The Mockingbirds (10 page)

“Hey there,” the other girl says. She’s tall, dark-skinned with long braided hair and deep brown eyes. She’s curvy too, big breasts and wide hips and wears a blue tank top and a long gray skirt. I’ve never met her before. “I’m Ilana,” she says, offering a hand. I shake and notice her skin is toasty, as if she’s been sitting next to a fire. Must be the dryers. They’re all on high.

“Alex,” I say.

The three of them shake hands with T.S. and Maia next, which must be some sort of Mockingbirds gentlemanly—or gentlewomanly, as Maia would say—protocol. Then the short-haired girl stands. I’ve never had any classes with her either. “I’m Amy. Thanks for reaching out. You’re our first this term. Martin told us you guys all know each other. Cool.”

Cool?
Is that cool? But if she says so, fine, it’s
cool
.

“Do you want to start your laundry and then sit down?” Amy asks next.

It’s less of a question, more of a directive. Maia, T.S., and I file over to the washing machines. I wonder if we’re just supposed to dry the clothes. I turn around, “Just dry?” I ask.

Amy, Ilana, and Martin all laugh, as if on cue. “You can wash your clothes,” Amy says. “We’re not into weird shit like making you dry clothes before you wash them.”

I nod, then stuff the clothes in a machine, add soap, and punch the quarters in. Maia and T.S. do the same and we return to the couch area.

“Sit next to me,” Amy says to me, patting the spot next to her on the couch. I do as I’m told. Ilana takes a chair this time, a mismatched partner to the couch. The chair looks as if it was born red but too many pizza stains over the years have turned it the color of grease. The pizza stains remind me I’m still hungry—that dinner would have been nice. T.S. sits on the other side of Amy, while Maia takes a spot on the floor next to Martin. There’s a Trivial Pursuit game there with orange, purple, and blue pies on various spots on the board. They all have a few wedges in them already.

“You can be on my team,” Amy says to me, and hands me a die. Ilana nods to T.S. and Martin to Maia.

I roll, wondering what this could possibly have to do with why we’re here. But before the red dotted cube even lands Amy begins, “The game is for show, in case you were wondering. The laundry is for show too.”

I nod, then land a six. “You move,” Amy instructs. “Orange pie.”

I move the orange pie to a music space. But Martin doesn’t take out a card. Instead he says, “My parents tortured me with this game growing up. They made me play eighties Trivial Pursuit every Friday, so I took their board game over break and am determined to beat them at it just to prove you don’t have to have lived through that decade to win the game.”

He’s just Martin, trying to be funny, to poke fun at himself too. It’s not so weird he’s here, after all.

“So rather than tell us about some British hair band, the first order of business is actually for me to let you know everything you say here is completely confidential,” Amy says. Her voice is sweet, innocent sounding, despite the gravity behind the words. “Everything you say here stays here until you decide if you want to take it to the next step.”

“What’s the next step exactly?” I ask.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get there. For now, I want you to understand who we are, what we do, and why we exist. I have no doubt you know about our founding, right?”

“Just kind of sketchy details,” I say, rattling off the little bit Casey had shared the week before I started at Themis, including the part about it being a justice system for the students, by the students.

Amy nods. “Exactly. We’re Boo Radley and Atticus Finch all rolled into one. And our mission is to make things right. We investigate and try crimes committed by students against their fellow students.”

Ilana jumps in. “We have to,” she says, her voice strong,
passionate. “The administration thinks because Themis is this liberal, progressive school, nothing bad could happen here. There’s no hate speech, no bullying here. How could there be? It’s Themis. We’re too good for that.” She scoffs, then keeps going. “So they have their training programs every year about being politically correct and right and wrong and they think that’s enough. They think being
enlightened
is enough, that we’d never do anything wrong because we’re here and because they had Diversity Day for us.”

When we were freshmen, we all went through an “Awareness Day.” We learned about being good citizens, about bullying, about drug and alcohol addiction. We learned about suicide prevention too. The year before I got here, a Themis girl killed herself. It was all sort of hush-hush. No one talked about the specifics much, but the school made sure to talk about warning signs at Diversity Day.

