Tease(11)

“I’m supposed to do the grocery shopping now?” This is a new one. I mean, run to the store for extra supplies, sure, but—

She sighs again and sits on the foot of my bed, still holding the towel.

“Bear,” she says, the nickname startling me. I haven’t heard it in months, and for some reason it makes my chest hurt. “I know you’re going through a rough time. But Natalie says this is all going to blow over, we’ll be back to normal soo—”

“When did she say that?” I ask sharply. I never heard her say that.

Mom must interpret my question differently, though, because she says, “I talk to her on the phone sometimes,” and her voice is angry again. Or defensive, I guess. “I’m sorry I can’t always be there for your meetings, but this affects me, too.”

I shrug. “It just doesn’t seem like it’s gonna blow over,” I say. “I mean, they had some other lawyer there today, and they’re still asking me about everything. There’s a lot of . . . like, notes and stuff. Everyone was taking notes.”

I don’t really feel like talking to her about this, but I figure she should know. About a month ago we sort of silently agreed she didn’t have to come with me to Natalie’s anymore. It’s not like there are set appointments, exactly, and when the office does call, Natalie always wants to see us during business hours. It was getting to be too much time away from my mom’s job, and all the questions were for me, anyway.

But then we kind of stopped talking about it altogether, I guess. We were never one of those, like, crime-fighting mother-daughter teams on TV who tell each other everything about their days. And now we don’t see each other much at all. Even when we’re in the same room.

“That’s just procedure,” my mom is saying now. “If they don’t write everything down, they can’t bill us.” She huffs a little, like she’s trying to laugh, but I can see she doesn’t really think it’s funny. Natalie isn’t the fanciest lawyer in town, but that doesn’t mean she’s working for free.

I look down at the quilt on my bed, pulling at the frayed edge of one of the squares. It’s handmade, but not by anyone I know. My parents got it for me at an antiques fair a long time ago. I remember Mom was carrying Tommy in the baby pouch, which is what we always called the little carrier thing, and Dad got all excited about this guy selling old vinyl records. I think they wanted me to feel excited about having a baby brother, so they were redecorating my room. But we only got as far as buying this quilt, cornflower-blue and sunny-yellow squares stitched together to make a big star. On the way home we’d stopped for ice cream and Tommy started crying, so Mom had to sit in the car and nurse him while Dad and I kept eating at the little outdoor table next to the parking lot. Even then, Dad didn’t really know how to talk to me, or hadn’t wanted to. We’d just eaten in silence, then gotten back in the car to drive home.

“I’m parked on the street,” Mom says, standing up again. “You just need to get out of the driveway for a second, it won’t kill you. Where are your shorts?” She’s shaking out my towel and hurrying out of my room.

I guess we’re done talking too.

The thing that sucks about summer school is everything. All the things about it suck. The school itself just feels totally sad—the parking lot is practically empty; the halls are only half lit; the grown-ups wear clothes so casual you realize they were actually trying to look professional during the regular year. And the airconditioning isn’t turned on all the way, so the whole place is sort of sticky and smelly all the time.

Brielle’s parents worked something out where she doesn’t have to be here, but when you can barely afford to pay your lawyer, much less make a donation to the school board or whatever they did, you don’t get special tutors. So it’s just me and the usual slackers, the kids you don’t see during the year because they’re skipping to smoke weed or drink or play video games all day at, like, their older brother’s apartment.

Dylan and the other guys didn’t miss very much school this spring, and Dylan didn’t get kicked off the baseball team. The charges were filed in April but things didn’t really get going until almost the end of the year, so I guess no one saw the point of derailing the boys’ senior year. And anyway, people weren’t as mad at them, Dylan especially, as they were—are—at me and Brielle. I don’t know why. I’m mad at him. I think. My mom used to say he was just as responsible as anyone; that he and Jacob and Tyler should take more of the blame. But lately I think she blames me and Brielle the most too.

Of course, Tyler is up on his own charges, since Emma was under eighteen and he wasn’t. So maybe the guys are getting their share of punishment, I don’t know. Natalie says we won’t see Tyler even if we go to court.

No one seems to care anymore that Emma was messed up. I mean, who starts at a new school and within three months has had that many hookups? Obviously someone who came to that new school because she’d been messed up at her old one—someone who was already in therapy, already on antidepressants, already a head case.

Seriously, if what happened with Emma pushed everyone to suicide, every high school in America would be empty.

“Okay, people, follow the steps on the board. And write down your work. One of you does the work, one of you writes it down, got it?”