Pushing Perfect(63)

“When did you figure it out?” Raj asked.

“Not for a while. I don’t know whether she’d had plans all along, or whether she finally just lost it when her grandmother’s Medicare ran out and she started missing mortgage payments on her grandmother’s house to pay the nursing home bill. Either way, she called me one day and said she had an idea for how to make things better and she needed my help. She was my friend—I’d have done anything to help her. Or so I thought.”

“She told you everything?” I asked, getting excited. Now maybe we’d really have something we could use.

Mark gave a harsh laugh. Almost not really a laugh at all. “Hardly. I just got the barest outline. She had a scheme, she said, and the less I knew the better. The spoiled students would support her, she said, and they’d get what they deserved.”

I was having trouble reconciling the bitter woman Mark was describing with the teacher who’d helped me so much. The person who helped Mark with his career, mentored him, guided him—that person I recognized. But this one?

“I told her I thought she was being too harsh. The students I’d met at Marbella were great—thoughtful and focused on their work, not too mean to someone who was a sub as far as they were concerned. ‘Sure, you like them,’ she said. ‘You’re sleeping with one of them.’ I hadn’t expected that. She’d always been so cool and understanding about Justin before. She sounded like a different person, someone I didn’t really want to know. ‘Whatever your plan is, I’m not interested,’ I told her. ‘We’ll see about that,’ she said.”

“That sounds kind of terrifying,” Alex said. She sounded less cold and more forgiving toward him than she had toward Justin.

“It was,” Mark said. “I told her I understood she was going through hard times, but it wasn’t the students’ fault. And she could call me if she wanted to talk, if she’d stop whatever she was planning. All she said was that she’d see me around, and that was the last time we ever hung out.”

“But that’s not the end of the story,” Justin said. He didn’t sound any warmer than he had before. I wondered whether it was that he didn’t believe him or that it didn’t matter what Mark said.

“I didn’t hear from her for a long time.” Mark was deep into the story now, and he seemed to get that this wasn’t only about Justin anymore. “I hoped that meant she’d dropped whatever it was she’d been planning, but I knew her well enough to know she didn’t just drop things. I figured radio silence meant she wasn’t going to include me in it, which was exactly what I wanted. I missed my friend, but that’s how things go sometimes. Sometimes we lose friends, and we miss them, but we have no way to get them back.”

I hoped that wasn’t true.

“Samantha called me a few months after I told her not to,” Mark said. “She told me her plan was off to a good start but she needed some help. I reminded her that I wasn’t interested, but she said that wasn’t an option. And then she reminded me of everything she knew about me and Justin. I’d had no idea she was willing to sink that low. She told me she’d done some research into California’s statutory rape laws, and I knew I’d do whatever she said.”

“To protect yourself,” Justin said.

“Yes, to protect myself,” Mark said. “And you—I didn’t want you to get involved in a scandal, but yes, I also didn’t want to go to jail. It’s a pretty big risk I take, being with you, and I’d rather still be with you than be an unemployed registered sex offender when they let me out of prison. Does that make me such a horrible person?”

Justin didn’t say anything to that, just drank his coffee and avoided eye contact with Mark.

The waitress came over with the food and unloaded big platters in front of us. We all stared at them. Our anger-fueled hunger had faded; I knew I couldn’t manage a bite of the pancakes I’d ordered.

“Anyway, I didn’t see what else I could do but what she said. I told her everything I knew about everyone I’d heard about.”

“Including me,” Alex said.

“Justin talked about you all the time,” Mark said. “You sounded so fascinating—I was dying to meet you, when the time was right. But Samantha became obsessed with you once I told her about the money. I might have pushed Justin for more about you in particular, and I’m sorry about that.”

So it was Justin’s fault that Ms. Davenport had gone after Alex, but not for the reasons Alex had thought. I wondered whether that would make a difference to her. Justin clearly didn’t care, though. “You don’t seem to feel too bad about setting me up. She made me tell her about all the other kids at the high school.”

“I didn’t know what she was going to do,” he said. “And I did it for you. Maybe if you’d told me what she was asking, I could have done something, but you never did. Even when you got that stupid Walmart job, and I was sure it was because of her, you never told me why. Just said you were trying to get in character, some method acting kind of thing.”

I almost laughed. That wasn’t a bad story.

“That’s everything I’ve got, okay?” He turned to face Justin. “Can we go somewhere and talk now, please? Can we not hash out our whole relationship in front of your friends?”