Alice in Charge

  “I can’t believe her parents are still so controlling when she’s out of college!” I said. “I mean, I understand we’re from different cultures, but why do they assume she’d be happier with an Asian boyfriend? She hardly even remembers China. She lives here now.”

  “Birds of a feather …,” said Pamela.

  “Like that kook’s letters in The Edge about keeping the races separate and pure,” said Liz.

  Gwen reached across the table and helped herself to the pita bread I’d left on my plate. “I don’t know. Whether we like to admit it or not, we do like to be with ‘our own kind’ sometimes.”

  “Never thought you’d say that,” Pamela said. “I’d think you’d be sick to death of people saying they’re happier ‘with their own kind.’”

  “It’s the ‘sometimes’ that’s important,” put in Yolanda, caressing one of her dangly earrings. Her nails, half an inch long, were painted a bright canary yellow.

  “Let’s face it,” Gwen went on, “there are things African Americans share that you just don’t, that’s all. Like, my grandmother can tell you about driving through the South and going straight through certain towns, no matter how hungry you were, because it just wasn’t safe to stop. And when you did finally find a place to eat—even a take-out joint—you had to go around to the back door and pay for your supper there. Eat it back by the trash cans or in your car.”

  We had no answer for that.

  “Yeah, and sometimes when I get together with my cousins,” added Yolanda, “especially with Aunt Josie, we get to laughing and talking black English, and you wouldn’t understand a word we were saying. Just something fun to do. We can talk about straightening hair, we can sway when we sing in church—stuff that may not have any meaning to you. Maybe Kay’s parents feel the same about wanting her to marry an Asian.”

  “But … if you carry this out to its logical conclusion …,” I protested.

  “No, you don’t carry it out to any conclusion. You don’t make it more than it is,” said Molly, siding with Gwen. “Just because we’re having a girls’ night out, does it mean we don’t want to get together with guys?”

  “No!” we all chorused.

  Molly was looking especially good in a cobalt blue sweater that made her wide blue eyes all the brighter, and she had a new haircut—loose curls about the face. It had grown out now a couple inches. “And by the way,” she added, “I’ve got a boyfriend.”

  We pounded the table and cheered. Molly, one of our favorite people, who once told us she’d never been kissed. “Tell! Tell!” we begged.

  “Well, he’s Indian. Pakistani, anyway. And my folks love him.”

  We hugged Molly and gushed some more.

  “And is he a good kisser?” Pamela asked her.

  “You’d better believe it,” said Molly mischievously. “I’m making up for lost time.”

  16

  AMY

  Because we’d had only three days of school the week before Thanksgiving, we’d delayed the printing of The Edge until this week. We still had a couple of things to add. One of the roving reporters had done a short piece on consignment shops catering to teens, where girls could get long dresses and heels and beaded clutch bags at fantastic prices. I had to edit it a little, but we wanted to make sure the story got in this issue, with only one full weekend left before the Snow Ball. And because Amy had done some of the calling to the consignment shops to get their contact info, her name was included in the byline. She was thrilled.

  I stayed after school on Monday to research white supremacy groups, but all I really had to do was Google the term hate groups and I was in. So many different names! So many disguises! I’d read that what you first see on the Internet is fairly benign: Our goal is simple—to show white youth a better way of life and teach them a sense of racial awareness and pride.

  Then you dig a little deeper and you get, Bring our troops home and put them on the Mexican border or, Money given to a church may end up going to help irresponsible people who live just like parasites on the goodwill of society. I even found a site promoting some kind of racial test. It said, If the results show that you have a moderate or extreme bias in favor of whites, you are okay. If you get any other result, you could be at greater risk of being cheated, robbed, raped, or even murdered…. Implying, of course, that if you choose mostly white, Protestant Anglo-Saxons as friends, you can live a relatively safe life. But if you start hanging around with Jews, you’re at risk of being cheated; with Hispanics, of being robbed; with African Americans, of being raped or murdered.

  There were promotions for musical and rap groups spewing out hate; preachers, black and white, predicting war between the races. Looking forward to it, actually. Our library received a magazine called Intelligence Report that kept tabs on hate groups, their leaders and methods, all over the United States. When Phil joined me at a table, we leafed through back issues, studying the ways the groups operate: racist disc jockeys with a new brand of neo-Nazi music; Holocaust deniers claiming that the German concentration camps during World War II were really filled with criminals or typhus victims; Klu Klux Klan supporters advocating death to the president.

  Phil showed me a photo of a young woman wearing an American flag as a sarong, her face contorted with contempt, holding up a sign reading GOD HATES FAGS. Another of young children giving the Heil Hitler salute. “It just keeps coming,” I said. “All the hate.”

  “So … we’ll keep writing about it,” he said. “We’ll come at it from different angles. Think we should devote a whole issue to it?”

  I thought about it a moment. “Let me see how much of this stuff I can stomach at one time,” I told him.

  Pamela called me that night. “About this dress exchange …,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can we exchange guys, too?”

  “You want to swap dates?”

  “I called Louie to invite him, and he said okay … and then he belched.”

