“You have the right to remain silent,” Allison says, rolling her eyes ever so slightly, as though she really wishes he would. She goes on with rest of the Miranda warning. Mr. Trumbull keeps struggling, but it’s useless. I think it would be useless even if the only ones holding him were still just Allison and Toni—they really do work out. A lot. They’re stronger than they look.
So are Mom and I.
Behind Mr. Trumbull and the FBI agents, I see a Panera worker coming from behind the counter. He’s pulled out his iPhone and appears to be videotaping the entire scene. I can imagine that video rolling on TV or going viral online.
I don’t care. Mom’s right—the listening device in my own bra is insanely itchy, so I pull mine out too. And then I look Mr. Trumbull in the eye and say what I’ve been longing to all along.
“One thing you said is true,” I tell him. “This is a win-win. Only, it’s really win-win-win. You go to prison like you deserve. Since Daddy had the idea for this sting operation, he gets to make up for some of the awful things he did. And Mom and me—we get to live the rest of our lives the way we want to, from here on out. We don’t have to be afraid ever again. And . . . I get to go to college.”
I could actually go on listing wins—this moment seems full of them. I am still a little afraid of that iPhone videotaping behind me, but unlike three years ago, I can just ignore it. Because this time Mom and I are going to be known for something we actually did ourselves.
And—it was good.
Mom and I throw our arms around each other and hug and hug and hug. I knock Mom’s scarf back a little, revealing a strand of dark blond hair. The two of us have mostly been on lockdown all week, hiding out in a hotel room in a remote location. But I sneaked out last night to pick up a box of Clairol Nice ’n Easy for Mom. We’re both going to see Daddy before we head back to Ohio. I have no idea what’s going to happen with my parents’ marriage—I have no idea what should happen—but I don’t think Mom should look like she’s aged a hundred years the first time she sees him in prison. Mom pulls the scarf off entirely and grins at me. I don’t think the hair color actually matters—I think it’s just that she’s so relieved and happy at the moment—but here’s something else that Mr. Trumbull was wrong about.
Mom is still absolutely beautiful.
I have to admit: I was wrong about her too.
“Do you think it’s okay now?” I ask.
Mom nods, and I pull out the iPhone that Mrs. Collins generously let me keep for an extra week. I’m probably going to be “poor but honest” for the rest of my life, and I’m okay with that. But I am never living without a cell phone again.
I begin a text to Oscar, Rosa, Jala, and Stuart:
It’s over, I write. Everything went perfectly.
• • •
There’s a huge party when I get back to Deskins. Okay, it was previously scheduled, and it’s for all of DHS, not just me. But no other school event could be so well-named: It’s homecoming.
I never had time to buy a dress for the dance. And because Mom and I didn’t keep that bank check from Mr. Trumbull, it’s not like I could easily afford one, regardless. But Rosa assures me that her older sister, Lily, has a closetful of possibilities she’s willing to loan me. Lily doesn’t just have dresses from her high school dances—she also has several more sophisticated (or, depending on your perspective, sluttier) ones she bought for clubbing now that she’s at Columbus State. So I head over to Rosa’s as soon as Mom and I arrive back in Deskins Saturday afternoon. I end up in the tiny bedroom that Rosa and her sister share, and Jala and Rosa and Lily work together to pull out dresses for me to try on.
It’s a little overwhelming: The room is so small, and there are so many dresses, and Lily talks every bit as fast as Rosa. And the two sisters have so many posters on the walls showcasing their differing interests in hot actors and famous lawyers—Mario Lopez faces off against Alan Dershowitz; Ryan Gosling faces off against Sonia Sotomayor . . .
Then I realize that’s not what’s overwhelming me.
This is the first time I’ve been over to a friend’s house since the day Daddy was arrested, I think. Since Annemarie Fenn’s.
Do I deserve this kind of thing again? Am I worthy now?
It wasn’t that I was unworthy before, I remind myself. I was just scared.
