The Mockingbirds (9 page)

My sister started it when she was a senior here. I didn’t know it at the time, since I was only in eighth grade and living at home in New Haven. But she had told me about them a week before I left for Themis. She was busy packing for her first year of college, and I was practicing a complicated Liszt piece on the piano, planning to impress my music teacher the second I set foot on campus.

Casey popped downstairs and sat next to me on the bench, a rare public appearance for her. She’d spent most of the summer in a bad funk, holed up in her room and barely interacting with another human being.

“There’s something you need to know about Themis,” she said. “You have to watch your back because the teachers and administration won’t do it for you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Casey told me about a group of seniors from the National
Honor Society who got bored one year and started a blog called “The Dishonorables.” It was an attack on students who weren’t part of the group. The administration heard about it and did nothing.

“Why would they?” I asked, a little underwhelmed by the whole thing. “It was just a stupid blog. People say dumb stuff on the Internet all the time.”

“It wasn’t just saying ‘dumb stuff’ on the Internet. It was relentless insults and taunts and bullying. And one of the girls was so messed up from it—from the name-calling—she left Themis and…”

“And nobody cared then?”

“Other than her, no. That’s my point, Alex. Students shouldn’t have to deal with that,” she said, getting that look in her eyes like she was on a mission, like she was about to suit up and play soccer. “Themis totally ignores everything because the very idea of bullying destroys their notion of who Themis students are—of who they’re educating to be future leaders of the world and all that stuff. They let it happen,” she said, shaking her head in disgust. “So I decided to do something about it.”

That something was the Mockingbirds.

Then she handed me the book—
To Kill a Mockingbird
—and told me to read it. “If
stuff
happens while you’re at Themis, just know you have options.”

She left the room, and I returned to Liszt because it all sounded kind of melodramatic to me. Then I started at
Themis, and I didn’t really think about the Mockingbirds for the next two and a half years, except to use the copy of the book Casey gave me in my freshman lit class.

Now I’m thinking I might need to crack open that book again.

I look at Martin the Mockingbird as he writes one more note:
BRING QUARTERS.

Boo Radley’s been leaving gifts for Scout and Jem as I bite into my apple. I turn the page, and now there are two pennies in the knothole of the tree next to their house. I take another bite, there’s twine; then another, there are two soap figures; another, then the knothole’s covered in concrete.

Which seems quite
unjust
to me, I decide as I toss the apple core into the trash.

Maia brought the apple back for me because I wasn’t about to set foot in the cafeteria again. She has her headphones on. She blasts them whenever she’s studying, so I can tell she’s listening to Roxy Music now. Maia has a thing for British bands from the last century.

“Maia!” I shout. She’s tapping her foot and she’s hunched over a book on her desk, so she doesn’t hear me. I take a piece of paper, crumple it up, and throw it at her. I hit her shoulder. She looks up, pulls the headphones off.

“Might there be a more civilized way to get my attention?”

“Did you know Martin was in the Mockingbirds?” I ask.

“Martin Summers,” she says. “Of course. He’s on the board, along with Amy Nichols and Ilana Ahearn.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I like to know these sorts of things,” Maia says playfully.

“I don’t even know who those other people are and I definitely didn’t know Martin was on it. He told me in physics today.” I add, “Do you think everyone knows who’s in the Mockingbirds?”

“Some students know. It’s not supposed to be a secret entirely. That’s partly how they have influence. But I don’t think they broadcast the names. It’s designed to be somewhat clandestine. And you know me—I like to know the things that not everybody else knows. Even if you asked T.S., she couldn’t tell you the names of the others. She barely even knew Martin was on it, and she sees him more than we do.”

“Maia… do you think
he
knows everything already? Martin, I mean.”

“I honestly don’t know,” she says. “But why are you so worried about Martin?”

I shrug. “It’s just I pictured strangers or something, students I don’t really know. It all seemed very abstract and removed when we talked about it earlier today and totally like some bizarre Internet prank when Casey told me about it before I came here. But now it’s real and
I’m
going there.
And there’ll be students with names and faces and there’ll be Martin too, someone I do know.”

“It might make it easier, right?”

“I guess. We’ll see….”

Then T.S. returns, opens the door with a flourish, and taps her watch. She’s been gone most of the day, soccer practice after class (they still practice in the off-season, which delights T.S. to no end), then dinner, then visiting with Sandeep.

“We can’t be late,” she says.

“I wasn’t going to be late,” I say.

“Never said you were. All I’m saying is let’s be on time.”

“No, girls. Let’s be early!” Maia declares joyously, hopping up from her desk.

“What is this, a party?” I ask.

Maia looks momentarily dejected. “I’m not invited?”

“I just didn’t think about it.”

Maia rolls her eyes. “Typical.”

“Don’t go there now,” T.S. says sharply to Maia. “This is about Alex, not you.”

Maia holds up her hands. “I believe I’m allowed to have an opinion and my opinion is I’m just as invested in this as you are, T.S. And I am equally committed to Alex.”

“Guys,” I say. “I want you both there.”

“Besides,” Maia says, giving us both a sly look, “I did do my fair share of recon. It’s no surprise, really. You know, James Bond is my countryman.”

