Bad Apple

  This annoys him. “Which pig?”

  “I don’t know. Jason’s?”

  “Nah.” Miles shakes his head. “He’s too stoned to notice.”

  “Bridget Fisher’s?”

  “That could be funny, but…we need someone even more uptight.”

  “Okay. Why don’t we just kidnap Baloney, then? LaDonna will have a fit.”

  “You want to kidnap your own pig.”

  “Yeah! Now that would be funny,” I say.

  “You mean it will wreck LaDonna’s grade-point average.”

  “Not if we don’t get caught. And who would ever suspect me of kidnapping my own pig?”

  “When?”

  “How about today, after school?”

  “Okay. You better be here,” he says. He grabs his books. “I didn’t know you were like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “I didn’t believe what people said about you.”

  “That’s funny. I believe everything they said about you.”

  He snorts. “See you after school.”

  It’s Mr. Anderson who catches us, just as we’re dropping a sealed plastic bag with a ransom note into the tank where Baloney had been.

  ( comments )

  “My friend Angela said her friend Priscilla said that her boyfriend saw Tola with Mr. Mymer in the art room and he was all over her. You know what I mean. And she wasn’t complaining.

  “I’ve been her lab partner since middle school, and she’s always been nuts. Never pays attention to the teachers. Always scribbling weird little drawings in her notebook. Makes me do all the work. Not that I can’t do the work. I plan on being a doctor. But still. It’s sort of unfair to be paired with someone so unambitious for so long. She could be ruining my future career.

  “I think the administration should be looking into that.”

  —LaDonna Rowan, classmate

  “I’m not going to apologize. I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh no, I hurt someone’s poor little feelings and I’m so so sorry.’ One time, Spit left me alone with a couple of his friends. He fell asleep in the other room. He told me later that they just wanted to find out what my natural hair color was.

  “I got over it. Shit happens to everybody. Sometimes it happens to you.”

  —Chelsea Patrick, classmate

  ANYWHERE AND EVERYWHERE

  “Where did you hide the pig, Tola?”

  This is the question they keep asking me, as if the answer will give them all the answers they ever needed.

  “There was a ransom note,” I say. “Twenty bucks and I’ll tell you.”

  “There are sanitation issues here.”

  Before we dropped the ransom note into the tank, I’d taken the hall pass again and hid the pig in the trophy case in the front of the school. I think about suggesting that they hire June’s dad to put in better locks. Instead, I say: “Ask Miles.”

  This frustrates them. They’ve probably already asked Miles, and he hasn’t talked, either. Which strikes me as incredibly funny.

  I’m the only one who’s amused. Me, the principal, Mr. Anderson, the school psychologist, and my mom are all stuffed in a tiny conference room off the principal’s office. Nobody seems to be having a good time.

  “Tell them where the pig is, Tola,” Mom says. Normally, she sits perfectly straight in chairs. Today, she slumps as if she can’t get the energy up to cross her ankles. She mutters, “I cannot believe what my life has turned into. This isn’t a life. This is a TV show. Saying things like ‘Tell them where the pig is.’ What kind of dialogue is that? I need a new writer.”

  The school psychologist frowns at my mom, and my mom stares back, daring her to say something psychological.

  The principal says, “Tola will fail biology.”

  Mom says, “That is unacceptable.”

  Mr. Anderson: “I laid out the rules. Mess with the pigs, and you and your lab partner fail. I couldn’t have been clearer. Your daughter chose to violate those rules. There are consequences.”

  “I don’t think the consequences have to be so severe, considering the circumstances,” my mother says. “This will go on her permanent record.”

  “Are those records really permanent?” I say. “I mean, like, you post a photo of yourself topless and drunk on Facebook and that image floats around cyberspace forever, and suddenly you’re forty years old and lose your job because your boss is using it as his screensaver. But are these permanent records the same? Really? I was just curious.”

  “I’m sorry I ever played those Baby Einstein videos when you were little,” my mom says. “I’m sorry you learned how to speak.”

  I can’t help it: I laugh. The psychologist is horrified. I have a feeling she’ll be putting in a call to Child Protective Services. I’m not sure they can remove children from their parents because of excessive sarcasm, though.

  “There,” says Mr. Anderson. “She doesn’t appear to be feeling any remorse. So I think the punishment is perfectly reasonable. And her lab partner will also fail. Lab partners live and die as a team.”

  Now the psychologist is horrified yet again. She doesn’t know who in the room is the most horrifying. “Live and die?” she says.

  I feel bad about LaDonna. Truth is, I wasn’t even thinking about her. I’m not sure I was thinking at all. I decide that this must be my problem. The not thinking.

  I say, “LaDonna had nothing to do with this.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” says Mr. Anderson. “She goes down, too.”

  The school psychologist: “Goes down?”

  “And it was my idea, not Miles’s. He shouldn’t get in trouble, either.” When I say it, I say it to my mom to gauge her reaction. She doesn’t blink.

  “I think we can make some exceptions this time,” says the principal. Mr. Anderson opens his mouth, but the principal puts his hand up. “LaDonna won’t be penalized.”

