Solomon turned the car radio on, but I switched it right back off.
I looked up at my house. Pristine gray paint. The home I had never felt completely at home in, but loved all the same.
“What do you want to do?” I asked Solomon. “Wait out here? Down in the basement?”
He looked off into the distance, and I was afraid he’d want to leave. Go off on another one of his weird, wild journeys. The time we’d spent together was making me feel strong, stable . . . and I hoped it wasn’t just pride that made me think it was helping him too.
“I’ll take a nap in the back,” he said, opening his door. “I’m so tired.”
I hadn’t told him, that I meant to tell my parents. Half of me thought maybe he wouldn’t want me to. Wanted to keep this secret. Because telling my parents meant something might happen. And maybe that would get Mr. Barrett punished, but it also might make headlines, become gossip, cause a backlash . . . make Solomon’s life even more hellish than it already was.
But staying silent couldn’t be the right call. Could it?
“That sounds great,” I said, watching him curl up across both back seats. “I love you, Solomon.”
“I love you too,” he said.
I headed inside. “Hey, honey,” my mother said, when I got to the kitchen. Dad was there too, and I said a prayer of thanks that I’d only have to have this conversation once.
“Hey,” I said. “I need to talk to you two.”
I looked at my hands while I tried to figure out how to do this. Where to start. What to ask. They were ruined, my hands. All those photo chemicals. They looked like they belonged to an eighty-year-old. I’d need to moisturize, soon, and often.
“I saw something terrible,” I said, without really putting any thought into how to say it. “I saw Mr. Barrett molesting Solomon.”
“What?” my mother yelped.
My father spoke too. “Ashley, what are you—”
“It was up in the treehouse,” I blurted. “When we were twelve. The day I fell out of the tree.”
“No,” my mother whispered, but it wasn’t the no of “I don’t believe you.” It was the no of “Please, God, no.”
They stared into each other’s eyes. Grasped each other’s hands. Their faces searching.
I knew they were trying to make sense of a world that seemed to crack open. A world they didn’t recognize.
“Ash,” my father said, but it wasn’t the Ash of “Come on, Ash, don’t be ridiculous.” It was the Ash of “Oh my god.”
“Fuck,” my father said, and clamped both his hands over his mouth. “Fuck.” Stumbled backward, leaned against the wall.
I felt the tears threaten to spill over my cheeks. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I—”
My father shook his head. Held up his hand to silence my apology.
“All these years,” he said, his voice so low it was hard to hear. “George, he—he always said that Solomon was crazy. Said he had persecution fantasies—told me that, over and over. Said he tried to hurt Connor. Implied that he had something to do with your falling out of the tree. And I believed him. I treated Solomon like a criminal.”
I remembered what Mr. Barrett had said to me, about Solomon’s mother coming from an Orthodox Jewish background. The casual, quiet anti-Semitism of it, implying: You know how those people are. How many times had he repeated that line, to the people around town? How many people had he convinced she was crazy?
“Abusers they—they discredit their victims,” Mom said, her voice barely bigger than a whisper. “Make everyone think they’re liars or—or crazy. So if they ever do ask for help, they . . .”
They won’t get any. My mother couldn’t finish.
And then my father started to cry.
I hadn’t expected this from him. I’d expected denial, him trying to tell me how his Good, Good Buddy Mr. Barrett wasn’t capable of anything so awful.
My mother took me by the arm, pulled me into a hug. Eventually my father joined in.
An hour later I returned to the car, with two mugs full of black coffee.
“Hey,” Solomon said. He was lying there, eyes open, looking past the ceiling. Holding his guitar, picking out haphazard strings of notes.
“Hey,” I said, handing him back his coffee. “Did you nap?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It was nice. You’ve been crying.”
“Yeah,” I said, and left a little silence, in case he wanted to talk about it, but he just kept strumming. I felt weird, light-headed. Powerful.
I need to do some research, my father had said. Talk to some people. See what we can do about this.
