The Way Back to Happiness (31 page)

He slammed the door shut on his final insult, which she was happy not to hear. Then he threw the car into gear and tore off down the street. In a daze, she watched him go. How could she have made him so mad? He never even seemed to like her all that much.

Boys like that are used to getting their way,
Bev had said to her once.

Maybe that was it. He wasn’t getting his way. Spoiled rich boy.

She hurried home, steaming from the encounter with Kevin, but relieved at the same time. From afar—or at least from the bleachers near the tennis courts—he’d seemed like a Greek god. Perfect, gorgeous, out of reach. If only he had stayed out of reach. She wouldn’t have had to come face-to-face with the fact that he was bad tempered, pushy, and immature.

At least she could put it all behind her and start fresh now.
It’s never too late to become what you might have been
.

At the house, Bev was talking on the phone. Alabama scurried to the kitchen, poured some tea to take back to her room, and spent the time until dinner writing a list of resolutions.

Bev knocked on the door and then poked her head in. “Supper?”

Alabama slammed her notebook shut and joined Bev in the kitchen, where preparations for broiled mustard chicken were well underway. Alabama hated mustard chicken nights. She almost complained, but then she remembered she’d been lucky to have a hunk of Mrs. Looney’s pecan pie and wasn’t even that hungry anyway. While Bev extracted wedges from a head of lettuce, Alabama thumped two place settings onto the table, grabbed napkins from Bev’s hand-painted rooster napkin holder, and sat down.

When the chicken breasts came out of the oven, perfectly charred, and joined on the plate by boiled new potatoes, she wondered if this was really how her life was going to be for the next four years. For the first time, she wasn’t filled with dread at the thought. Really, given all that had happened, things could have turned out a whole lot worse. What if there had been no Bev at all?

There. She’d adopted an attitude of gratitude—one of Bev’s sayings—and it didn’t even make her want to vomit.

Maybe this was progress.

She looked at her aunt, who was unusually silent. Her face crinkled with tension, and worry.

“Is something wrong?” Alabama asked her.

“No.” Bev straightened and brightened. “Do you have a lot of homework tonight?”

She shrugged. “The usual. Why?”

“You looked busy when I popped into your room earlier. Now, I wasn’t meaning to snoop, so don’t—”

“I was making a list of resolutions.”

Bev’s fork halted in midair. “What a terrific thing to do—prepping yourself for New Year’s.”

“Actually, I thought I might as well consider this a new year right now. January first is an artificial marker, isn’t it? I mean, every day’s the start of a new year, when you think about it. So why not start my new year now?”

Bev’s mouth dropped. “Oh my word, I’m so impressed! That’s profound—almost worthy of a poster.”

Alabama shuddered at the reminder of poster making. “Cue the glue and glitter,” she muttered.

“Don’t be self-deprecating,” Bev said. “There are plenty of people in the world who will want to put you down. Don’t do their work for them.”

“Wow. It’s like we’re sitting at the table of wisdom.”

“Well,
I
thought it was clever.” Bev took a bite of chicken and while she chewed, her face lapsed back into worry.

What was it with people and suffering in silence today? “There must be something wrong,” Alabama said. “You only get that look when something’s really bothering you. Is it school?”

“No.” Bev wiped her mouth. “Well, yes. I do worry if my job’s going to disappear someday, but my biggest concern right now is Mama. She hasn’t called, and when I ring the apartment, no one answers.”

“Maybe we should get her an answering machine.”

“Lord, I tried that. She won’t have one of the things. She thinks it’s rude to have a machine answer the phone for you. But evidently it’s perfectly polite to take off to Las Vegas with a man you barely know and never get in touch with your daughter to let her know whether you’re dead or alive.”

Alabama laughed. “Wink’s not a stranger.”

Bev’s voice held a note of hysteria. “They were supposed to be back last night. I even resorted to calling Brenda Boyer this afternoon to see if she’d heard anything. Of course she hadn’t.”

“Maybe they missed their flight.”

“Maybe,” Bev said, sighing. “One thing’s clear. No hospital in Las Vegas has seen either one of them.”

Alabama gulped. “You
are
worried.”

“At their age, anything can happen.”

“Anything can happen anytime,” Alabama said.

For instance, your whole world could come crashing down while you’re off canoeing. And someone you’ve hated your whole life could become the person whose worries you share at the dinner table.