So because the school had passed on its modern wisdom, nothing could go wrong. We’ve been trained to be good, because we
are
good. Everything is wonderful. No one gets punished—no student ever gets punished other than losing an attendance point here and there—because the administration thinks we’re perfect. Because if we weren’t, it would reflect badly on them. Just don’t flunk a class though!

Maia can’t resist jumping in. “That’s completely what happened with my roommate, Kelly, last year. There was never any acknowledgment of her problem with prescription drugs. They didn’t ask what was wrong or look into
what her issues might be. Instead, she was just the girl who failed, so she’s the girl who couldn’t come back.”

“They can’t accept we’re not perfect. We’re teenagers, we’re awful sometimes,” Amy adds.

“That’s why your sister started the Mockingbirds,” Martin continues, and it occurs to me these three people—two strangers, one friend—probably know more about Casey’s motives than I know. Maybe there’s even a Mockingbirds history book somewhere, full of rules and laws and all the violations ever brought before them. Martin adds, “Because the school has given us no choice but to police ourselves.”

Amy takes over now. “So what happened to you, Alex?” she asks, her clear blue eyes fixed on me.

I swallow hard. How am I supposed to tell them what happened? I can’t even say the word to myself, let alone out loud. I close my eyes and wish Casey were here to speak for me. But instead the voice I hear belongs to T.S.

“Alex went out with a group of us Friday night and we were drinking and she got really drunk and wound up back in this guy’s room, Carter Hutchinson’s room. And she passed out. And he had sex with her twice,” T.S. says, her voice threatening to break, but staying strong as the anger cements. She has her own anger over this, just like I have my shame.

I open my eyes and look away from them all. I watch the clothes, wet and clean in the washing machines. The dirt removed, they’re new again. Like I can be, if I let them help me.

“I’m sorry, Alex,” Amy says. Ilana and Martin murmur their condolences too.

I wipe away something wet on my cheek and look back at everyone. I shrug my shoulders, ready to move on. I don’t need a public mourning—however well-intentioned—for what I’ve lost. “What now?” I ask.

“You mean what can we do?” Amy asks me.

“Yeah, what can you do?”

“Do you remember two years ago when Paul Oko stopped playing football?” Amy asks.

“He was the quarterback, right?” I say. Paul Oko was a star athlete, the pretty boy of the school, the golden child. One day, he simply stopped playing quarterback. I had never been to a Themis football game, but you didn’t have to follow football to know about his exodus from the team. Especially because he
chose
to quit. I was a freshman but I still heard murmurs that there was more to it. He didn’t just lose interest in his favorite sport.

Maia dives back in, always eager to contribute. “Right, it was totally out of the blue. One night in the cafeteria he just stood up and said ‘I can’t play football anymore. I’m quitting the team.’ ”

“Do you know
why
he quit?” Amy asks, looking to Maia now to see if she knows the answer.

But Maia always knows the answer. “Of course. He was the one who kept calling the receiver a faggot. Every day at practice Paul kept saying he didn’t want to pass to a queer,” Maia recalls. For a second Maia reminds me of T.S. with
her encyclopedic knowledge of sports, but there’s a key difference between them. T.S. allocates brain space for sports, plays, and strategy, Maia for people.

Amy nods. “The receiver came to us. Classic hate speech case.”

“You’re the reason he quit?” I ask, looking at Amy, Ilana, Martin. “I mean, that was the Mockingbirds? You can do that?”

“Just like we heard the case of the Dishonorables. We call them by the name they called their victims,” Amy says with a snort. “Anyway, they all were leaders of the Honor Society. President, VP, secretary, and treasurer. Proof that power corrupts, right? Anyway, the Mockingbirds heard that case three years ago, when Casey was a senior. We heard Paul’s case two years ago. Heard them both right here in this laundry room, and the council ruled in both cases. Seniors were guilty, Paul Oko was guilty.”

