“So where to?” Ellerby asked again.
I glanced over the seat at Sarah Byrnes and said, “To Lemry’s house.”
I expected a protest—like maybe she’d kick the windows out—but she stared straight ahead.
“She’s expecting us,” I told Ellerby.
Sarah Byrnes just shook her head in disgust, holding onto her tough act, but seeing her father had rattled her.
Shortly after we arrived, Lemry sent Ellerby and me packing. “Why don’t you guys go do whatever it is guys do for a few hours? We’ll call if we need you.”
Sarah Byrnes appeared unsure, like a cornered animal, but said nothing. I was just glad to get away from her before she got a chance to get me alone and separate my body parts.
So here we sit in the middle of Lemry’s class on the first day Sarah Byrnes has been with us, which is hard to figure because I would think school is the first place her dad will look—I’m surprised he hasn’t already. I’ve had very little chance to talk with Sarah Byrnes, because Lemry told me to leave her alone until she got her bearings.
Mautz is sitting in today, uninvolved, but leaning against the wall near Lemry’s desk like a sentry. I’m thinking this might be a good day to go light on my usual form of class participation. We’re into the last installment of the abortion issue—Lemry gave it a few weeks’ enforced rest to let people calm down—and Mark Brittain is well into the same old happy horseshit he uses to scold the world. Ellerby is following my lead of restraint because, even though he wouldn’t agree to follow Mautz’s edict to stay off Brittain’s case, Lemry told him that when a fool and a wise man argue it’s sometimes hard for those of us on the outside to tell the difference. That shut Ellerby’s trap right quick.
We sit in a circle, and I’m watching Jody stare at the flat surface of her desk while Brittain rambles. Sarah Byrnes is directly across from us, shifting nervously in her seat in a way I recognize, and if Mark Brittain recognized it too, he’d shut the hell up. But Brittain’s four-point-oh grade average includes no A’s for insight, and he forges on like a runaway gospel train without Ellerby and me there to throw objects onto his tracks to derail him. “It’s God’s law,” he says, “that every human must step up and take responsibility for his actions. All life is sacred, and if a woman makes the mistake of fornication and she gets pregnant, she has the moral obligation to bring that child to term.”
Bring that child to term. Jesus, Brittain, you’ve been watching too many doctor shows.
“Not everything is about Christianity, Mr. Brittain,” Lemry says. “We’ve heard that argument about enough, I think. Let’s go on.”
“With all respect,” Brittain says, “everything is about Christianity. It’s when we believe it isn’t that we get into trouble.”
Lemry sighs. “Okay, everything is about Christianity for you, Mark. But there are other perspectives, and I want to hear them.”
“Let’s stay with this view just one more minute,” says a soft voice, and the class looks up in unison to see that it’s coming from Sarah Byrnes. Sarah Byrnes scoots her desk an inch or so forward, staring directly across the circle at Brittain. “Are you telling us all life is sacred? That it’s all equal?”
Sarah Byrnes’s intensity visibly pushes Brittain back in his seat, but he holds his ground. “That’s right.”
“You think my life is as sacred as Ms. Lemry’s? Or Mr. Mautz’s, over there? Or yours?”
“Of course it is,” Brittain says, and I detect a note of patronization. That is a big mistake.
Sarah Byrnes slides out of her seat and walks across the room, her Nikes as silent as moccasins on a hard dirt trail, and kneels in front of Brittain. Mark looks at the desk. Very softly she says, “Look at me.”
Brittain looks up, but his sight drops immediately back to his desk top. The rest of the class, me included, fidgets.
“No,” Sarah Byrnes says, as softly as before, “keep looking at me.”
Brittain lifts his gaze, and I think I see a drop of sweat form on his forehead. Mautz looks at Lemry, but Lemry doesn’t move a muscle.
“Are you saying,” Sarah Byrnes continues, “that if you knew you were married to someone who would do this to your baby,” and she touches her face, “you should have that baby anyway?”
Brittain looks confused; he doesn’t know the real story behind Sarah Byrnes’s condition.