 

The next morning, she awoke before her alarm and left a note for Bev while her aunt was in the shower, saying that she needed to get to school a little early and couldn’t wait for a ride. She speed-walked to school, arriving there ten minutes before the first bell. Her first stop was Stuart’s locker.

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected—maybe nothing—but she felt stunned, then sick. Someone had cut a picture of a shriveled, dying Rock Hudson out of an old
National Enquirer
and taped it to a blue piece of poster board. With red paint, they’d slopped the warning THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO HOMOS!!! all across the poster and picture. Beneath, the words YOU WILL DIE!!! had been added, in case the original message hadn’t come through loud and clear.

And the worst part? In the lower left-hand corner, the poster board was discolored and water-stained. Just like the poster board she and Kevin had stolen from Bev’s garage.

Lunging forward, she pulled the poster down, rolled it up, and then sprinted down the hall to stow it in her own locker. She stayed in the library until class time. Later, when she saw Stuart in algebra, he looked calm. Calmer than she felt, for sure.

“Hey,” she said.

“You want to meet in the auditorium during lunch?” he whispered. “I have to practice giving a speech on the history of the United Nations.”

“I . . . I don’t know if I’ll be able to. I’ve got to do something.”

“What?” Stuart asked.

“I’m going—”

Mr. Atkins glared at them, and she shook her head at Stuart and hunched over her textbook. Only to herself did she finish the thought.
I’m going to do something that will make you hate me.

In fact, it might make everyone hate her.

B
ev skipped assembly in order to sneak into her classroom and set up a film projector for fourth period. Technically, this was Oren’s time to have the classroom, but the anti-drug film she wanted to show was long, and if she didn’t set up the projector in advance, she wouldn’t have time to finish her lesson plan before the end of class.

She signed the projector out at the library and set off for the biology room as fast as she could, given the wobbly metal stand it came on, with a wheel that kept sticking. She supposed the film projectors didn’t rate new carts now that videos were more common. But some of her favorite materials hadn’t been transferred to videotape.

As she backed into the classroom, she was greeted by a bellow from Oren at the desk.

“This is O time.”

“I know,” she said, “and I’m so sorry for the intrusion, but if I don’t get the projector set up, then I won’t have time to show the film and do our worksheet too, so . . .” Even after the explanation, his nostrils were flaring. “I know it’s a huge favor to ask.”

“This is not what we agreed. If we don’t follow the rules, then what was the point of making them?”

“But if we can’t work together and compromise, what example does that set for the students? Plus, I’ve already checked out the projector, and if I take it back now, I’ll have to explain why, and we’d both look a little silly if I did that, wouldn’t we?”

He exhaled a gust of exasperation. “Well, all right. But hurry, and please don’t make too much noise. I’m trying to concentrate on these papers. I
thought
I’d have a few moments of peace and quiet.”

“I’ll be quiet as a mouse.”

It didn’t work out that way. First, she had trouble getting the film canister open, and tugged until the metal top popped off, clattering onto the tile floor. “Sorry,” she whispered to the vein throbbing on the dome of Oren’s bald head.

A few minutes later, as she was spooling the film into the machine, a loud crackle broke the silence in the room, which was always a precursor to an intercom announcement. Jackie’s voice traveled through the speaker box on the wall. “Bev Putterman, please come to the front office. You have an urgent message.”

The film slipped out of her cold fingers. “I have to leave this,” she told Oren.

“I guess you do,” he agreed, sounding almost sympathetic. He was probably glad it would get her out of the classroom. “Hope it’s nothing serious.”

Her first worry was that something had happened Alabama.

But as she hurried down the hall to the office, another possibility occurred to her. What if this was a pretext for getting her into Lon’s lair, so he could fire her? Did he already have enough black marks in her file to justify terminating her?

She rushed into the office and stood at the high counter that separated Jackie’s work space from the rest of the world. The woman was at her desk in the far corner, typing, and didn’t look up when Bev came in.

“You said you had a message for me?” Bev asked.

Jackie glanced over but kept typing, in no hurry to cough up this urgent message. “I intended to deliver it to you during the assembly, but you weren’t there.”

“I had something to tend to.”

“Lon doesn’t like the faculty to skip the assembly.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“It’s Lon you should be apologizing to. Assembly is meant for the entire school, to create a together moment. He sees the school as family, you know.”

Given the nepotism in his hiring practices, the entire faculty might actually be his family soon.

By force of will, Bev held her tongue. “The message . . . is it about Alabama?”

