What Comes After (22 page)

I nodded.

“But if someone was starving, and only had access to meat. Or if we were talking about nomadic herders in Africa, who only knew the culture they were born into, surviving on their livestock. You wouldn’t think eating meat, killing animals, was wrong in those circumstances.”

I said no. I wouldn’t like it, but no.

“The thing about lying,” Mr. DiDio said, “is that it’s this corrosive thing. It’s bad to the other person, the person you’re lying to, but it’s just as bad or worse on the person doing it. And it’s just flat-out wrong. Usually.” He let that sink in for a minute, then he continued.

“But then there’s the question of
why
you’re telling that lie,” he said. “If there’s a greater good involved, I guess you might say. And that’s where it gets complicated. That’s where the situational ethics come into play.

“Do you understand what I’m saying here, Iris?”

“I think so,” I said. “Sometimes the end justifies the means. Like if an animal is injured, and suffering, and you know you can’t save it. You have to put it down. It’s still killing, but you have to do it because you don’t want the animal to suffer. I saw that all the time with my dad.”

Mr. DiDio warmed his hands on his tea mug. I did the same with mine.

“I want you to ask yourself if there isn’t some other way to proceed here, Iris,” Mr. DiDio said. “Are you really doing what’s right for this situation? There’s no easy answer. . . . Maybe meditate on it. And whatever you decide, just promise me you’ll be careful.”

I could tell he was worried. He shook it off, though, and smiled. Then he lifted his mug of tea and said, “Drink up.”

Some of my anxiety dissipated after the talk with Mr. DiDio. I even slept better that night, too. And I caught a break the next day after English class when Shirelle followed me down the hall.

“Hey,” she said, grabbing my backpack. “Iris. Stop running away from me. I’ve been trying to talk to you.”

I looked at her expectantly, ready to hear the same thing I’d been hearing from the teachers:
So sorry about what happened. If there’s anything I can do, please let me know.

Instead she said, “I hear you play softball.”

“I used to,” I said. “In Maine. Who told you that?”

“That white boy Littleberry. The other person you’ve been ignoring who’s been trying to talk to you for the past week. He said he hung out with you before, and that you were a mighty softball player.”

“What else did Littleberry tell you?” I asked, thinking about Aunt Sue and her gun.

“That was all,” Shirelle said.

She let go of my backpack, and I started walking again. “He saw me take some swings one time,” I said. “That’s all.”

“I don’t know,” Shirelle said. “He said you nearly killed a boy with a line drive.”

I shrugged. “He should have gotten out of the way.”

Shirelle stopped again, and this time I stopped with her. “We need you on the team,” she said.

“Just like that?”

“Yeah, just like that. We’re pretty short on girls right now. Anyway, I’m captain, and it’s up to me if you’re on the team.”

“What about your coach?”

“Coach Davis? What about him?” Shirelle said. “He’s also one of the football coaches. What that means is that Coach Davis never comes to any of our practices, and we do everything all on our own. In the spring he’ll come out for the games and sign the lineup card, but that’s about it. He takes naps in the dugout.”

“So why does he do it?”

“Coach?”

“Yeah.”

“Money, I guess.”

“A lot of money in girls’ softball?”

Shirelle laughed. “Oh, yeah. Millions.”

I shook my head. “If he’s a football coach, don’t you think he’ll hate me?”

Shirelle looked at me hard for a second. “Look, I won’t lie to you, Iris. There’s people that are going to blame you for Book Allen getting in trouble, especially if they lose in the play-offs with him not there. There’s always going to be people that are that way, that want to blame the victim or whatever. But you know what I say to them? I say what you ought to say, too.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is: Kiss. My. Ass.”

I smiled despite myself. “When’s practice?”

“Four o’clock. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

The bell rang, and Shirelle jogged off to her next class. “Think about it!” she shouted. I ignored the bell and walked slowly, thinking. Joining the team would give me the cover I needed. I could leave the truck at school, drive it out to Aunt Sue’s after the bell rang, take care of the goats and Gnarly, and still make it back in time for practice. I wouldn’t tell the Tutens that we only practiced three days a week, which meant I’d have longer with the goats on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’d have to figure something else out for the weekends, but already I felt better than I had in a long time.

I told the Tutens that evening.

Mrs. Tuten was concerned at first. “Are you sure you’re ready for something like this, Iris?” she said. “I mean, we’re happy for you to take part in extracurricular activities. And we don’t mind picking you up from school when you’re finished. It’s just...” She wound her napkin around her hand, first one way and then the other. “It’s just, are you
sure
you’re ready?”

“I’ll still walk the ferrets,” I said, not answering directly.

We were at the kitchen table. The Tutens ate pork chops. Mrs. Tuten had made something she called vegetable medley for me, which came out of a frozen food bag and consisted of tiny cubes and balls of carrots, peas, corn, possibly potatoes, possibly green peppers.

Mr. Tuten chewed thoughtfully for a while, his eyebrows practically meeting at the bridge of his nose, and then he finally spoke. “Iris,” he said, “I’ve been thinking this over, and I’ve decided that you are welcome to use the bike if you would like. To ride it to school. And home from your practices.”

Mrs. Tuten started to speak, but he put his hand over hers, and she kept quiet. I noticed the Tutens spent a lot of time like that — not quite saying all the things they wanted to say.

I smiled a genuine smile and promised to take good care of the bike.

The rest of the letter was light and upbeat, even kind of chatty. I didn’t tell Dad about getting harassed at school, or about my anxiety attacks. I didn’t tell him how worried I was about going to court and testifying against Aunt Sue and Book.

