The Mockingbirds (8 page)

The door closes, and the boy is inside Richardson Hall. Inside the building where Carter fucked me while I was sleeping.

Lunchtime.

Part of me feels like I’m walking into the lion’s den. Another part of me knows I can’t become the freak who eats in her room just to avoid other students. Besides, maybe there’s nothing to be worried about, I reason as I walk into the cafeteria with Maia and T.S. Maybe no one’s really talking about me. Maybe they already gossiped over the weekend and they’re on to someone else.

“I saw your note back in the room,” I say to T.S. Her short blond hair hits her cheeks.

“And?” she asks.

“What note?” Maia interrupts.

“Nothing,” I say quickly.

“Oh no, you don’t,” Maia says firmly as we drop our
bags at our usual spot, a wooden table near the edge of the cafeteria. Martin and Sandeep are already seated. “What’s going on?” Maia asks.

I head over to the food line, grab an apple, then make my way to the salad bar. As I spoon lettuce onto my plate, someone starts talking to me. It’s Kevin Ward. My stomach drops.

“Hi, Alex,” he says. He has light brown hair, wavy, and cool brown eyes. I picture him playing water polo as I dunk him, press his head underwater for a very long time so he can’t talk to me. When he rises to the surface, his hair is flat and wet, his eyes are red, and he’s gasping for air at the side of the pool.

“Hi.” I add garbanzo beans to my plate.

“How was your weekend?” he says, a grin on his face. He’s never asked me anything before. We don’t chat at the salad bar. We don’t chat anywhere.

“Fine.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Modest,” he says softly.

“Excuse me?” I ask.

“I heard it was better than fine,” he says, then winks at me. He leans in close to me. “I can go more than twice. If you’re up for it, I could go five, six times.”

Then he heads to the table with the other water polo boys. Just as he sits down, he’s joined by Carter. Kevin high-fives Carter, then tips his forehead back toward me. Carter looks over from across the cafeteria, doesn’t say anything, just mouths something to me, something like “go again?”

My hands shake; my plate of lettuce and garbanzo beans threatens to spill onto the white tiled floor. Carter has seen me at my worst, my most vulnerable, and now he’s telling his friends. I was a virgin—I’d still be a virgin if it weren’t for what he did to me while I was passed out. I walk quickly to the table, place my plate down, and say to Martin and Sandeep, “I’m going to skip lunch. This salad looks gross.”

I grab my backpack and rush out. As I push the doors open, Natalie saunters in, towering over me. “Hey, Alex, where are your shades today? They were a nice touch.” Then she leans her head back and laughs as she brushes past me. I notice she even has muscles in her neck.

I mutter under my breath, “You better get a leash for your boyfriend, Natalie. He sounds like the type who strays.”

But she’s already gone and I’d never have the guts to dish right back to her. I’m nothing, helpless. I couldn’t say no to Carter, I can’t even talk back to Natalie. I reach the quad, then stop for a second, considering where to go. My room, music hall, my next class that doesn’t start for forty-five minutes? Somewhere, anywhere but here. Maybe the school office to withdraw?

I’ll say I’m sorry, I’m not cut out for Themis. I’ll call my parents, tell them I’d rather be in a public school in New Haven and please can I come live at home again? I’ll go straight to my house when the school bell rings each day, practice piano in the living room, never go out, never see
anyone except my parents. Maybe I’ll even ask my mom to homeschool me, and even that will be better than being surrounded by all these people, everywhere, climbing all over me, stepping on me, talking about me, thinking they know me.

T.S. bursts through the doors with Maia next to her. “What happened back there?” Maia asks.

I look at T.S., who knows what happened Friday night. I look at Maia, who doesn’t. “I slept with Carter on the water polo team and he told Kevin Ward,” I tell Maia. “And Natalie Moretti told the whole track team.”

“Bastard,” Maia says, though it hardly sounds like a swear from her. “You want me to go take care of him for you? I can undress them with my words, with my vicious rhetoric,” she says. Then she holds her hands up and flexes her fingers like a cat, her long nails painted dark blue. “Or my claws.”

