The Mockingbirds (25 page)

I look up at the ceiling, then the clock, then the
Excellence
poster on the other wall. A golfer swings his club, watches his shot, the sun setting majestically on the horizon. I wonder if Ms. Vartan plays golf now too. She probably does it to unwind from the terrible stress of Themis Academy. “It was in the script. It was in the scene. Ms. Peck made us act out a scene and the kick was in it,” I say.

The two of them laugh, bright smiles beaming across their clueless faces. They lean back in their chairs, relieved.

“Well, that makes perfect sense now!” Ms. Vartan says, relieved her Candy Land school remains unblemished.

“We should probably bring Henry in here too,” Mr. Christie says as he rubs his hand through his reddish beard. I half-expect him to pluck out food crumbs, little bits of blueberry muffin from breakfast or something. I bet he’d eat them again. “Just to make sure he’s… fine.”

“Fine?” I ask.

“Well, yes,” Ms. Vartan says. “It
is
against the code of conduct to hit another student—”

I cut her off. “It was in the scene, I told you. It was in the scene.”

“I understand,” Ms. Vartan says. “And I don’t suspect you’ll get a write-up or suspension.”

“Suspension? That’s even an option here?”

“Like I said, the code of conduct does forbid hitting another student,” Ms. Vartan says.

I scoff. “Code of conduct?” I ask, then I bite my tongue. I don’t say what I really want to say—their code of conduct means nothing. There is only one code of conduct that matters here at Themis.

“I’m sure it will all be fine,” Ms. Vartan reassures, but I’m not reassured because Henry’s a pig and Henry will blame me because he hates me.

No, it won’t be fine,
I want to say.
A student date-raped me on your campus and it’s not fine. It’s not fine because you can’t do anything about it, because you think we’re fine, and you think this—my kneeing another student in the balls—is fine too. But it’s not fine because there are no Mockingbirds around. So there is no way of knowing if I will be safe right now. Because you can’t protect me and they’re not here
.

I wait for them to swoop in, wait for Amy or Martin or Ilana to save me. They will, I know they will. They will save me from Henry. They will save me from myself, from my own emotions that swing daily like a pendulum—fine one minute, a total mess the next. I glance nervously at the door, waiting for the Mockingbirds. Mr. Christie leans in and asks gently, as if he’s talking to a six-year-old, “What was the scene about?”

“It was a rape scene,” I say coldly. But when I see the color drain from Ms. Vartan’s face, as if I had just injected
her with white dye, I keep going. Mr. Christie removes his glasses, presses his fingers against the bridge of his nose. “Ms. Peck picked the scenes she wanted us to act out. She read our early drafts. She knew my first scene was a rape scene. And she made me act it out. And she knew what was supposed to happen in the script. Henry grabbed my hair, he yanked my neck back, he slammed his fist into my stomach. It was in the script. I wrote it. It’s an
attempted rape
scene. Caliban tries to rape Miranda. But she kicks him. She kicks him hard, twice. In the knees. So I slipped. So I kicked him in the balls. I meant to kick him in the knees, I meant to stick to the script, but I slipped. But the point is she stops him. Don’t you get it? She. Stops. Him.”

Ms. Vartan, her face still ashen, opens her mouth to speak, but then Henry walks in. Only he doesn’t look like big, blond Henry. It’s as if the edge has been stripped off him, as if he’s been whitewashed. Ms. Peck follows him in, and I reason she must be his junior advisor. He hangs his head low, like a dog who has been caught eating his master’s slippers.

“Hello, Henry,” Ms. Vartan says kindly. “You two had such an interesting English class, didn’t you?”

Euphemism.

Henry nods.

“And I guess you and Alex maybe are just better actors than we thought,” she says a little too jovially for my taste.

He nods again.

“You really took the stage directions to heart,” she remarks.

He nods once more.

“But you know, we do need to exercise better judgment. Because it is against the code of conduct to hit another student in the…” She trails off.

“Genitals,” Mr. Christie says, finishing her sentence.

“Yes, there.”

“Um, yeah. It wasn’t Alex’s fault,” Henry offers up. “We were just trying to do the best we could. We both agreed beforehand that we really needed to give it our all in the scene, do the best we possibly could. That’s the Themis way.”

I don’t dare look at him. I don’t dare make eye contact because I can’t believe he’s lying to cover for me.

Ms. Vartan looks pleased. “See, that’s what this school is about. Students who excel, even when the assignment is misguided,” she says, then glares at Ms. Peck.

“We really shouldn’t be asking students to act out rape scenes, Ms. Peck,” Ms. Vartan says in a hard voice this time. “We don’t want to create a climate where it seems we’re condoning rape.”

But you do and you have, I want to scream. You created this, you created this place, this perception, this environment.

Ms. Vartan turns to Henry and me. “I hope you can forgive us for putting you in this position.”

Here we are, two students who attacked each other, not
because of a commitment to the assignment but because we hate each other. And they want us to forgive them. This is
The Twilight Zone,
this is
Pleasantville;
this is the world upside down.

“Uh, everything is fine,” I say.

“Yes, fine,” Henry echoes.

And we’re dismissed.

“Thanks for saving my ass today,” I say to Amy at lunch.

She looks at me quizzically.

“You know, with the whole English class thing,” I say.

“What are you talking about?” Amy asks.

I explain what happened and how Henry changed his tune. “I assume you guys got to him or something.”