  “Thank you,” I say. I don’t need LaDonna hating me. I don’t need to get anyone else in trouble for anything I’ve done.

  “We’ll figure out later what Miles’s punishment will be. But Tola will be given an F for this semester and will not be allowed back in Mr. Anderson’s class. She will be in a study instead and will have to make up biology over the summer.”

  I have another idea. “I’ll tell you where the pig is if you give Mr. Mymer his job back.”

  “Tola!” my mom says.

  “One doesn’t have anything to do with the other,” says Mr. Anderson. His lips are curled away from his teeth as if I disgust him.

  “Well, your class doesn’t have much to do with life or death, but you seem to think it does.”

  Mr. Anderson turns bright red, but before he can start demanding that I be court-martialed, my mom says, “My daughter is experiencing significant emotional distress—”

  The psychologist cuts her off. “Obviously! Probably due to the fact that—”

  “If you’ll let me finish,” says my mother, in that tone that means if the woman doesn’t shut the hell up, Mom will have everyone buried up to their heads in the desert and let loose the fire ants. “Tola is experiencing significant emotional distress due to the fact she was taken advantage of by a predator.”

  “Mom, will you please stop! We’re not on Dateline.”

  “We’re very sorry, Mrs. Riley. Very sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry—”

  “Well, sorry doesn’t fix the situation, does it? She’s lost her father—”

  “I haven’t lost my father,” I say.

  “He’s not here, is he?” she snaps. “This is an extremely difficult time for my whole family. I’m doing my best to keep it together and I believe the situation will improve, but I would appreciate a little more sympathy and cooperation from you people. I do know that teenagers are old enough to suffer the consequences of their mistakes, but I also know that she is a minor and that she was abused by one of your staff!”

  The principal is silent for a few seconds. “What do you suggest?” r />
  “I don’t want an F to appear on her report card. She’ll take the summer class to make up the work, but no Fs. And I don’t want her record to include any suspensions, either, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  The principal considers this. “I think that can be arranged. But she’ll have to see the school psychologist.”

  Mr. Anderson barks, “Kids today can’t just do whatever—”

  “Mr. Anderson, you can get back to your students now,” the principal says.

  “But—”

  “Now,” says the principal.

  Mr. Anderson storms out. I think he’s contemplating rejoining the marines. The slamming door echoes in the little conference room.

  “Thank you,” says my mom. “And for my part, I can reassure you that Tola won’t be acting out again. Will you, Tola?”

  But she’s not asking, and I’m not promising anything.

  I’m excused for the day. The ride home with Mom is quiet, but the kind of quiet that’s filled with all the things you really want to say but can’t. I wonder if that’s something I can paint. Every once in a while my mom swipes at her eyes and sniffs. When I ask if she’s okay, she laughs and says, “Peachy.”

  Later that night, she asks me, “What are you trying to do to me, Tola? What are you trying to do?”

  Madge has a new hobby. In addition to watching war movies, reading the latest research on psychiatric medication, screaming at Pib, and ignoring my mom’s pleas for better communication, she’s now a faithful reader of TheTruthAboutTolaRiley blog. (Mom had it shut down, but it popped up again and again in different forms and on different sites.) Madge reads the news articles quoting me and Mom at the school-board meeting. She reads about how Mr. Mymer and I were “observed” by another student “acting in an intimate manner,” which makes me picture a middle-aged couple crammed in a grimy bathroom, cleaning out each other’s ears with Q-tips.

  The comments describe something you’d see on late-night TV or YouTube, complete with bad behavior in broom closets and lots of inappropriate language. In one of them, Mr. Mymer isn’t a Mr., he’s a Mrs., and we’re hot lesbians in luv. In another, I’m a twelve-year-old immigrant boy from the Philippines and Mr. Mymer is a twice-married, fifty-three-year-old father of seven. I stole a fetal pig, the post said, because it reminded me of the baby pigs I ate back home.

  “Things were bad enough for you,” Madge says, “and then you go and mess with Mr. Anderson. What is up with that? You’re such an idiot.”

  Rather than making an artistic statement, or even a rebellious one, the pignapping has confirmed everyone’s worst opinions of me. Do-anything, say-anything Tola Riley. I’m not allowed to be online anymore, so I can only imagine what’s happening in other places on the Web, how the collective has examined and reexamined the evidence, the articles and the blogs and the texts that have been passed around; how they have all decided together what must have happened to me. I think about how nice that must be, to feel so sure of your own judgments, basically because no one is allowed to have different ones.

  “But then most people at school are idiots, too. Nobody can decide anything for themselves anymore,” Madge is saying. “It’s all about groupthink.”

  I can’t even remember where this started, when I became this outcast. Did it begin when people discovered I could eat more than a football player? When I outran Josh Beck? When I told Chelsea Patrick that I wouldn’t go to the mall to meet some dealer named Spit?

  “I dumped my Facebook,” Madge says. “I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “Couldn’t stand what?”

  “Do you ever listen when someone is talking to you? You’re so annoying. It’s like you’re trapped in your own head all the time. The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know. There are other people in the world,” she says. She mercilessly pounds on the computer keys. “Wait a minute. There’s something new here. You have a blog.”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve been reading?”