“Are you the council?” I ask.

Amy shakes her head. “No, we’re just the board of governors. We run the group, but we don’t decide guilt or innocence. The council does, and it consists of nine students we appoint each term. The New Nine, so to speak. We’re interviewing candidates now, so our tryout flyers are around campus. They come up through our system,” she says, and I wonder what she means by
system,
but I don’t ask. “Then we’ll settle on the nine. And then when it’s time for a case, three are randomly chosen a few days before to hear the case and render a verdict. That way the council can’t really
be manipulated or bribed for a specific case. It keeps everything honest and it works.”

“The council just hears the cases,” Ilana adds in her smooth voice. “In a perfect world—in the world Themis thinks we have—there’d be no cases. But there are never no cases. There are always too many cases. There’s always someone doing something wrong.”

“So when Paul was found guilty, you made him resign from the team?” I ask.

“We don’t make people do anything,” Amy says. “But he knew what he was getting into.”

Martin steps in to explain. “If you consent to a hearing one way or the other, as the accused or the plaintiff, you agree to the consequences,” he says.

“And those are?”

“The thing you love most is taken away,” Amy says. “That’s the punishment. That’s the justice we can dole out. Paul quit, as you know. And before our time, the four students on the Honor Society stepped down too. They had to.”

I let that sink in for a minute, the idea—no, the reality—that underground justice is alive and well at Themis Academy. That students mete out punishments. That other students adhere to them. “But what if the other person doesn’t agree to that? I mean, how do you enforce it?” I ask.

The trace of an impish grin forms on Amy’s pert face. “We don’t usually have to enforce it. Most students agree
to the code, because the code is for them. We’re here for each other. So it’s not usually a problem.”

Ilana leans her head to one side, then the other, stretching her neck, as she adds, “But just in case, we make sure students are, how shall we say,
compelled
to appear before the hearing and agree to the terms.”

“You don’t beat them up, do you?” Maia asks aggressively. “Because that would go against the whole purpose of the group, you know? You’re supposed to be ‘doing good.’ ”

Ilana and Amy exchange smiles. “I like that you brought your bulldog, Alex.”

“English bulldog,” Maia adds, never content to let someone else get the last word.

“Martin, do you want to explain?” Amy asks.

Martin leans closer to us, his brown hair falling into his eyes. He pushes his hair back, then is dead serious. “We’re not violent and we don’t bully. That would go against what we stand for. We’re here to be good, to do good, and to make a difference. And we have nonviolent ways of helping students in need, like you.”

Ilana jumps in. “We helped some freshmen last semester,” she says. “All sorts of absurd backstabbing going on amongst the young thespian community. But we got it sorted out.”

They’re masked avengers, Robin Hood or Spider-Man, caped crusaders fighting for truth, justice, the American way.

“So…,” Amy says, breaking the silence. “If we take your case on—”

“You don’t take on every case?” I ask, interrupting her and silently taking in the possibility that, after all this, I might be stuck dealing with this alone.

Amy shakes her head. “Nope. We vet them first. We have to make sure it’s a case we can handle fairly.”

I wonder how they’ll be sure when I can’t even remember everything. I hate that I was that drunk. I hate that I became someone who can’t remember, whose defense rests on having been in a completely unremembering state of mind.

“… So as I was saying, if we try this case, it would be the first date rape case for the Mockingbirds, Alex. We’re still relatively new and the code of conduct is evolving. And because of our mission—we want to be fair and just—we’ll need to revise the code of conduct to include date rape. The original code was just written broadly, that’s all. So we want to cover all our bases. And then we’ll have to vote on it.”

“The three of you?” T.S. asks.

Ilana chuckles. “No, not us,” she says. “You don’t seem to get it. The three of us are only here to make sure the Mockingbirds exist. The Mockingbirds are really all of us, all the students.
We
don’t matter.
You
matter. The students matter. The students will vote on the revisions. The code is for the students. Everything we do is for the students, for each other.”