Issuing a long-suffering sigh, Jackie got up, ambled over to the tray where she kept a pink pad for phone messages, and read it out to Bev. “Your mother. She said to tell you that she will call you when she gets back from New York.”

Bev tilted her head. “You mean Las Vegas?”

“She said New York.”

“B-but that’s impossible.”

“I took the message myself.”

“She went to Vegas,” Bev insisted, but for her own benefit, not to be argumentative. Then she asked, “She didn’t say anything else?”

“I wasn’t going to demand your mother’s life story over the telephone. The office phone isn’t supposed to be used for faculty personal business, you know, except in real emergencies. I’m not a switchboard operator.”

All the way back to her classroom, Bev tried to puzzle out what could have happened. How did a seventy-seven-year-old woman go to Las Vegas and end up on the East Coast? Was there an emergency? There must have been, or why would she have called the school? Had something happened to Wink? Maybe he’d snapped, and Gladys fled Las Vegas to get away from him?

As she returned to a barely civil Oren and threading the projector, she envisioned Gladys holed up in a fleabag hotel in Hell’s Kitchen, cowering in fear for the moment when her crazy, ukulele-wielding, plaid-pantsed geriatric husband would crash down the door.

The door behind her opened suddenly, making her jump, startled. Alabama poked her head in and said, “Oh, sorry! Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Bev didn’t know whether the apology was for scaring her half to death, or in response to Oren’s exasperated glottal emissions. She said, in a low voice, “Now’s not a good time. I need to finish this.”

“It’s
really
important,” Alabama said. “Like, life and death important.”

Bev frowned. “All right. If you think it can’t wait.”

Her niece cut a gaze over to Oren. “But I sort of need to talk to you alone?”

“We can go out in the hallway.”

“It needs to be in private,” Alabama said.

The scrape of Oren’s desk chair screeched through the room. “I’m going to the faculty lounge for coffee,” he said. “My concentration’s shot here, anyway. You have five minutes.”

“Thank you, Oren,” Bev said.

Alabama kept her head down until he’d huffed out.

Bev noticed a rolled-up piece of poster board in Alabama’s hand. “What’s going on?”

“You know how you were telling me that it’s never too late to become what you might have been?”

“Yes . . .”

“Then, maybe, is it never too late to do what you should have done in the first place so you wouldn’t have become someone besides who you originally wanted to be?”

Bev frowned. “I’m not sure I followed that. I think you’d better back up and tell me what this is about.”

Alabama took a long, deep breath. “Someone’s threatening Stuart.”

For some reason, that was the last thing in the world Bev had expected to hear, especially after that buildup. “Why?”

“Because he’s gay.”

The statement rattled Bev. Not because it was hard to accept—
of course he is,
she thought immediately. The words took a moment to absorb because in small towns in Texas, being gay wasn’t something high school boys advertised. But Stuart wasn’t about hiding his light under a bushel. Falseness wasn’t in his character.

She hoped strength was.

“I mean, he’s never had a boyfriend or anything,” Alabama continued, “but he’s pretty sure he is, and some of the stuff he does makes all these idiots in school hassle him. But I think they might do that no matter what, because he’s different and they aren’t nice people. Some of them, at least.”

“Has someone beat him up?”

Alabama shook her head. “Not that I know of.... It’s more psychological than that. It’s like they’re trying to make him freak out. He’s really nervous.”

“What have they said to him?”

Alabama held back, rolling the poster board in her hands nervously, until she finally said, “Stuff like this,” and unfurled it in one movement.

Bev stared at the macabre, mean-spirited, hateful message. How could someone do something like that at New Sparta High School—and to Stuart, of all people? Who had Stuart ever hurt? Her blood pressure shot through the roof.

“I found it on Stuart’s locker this morning. I tore it off before he could see it.”

“Does he know who’s doing this?” Bev asked.

“No, but I do,” Alabama said. “Only, Stuart doesn’t know that I know who did it. And he’s told me that he doesn’t want to tell the principal anyway, because he’s afraid it would just make everything worse.”

“He’s wrong. He should tell—and if he won’t, I will. This is awful.”

“I should go to Mr. Kirby.” Alabama bit her lip. “But the thing is, when I tell, I’m going to be telling on myself. In fact, I might get thrown out of school.”

Bev didn’t understand, but her niece’s tone sounded so deadly serious, she knew something bad was coming. “How could that be?”