She pushes. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“I think…Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
Sarah Byrnes sits back on her haunches and sort of smiles, looking across the room at Mr. Mautz. Then she leans forward again and puts her hands on Mark’s desk. “I’ll give you one more chance,” she says. “Are you telling me that a woman who’s married to a man she knows will disfigure or kill her baby, and who knows she doesn’t have the guts to get away from him, should have that baby anyway?”
Brittain has regained some composure. “We can’t make predictions like that,” he says. “All life is sacred. Everyone deserves a chance.”
“Think you’d like to have my chance?” Sarah Byrnes asks, pointing to her face.
“It’s not something I’d choose,” Brittain says, “but…”
“It’s not something I’d choose, either,” Sarah Byrnes says quickly. She stands up to walk back to her seat, then turns in the middle of the room. “You and Mr. Mautz go to the same church, don’t you?” she asks.
Brittain glances at Mautz, who nods imperceptibly. “Yeah,” Brittain says. “What’s that got to do with…”
“Do all the people in that church think all life is sacred?”
Brittain says, “They certainly do.”
“And do they treat people’s lives as if they’re sacred?”
Brittain feels safe here. “Of course they do.”
Sarah Byrnes moves a couple more steps toward her desk. I swear to God she’s going to grow up to be a crispy version of Perry Mason. She whirls and faces Brittain. “Mark Brittain, I’ve been in the same class as you from first grade on, and I could count the number of times you’ve spoken to me on an amputee’s fingers. I can’t even get you to look me in the eye. Are you telling me my life is as sacred to you as Jody Mueller’s? I mean, up until Eric the Great aced you out?”
Brittain opens his mouth, but Sarah Byrnes whirls, and all of a sudden she’s running it down Mautz’s throat. “And this man, who goes to the same church you go to, you know how many decent words—hell, any kind of words—he’s uttered to me in the past six years? Zip. Zero. I have a three-point-six grade point average, for God’s sake; had a straight four-oh in junior high, and the best he’s been able to do in all that time is to chew out my friend for an underground newspaper that was so bizarre it didn’t deserve a minute of his time. He didn’t even respect me enough to show me his disgust. He told Eric what to say to me.”
Mautz starts to speak, but she whirls back to Brittain. “How come you people care so much for the unborn when you don’t give even a little bit of a shit for the born?”
Now Mautz breaks in. “Mrs. Lemry, don’t you think this has gone far enough? I would expect you to have a little better control of your class.”
“She seems in control to me,” Lemry says. “You ought to be here on a bad day.”
But Brittain is wounded now, and I think we’re about to have a bad day. His face is red, his neck pushing against his collar. “Crybabies,” he says. “Nobody wants to take on the tough stuff. You’ve been pulling all kinds of stuff since you were a little kid and hiding behind the fact that you were disfigured. I’m tired of all the excuses! Tired of them, you hear? You step up and take your medicine! You should be damn glad you’re alive and that God loves you!”
“Jeez, Brittain,” Ellerby says, “get a grip. Tap your helmet, man.”
“Go to hell, Ellerby! Just go to hell! You’re the perfect example of what’s wrong. You’re worse than she is. You’re even worse than Calhoune! You are evil!”
Lemry looks over to Mautz.
“Now it’s out of hand,” she says quietly. “Okay, class, let’s give it a rest….”
Brittain turns to fire on her, but Jody steps in as he opens his mouth and says, “Mark Brittain, shut your mouth.” Brittain stops in midsentence like somebody filled his mouth with a bomb. “I’ve heard your self-righteous BS for the last time. I really believed that you were special for a while there, but you just make me sick.”
“You better…”
“Shut up!” She turns to the rest of the class. “Man is known by his works. I’ve heard that out of Mark Brittain’s mouth so many times I thought he made it up. Well, let me tell you about Mark Brittain’s works. A little less than a year ago, I had a six-week-old fetus inside me. Mark Brittain’s and my works.” Tears form at the edges of her eyes.
I move my chair close to Jody’s, and she takes my hand. “I wanted to keep it. He said no. I said I’d go away to have it. That’s how desperate I was, how awful I felt about what I’d done. And you know what he said? You know what he said? He said he could never do the work he needed to do in the world with an illegitimate child hanging over his head. He said I’d have to get rid of it.”