Jala tosses a dress at me and it lands on my head. She jokes, “Really, there’s not enough material in that dress to be a scarf.” All four of us laugh.
I do deserve this. I think. I deserved it all along.
I end up choosing the dress that fits the best, even though it’s fire-engine red and covered in ruffles. After three years of picking clothes based on not wanting to be noticed, this is about as far as I could go in the opposite direction.
I look at myself in the mirror and think, A defense attorney would definitely not want a girl wearing this to court. And there’s no way I would be allowed to visit my daddy in this outfit.
But I’m not going to court or visiting prison tonight. I’m not just the daughter of a criminal. Those aren’t the only things that define me.
“Oscar is going to love that on you,” Rosa says, grinning in a way that makes fun of her sister’s taste and gives me an out if I want to refuse this dress.
Even if Daddy weren’t a criminal, even if he hadn’t been caught, this dress never would have been my style. I start to think, It’s awful being too poor to even buy my own dress for homecoming. But that’s instantly swept away by another thought: I’m so lucky someone cares enough to loan me a dress.
It strikes me that those two thoughts are about a lot more than dresses. Whether I feel pathetic and despairing or lucky and blessed—it’s all up to me.
“Ignore my sister, who has no fashion sense,” Lily says. It’s funny how much she sounds like Rosa, even as she’s making fun of her. They look alike, too, except that Lily clearly spends a lot more time on her hair and clothes. “How do you feel about it?”
I realize that I’ve never once worn a dress in my past three years in Deskins. I’ve never had a reason to.
“I feel . . . ,” I begin. “I feel like a little girl sitting in church in a frilly dress, thinking about how much God and everybody else loves her.”
“Oh, no!” Lily cries in dismay. “It’s not sexy enough? We can fix that!”
She tugs the top part of the dress downward. I pull it back up.
“No, no,” I say. “I mean, it’s good.”
There’s so much else I could say, about deeper topics than dresses, but Rosa is the one who’s distracted now.
“Can you believe this?” she says. She’s bent over the laptop open on her desk. “Stuart’s supposed to pick me up for homecoming in just an hour, and—”
“What?” I say in astonishment. “You didn’t tell me you were going too!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Rosa said, shrugging. “I just thought you should get the first pick of the dresses, after the week you’ve had. After what you’ve been living with the past three years.”
She really is a great friend. But she’s not going to manage to distract me.
“Hold on,” I say. “You—and Stuart—and . . .”
Rosa rolls her eyes.
“We’re going as friends,” she says. “Just for fun. Like you and Oscar, right? I won’t have time to think about romance until I’m thirty. High school relationships—who needs the drama?”
“My sister is an idiot,” Lily says. She glances hopefully at me, as if expecting me to force Rosa to reveal some deep, long-simmering desire for Stuart. Or maybe to declare that I, at least, am passionately in love, and my high school boyfriend is “4Ever.”
I don’t say anything. I’m not doing that to Rosa. Not in front of Lily and Jala, anyway. And I’m not sure what Oscar and I are, except that he’s kind and I trust him. And that seems incredibly romantic to me after three years of trusting no one.
Oscar and I are . . . a possibility, I think. One of the many possibilities
I didn’t have before.
“Anyway,” Rosa says, pointing at the laptop in front of her. “When he should have been getting ready, Stuart just sent me another draft of his Common App essay. That boy is crazy!”
Jala sits down by the computer too, and watches Rosa open the essay.
“Whoa,” Jala says. “He wrote this one about last week, and why he decided to stay in Atlanta with the rest of us instead of going on to Nashville like his parents expected.”
I lean in to read the essay too.
“It’s actually . . . humble,” Rosa marvels. “Self-deprecating. Mature. This is good.”
Jala drapes her arm over my shoulder.
“When he gets in to Harvard, it really is going to be thanks to you,” she says.
“Girls,” Lily says strictly. “Worry about the fancy college plans another time. I’ve only got an hour left to do your hair and makeup. Put that computer away and let me get to work!”