“Because I know who this poster board belongs to. It’s yours.” She pointed to the water-stained corner, which was discolored and warped. “I was there when Kevin Kerrigan took it from our garage. I told him about it, and gave it to him.”

How awful. She never had trusted that boy.

“But you didn’t know he would do this,” Bev said.

Alabama’s head drooped. “No, but I helped him do the other posters. The
What’s up, Miss Putterman?
ones.”

The confession tapped through Bev’s mind like words on a teletype—it took her a moment to string them all together and process the meaning. Disappointment knotted her insides. She searched for something to say, but failed.

As if it took her last drop of courage, Alabama looked up at her, lower lip trembling. “I’m so sorry, Aunt Bev. It was me who did those posters—Kevin and me,” she confessed. “But that’s how I know that it’s Kevin doing this now.”

 

“This is a thorny situation.” Lon clasped his hands together in front of him, staring at his knuckles with exaggerated gravity. “We’ve got your niece’s word against Kevin’s. He says she’s lying. For all we know, she might have made those earlier posters all by herself.”

Bev pinched her hand to keep her temper at bay. “She had no reason to confess—she could have gotten off scot-free. No one suspected her—least of all me.”

“Doesn’t exactly make her testimony unimpeachable, though, does it?” he said.

“To my mind, it does. She had no reason to say anything except that she wants Kevin to stop bullying Stuart and she worries he won’t unless he’s punished. She knew when she told me that there would be consequences for herself, as well, for the other incident.”

“You bet your bottom dollar there will be.”

Bev flushed. “But whatever happens to Alabama, Kevin should be punished twice over. His acts were threatening. What else could you call writing ‘you will die’ on a poster and putting it on someone’s locker? Stuart Looney’s been nervous walking home in broad daylight.”

Lon leaned forward. “It’s just boys giving each other a hard time. Maybe you wouldn’t understand, but this kind of thing is perfectly natural.”

“You don’t have to explain natural to me,” she said. “I’ve been around teenagers as long as you have, and I’ve seen all sorts of harassment and teasing. I’ve seen boys after they’ve been beaten up. But I haven’t seen anything as mean-spirited and premeditated as this. According to Alabama, this is one incident of many. Stuart destroyed the other posters.”

“Because he probably didn’t think they were that big a deal until his little friend saw one and he realized he could milk the situation for a little sympathy from a girl.”

How many layers of obtuseness could a person have? “Because he was embarrassed, and scared.” Bev wanted to reach across the desk and whack him with his stapler. “I can’t believe you, Lon. You’re always going on about how we need to be modern and forward-thinking. What is this”—she held up the poster again, which he had barely glanced at—“except the worst kind of Neanderthal bullying? Is this what you want in your school? What if the newspaper got hold of this story?”

He straightened, alarmed. “This is school business.”

“This school is part of the community.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I’m not so sure the community would get behind you on this, Bev.”

“I think they would. It seems to me that your hesitation to bring Kevin Kerrigan to account has a lot to do with the fact that Keith Kerrigan is the mayor, a school board member, and an old golf buddy of yours who helped swing the donation of the computer lab. So basically, if you’re a bigwig in this town, your kid can terrorize younger kids to his heart’s content.”

Red in the face, Lon began to sputter out objections so fast his words tripped over themselves. “Terrorize! Who said . . . Yes, Keith Kerrigan is a good friend and solid member of this community. . . . And no matter what you say, it’s Kevin’s word against Alabama’s.”

“If nothing’s done, I’m going to make a fuss, Lon.”

“Oh, something will be done,” he said, his lips flattening into an implacable line. “Alabama is suspended for three days. Theft and destruction of school property.”

Bev stood up. “I will be at the next school board meeting, and I intend to bring this up with your friend.”

“Keith Kerrigan is a pillar of this community, Bev. A pillar.”

She stood and rolled up the poster. “Fine. When you tell this pillar that his son is suspended for
six days,
I’ll be willing to consider you both pillars. But right now, I think you’re being”—
a weasel
was what she nearly said—“weak.”

Cheeks flaming, she turned to leave as fast as she could, before she gave him enough ammunition to simply fire her on the spot. She probably already had.

He stopped her before she could reach the door. “Bev.”

She pivoted.

He held out his hand. “The poster? I would prefer that you leave it with me.”

She cupped both hands around it. She could just imagine the evidence conveniently disappearing before the school board meeting. “I can’t do that. It belongs to Stuart Looney. Your friend’s son gave it to him.”