Authors: Barry Lyga
"I didn't!" It was a lie, but a lie of fact, not of intention. I'd never meant to tell Mom about Eve. It slipped out. It was a mistake. I didn't want her angry at me for something I couldn't control.
"I didn't tell," I told her. "My mom figured it out."
"God, Josh." I thought she might be crying. She didn't seem interested in
how
Mom figured it out. "I'm going to lose my job. I'm going to go to jail..."
"Where are you?" I asked. She wasn't keeping her voice down.
"I'm in the car. I haven't been able to sleep. I didn't get to the phone fast enough before and I've been sitting here staring at the phone, waiting for you to call back. Josh, this is
terrible.
"
"My parents are taking me to the police tomorrow."
"Oh, shit," she said, and in that moment, something inside me broke. Eve was no longer my teacher, my confidante, my lover. She was now a scared, desperate ... child.
"Please, Josh. Please, don't tell them anything."
My bladder felt like it would burst. It was cold in the basement and I was shaking, which didn't help the situation at all. Plus, I was absolutely terrified of getting caught at any moment.
"Please!" she begged.
"I have to go," I told her. I meant it in more ways than one. I became convinced that I'd just heard a footstep on the third stair from the top.
"I love you, Josh," she said, crying. "I love you."
"I love you, too," I told her. "I won't say anything. I have to go." And I hung up on her as quickly and as quietly as I could.
I stood there in the darkness, trembling, both hands ground into my crotch to keep myself from peeing. I
had
heard a step. I
knew
it. I waited and worried, worried and waited, the sound of my own breathing suddenly too loud and raucous. I held my breath; my heartbeat pounded my ears.
I had to breathe again. I let out my breath and stood stockstill, listening again for the footsteps.
Nothing.
My imagination.
I sneaked into the laundry room and peed into the utility sink, aiming for the drain so that it would make as little noise as possible. Then I sneaked back up the stairs, pausing again for a moment at my parents' door before returning to my room and climbing into bed, gulping and heaving air as if vomiting.
Mom pounded my door and shouted, "Josh! Up! Now!" I jerked awake as if electrocuted.
The first session with the police didn't go well. There was a man and a woman—both dressed in suits, both detectives. They told me their names, but I couldn't process them. I was in the
police station.
"Tell them what you told me, Josh," Mom said. "In the car yesterday."
I said nothing.
"Josh, do you understand that we need to know what happened to you?" the woman asked.
I couldn't think straight. I thought of my promise to Eve. I thought of the horrified look on Rachel's face, of the anger on her father's, of the absolute disgust on her mother's.
And I continued to say absolutely nothing.
That was the day, pretty much. They tried a variety of tactics to get me to talk, but I wouldn't. I said nothing. Mom tried the guilt trip in various forms—"Mr. and Mrs. Madison are going to file charges against you if you don't..." and "How can you put your father and me through this?"—but I wouldn't say anything. I
couldn't.
I had promised.
That night, I listened through the vents again. Dad said, "Maybe this is too much for him, Jenna."
"What do you mean?" Mom's voice was cold, as if she were asking the question just to be polite.
"Look, he wasn't hurt or anything. Maybe we just keep him away from the Sherman woman, get him transferred to another class—"
"Are you
insane?
" If I closed my eyes, I could see Mom's expression, just based on her voice. It was the way she had looked in the car. "That woman
molested our son
and you think we should just drop it?"
"Jenna—"
"The Madisons are only holding off on their charges and their lawsuit because they believe Josh was molested. If we just drop it, they could still sue or have him prosecuted."
"No one's going to prosecute him for what happened."
"You don't know that. And what about a lawsuit? That would ruin us."
"I'll call a lawyer in the morning."
I drifted off to sleep on that. Dad sounded pretty confident, and talking to a lawyer sounded pretty safe.
They kept me out of school for the rest of the week. Then we all went back to the police station on Saturday. Mom took me into a room with the male detective while Dad filled out paperwork with the woman.
The room was painted a pale blue. It was pretty bare, except for a big mirror like on the cop shows and a card table with some folding chairs. Mom dragged a folding chair a few feet away and sat down, while I sat across the table from the detective.
"Josh, I know you don't want to talk to me. Maybe you're afraid. Maybe you're angry. I understand that. So I want to tell you something. I want to explain to you that we've already taken that first step, and you didn't have to say a word. We already know that something's going on between you and Mrs. Sherman. Would you like to know how?"
I was still in silent mode. Even though Mom and Dad had harangued me and yelled at me most of the previous night, I was still determined to say nothing at all to the cops. If I said nothing, then Eve wouldn't get in trouble. That's what she promised me.
"Well, I'll tell you. See, your parents gave us permission to search your house. And we also did something we call a phone dump. You know what that is, Josh?"
I said nothing. I didn't shake my head. I just stared at the table directly in front of me and clenched my hands together in my lap.
"That's where we go to the phone company and ask them for your records. The phone company keeps a record of every phone call into and out of your house. Did you know that?"
I didn't. But I wasn't about to let him know that.
"So we did a phone dump on your house, and do you know what we found?" He unfolded a piece of paper and held it up for my benefit. I refused to look at it. "Two phone calls from your house to Evelyn Sherman's cell phone on the day you attacked Rachel Madison in her closet. Well, the next morning, actually. Two-eleven in the morning and then two-sixteen. The first call lasted less than ten seconds. Did you hang up on her? Was it a prearranged signal?"
I kept my lips pressed together. My heart was hammering. I wouldn't let on.