Within the next hour Lily arranges my hair so it towers over the rest of my head. She also plasters way too much makeup onto my face, and then, at my request, removes about 99 percent of it. And then Oscar and Stuart arrive, and our friends Lakshmi and Clarice with their dates, and we all go to the park, where Mom and the other parents take pictures of our whole gang.
This is so high school, I tell myself, smiling broadly. Daddy didn’t steal it from me, after all.
Oscar drives us to the dance, where I discover there’s a big difference between middle school and high school dancing. Or maybe “dance” means something completely different in Georgia and Ohio.
It doesn’t actually matter, because Oscar doesn’t know how to dance either.
“Let’s just make it up as we go along,” I suggest.
I’m sure we look ridiculous, but who cares?
It’s almost time to leave when Ms. Stela, who’s one of the chaperones, comes up to me.
“There are reporters out front,” she tells me. “I’m sorry—somehow they found out you were here. We wouldn’t let them in. We had rules that everyone had to go out the front door, but . . . if you want, I can get the janitor to open a back door, and you and Oscar can sneak out that way.”
I square my shoulders.
“No,” I say. “They’re not going to make me sneak around. I’m done with that. But, Oscar, you could go out ahead or behind me if you want. You shouldn’t have to deal with this.”
Oscar looks offended.
“What?” he says. “And miss my chance to let the whole world see that I have the prettiest, best date at the whole dance?”
We walk out together.
There are indeed adults with microphones and TV cameras and recorders standing on the front sidewalk. They’re talking to Shannon Daily, who’s somehow managing to live down the shame of breaking her family tradition of always being voted homecoming queen.
“Oh, yes,” Shannon’s saying. “I met Becca at freshman orientation three years ago. I always thought there was something so sad about her, so I’ve always tried to be nice.”
Try, you always ignored me, as long as you thought I wasn’t any help to you, I think.
Then Shannon’s friend Ashley Stevens shoves her way into the spotlight.
“Yeah, Becca and I were both finalists for a big scholarship,” Ashley says. “It must have been hard for her, since the rest of us were honest about who we are and what we’re really like.”
Yeah, right, Ashley, I think.
“Are you going to tell everyone what liars those two are?” Oscar whispers in my ear.
“Not worth my time,” I say.
And . . . maybe I feel a little sorry for them. I know what it’s like to feel small and desperate and worthless. I know what it’s like to think you can never show your true self.
Someone in the crowd of reporters recognizes me, and they surge in my direction, abandoning Shannon and Ashley. My eyes blur for a moment: In the glare of the cameras and facing the darkness beyond, it’s hard for me to tell if there are just four or five of them or fifty.
Either way, I know anything I say could potentially be seen and heard by the entire world.
“Miss Jones! Becca! Over here!” the reporters are screaming. And then they’re all spitting questions at me at once: “How did you come to suspect your father’s defense attorney?” “How did you and your mother set up the sting?” “How much did the FBI help?” “What do you think should happen to Burton Trumbull now?”
I lift my hand for silence.
“I can’t comment on anything connected to the charges against Mr. Trumbull,” I say. “That information would have to come from the FBI or the U.S. Attorney’s office in Atlanta. I wouldn’t want to say or do anything to hurt the case.”
I have learned many things from my father’s mistakes. And this is exactly what the FBI told us to say if anyone asked.
But the reporters aren’t satisfied.
“How did you get through the stress of the past week?” they ask. “Were you this calm all along?” “How many people here in Deskins knew the truth about you and your mother?”
I glance at Oscar. There’s actually a question in there that I want to answer.
“Look, my mom and I were in this together, so that helped,” I say. “And I told four of my very closest friends about a week ago. I had a Catholic, a Muslim, and a Presbyterian all praying for me. I even had an agnostic praying for me, just in case!”
That makes the reporters laugh. For a moment it seems like that should satisfy them and I can just go on with my life.
No—that was too much to hope for.