I didn’t want to think about those things now, not when there were finally good things to focus on. There was time for all that later.

I showed up for softball the next day at the athletic fields behind the school, after racing over to Aunt Sue’s to feed and milk the goats. The football team was out in their practice uniforms, running plays on their perfectly manicured practice field while their fifteen coaches looked on, some of them consulting clipboards, some of them barking orders. I scooted away from there as fast as I could, my heart beating double time until I made it past the baseball diamond and the track.

I lifted my old glove to my face. It smelled like grass and clay and neat’s-foot oil and Maine. I kept walking until I found the softball team: a dozen girls walking in circles around a weedy, sloping field, heads down, occasionally stooping to pick up rocks, then throwing them into the woods. Some of them had decent arms, but most looked as if they’d have trouble throwing from second base to first.

Shirelle waved. “You’re late, girl!” she shouted from across the field.

“Where do we practice?” I yelled back. I hadn’t passed a softball diamond yet, though we were at the edge of school property.

She pointed down as I got closer. “Here.”

“Here?” While there was some grass, it was mostly dirt and rocks and weeds — even some broken glass. No pitcher’s mound, no clay infield, no bases, no backstop, no foul lines or baselines, no batter’s box, no bleachers or stands, no warning track, no outfield wall, no scoreboard.

“Yeah,” Shirelle said. “Every practice, we try to clean it up a little more first off.”

I warmed up my arm lobbing about thirty rocks past the tree line. I also picked up a dozen shards of glass, collecting them in my glove, then jogging over and dumping them in a little pile next to a scraggly pine.

“OK, everybody,” Shirelle yelled. “Two laps around, then wind sprints.”

I hadn’t run wind sprints, hadn’t run at all, since leaving Maine. My ankle hurt right away, but I tried to ignore it. My lungs and legs burned just doing the warm-up laps. The wind sprints nearly killed me, but I wasn’t the only one. Three girls quit halfway through. Shirelle yelled at them, but they stayed bent over, hands on knees, panting for air.

We partnered off to warm up our arms some more after that. I had a girl named Annie, who told me her shoulder already hurt from throwing all the rocks, so we took it easy, soft tosses and grounders, which was OK with me. Almost as soon as we started, I cut my knee on a piece of glass when I dropped down to stop a grounder, but it wasn’t bad — it tore a hole in my jeans, but there wasn’t much blood.

“You want to stop?” Annie asked, clearly wanting to call it a day herself. Her glasses slid down, and she pushed them back up to the bridge of the nose with her glove.

“No,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”

Shirelle had basketball practice at four thirty, though, so after an hour she said we’d done enough for our first day. I should have been discouraged. I’d never been on such a sorry field and hadn’t been around such sorry players since T-ball. But it felt good to be catching and throwing. Just the feel of the ball smacking into my glove made me smile. Even if I’d amputated my whole leg on one of those shards of glass, I still would have wanted to keep throwing that afternoon.

Shirelle and I walked out to the parking lot together. “Thanks for inviting me to join the team,” I told her.

“Oh, sure,” she said. “What position you want?”

“Center field.”

“You got it.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah,” Shirelle said. “Not much of a team, I guess.”

I punched my glove. “It’ll do.”

The next day, just as I finished milking the goats, a familiar blue-and-white truck pulled into Aunt Sue’s yard. It was Animal Control. I froze at the door of the barn, a basket of eggs in one hand, a bucket of goat milk in the other.

The same officer from before, when Book killed Dewey, stepped out of the truck — a short, chubby man with a brown uniform, his long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He seemed as surprised to see me there as I was to see him.

He spoke first. “I know you. You’re that girl, aren’t you?”

“What do you want here?” I asked nervously before he could ask me the same thing.

He pointed at the goats, who crowded around me as if they thought I needed protection. “I come to check on them,” he said. “The lady that got arrested, she didn’t make any arrangement for the animals. I been coming out every other day.”

I knew that wasn’t true. I doubted he’d come out more than once or twice since Aunt Sue and Book were arrested. I didn’t say that, though. The sun was lower now, shining in my face just over the roof of the house. I shielded my eyes. “I’m taking care of them now,” I said. I held up the eggs and milk as proof.

He stepped closer to the fence. “Nobody told me. And the Animal Control Office is gonna have to have something official.” He glanced at his clipboard. “From Miss Allen. They got to have some kind of a guarantee from her. You got some kind of a guarantee from her? Because you could be anybody, and they have to have them a guarantee.”

I should have lied, gone inside and forged a letter from Aunt Sue,
something,
but I wasn’t thinking quickly enough. “What happens if you don’t have that?” I asked. “I mean, I can get you something, but what if you don’t have anything?”

“Then we got to take them all to the shelter,” he said. “This is just temporary — me coming out here. Can’t just leave them animals. They usually have to put them down. Somebody might adopt the dog, although from the looks of that one, I kind of doubt it. They don’t usually put up farm animals for adoption, though — goats and chickens and such. They just take them to the slaughterhouse.”

He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. I had to fight to stay calm, to not start shouting again, the way I’d done at the boy who walked up behind me at school. I couldn’t stop stammering, though, as I assured the Animal Control guy that I would get his guarantee, that he just had to give me a couple of days, that I would bring it to his office, that I would do whatever they needed me to do.

“Just get it by next week is all,” he said. “You got to get it signed by Sue Allen. And you got to get it notarized, too. Don’t forget about that.”