  “No, I mean you have your own blog. Someone claiming to be you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Listen to this: To all you haters out there, this is Tola Riley. The real Tola Riley. I just want to set the record straight once and for all. Al Mymer didn’t hurt me. He didn’t molest me. He never touched me, okay? He’s not that stupid. He knew everyone would freak out if he did.

  “I’ll be honest. I wanted him to. Man, did I want him to! Anywhere and everywhere and over and over and over.

  “But this is not some stupid high-school fling. He loves me. So we’re waiting till I turn eighteen. Then we’re free to do whatever we want, and no one can stop us. Not my mom, not this stupid school, no one.”

  “I didn’t write that,” I say, my face sizzling. “I did not write that.” But I did write things like it. Once, a long time ago, when Chelsea dared me to, I pretended to be a guy and wrote a couple of messages to some sad girl on MySpace. I didn’t think it would hurt anyone, not really. But it did. It must have.

  “They can trace all the computer stuff, so if you didn’t write it, they’ll know. We can tell Mom and she’ll have the lawyer threaten them.”

  “A lot of good that will do,” I say. “It will just pop up again somewhere else.”

  She bites her lip. “Unless you ditched school and used a computer at the public library or something.”

  “I didn’t! Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just saying that if you did—”

  “I thought you believed me.”

  “I do believe you.”

  “Then why are you saying this stuff?”

  “I’m telling you what’s on this blog, idiot. Why are you getting all mad at me?” She slams the computer shut. “You should be mad at Mom. You should hate her guts. Look what she did to you! She accused you of hooking up with a teacher in front of the whole world! After what she did!” She throws up her hands.

  Now I’m completely confused. “Wait, what did she do?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You can’t say something like that and then say ‘never mind.’”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “No,” I say, taking the computer away, “you can’t.”

  “Fine. Mom made out with Mr. Rosentople.”

  “She what?”

  “It’s why he keeps coming over here, babbling about the cat. He still wants to see Mom.”

  “But…how?” I say. “When?”

  “A while ago. Right before Dad left. I had my window open,” Madge continues, “and I heard your stupid cat yelling. So I went to find out what he was yelling about. I went outside. The meows seem to be coming from Mr. Rosentople’s yard. I wasn’t about to climb the fence, so I just cut around it by using the woods out back. From the trees, I saw them. Kissing.

  “At first, I didn’t get it. Then I almost threw up right there. I ran back home. Pib was waiting for me by the outdoor grill, yowling like someone had slammed his tail in a door. Stupid cat.”

  I sit perfectly still, thinking. “Maybe it wasn’t what it looked like.”

  “It was,” Madge says. “I saw it.”

  “Well, maybe he was the one who kissed her.”

  “Who cares who kissed who?”

  “I think it’s important,” I say. “I think it’s very important.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this when it happened?”

  “You were young.”

  “I was fourteen, not four.”

  “Yeah, well.” She grabs a pen from my desk and writes the words PUNCH DRUNK on her jeans. She draws a little fist. And another. And another. “Mom didn’t think it was a good idea to tell you, either. She asked me not to.”

  “She knows you saw?”

  “Yeah. Do you think I’d let that one go?”

  “What did she say about it?”

  Madge crinkles her brows. “Some stupid excuse about it not being what I thought, blah blah blah.”
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  “You don’t believe her?”

  “Look, what’s very important is that Dad left right after that, okay? Mom is not the ethical queen she says she is.” She pauses. “Why are you defending her? What’s wrong with you?”

  I say, “Did you ever talk about it with your therapist?”

  “Are you kidding?” she says. “He’d just give me an assignment.”

  “An assignment? What are you talking about?”

  “That’s the kind of therapist he is. I get these little jobs or tasks that are supposed to help me. Like, say, if I were having a problem shopping in the grocery store, like if I were agoraphobic or something, he might give me the task of walking in the entrance and then walking out again. Then, the week after, he’d have me walk up and down one aisle. Then, two. Like that.”

  “Do you have problems shopping in grocery stores?”

  “No, it’s just an example! You are being so weird! Every reaction you have is all wrong! And everyone thinks I’m the crazy one.”

  “Not everyone.”

  “Please,” she spits. “You don’t even try to understand what I’m going through.”

  I’m about to ask what Madge is going through, with her straight As and her gap year and the fact that no one is writing talk-show-inspired blogs about her, but for once I stop myself. I see the red eyes, the dark circles draped underneath. She’s going through something. Just because I don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not real. She has a paper bag hanging out of her back pocket. She’s exhausted. For the first time, I wonder how much she’s sleeping. If she’s sleeping at all.

  “What kind of task would he give you about Mr. Rosentople?”

  “Run him over with the car.”

  “You’d have to drive for that,” I say.

  “I’d get Mr. Doctor to run him over.”

  “Does it count if you use a proxy?”

  “Proxy? Have you been studying your vocab?”

  “Mr. Lambright rubbed off some, I guess.”

  “Mr. Lambright. I liked Mr. Lambright. I miss him.”