I’ll call Jocelyn, Mom had said. She’s a lawyer. I’ll give her the general info—nothing specific—and see what our options are.
Promise me, I’d said. You won’t do anything without telling Solomon first. Making sure he’s okay with it. We can’t hurt him any worse than he’s already been hurt. And they’d promised. My parents hadn’t fixed anything, but Solomon and I weren’t in this alone. That made a difference.
“I’m going to Justin’s house now,” I said. “I’m confronting them all. The whole team, one at a time, for what they’ve done.”
“Why?” Solomon asked. “That seems totally crazy.”
I opened my mouth to answer, but realized I didn’t have one.
I thought of Mr. Barrett. Whatever he was, he hadn’t always been like that. He’d been a kid once, and full of magic like all children are. Somewhere along the line he got broken, twisted. And started hurting people.
“Because I want to believe that people have a choice,” I said, struggling not to whisper. “Whether to become monsters. I want to believe that if you give them a chance, they’ll choose not to continue hurting people.” I paused. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is totally crazy. Do you want to come?”
“Where you go I go,” he said.
Which was lucky, because if he had said no, I might not have been able to do it on my own.
We went.
I wish I could say that I walked in there knowing exactly what to say, how to make them see the light, how to get them to do the right thing. But that’s not the way it was. I was scared, and awkward, and didn’t know what the hell to do.
Justin’s house smelled like steamed dumplings, and his mom was supernice to us and I felt really awful handing him the photo I’d developed with my eyes shut, channeling (the other side) whatever gave me the ability to see things that weren’t there, but were still real.
He stared at it for a long time, and then handed it back to me. Looked from me to Solomon and then back again. “How did you get this?”
So he could see it. So they were visible to the person who was in them.
“Never mind how,” I said.
His Induction had been pretty mild, compared to the swastikas and arson of some of his teammates. He’d put a dirty magazine into the backpack of Rory Lowell, a Jehovah’s Witness classmate of ours so strait-laced that back in first grade he had to go to the principal’s office whenever we celebrated someone’s birthday.
The photo didn’t show what happened when the magazine was discovered. If a parent found it and flipped out, or if Rory found it and recognized it for the bullying tactic that it was, if he got scared and upset. Or if he was superhappy about this forbidden fruit landing in his lap. It just showed a slightly blurry Justin sneaking it into Rory’s backpack.
“Are you going to show my mom?”
My heart broke, at that. At the sadness in his voice. He wasn’t scared of the cops or the teachers. He just didn’t want to disappoint his mom.
“I’m not going to show anyone,” I said, and did not add, because no one but you and I can see this photo. “But I want to stop the Induction Ceremonies, and I want your help.”
He nodded. He listened.
“Sheffield is the one who should go down for this,” I said. “He’s the mastermind. But he only has the power that you give him. If everybody got together, you could stop this before it gets any worse. Before people get hurt, or go to jail.”
He nodded, but slowly. He wasn’t agreeing to anything. Not yet.
Thinking about Sheffield as the mastermind, it occurred to me for the first time to wonder what Mr. Barrett’s place might be in all of this—the destruction planned by the football team he coached. If he knew about it; if he was involved.
“Thanks, Ash. For not telling my mom.”
“No problem,” I said. “Just please don’t mention this to anyone, okay? Not yet.”
“And stay tuned,” Solomon said, standing up. “We’ll call you soon, with how we’re proceeding. What we need from you.”
“Yeah,” Justin said, and stood up too, and shook our hands very awkwardly. “Sure.”
“One down, twenty-nine to go,” I said to Solomon, when we were back in the car.
“You’re amazing,” he said.
“I learned it from watching you,” I said.
In the rearview mirror, I looked at how he stared out the window. His face seemed to lose focus, and I wondered what he was seeing. From my car speakers, Ms. Jackson told us about the Hudson Police Department’s plans for an increased presence at the annual Halloween dance, in light of recent destructive acts.