flits from store to store like a large, inappropriately dressed butterfly fluttering from flower to flower. In every store, she makes a beeline for the thing that would look absolutely the worst on me, and that I would feel weirdest wearing—the ruffled shirts, the cheerleader skirts, the see-through blouses with lacy matching T-shirts underneath. Joan holds them up to my sweatshirts and jeans and tells me how gorgeous I’d look. At least the mall isn’t crowded yet. It would be so much more humiliating if anyone saw Joan and me playing this sick little game.

“Do you need underwear?” Joan asks.

Wicked Witch
, I think. “No thanks,” I say. “I’ve still got tons I bought with Mom.”

If she says I need a new bra size, I’ll simply have to kill her.

It helps a little to think about my narcissism conversation with Doctor Atwood. I imagine Narcissus gazing at himself in the lake until he turns into a flower and doesn’t even notice the difference. When Joan looks in the mirror, she sees herself, and when she looks at me looking in the mirror, she sees herself. I’m out of the equation, an innocent bystander at the major love affair that Joan is having with Joan. Which is a relief, in a way. It lets me come home from the mall with a sweater and a skirt I will never wear, but without having been too horribly insulted by Joan’s free fashion advice.

Sitcom Mom Joan takes me and Josh home and waits about five seconds before rushing off to go have her Joan time. She spends those five seconds setting me and Josh up in the living room with our books and telling us, “I want to see you here when I come back. I want you each to have read at least two chapters.”

Josh and I wait till we hear her car pull out of the driveway. Then we turn on the TV. Joan could have blocked the satellite, if she was serious. But she doesn’t care that much. Basically, she just wants her Joan time, and she doesn’t want any trouble.

Insanely, Josh thinks he can grab the remote. I’m the oldest, it’s my house. Every rule of kid etiquette says it’s mine. But the weird thing is, I let him. I’m so tired from my terrible week. I’m not going to fight with him like I fought with Geoff, Mom’s so-called grown-up husband. I’m so exhausted, I’m just as glad to lie on the couch and watch whatever Josh wants to see.

Josh goes straight for MTV. Wait a minute. Shouldn’t a kid his age be all about the Disney Channel? And it’s not only MTV. It’s one of those
Girls Gone Wild
shows. Same drunken frat kids, same blond girls lifting their shirts, the fuzzy buttons dancing on them, dancing along with the girls, and everybody screaming and yelling until the shirts come down again. That’s what Josh wants to watch? He’s nine! What’s going on here?

Of course, I can’t stop thinking of that time I went to Shakes’s house, when I came back from Wisconsin,
and they were watching one of those programs. I should have taken it as a warning, I should have gone home that minute. They’d become different people. They’d turned from kids into boys. But I’d refused to see that. And ignoring it broke my heart.

“I can’t believe you’re watching this crap,” I tell Josh.

“I wish you didn’t say crap all the time.” He’s imitating his mom, and we laugh. I like him better already. It’s not his fault he’s Joan’s kid and she likes him better than me. After all, she’s his real mom. He’s the one who’s got to deal with her all his life. Meanwhile, he’s watching this program that’s all about drunk girls showing their boobs. I feel like it’s my duty to set the poor kid straight.

“What does this program do for you?” I can hear my voice rising. “What does it mean to you, Josh? Is
that
who you want to be? One of those guys? Going to islands where poor people live and getting smashed and screaming till some poor girl shows you her tits?”

Poor Josh! The kid is staring at me. He must think I’ve lost my mind. Well, he’s right. I’m blaming him for everything that isn’t his fault. I’m acting like he’s one of
the drunk guys yelling at the girls, or like he’s the one who produced the show—or as if he’s done what my so-called friends did.

Josh says, “Is that what happened to you? Did those guys yell and scream till you showed them your boobs?”

Wow. I’m not prepared for this.

“No,” I say. “Not really. Those girls are drunk. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

“Did you?” says Josh. “Did you know what you were doing?”

I shake my head. “Let’s stop right here. I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

There’s something about the way he’s looking at me, with his head cocked, like a puppy. He’s not trying to be cute, he
is
cute. And I’ve just had that moment of liking him, of thinking he’s not so bad and feeling sympathy for the poor kid.

I can’t bring myself to lie to him.

Which makes things a little complex. Because I’m no longer sure what’s a lie and what’s true.

I remember two things happening, two things that
were sort of like each other, but that weren’t each other.

Those two things have one thing in common, the one fact that no one’s denying. And it’s this: Chris and Kevin and Shakes all touched my boobs in the back of the school bus.

The question is how it happened. You could say there are several versions of the same event. And that’s not counting what I said at the beginning, and that I was planning to keep saying—namely, that
nothing
happened, and that Daria made the whole thing up because she was jealous of me and my friendship with the guys.

If you don’t count the nothing-happened story, the first version of the incident is very complicated. The second version is very simple. And then there’s the version in which money comes into the story.

I told Joan the simple version, and then I told it to everyone else. For a while I remembered the first two versions of the story together. Then it began to seem as if the second version, the simple one, was the way it happened. And then the money thing got added into the mix, and I sort of went into free fall.