I momentarily savor the thought of Maia cracking Carter’s head, then Kevin’s, then Natalie’s. Then T.S. jumps in.

“You didn’t sleep with him. He raped you,” T.S. says, her green eyes deadly serious.

Maia’s dark brown eyes go wide in shock. She takes a deep breath. “Alex, my God! Are you okay?”

I don’t answer. I look back at T.S. “Are you sure? I mean, totally sure?” I ask, because this thing is like whiplash. Doubt, certainty, doubt, certainty. It changes from one second to the next.

“You were too drunk to give consent, Alex,” T.S. says.
“You were not able to say yes. He’s not supposed to have sex with you under those conditions. I knew as soon as you told me what happened, I knew you weren’t in a state of mind to have sex with anyone. Then Sandeep just confirmed it beyond a shadow of a doubt when he told us how
much
you drank.”

Maia cracks her knuckles. She’s ready for a fight. “Guys, just say the word. Seriously,” she says. A group of freshmen girls walking to the cafeteria glance over at us. Maia stares them down. They look away instantly.

“No, don’t do that,” I say.

“You could go to the police, then. You could tell them what happened and press charges,” Maia offers up.

“No way am I going to the cops. No way in hell! I’m not pressing charges or going to court or involving my parents or the authorities.”

“You don’t have to,” T.S. says. “There’s another way.”

I know what she wants me to do.

“You could go to the Mockingbirds,” she says.

“Shh… I don’t want anyone to hear,” I say.

“Well?” T.S. asks. “Do you want to?”

“I don’t
want
to do anything,” I say, because I want this to go away. I don’t want to be the poster child for date rape.

“And what about the next time he says something about you?” T.S. asks. “What about the next time he tells his friends he thinks you’re an easy lay? What about when he tells other boys he banged you twice the first time he met you?”

I grit my teeth, kind of grinding them against each other. I press harder, so it feels as if my teeth might split. I picture little bits of white sawdust spreading around in my mouth, a molar shearing off, like a glacier calving in the Arctic.

“Maybe he won’t,” I say softly, looking for a quiet way out, a secret back door I can slip through. I’m just a quiet mouse and I disappear into the woods.

“I bet he already has,” T.S. says.

“Maybe he just told Kevin,” I offer pathetically, my voice quavering. I suck the tightness in my throat back in. “Maybe they’re best friends. I mean, I told you, T.S. And I told Maia now. And Natalie knows because she saw me and goes out with Kevin. Maybe it’s just the three of them who know. That’s not bad, right?”

Maia takes over. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that he just told Kevin. And Natalie, oh-silent-quiet Natalie, hasn’t told a soul either. Would that change what happened Friday night?”

“That has nothing to do with this.”

T.S. raises an eyebrow. “So him raping you has nothing to do with whether you go to the Mockingbirds? It has everything to do with it.”

“Don’t use that word.”

“Let’s see, then, if he just told one person,” Maia suggests. “I doubt it, considering that Hadley and Henry were talking about you at Debate on Saturday, and they’re on the swim team. They’re friends with all the water polo players. Let’s find out how far the bastard is spreading lies or not. I
know the swimmers. And Hadley Blaine is dying to become my second-in-command in the Debate Club, so I can get pretty much anything out of him.”

She wheels around and heads back into the cafeteria. I stare at T.S. “What’s she doing?”

T.S. shakes her head. “I don’t know, but she moves pretty fast.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, she went from not knowing to interrogating in about ten seconds. The mob should recruit her. She’d be the muscle,” T.S. says, trying her best to keep the mood light. But I can’t laugh right now. I sink down to the ground, sitting on the cold grass. I pick a few pieces out of the lawn. T.S. sits next to me.

“Listen,” she says softly. “I just think you need to stand up for yourself.”

“You act as if I’m a victim, like I’ve always been some kind of victim.”

“I don’t think you’ve always been the victim. But you’re one now, and I think you should do something about it.”

“Are the Mockingbirds really going to solve this?” I ask.

