The Mockingbirds (32 page)

And then she says it.

“Guilty of sexual assault. The punishment begins immediately.”

We eat cake later that night.

Casey picked up a chocolate cake from a bakery on Kentfield Street and dropped it off. I’m sure we could have pilfered a school birthday cake, but somehow it tastes better since we bought it.

T.S. hands Maia a large knife and says, “As the most kick-ass lawyer this school has ever seen, you should have the honor.”

Maia bows, then curtsies—for the queen, she says—and doles out slices of chocolate layer cake to T.S., Sandeep, Martin, and me. Dana even stops by and has a piece too. Amy’s not here; Ilana’s not here. It’s not a Mockingbirds celebration, just a friends one.

Everyone is still a little high from the victory, a little thrilled the trial is behind us now because they all invested their time, their effort. I watch them laughing again, loose again, reliving certain moments, like Maia’s imitations of Carter’s Southern gentleman routine. The rest of them didn’t see him being questioned, so Maia’s reenacting parts of it.

“ ‘And then we made love, at least it felt that way to me,’ ” Maia says, imitating him. She gags afterward for effect, letting her audience know what she thinks of Carter’s words.

But I don’t want to hear them again.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, and slip out of the common room. I head outside, where I sit on the steps outside my dorm. I don’t feel like eating cake or celebrating or conducting a play-by-play as if we just won the basketball tournament or something. Justice doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t erase what happened. It doesn’t make you who you were before. I’m becoming someone else—someone else I’m figuring out how to be.

I wonder briefly why I went through it, why it was worth it. Because in some ways, nothing changed. This is just how it goes, this is how it feels to take a stand. It feels like life, like chocolate cake, like just another average school night; it feels like wanting to be alone. You don’t parade in the streets, you don’t dance on the grave. You sit on the steps and you watch the school go by and the moon rise higher in the sky and it feels like…

Like normal, actually. It feels like normal.

I want normal. I like normal. I did this for normal.

So I stand up and walk across the quad. Alone. I don’t need a bodyguard and I don’t need to hide and I can choose—
I
can make a choice—to look up at the trees and around at the dorms and down at the path and whichever way I want because I’m not going to be afraid anymore.

I walk to the dorm all the way across on the other side of the quad. I go up to the second floor. I knock on a door. Mel answers.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” she says, and her eyes ask the question.

I nod.

“Good,” she says quietly.

“Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think it will be.”

“I think it will be too,” Mel says. “When will his punishment be announced?”

“Tomorrow. Lunchtime in the cafeteria.”

“Are you going?” she asks.

I hadn’t thought about it before. But something about it feels like attending an execution, and that’s not the kind of thing I’d do. So I decide to be me again and to do what I do.

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you want to skip lunch?”

Jones looks at me, raising his eyebrows at the question I ask when English class ends. “You want to skip lunch today, of all days?” he asks suspiciously.

I nod.

He knows what happened. We haven’t talked about it, but he knows.

He shakes his head, kind of in fascination. “Isn’t this the moment you’ve been waiting for?”

“No, this isn’t why I did this,” I say, but I don’t add anything more because I don’t have to keep explaining why I did it, even to Jones, even to my friend who doesn’t believe in the Mockingbirds, who believes in something else, in his own sense of right and wrong. Maybe, ultimately, that’s
what we’re all aspiring to—to have our own sense of right and wrong and to act on it.

“Where are we going when we skip lunch?”

I roll my eyes. “You don’t actually know?”

“No.”

“Think, Jones. It’s not hard.”

“Music hall?”

I nod.

When it’s time for lunch, they’re waiting for me on the steps of the cafeteria. Martin and Maia and T.S. and Sandeep and Amy and Ilana. They expect me to join them for this moment.

“I’m not going in,” I tell them.

“Not again?” T.S. asks woefully. “I thought you were cool going to lunch now?”

“I thought that’s why we did this,” Ilana asks, a touch of indignation in her voice, as if I’m not grateful. But that’s not what this is about.

Martin says nothing and his eyes are quiet too. The green flecks aren’t sparkling; they aren’t moving today. I know why. He’s thinking I disappeared last night. He’s thinking I’m disappearing now.

“I’m cool going to the caf. But I don’t want to. I don’t need to,” I say. “I’ll see you guys later.”

I leave and walk across the quad, knowing that shortly Carter will do his requisite Paul Oko routine, announcing he’s voluntarily withdrawing from the water polo team and
if anyone wants to know why, the answer is in the book. In a few minutes there could even be a schoolwide dash to the second floor of Pryor after that. His entry will have shifted to ink then. Permanent.

I push open the door to the music hall, and Jones is there with his violin. He doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t ask how I feel. He doesn’t need to.

“I would have thought you’d bring your guitar,” I sass as I sit down at the piano.

“I didn’t know you were that kind of girl,” he says.

“Guess we’ll have to see if you can keep up on your violin.”

“Oh, I can keep up with anything you throw my way.”

I give him a smirk, say nothing, and let the music do the talking. The second Jones hears what I am up to, a knowing grin breaks across his face.

Because he’s finally playing Gershwin how he wants. The hip-hop way.

We play through the whole lunch period, blasting
Rhapsody in Blue
as if we’re a couple of rappers, jamming fast and to the beat and with a new kind of rhythm Gershwin never intended but probably wouldn’t have minded. And I don’t need to be in the cafeteria; I don’t need to be anyplace else, because the music takes me to the only place I want to be right now. To the place where I am and have always been wholly me, the only church I’ve ever belonged to, the only place I’ve ever prayed.