“That’s a lie!” Brittain yells. “You…you bitch, Mueller. I knew you’d try to slander me when I dumped you.”
Jody doesn’t miss a beat. “I asked him about the church’s stand on abortion, and he told me that what he had to say to the world was more important than one error in judgment. An error in judgment. That’s what he called it. He said making love to someone who didn’t have the common sense to protect herself was nothing more than that. He didn’t call it fornication then, he called it an error in judgment.
“And you know what I did? I had the abortion. That’s how screwed up I was. And I had it alone, because Mark Brittain couldn’t be seen at the clinic. I had to cross lines I’d marched in to have an abortion alone.” She turns to Mark. “I don’t know right or wrong about sacred life, Mark Brittain, but I know this. You don’t talk to Sarah Byrnes that way. You just don’t. And you don’t talk to me that way, either. Not ever again.”
Having gathered his books, Brittain stops at the door. “What you all just heard out of Jody Mueller’s mouth is a filthy lie. It’s just one more example of what happens when you try to take the high road. You can believe it if you want to, but it’s a filthy lie.”
“Well,” Ellerby says, “I won’t be doing my report on shame. I could never top that.”
CHAPTER 14
Boy, today the stakes went up. Mautz barged into Lemry’s class to say Mark Brittain tried to kill himself last night. Mautz looked directly at Lemry, then me, then Ellerby, and finally Jody, as if to let us know where he considered the blame to lie.
“I’m not pleased with what I saw in here yesterday,” he said after his announcement, “nor with what I’ve heard about what goes on in here. A sensitive boy…”
“Stop!” Lemry said, with such force that Mautz backed off immediately. “I’m not interested in your personal thoughts about suicide, sir, and you have no right to imply that the responsibility for Mark Brittain’s decision lay with members of this class.”
“Mrs. Lemry,” Mautz said right back, “maybe you don’t know how serious this is. Mark Brittain is lying in Sacred Heart Hospital on the edge of a coma as a result of a drug overdose. This wasn’t some adolescent cry for attention.”
“I feel as badly about that as you do,” Lemry said. “Maybe you’ve forgotten that Mark is a member of my swimming team, and I respect him as a student. But you are out of line in this classroom, and if you don’t leave, I’ll lodge a formal complaint with the Washington Education Association.”
Mautz’s eyes blazed. “Mrs. Lemry, I’m the vice-principal at this school. I…”
“That’s right,” Lemry said. “You’re the vice-principal. The vice-principal in charge of discipline. If I’m having a discipline problem, I’ll call you. Right now, I’d like you to leave, or I’ll go to the principal’s office and bring Mr. Patterson back here to straighten this out. If you’d like to talk to me during my break, that’s third period.”
“You could be getting yourself into serious trouble,” Mautz said, but he looked uneasy, as if Lemry had scored.
“I want you out of my classroom,” she repeated, and Mautz turned to leave.
The guy must be unconscious. He never noticed how the class sat stunned at the news of Mark, how the breath blasted out of the room as if we’d been kicked in the collective stomach.
“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” Lemry said the moment the door closed behind Mautz. We stared blankly back at her. “Looks like this is a good time to talk about suicide.”
She gave us a minute, then said, softly, “Let’s talk.”
“Oh, God.” Jody burst into tears. “He really meant to do it. I know Mark. He really meant to do it. This is my fault.” She dropped her head to her desk, and I tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away.
“Let her be,” Lemry said. Then, “I know you think it’s your fault, and I know that hurts. And it’s going to hurt, there’s no stopping that. But it’s not your fault. Mark Brittain himself said we’re all responsible for our own actions, and this was his, Jody, not yours.”
“But if I’d been more careful. I knew what he was like. I knew…”
Ellerby stepped in. “If you’re going to assign guilt,” he said, “you can’t assign it all to yourself. I’ve been badgering Mark Brittain for more than two years.”
“Maybe,” Jody said through more tears, “but I humiliated him. That’s what he couldn’t stand, to be humiliated. I went with him for two and a half years and I knew that.”