Amy shakes her head. “I had no idea that even happened,” she says.

“Then why did Henry say everything was fine?” I ask.

I have my answer after lunch when Jones catches up with me on the quad. “I told you I’d look out for you,” Jones says.

“What do you mean?”

“Henry the douche-pussy-scumbag.”

“Right, but what do you mean?”

“Well, he backed off, right?”

I stop walking and place a hand on his arm. “What did you do, Jones?” I ask, and my heart plummets to the floor, then shoots back up again like a free-fall ride in an amusement park. Because if Jones violated the code—
our code
—then I hate to think about his being on the wrong side of the Mockingbirds. “Did you hit him or beat him up or something?” I croak out.

He laughs. “No, that’s so pedestrian and I might damage my hands. Besides, I’m more creative than that.”

“What did you do?”

“After they pulled you out of class, I went up to him and told him I’d tell the entire school he came on to me last night in the common room of our dorm and that I rebuffed his advances.”

“He did that?” I ask, shocked.

Jones shakes his head. “No. But I’d have no problem starting the rumor if it would help you.”

“But it could have backfired, Jones. He could start rumors about you.”

“One, I don’t care. I like girls and there’s no rumor anyone could start that’d change that. And second, I don’t care; I just didn’t want anything else bad to happen to you.”

I don’t know what else to say, so I say the simplest thing. “Thank you, Jones.”

“Don’t mention it.”

That afternoon, T.S. explodes into our room after soccer practice, all sweaty and muddy from playing in the rain, hair mussed up, dirt smeared on her thighs. “You are never going to believe what happened to Ms. Peck after today! She’s on probation for the rest of the month!

She dances a little jig in the room, pumping her fists up and down as she turns in circles, sort of a half-tribal, half-hip-hop victory dance. I jump up from my desk, where I’ve been doing homework. “Get out of here! Are you serious, like totally serious?”

“I am so serious I am beyond serious. I am more serious than I have ever, ever been.” T.S. punches the air with her fist. “Pro-ba-tion!” she sings, enjoying every single solitary syllable. “But it gets better. She’s not allowed to see
The Merry Wives of Windsor
either. That’s her punishment! Can you believe it? And she was devastated.”

I laugh.

T.S. nods vigorously, then grabs my elbow and we dance in a circle together. “Isn’t it great how the teachers get
all
the punishments, both the harsh discipline and the ridiculous kind?”

“Like probation paired with not being able to see a stupid play.”

“Totally. And she was dying to see it. That’s the thing. She wanted to see that production so badly because she’s
the”—T.S. stops to sketch air quotes—“
Shakespeare expert
. Anyway, so Ms. Vartan was all over her. She said ‘Shame on you, Ms. Peck,’ except Ms. Vartan doesn’t call her Ms. Peck. She calls her ‘Susan.’ So she was saying, ‘Shame on you, Susan!’ I mean, that makes it even more demeaning because they’re all into proper titles. But to say ‘shame on you’ to an adult? To a teacher? It’s beautiful! She asked what she was thinking having students act out a rape scene, and a violent one at that, and what it might possibly do to us, what ideas it would put in our heads.”

“As if that’s where it came from.”

But then T.S. stops laughing. “I do think it was wrong. No teacher should ask you to do that. You had every right to defend yourself. You said I’m not going to take it and then
wham
—right where it hurts.”

“Too bad I didn’t do that to Carter,” I say dully.

“Alex, you couldn’t. You can barely even remember what happened.”

“T.S.,” I whisper, “I remember more now.”

She stares hard at me. “You do?”

I nod and sit down on the bed. “Yeah, sometimes when I play the piano or when I see someone who was at the party or even just hear a word, it comes back. I remember parts of it.”

“Like what?”

“Just details, here and there.”

“Like?”

“How I didn’t want to go to his room. How on the way to his room I told him I wanted to go back. How when I was there I could barely stand up, I was so out of it. I just sank down to the floor and crashed. How when he started”—I pause and close my eyes when I say the next thing—“when he started with me, I tried to push him away. I put my hands on his chest. I shook my head. I said no.”

“I’m so sorry, Alex. I’m so sorry it happened.” T.S. moves over to me and places an arm around me. “But I’m glad you’re remembering more. It’s only going to help your case. It’s going to help you at the trial. And I know you’re going to win.”

“Win” is such a strange word to use. Is this about winning? I can’t even think about it that way, so I change the subject. “By the way, how did you know what Ms. Vartan said to Ms. Peck?”

She lowers her voice in some sort of conspiratorial whisper. “Ms. Vartan’s secretary thinks I’m the bomb. I brought her truffles and she told me everything.”

“You brownnoser.”

“Whatever works,” T.S. says, and hops up from the bed. “I guess the Mockingbirds are rubbing off on me, huh?” She rummages through her closet for a towel and her shower basket, kicks off her sneakers, and heads for the door. Before she opens it, she turns around. “Oh, I almost forgot. Amy called earlier. She said they set a date for your hearing. Day of your concert. The Saturday of your Liszt-Does-Beethoven performance in two weeks. Weird, huh?”

Quite the coincidence, indeed.

The trial countdown begins.

Maia, one-hundred-and-twenty-miles-an-hour Maia, kicks it up a notch. She now spends every spare second prepping, interviewing witnesses, and discussing strategies with T.S. and me in hushed tones in the caf, our room, in between classes.