It’s weirdly hard to sort them out, the story and the
truth, even though I was physically there, an actual eyewitness. More than an eyewitness. I was actively involved. The victim, says one version. A ho, says another. So you might think I would know. But the only thing I understand now, which I didn’t know before, is how confusing it can be. I mean, the whole question of what’s true, what’s a lie, what you think, what you say, and what you start to believe.

“What do
you
think happened?” I ask Josh. “What have you heard?”

I can’t blame Josh for not answering. On screen, a blond girl is pouring a whole pitcher of beer down the front of her T-shirt.

“Weird,” says Josh. “I don’t get it. I mean, what’s the big deal about boobs? Why isn’t it sort of the same as letting somebody touch your arm?”

First I think,
Is Josh gay
? Then I remember: He’s a kid. He hasn’t turned into a guy yet. He doesn’t even know that he’s not supposed to be honest.

“It’s not the same as your arm,” I say. “But I don’t want to talk about that now.”

“What do you want to talk about?” asks Josh.

“Shut up for a second,” I say. “I need to think.”

The strange thing is that, the whole time they were touching me, I kept telling myself,
Relax, it’s no different than if they were touching your arm.
Not that I even wanted them touching my arm, at that point. Besides which, it wasn’t true. It
wasn’t
like they were touching my arm. My breasts are the newest and tenderest part of me. My arms have been around for my whole life, they’ve had time to toughen up. And it hadn’t felt the same when Shakes touched my arm as when he touched my breast.

Josh gets bored pretty soon, and we watch the last hour of
Spirited Away
. We have the television off and our books open long before Joan returns.

Dad comes home an hour after he said he would, which pretty much kills the possibility of an afternoon movie. But here’s the really spectacular treat: Dad has to get an oil change!

Joan says, “Why don’t you go with your dad, Maisie? Keep each other company.” There’s no way for me to refuse. It would make my dad feel worse, and he already looks like a guy who’s been doing root canals since eight
A.M.
Well, he’d better keep doing as many as he can. Who knows what fancy ride Joan will want after she realizes that no one else but her thinks the Volvo is hot?

Part of me knows that my problems aren’t Joan’s fault. What happened with Shakes and Kevin and Chris didn’t have anything to do with her, unless you count the fact that I would never have left for a year to live with Mom and Geoff if Joan hadn’t been so annoying. If I hadn’t left, maybe it would have been different. The guys and I would have seen each other changing, day by day. It wouldn’t have seemed so major. And maybe Shakes and I would never have started doing that stuff we were doing in the back of the bus, which pissed the other two guys off so much that…so much that they did what they did. So if you want to look at it that way, you could say that
everything
that happened has all been thanks to Joan.

I can tell that Dad would prefer to get the oil change by himself. Probably he’d like his equivalent of Joan time. Dad time. He probably needs it after a week of poking around in people’s mouths, and listening to Joan. But he doesn’t want me to feel rejected either, and so—two
potential rejects—we keep each other company. Just like Joan tells us to do.

I know Dad’s practice does pretty well, but I also know he’s not exactly one of those celebrity cosmetic dentists-to-the-stars you read about in magazines. Dad’s still driving his high-mileage Saab, while Joan’s out there tooling around in the brand-new fully loaded Volvo. Well, fine, that’s Dad’s choice, too.

We get into the Saab and start out for the oil-change place. If you looked at us, you’d probably think that we’re going to pay some kind of tragic hospital visit. We feel the pressure: We’re
supposed
to have a conversation, which is bizarre, because those long-ago, pre-Joan days, we’d always just been able to
talk
. I don’t remember what we talked about, I just know that we did.

It freaks me out that my dad is the only other person who remembers that time. The only one who was there with me during the years with Mom. Shakes and Kevin and Chris knew Mom, but now they’re out of my life. There are hardly any living witnesses to corroborate my story that once I had a real family like the
other kids on the block.

Doctor Atwood once said that the real reason I’m so mad at Joan is because I’m mad at Mom, but that I’m afraid of
those
feelings. I refused to talk for the rest of the session, and the next time she brought it up, I said I’d stop coming to therapy unless she shut up about it. So I guess it means she’s probably right.

Meanwhile, every time Joan forces me and Dad to spend some quality time together, I make a special point of bringing up Mom. That may be another reason that my dad doesn’t want me along for the oil change. Which makes me feel even worse, which makes me not want to be with him, either. And that makes me feel so guilty that I’ll say anything to break the uncomfortable silence and make my dad feel better.

I say, “How are things in the office, Dad?” Then I zone out while Dad drones on about some shadow on some poor dude’s X-ray that only he noticed, and it meant a whole complicated surgical operation, and if my dad hadn’t picked it up, the guy’s mouth would have exploded.

Poor Dad! This has got to be hard on him. And
I don’t mean the oil change. I mean the incident, the court case, the whole scandal and drama. It’s probably tough for fathers to think about their daughters kissing some guy. Let alone about some guy touching her breasts. Let alone three guys touching her breasts. Let alone whatever Dad thinks went on in the back of that bus.

Oddly enough, considering what
I’ve
been thinking, Dad says, “This can’t be an easy time for you, Maisie.”