A flood of anger welled in my throat, and I thought for a minute I’d actually choke on it: Mark Brittain humiliated himself. Screw Mark Brittain. He’d been cramming his philosophy down our throats as long as I could remember and now that his true colors had been uncovered, we were supposed to feel shitty.
Lemry slowly paced the outer edge of our circle. “Listen, a person attempting to take his own life is a tragic thing. I’m sure everyone here can think of something they wish they’d said to Mark, but none of us knew. Obviously Mr. Mautz thinks I should take responsibility because of what I let us talk about as a class. But I want no misunderstandings. I’m not to blame for Mark’s decision and neither are any of you. Suicide is personal, and I refuse to have anyone walk out of here today without understanding that. Mark Brittain needs help; hopefully this will help him get it. He’ll need understanding from all of you. He’ll need to not be abandoned. But your guilt will only give him the mistaken belief that his actions were not of his own doing.”
Lemry stopped pacing. “I don’t want to sound harsh, and I know I’m probably getting ahead of your feelings, but we don’t have time to process everyone’s pain before the class is over. We do have time to put it in perspective.”
Sally Eaton, the girl who pickets the abortion clinic at Deaconess regularly and who thinks Mark Brittain is the cleverest thing since remote control, raised her hand. “Ms. Lemry, I’ve known Mark for a long time, and he’s somebody who stands up for what he believes. I think he’s too sensitive for the callous way this class looks at things. Some cruel and untrue things have been said, and I think he’s been treated unfairly by all of you—and this is the result.”
Lemry cut her off. “You can have your thoughts about that, Sally, but I repeat: No one is responsible for Mark Brittain’s decisions but Mark Brittain. I agree we can all learn something about how fragile the human psyche is, but the lesson here is to look at our own thoughts about life and death, not take the blame for someone else’s.”
Sally started to protest, but Lemry continued quickly. “You’re entitled to your feelings, Sally, and I’ll be happy to talk with you after class, but I won’t have anyone blaming anyone for this in my classroom. That’s final.”
Sally stood and gathered her books, bursting into tears. “That’s fine. I’m dropping this class. You can flunk me if you wa
nt. This class is mean! That’s why Mark Brittain is in the hospital!”
I thought Lemry would stop her, but she walked to the classroom phone and called the office to let them know Sally was out of class and very distressed. She said she thought Mautz might be able to help her. At her desk she heaved a sigh. “Anyone else?”
Silence.
“One of the worst things schools do is give you the idea that they can take responsibility for other people. We want the best athletes and students and debaters to be role models—to set examples for the other kids. We pressure many of you to do that all the time. We ask for perfection—no, for a show of perfection. Then we’re disappointed when you let us down, and even if we’re not, you are. Well, I want to go on record as saying the sooner you learn you’re your own life’s accountant, the sooner you’ll have tools to hammer out a decent life. Mark Brittain is in the hospital because he tried to poison his body. He felt bad because of his responses to the world, not yours. Other people may try to tell you differently, but don’t let them. You won’t be helping yourself, and you won’t be helping Mark Brittain.”
We sat in silence, absorbing Lemry’s words. That silence was interrupted by Mautz’s booming voice over the intercom: “Mrs. Lemry, could you come to the office immediately, please? Thank you.”
When the bell rang, ending class, Lemry hadn’t returned.
Workout felt strange today; Brittain wasn’t leading his circle pattern, and there was no one to go after, though Ellerby and I gave each other good challenges playing games with the clock. When Brittain’s group knelt to pray before the first set of two-hundreds I found myself looking away, a bit ashamed. I could have laid off him a little.
I meant to ask Lemry why she didn’t get back before the bell, but I never got the chance.
At home, Mom said pretty much what Lemry said, but a little voice nags at me, saying I should be more careful. None of that is at Jody’s expense, though. I don’t think I should have stayed away from her, and I’m not going to start. Brittain did what he did at the abortion clinic, and trying to take himself out on drugs doesn’t buy him any sympathy from me in that regard. I could do with a little less confusion.