And we’re all good, everything is forgiven between Beethoven and me because this is the part of me that hasn’t changed. In this moment I’m not defined by the other things, the things that happened to me, the things I didn’t choose. This is the part of me that defines me for all time, for always. The thing I choose completely.

After French class that afternoon, Martin taps me on the shoulder. “Hey, you,” he says.

“Hi.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Good,” I say.

I know he wants to say more but doesn’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say either. Because now it’s just us, no trial, no case, no protection.

“Amy wants to see you tonight,” he says.

“She does?”

“Yeah, we’ll all be there. Well, the board, at least. Laundry room. Eight o’clock?”

I nod. “Do I have to bring quarters this time?”

“I’ll get your back,” he says.

I think I should start getting my own back now, so I say, “It’s okay, I’ll bring them.”

Later that night I stuff four quarters into my jeans pocket. But I don’t bring laundry. The dryers work the same with or without clothes in them.

I run into T.S. on the stairs. She’s bounding in, wearing soccer clothes. “I just had the best idea! I’m going to be a runner next year. Well, I’ll try out, at least.”

“For the Mockingbirds? Really?”

She nods excitedly. “Yes. I’ve been practicing my poker face for when the board gives me the sign-off to mark someone absent.” Then she demonstrates with her best stony look.

“You’re a shoo-in,” I say.

“Besides, I’d kind of be defying the stereotype of freshmen and sophomores as runners. I’d be the senior, getting in there on the ground floor, mixing it up. A runner of the people,” she says, and dashes up the stairs.

When I reach the laundry room, it’s like I went back in time. Amy on the couch, Martin and Ilana on the floor. Trivial Pursuit spread out. I walk back to them. Amy’s wearing a dark green V-neck T-shirt and jeans.

“Hey there,” Amy says, a big smile on her face. I wonder if she is mad about my missing today’s main event. If she is, I can handle it.

“Hi,” I say.

“How are you?”

“Fine,” I say.

“How was not going to lunch?” Ilana asks.

“I didn’t want to be there,” I say defensively. “I didn’t think I needed to.”

“You didn’t,” Amy says. “It’s fine you weren’t there. Do you want to hear how it went, though?”

I shake my head. “No interest.”

Amy nods sagely. “Good for you.”

Good for me? I guess it is.

“Are we playing?” I ask, gesturing to the game.

“Sure,” Amy says, and rolls the die. A two. She moves her piece to the music category. “Alex, music! Your favorite.”

She whips out a card but doesn’t ask a question. Instead, she says, “First of all, I want to thank you for your courage. You held up well and you’re really a great example. Actually, you’re a rock star.”

She continues, her blue eyes lighting up as she speaks. “Even though we had a few surprises”—she looks pointedly at Martin when she says this—“all in all I think our tradition of justice continued.” Then she lightens, laughs a bit, and says, “Man, what a douche bag Carter is!”

Ilana laughs too. Martin doesn’t.

“And I think you did every woman at this school a service by speaking up,” Amy adds. Then she leans back on the couch, crosses her legs, one black Converse–clad foot kicking up and down absentmindedly as she speaks. “Back when we started, you asked me why I did this. Why I was in the Mockingbirds.”

I nod, remembering the night she brought mac and cheese to my room.

“And I told you it worked,” Amy adds. “Do you know how I knew that?”

“No,” I say.

Amy twists around on the couch, her back to me. She turns her head back though, her eyes on mine as she pulls her shirt up. Right above her black bra strap is the word
Queer,
marked on her skin like a patchwork quilt. The first two letters are a scar, barely fading, still more pink than white. The last three are tattooed on. I shudder, feeling a phantom pain in my back too. But her back had a real blade on it, one that dug into her skin for two long letters. She pulls her shirt down and turns back to me. “Do you know Ellery Robinson?”

I shake my head, but the name sounds terribly familiar.

“She was a senior last year,” Amy says. “She did this. Well, the first two letters. I finished what she started with a tattoo last summer.”

Then it hits me, like a bullet. Ellery’s name was in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Under “Watch Your Back.” The name I didn’t know, the crime I didn’t recognize.

“It happened in May after I’d asked her out on a date. I thought she liked girls. I was wrong. Or maybe she’s just still in the closet. Either way, she didn’t like it because I asked her in front of some of her friends. So she did this to me. She left her mark. So I sought out the Mockingbirds.”

“But,” I jump in, “you could have gone to the police with that!”

“You didn’t go to the police,” Ilana says matter-of-factly. “You came to us.”

“But you have evidence there,” I argue. “On your body! You could have gone to Ms. Vartan.”

“And what good would it have done?” Amy asks, then gives me a kind sort of shrug. “The receiver didn’t. The kids who weren’t in the Honor Society didn’t,” she says, reminding us of the first cases the Mockingbirds tried. “And you didn’t either. You know what the school’s like. I came to the Mockingbirds and they helped.”

“What happened to Ellery?” I ask.

Amy waves a hand in the air dismissively. “It was the end of the school year and the hearing was in late May, just a couple days before she graduated. Nothing happened to her, but it didn’t matter. I did it to make a point. What she did was wrong.”

“Obviously.” I look to Ilana and Martin, wondering where their scars are. “So are you guys in the Mockingbirds because something happened to you?”

They both shake their heads, then Ilana says, “After I heard what Paul Oko did my freshman year I got involved. I’ve been involved the last three years. I’ll miss this most when I go to Columbia next year.”