“Are you very religious?” one of the reporters calls out. “Did that help carry you through the past three years?”
Yes . . . no . . . maybe? Maybe in ways I didn’t even know?
“I don’t know what I am,” I say. “But I intend to find out.”
Nobody seems to know what to make of that answer.
“Have you forgiven your father?” someone else asks.
There is silence now, because apparently everyone is curious about this. I can imagine my answer to this question traveling farther out into the world than anything else. I can picture the kids I knew back in Georgia seeing it online; I can imagine Mom watching it in our Deskins apartment; Daddy watching it in prison.
“Yes,” I say softly, looking directly into the cameras. “I have forgiven my father.”
Some idiot follows up with the question, “Does that mean you think everything your father did was okay?”
I glare at him.
“That’s not what forgiving means,” I say. I point back toward the DHS entrance. “Do you need to come back to school for some remedial vocabulary help? I know several English teachers who would love to help you be more precise with your words.”
The rest of the reporters laugh at this.
They actually like me, I think. For the first time I can see how someone could enjoy this kind of attention.
But it’s not something I plan to seek ever again.
“Where do you want to go to college?” someone asks.
Stuart would tell me this is the time to deliver the killer line: “Vanderbilt. I’ve dreamed my entire life of going to Vanderbilt.” But I’ve never even been there. What if it’s not actually a good place for me? What if it is just a bunch of rich Southern kids with their own polo ponies? All the reasons I had for wanting to go there seem to have disappeared. I don’t need to go to Vanderbilt to prove anything to anyone.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I’m still figuring that out. I know someone who really loved Kenyon. I have a friend who’s at Ohio State, and if I went there, maybe we could room together someday.”
I bet Jala would like OSU a lot better if she lived on campus, I think.
“Really,” I add, “I’ll probably be like most of my classmates and end up choosing based on where I can get the best scholarships and financial aid.”
At least now I’ll be able to apply for financial aid.
Using my real name.
“Are you going to write your college essay about your father and Mr. Trumbull?” someone else asks.
Oscar squeezes my hand.
“Too complicated,” I say. “That’s too much to cover in five-hundred words, don’t you think?”
Stuart could do it because he had such a small part of the whole story. But not me. Anyway, it’s not what I want to get me into college. Though . . . I do actually see now why colleges would want kids who have faced serious problems.
Because, kids like me, we’ve learned how to survive, I think. We already know that the world is not always going to treat us with kid gloves. And we can thrive in spite of that.
Or—maybe even . . . because of it?
“What do you want to study?” another reporter asks.
“Maybe . . . ,” I say. An idea occurs to me for the first time. “Maybe I could learn how to help other kids like me, who have a parent in prison.”
“Like a social worker?” someone asks. “A counselor?”
Ms. Stela steps forward just then, and I forget that I ever considered her a failure as a guidance counselor.
“Please, can’t you just let Becca go?” she asks. “She’s been so patient with you, but this is her homecoming. Let her enjoy herself.”
“One last question,” someone shouts. “What do you think the future will bring?”
That is a ridiculous question. Who knows? Three and a half years ago, the day my father was arrested, I had no idea what lay ahead. I’m actually glad I had no idea.
The funny thing is, I can kind of see how the future will take shape now.
Odds are, tomorrow I will see some coverage of this interview that will be utterly awful and cringe worthy—maybe some newspaper will use a stupid phrase like referring to Oscar as my “tall, silent, Asian date.” Or they’ll try to describe this crazy dress I’m wearing.
But it can’t hurt me, whatever they write or show video of. I will still be myself, and Oscar will still be himself, and it won’t matter how anyone else defines us.
And anyhow, I’ll have too much else to worry about, with a week’s worth of homework to catch up on and colleges to decide on and applications to fill out. And after that? I’m pretty sure Rosa will get the Whitney Court Scholarship—just in case it helps, I’m going to write the Court family a letter telling them I think she should win. I’m also going to thank the Court family for their part in making college possible for me, even without giving me a dime.