With that, the tension seeps out of the room and T.S.
says, “Maybe you can go sniff out some laundry for us then, Ms. Bond.”

“What do we need laundry for?” Maia asks.

“If you were really a top secret spy, you would know. Since you’re not, grab your laundry. Both of you.”

We do as we’re told, snagging our laundry bags from the closet. T.S. extracts a roll of quarters from the pocket of her shorts. “I have mine.”

I pat my back pocket, where I stuffed three dollars in quarters after Martin’s tip. “Me too.”

Maia dashes to her desk and grabs a handful of quarters, then we follow T.S. down the hall, laundry bags in tow, like a couple of hobos.

“This is really glam. Mind telling us what laundry has to do with the you-know-whats?” I ask.

T.S. shakes her head. “You guys are the worst secret agents ever. You cannot put clues together.”

“You know, Maia, you should do your spring project on James Bond,” I say in a faux British accent and even force a smile, because I don’t want to be the dark and silent “date rape girl.” I can still laugh, like I did at Martin’s birdbrain joke. I can still be funny—or at least try to be.

“That’s a fantastic idea,” Maia says. She skips once, then turns around and walks backward so she can face us and talk. “You know, I could actually do something on the symbolism of the Bond Girl.”

“Okay, I’ll take the bait,” T.S. says as she pushes
open the door to the stairwell. “What does the Bond Girl symbolize?”

“Independence. Because she’s usually smart, rich, and self-employed, meaning she doesn’t work for the government.”

I open the front door of the dorm as I ask, “So it’s better to be a Bond Girl than to be James Bond?” I like that we’re not talking about me or the Mockingbirds or the four-letter word, so I’m happy to keep steering the conversation to the trivial.

T.S. shakes her head, points down the stairs. “Do you do laundry outside, dork?”

“Are we really doing laundry?” I ask.

T.S. nods.

“I thought it was just a cover.”

Maia returns to my question. “It’s totally better to be the Bond Girl. You should never work for the government.”

“So, if you think about it, the Bond Girl really defies the idea of the Bond Girl
stereotype,
” I say, catching T.S.’s attention with the last word.

“As the reigning expert on stereotypes I’d have to say the Bond Girl both embraces them and defies them,” T.S. says.

“You’re both wrong. She
rises
above them,” Maia counters as T.S. opens the door to the basement level of the dorm. Someone’s cleaned up the mess I made of the lost-and-found bin.

“Okay, can we take a break from the Bond Girl debate so you can tell us where the hell we’re going?” I ask.

T.S. flips her short California Girl hair and tips her chin down the hall. “The laundry room.”

“Right, yeah, figured that one out, T.S.,” I say. “I mean, why are we going to the laundry room?”

“The Mockingbirds.”

“I know that! But why
there
?” I ask.

“You’ll see,” she says.

“Do you know Martin’s in it?” I ask.

“I’d heard he was in it,” she says.

“Why does everyone know these things and I don’t?”

“Like I told you before, not
everyone
knows,” Maia says.

But I still feel like an idiot. Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to what’s going on around me. Maybe if I paid more attention, I wouldn’t have been… I stop in my tracks, place a palm against the cold concrete wall. I still can’t say the four-letter word, even to myself, even silently.

“You okay?” T.S. asks. I’m still holding on to the wall.

“I’m fine,” I manage to say, and then keep walking.

“Anyway, as for Martin, yes I knew he was involved, but it’s not as if we really talk about it. The case they heard last semester involved a bunch of freshmen anyway, no one we knew. Theater students, I think.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird? That he’s on it?”

T.S. looks at me. “Not really. Martin’s always been, I don’t know, above the fray.”

I think about that for a moment:
above the fray
. Then the sound of a whirring dryer grows louder as my laundry bag bumps against my lower back. We continue our march down the linoleum floor and I can now hear more than one
dryer going, tumbling in harmony, tossing clothes in endless circles. The double doors to the laundry room are wide open. There’s a sign on one of them, just a sheet of white paper with words in all caps in blue ballpoint pen:
THE KNOTHOLE
.

Clever. Very clever.

I hear a voice asking, “What movie introduced audiences to a Mogwai named Gizmo?”

The question comes from a girl sitting cross-legged on a beat-up old mustard-colored couch all the way in the back of the laundry room. Her black hair is super-short, spiky almost, and she wears tight black jeans, black Converse high-tops, and a long-sleeve gray shirt. At first I think the question is for us, like a trick question, or a secret code or something. We have to answer it correctly or we can’t pass through. Maybe we’ll even fall through a trapdoor planted just a few feet in front of us. Then someone answers, a disembodied voice coming from the ground below us.

“Dude,
Gremlins,
” a familiar voice says.

“Nice,” the short-haired girl says. Then to us, “Hey, want to play Trivial Pursuit?”

“Sure,” T.S. says.

We walk past three rows of dryers and washers—one to our left, one to our right, and one on the far right wall. A boy and another girl pop up from the floor. The boy is Martin.

“Hey, Alex,” he says. He has a gentle look in his eyes, caring even. Then he nods casually to Maia and T.S., acknowledging them.

“Hi,” I say, still a little nervous to see him here, to even be here at all.