  “Whoa!” I said. “You mean that was part of the response?”

  “I don’t know. He excused himself, of course. He said he’d just had dinner, but still….”

  “Was the burp a part of the ‘okay,’ or was it ‘okay’ and then a silence and then a burp?” I asked her. I saw Dad staring at me from across the room.

  “Sort of part of the ‘okay,’ I guess,” said Pamela.

  “Was that the whole conversation?”

  “No. He asked about flowers and who we were going with and the color of my dress and everything, but I think … I thought … I heard another belch toward the end. I mean, I was going to ask him what he’d had for dinner, but then I figured I wasn’t supposed to have heard it. But if we’re dancing and he’s belching—”

  “Pamela, this is the first guy you’ve gone out with since you and Tim broke up. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Tim never belched the whole time you were with him?”

  “I can’t say that.”

  “He never grunted or scratched or blew his nose or picked his teeth? Never?”

  “He probably did, but not on our first date.”

  “Pamela, chill,” I told her. “You are going to the dance with Louie. Now cut him a little slack, huh? For all you know, your stomach is going to growl during a slow number.”

  “Now I have something new to worry about.”

  “Good. If your stomach growls, it cancels out his burp. Period,” I said.

  When I hung up, Dad was still staring at me. I started to explain, but he said, “I don’t even want to know,” and he settled down again with the paper.

  After school on Tuesday, I stayed late again to check in with our counselor, Mrs. Bailey, about my college applications. By the time I left her office, it was twenty of five. I was walking down the hall toward my locker when I saw Dennis Granger come out of his classroom farther on, pulling on his jacket and heading toward the south exit. I automatically slowed, not wanting to let him hear my footsteps and be in
an empty corridor with the man after school hours.

  I wondered about the teacher he was subbing for this year—if she had had her baby yet and whether she was even coming back. How you manage motherhood and a career. Wondered if I should do a feature article on substitute teachers and what it’s like to suddenly take on a class for a semester when you don’t know the students, possibly not even the subject, and have nothing to go on except the teacher’s class notes for the course.

  No, I decided. It could undermine substitute teachers’ influence on a class to find out just how unprepared, and possibly nervous, some of them were. And I sure wasn’t about to interview Dennis Granger. I waited until I saw him disappear down the steps at the end of the hall, and then I walked on.

  I was just passing the door of the darkened classroom when I heard someone crying—soft little sobs, like whispered speech. I stopped, listened, and tried to see through the glass. Finally I opened the door.

  At first I didn’t see anything, as the shades had been drawn against the afternoon sun. Then I noticed a girl leaning against the wall in one corner, hands over her face, her shoulders shaking.

  “Amy!” I said, and went quickly over to her. “What happened? Are you okay?” But the sight of her disheveled clothes made me sick to my stomach, and the dark stillness of the room gave it an aura of evil.

  Amy’s face was turned to one side, as though she couldn’t look at me, and she covered the front of her khaki skirt with both hands.

  My heart was pounding furiously. I didn’t know whether to go screaming after Dennis Granger or stay with her.

  “Amy,” I said again, gently clasping her arms and looking her over. “You’re not okay, are you?”

  She shook her head, but tried to stop her sobs. “Hi … A-A-Alice,” she said jerkily, tugging her clothes back in place.

  “I saw Mr. Granger leaving,” I said. “What happened in here?”

  She wouldn’t look at me. “He … helps … me with English,” she said finally.

  I backed off and stared at her. “Granger’s your tutor? You’ve been coming to him?” Oh, God! “But something else happened, didn’t it?” I asked, looking her over carefully. I gently removed the hands that were trying to hide a wet spot on the front of her crumpled skirt. “Amy, tell me….” And now my own voice was trembling. “Did Mr. Granger rape you?”

  “No!” she said explosively.

  “Did you have your underwear off?”

  “No, Alice. I don’t take my underwear off for guys, even when they ask,” she said.

  “Did … did he ask?”

  She wouldn’t answer.

  I felt we had both been violated somehow. That we had both been molested, one way or another, here at school. I wanted to get out of that room, but Amy wasn’t ready yet, still crying.

  “Please tell me what happened,” I begged.

  She sniffled some more but began shaking her head again. “I’m not going to come back to Mr. Granger anymore. I can do my English myself,” she said, and her hand went back to the front of her skirt.

  I eased her down in one of the chairs and took the one next to her. “Listen, Amy, this is molestation. If Dennis Granger put his hands under your clothes or pressed against you or anything like that, you need to report it. He pressed against me too.”

  She glanced at me quickly, then dropped her eyes again. “Did … did you report it?”

  “Not yet, but I’m going to.”

  Amy scrunched up her face so tightly that her eyes closed. She shook her head. “I didn’t get raped,” she repeated.

  “Maybe not, but he took advantage of you—of me—and that’s never right for a teacher. For any guy. Let’s go to the office. I’ll go with you.”

  “No, Alice!” she said. “My mom’s picking me up at five.”

  “Then we’ll tell your mom.”

  Amy began crying again. “No! She’ll say I did it.”