“You know their track record as well as I do,” T.S. says as Maia returns, joining us on the ground. She huffs a few times, almost like she’s blowing out smoke before she can talk. She’s fuming, and the nail on her middle finger is broken, jagged. There’s a tiny bit of blood on her finger.

I point to it, wide-eyed. “What happened?”

She takes one more breath, then adjusts her ponytail.
“The whole team knows. Both teams, actually. Swim team, water polo team.”

I drop my head into my hands.

She continues. “I sat down next to Hadley and asked him if he’d want to help me with the prep work for the next debate, and he practically panted in excitement. Then a bunch of guys at the table laughed, and I leaned close to Hadley and said, ‘What’s so funny to your mates?’ And he said, ‘Carter’s entertaining his teammates with his weekend activities report.’ ”

I grind my teeth again, and I swear I crush one of my own canines into dust in my mouth.

“So I tell Hadley to be at practice two hours early to help, and he starts telling me about how he’ll do this and that, but I just pretended to listen and instead focused on what Carter was saying. Carter didn’t realize I was listening to him instead of Hadley. And that’s when I dug my nails into the table because it was all I could do not to gouge Carter’s eyes out. This one ripped off”—Maia stops, holds up the finger with the torn nail—“when he told them that you were”—she pauses, collects herself—“
begging
for it.”

I jump up. “That’s a lie!”

I won’t let him have the last word.

I turn to T.S. “Take me to the Mockingbirds.”

Physics that afternoon is worse than lunch because Carter is in my class. The vein in my forehead beats so hard I’m afraid everyone can hear it. I’m convinced it’s going to burst, explode in a shower of blood in class, and everyone will turn around and say, “For a good time, call Alex.”

But Carter doesn’t notice me, and we’re all taking furious notes anyway while Mr. Waldman goes on about the Meissner effect, magnetic fields, and superconductors. The only saving grace is we have assigned seating. Carter sits in the front row and I’m all the way in the back next to Martin. I spend the entire class thinking
don’t turn around, don’t turn around, don’t turn around
as I invent new ways to use Martin as a potential shield if Carter so much as moves a muscle in my direction.

I know Martin well enough. I remember seeing his face a lot last year because he was a runner in some of my classes. But I didn’t meet him officially until T.S. and Sandeep started dating after spring break sophomore year. Pretty soon, we all were sharing a table in the caf, and since T.S. and Sandeep live in their own little bubble most of the time, Martin and I talk to each other more than to them. Martin’s goofy, like with the birdbrain thing, but also very driven. He’s tall with kind of shaggy brown hair, slightly a bit mussed up, and brown eyes that have tiny flecks of green in them. He’s wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt and a wristband or something. He leans in, whispers so low I can barely hear, “You know, you can levitate stuff with the Meissner effect.”

I give a silent laugh, then whisper super quietly, “Maybe you can, but I definitely can’t.”

“I’ll show you sometime. You know, since I’m a science geek and all,” he says as if it’s an insider’s secret, his being a science geek. Then I notice Martin reach into his front jeans pocket. He swipes out his cell phone surreptitiously so Mr. Waldman doesn’t notice. He flicks open the screen, then closes it shut just as quickly as he opened it. His shoulders tense; he rests his forehead in his hands for a moment. I’m about to ask if he’s okay when he moves his hand down the spiral-bound paper, writing at the bottom of the page in neat, blocky letters:
I WILL SEE YOU AT EIGHT.

I furrow my brow.
WHY?
I write back in my notebook.

He answers:
I AM ON BOARD OF MOCKINGBIRDS.

“Oh.” It slips out softly from my mouth, but Mr. Waldman doesn’t notice. He’s busy drawing a magnet on the board, the bald spot on the back of his head glaring out at us. It never occurred to me Martin would be involved. It never occurred to me
who
would be involved. Politics, issues, and stuff that doesn’t involve dead composers have never been my thing, so I’ve barely given a second thought to who was in the Mockingbirds. The irony is I
should
know more about the Mockingbirds than most students.