"The second call lasted forty-seven seconds. I'm guessing you got through. What did the two of you talk about? Or did you just leave her a voice mail? Tell me, Josh—when I go to a judge and get a subpoena to have the cell phone company turn over her voice mails to me, am I going to hear a voice mail from you on that night? Hmm?"
And that's when I knew I was safe. He almost had me for a second there, but then he made the crucial mistake of giving me too much information. If he was fishing for voice mails, then he had nothing else. And I hadn't left Eve a voice mail, so I was safe. Eve was safe. He couldn't even prove that I was the one who made the phone call, just that it came from my house. Eve had been calling Mom's cell phone all day long, after all. Anyone in the house might have called her back.
"I wonder what I'll hear, Josh," he went on, but by now I knew I was safe.
"We also did a phone dump of
her
records, Josh. Don't need a search warrant for that. Not bad, huh? Did you know that?"
Again, I didn't. Something like a ball of ice settled in the pit of my stomach.
"We found repeated calls to your house right here." He pointed to a calendar. "This Saturday and Sunday, just a couple of weeks before Christmas. You remember the phone ringing a lot then, Josh? I bet you do. I bet you were waiting for a call from her, but your parents were around, so you couldn't answer."
Behind me, Mom gave a little hiccup-gasp.
"But then there's this last call, one of the ones on Sunday, that goes about ... oh, say a minute and a half. So she finally got through to you, huh? And then, in the following week, there are calls early in the morning to
her
number from your house. Were you sneaking in little calls while Mom was getting dressed or making breakfast or in the shower or something, Josh?"
He sighed. "Josh, you can give me the silent treatment all you want. It's not going to matter. We have evidence already and we haven't even searched her house or dumped her e-mails or voice mails. It's only a matter of time. You have to believe me, Josh. And it's going to go a lot easier on your mom and your dad and on you if you just cooperate. You didn't do anything wrong, but you're doing something wrong right now. You're defending her."
He strummed his fingers on the table for a little while, waiting to see if I would look up or talk. And then:
"Want to talk to me about this?" he asked.
I looked up. He was holding a clear plastic baggie. Inside it was the birthday card Eve had given me not a week ago.
"Where did you get that?" I whispered.
"Your parents gave us permission to search your house." He looked at the card through the plastic. "You remember what it says inside, Josh?"
I can't sign it if you take it home with you,
Eve whispered in my memory.
"Says, 'I love you,'" he commented, as if noticing that the sky was clouding over a bit. "Who's it from, Josh? Hmm? Not from your parents. Not from any relatives we could identify—you have cards from all of them and they're signed. So where did this one come from?"
I flickered
—If your parents see it—
and came out of it. "I found it in my locker," I heard myself say.
"Oh? Found it in your locker?"
"It must be from a secret admirer."
He dropped the card on the table in front of me and drummed his fingers. "You know what I think, Josh?" He didn't wait for me to answer, not that I would have. "I think that yesterday I went to your school and your principal gave me a piece of paper with some of Mrs. Sherman's writing on it." He opened a folder and took out another plastic bag, this one with a slip of paper inside. He held it and the card up to the light next to each other and squinted at them. "Now, I'm not a handwriting expert, but they look pretty similar to me. What do you think, Josh?" He slid them both across the table to me. "Hmm? What do you think?" He shrugged. "I'll tell you again what I think: It'll take a couple of months to come back from the handwriting lab, but when it does, that note will match that card and then we've got her."
I thought back to how Eve had wanted to give me things: Little notes. A lipstick-pressed card. Her panties. But she'd always take them back before we even left the apartment.
I don't know where you could keep it,
she would say.
I don't know how you could keep it hidden.
My throat tightened. I closed my eyes. I was doing everything wrong. I didn't know what to do next.
The detective decided to get some coffee. He left me alone with Mom for a little while and she berated me for not cooperating. I bore it in silence. I would just have to bear
everything
in silence from now on.
When the door opened again, it was the female detective. She gave me a nice smile and asked if I wanted something to drink, which I did, but I wasn't going to tell her that. She ruffled my hair before she sat down, just like Eve used to, and I reminded myself not to say anything at all.
"Josh, I feel terrible about this. I know you care about your teacher, about Evelyn, a lot. Is that what she told you to call her? Evelyn?"
I said nothing.
Eve,
I told myself.
Eve. Eve. Eve.
"I know that the two of you have a very special relationship. She treated you like an adult, didn't she?"
That was the closest I came to breaking then. I almost opened my mouth. I don't know what I would have said, but I came damn close to opening my mouth. Instead, I just pressed my lips together more firmly.
She noticed, though. "I know, Josh," she said, her voice low and soft. "I know. She told you you were like a grownup, didn't she? She told you that you were special, that what you and she had was special, that she could get in trouble if you told anyone. I know. I know how much that meant to you, Josh.
"And that's why I hate to do this. I really, really do. But, see...
"Do you think you're the first kid she's done this to, Josh?"
She pushed a closed manila folder to me across the table and tapped it with two fingers. "Why do you think she trans ferred out of South Brook High and into your middle school, Josh? There are two sophomores on record stating that she made advances toward them. Sexual advances, Josh."
She leaned over the table. "Josh, did she tell you she loved you? Because it's not true. She doesn't. She never did."
I couldn't let this go by without comment. Without lifting my eyes from the table, I said, "I don't believe you."
She tapped the folder again. "I know you don't. And I don't blame you. This is so hard for you. But it's not me you need to believe, Josh. It's these two guys from South Brook. Go on. Open the folder. Read it. You'll see."