  “Did what? No matter what you did, Amy, he’s the teacher.” I studied her. “Has this happened before?”

  “Just … well, last week … no, the week before … when the tutoring was over, I kissed him.”

  “You … kissed him?” It was as though we were suddenly little five-year-old girls searching our way through a forest. Turn here? Turn there? Do this? Do that? At what point was it okay to yell?

  “I got a good grade on my English paper, and it was because he helped me with that part, and I kissed him on the cheek for a thank-you. I’ve kissed him … well, maybe four times when tutoring was over, and … well, after the first time he said he liked it so I did it again. My mom would be really mad.”

  That sick feeling came over me again, and I swallowed. I tried to think of a way to get through to her, but she continued:

  “Then … last week … when I bent over to kiss him, he asked if he could kiss me back, and I said I guessed so, and he got up and put his hands here … and here … and then he touched me here.” She motioned toward her breasts.

  “And what happened today, Amy? I won’t get mad, no matter what.” How skillfully we are manipulated, I was thinking. How easy it is not to tell.

  “Well, I didn’t kiss him when tutoring was over, because I didn’t know if I should. But when we were done, he asked if I was going to kiss him, and I said maybe. He got up and moved me into a corner and kissed me, and this time …” She pointed to her breasts again. “He put his hand under my shirt and under my b-b-bra.”

  Her face was flaming, and she was on the verge of tears again, I could tell. She stopped to take a deep breath. “Please don’t tell anyone, Alice.”

  “Amy, whether you kissed him or not, what he did was very wrong, and he knows it. If you don’t report this, I will. The principal has to be told.”

  “No, Alice! Don’t! I’ll tell … I’ll tell my dad.”

  “This is important, Amy! It’s serious. Nobody’s going to punish you because Mr. Granger knows better. Promise me you’ll tell your parents.”

  She wiped her face and took more deep breaths. “I’ll tell,” she said, and looked at the clock. “I have to go. Mom will be waiting, and if I’m not there, she says, ‘Dawdle, dawdle dilly, that’s you.’ I hate dawdle dilly.”

  Amy picked up her book bag and started for the door. I got up too, put my arm around her, and walked along beside her. If I had reported Granger earlier, would this have happened to Amy? But then again, the old doubt: What exactly had he done to me? Who would ever believe it? He’d say that somebody going by had bumped into him, which made him bump into me. Perfectly possible.

  “Why are you coming with me?” Amy asked, her voice still a bit breathy.

  “Because I know how upset you are. I’m your friend, after all.”

  “That means you like me, and I like you too,” she said.

  As we approached the south entrance, I saw a silver Volvo waiting at the curb. When we got to the door, Amy put out one elbow to block me and said, “I can do this myself.”

  I hesitated. I had fully intended to walk her to the car, to be there for moral support. But then I realized that I was treating her as though she weren’t capable of handling this herself.

  “Okay, Amy,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I watched her walk toward the car with her little lopsided gait, drop her bag on the backseat, and climb in the passenger side. I could see a woman’s face turned toward Amy, see that something was being asked, something answered, and then … in far too short a time, the car moved forward again.

  She hadn’t told. If she had not told her parents by the time she got to school tomorrow, I would report the incident myself. I wondered if I should go back to Mrs. Bailey and tell her about it right then. But when I got to her office, she had gone.

  I worried about Amy all evening. For one thing, if she told her parents what had happened, she would probably mention that she’d talked about it to me, and they might call me to verify her account. In any case, no one called.

  But it was equally possi
ble that they would not want to discuss it with anyone other than the principal, or possibly the police, and they could very well show up tomorrow at school. The more I thought about it, though, the more I doubted Amy would tell them. And if she didn’t, who should I tell? Her parents? Mrs. Bailey? Mr. Beck?

  Twice I was on the verge of talking to Sylvia about it. But the thought of going to her made me feel even more like a child. I’d already lost that assurance of safety and trust you’re supposed to get in school. The only way I could see to feel seventeen again was to prove I could handle this myself.

  Just thinking about Dennis Granger made me seethe. How did he dare? I didn’t have to ask myself what attracted him to Amy. Her vulnerability, her need, her trust. It infuriated me that people like him could masquerade as responsible and caring, all the while trolling for girls like Amy.

  I woke twice in the night, wondering if it was time to get up, and finally I rose at five thirty, showered, and was glad when Dad said I could have his car for the day, knowing I had Student Jury after school.

  As soon as I got there, I looked for Amy, but I had to turn in some copy at the newsroom and still hadn’t seen her when the first bell rang. I began to think she may have stayed home. When I caught sight of Dennis Granger over the lunch hour, chatting it up with students, I knew immediately that he was still on board.

  I’ll give Amy till two o’clock, I told myself. And then, I’ll give her a half hour more.

  Then I saw her going in a restroom after the last class and followed her in. Another girl was just leaving, and we were alone.

  “Amy,” I said, “did you tell your parents?”

  She didn’t answer. She was washing some ink off her hands.

  I leaned over so she had to look at me. “Amy, this is too big a thing to keep secret. Not what you did, but what he did. To both of us.”