Phyllis checked the time as she and Chase stepped into the short hallway leading to the gym. She had only a few minutes before she would need to head back to her classroom, but what she was doing here might be important, too.
“How much has Ronnie told you about what happened up in Pennsylvania?” Chase asked.
“Not a lot,” Phyllis answered, deliberately being vague.
“She never said anything about the two of us going to the same school up there?”
Phyllis raised an eyebrow in feigned surprise. She couldn’t admit she already knew about that without telling Chase she’d been looking into his background, and she didn’t want to do that. If he knew, he might decide not to tell her anything.
“She made it sound just the opposite, in fact, as if she didn’t know you until she came down here.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not true. We weren’t close or anything, but we knew each other up there. We were in a couple of classes together. I never really paid much attention to her, though, until that business with Shelby Vance started.”
Now he was talking about something Phyllis actually knew nothing about. She hadn’t run across the name Shelby Vance when she was searching for information about Chase on the Internet.
So she was sincere when she asked, “Who’s Shelby Vance?”
“The most popular girl in school. And the head mean girl.”
Over the years of teaching junior high, Phyllis had seen plenty of “most popular” girls. The cheerleaders. The athletes. The rich girls. The ones who had developed physically earlier than their peers.
Unlike the stereotypes found so often in movies and TV shows, many of those girls were smart, sweet, and genuinely nice young people. Some weren’t, of course—enough so to give rise to that stereotype. According to what Chase was saying, Shelby Vance fit into that category.
“What’s the connection between this Vance girl and Ronnie?” Phyllis asked.
“None at first. I mean, they moved in completely different circles. But then Shelby noticed Ronnie one day, and she decided to have some fun.”
“But it wasn’t fun for Ronnie,” Phyllis guessed.
Chase shook his head. “You know how she is. She likes being an outsider, being different. It’s not just her hair, it’s her whole attitude, the way she considered herself apart from most of the people in school. And that comes across as looking down on them. It’s like a red flag to a girl like Shelby, who has to feel like she’s better than everybody else or her whole concept of herself collapses. She started making fun of Ronnie, and of course all her friends had to follow suit, and suddenly it was like Shelby was running this whole campaign of terror against Ronnie, not just at school but on social media and other places in town, wherever their paths happened to cross.”
“You’re saying Ronnie was bullied.”
“Yeah, big time.”
“I never heard anything about this. Did she tell her parents or any of her teachers?”
Chase scoffed and shook his head. “Ronnie’s not the type who runs to some authority figure for help. She tried to deal with it herself. She asked Shelby to leave her alone. Of course, that didn’t do a bit of good.”
“It might have even made things worse,” Phyllis mused.
“Yeah, maybe. Anyway, I kind of knew what was going on, but I didn’t really pay much attention to it. I mean, Ronnie didn’t run in my crowd or anything.”
Your crowd of drug dealers, Phyllis thought, but she kept that to herself since Chase seemed to be opening up to her.
“Then Jerry Plemmons and his buddies started harassing her.”
“Who?”
“Plemmons was Shelby Vance’s boyfriend,” Chase said. “If Shelby was the mean girl stereotype, then Plemmons was the dumb jock. Not really dumb, mind you, but he acted like it sometimes. And of course he did whatever Shelby told him to do. He and his friends started pushing Ronnie around. A couple of her guy friends tried to stand up for her, but they were, well . . .”
“Weirdos like her,” Phyllis guessed.
Chase grunted. “Yeah. I probably wouldn’t have thought of that word, but it’s a good one. They got beat up, and that was the last time anybody tried to defend Ronnie.”
“Until you got fed up with it and stepped in.” It was a guess on Phyllis’s part, but given everything she knew, where else could this story be leading?
“That’s right. I told Plemmons to back off and take his buddies with him, and he figured he’d whip me like he whipped those other guys.”
“I suppose it didn’t work out that way,” Phyllis said, shaking her head.
“Not quite. I didn’t hurt him enough to put him in the hospital, but he woke up sore and shaking for a week, I’ll bet.” Chase smiled a little, as if the memory was a fond one. “That was enough of a message for everybody else to decide it would be a good idea if they left Ronnie alone. It would have been fine with me if she had never heard about what happened—”
“But she did, and you were her hero,” Phyllis said. “Her knight in shining armor. She would never think of it in those terms, but that was the way she felt.”
“I guess. I wouldn’t think of it like that, either.” A wry laugh came from Chase. “Nobody ever considered me any kind of a hero before.”
It was hard to be heroic when you were selling drugs and ruining other people’s lives, Phyllis thought. But at the same time, she couldn’t help but feel a small surge of gratitude that Chase had stepped in and put a stop to the bullying that targeted Ronnie as its victim.
“After that, some other things happened that didn’t have anything to do with Ronnie, and I wound up leaving town,” Chase went on. “But before I left, she made it pretty clear she had a crush on me, and she talked about how the two of us ought to run away together and come down here to Texas where her grandfather lived. She claimed we were meant to be together. I didn’t believe that, of course. I didn’t fall for her or anything. I just tried to help out a kid who was—and no offense here—kind of pathetic. That’s all.” He shrugged. “When I decided to leave town, I remembered her talking about Weatherford. She made it sound like a pretty nice place. So I thought I’d give it a try. Hey, it’s a long way from Pennsylvania.”
“It never occurred to you that she might run away and follow you down here?”
“I swear to you it didn’t, Mrs. Newsom.” His expression hardened. “The last thing I wanted was any of my trouble from up there following me down here.”
Phyllis could easily imagine that, considering how much of his trouble had been with the law.
He seemed sincere, though, and she decided that she believed him . . . for now. She would keep an open mind, though, and open eyes, as well, for anything that might contradict what he had told her.
And none of his story, even if it was completely true, meant that he wasn’t dealing drugs here at Courtland High School. Maybe he had some decency left in his character that had led him to defend Ronnie. Phyllis was grateful for that. It didn’t absolve him of his wrongdoing.
But neither was it her job to bring drug dealers to justice. The law would take care of that, as best it could. Her only real goal was to keep Ronnie from being hurt.
“If you’re telling me the truth about not having any . . . romantic feelings . . . for Ronnie, I hope you’ll continue trying to discourage her.”
“That’s exactly what I want to do, and as far as I’m concerned, you can discourage her, too. It won’t offend me. Like I told you, I wish you’d try to talk some sense into her head.”
“I intend to,” Phyllis said. “In the meantime, you can keep your distance from her.”
“Yeah, believe me, that’s not always easy to do. She keeps ambushing me.”
“Try,” Phyllis said, and before she could add anything else, the bell rang for the end of C Lunch and the beginning of the passing period. She started to turn away, but she paused to say, “Thank you . . . for what you did for her.”
“She’s a good kid. She didn’t deserve the crappy way they were treating her. I’d say that she ought to try to blend in more, but that just wouldn’t be Ronnie, would it?”
“No,” Phyllis said. “I don’t suppose it would.”
◄♦►
By the time Phyllis got there, all the students were in the classroom, waiting for fifth period to begin. She had to put everything that was going on with Ronnie and Chase out of her thoughts and concentrate on the lessons she needed to teach that afternoon.
When classes were over for the day, though, she allowed herself to think once more about the dilemma facing her. Sam still didn’t know anything about what had happened. Phyllis had uncovered a great deal in the past twenty-four hours, and she could share all of it with him. She was sure he would be very interested, especially because the bullying Ronnie had undergone in Pennsylvania went a long way toward explaining her behavior problems over the past year. The girl had kept it all to herself, unwilling to share the burden with her parents. That was admirable in a way . . . but probably not very wise.
Even though Sam and his daughter and son-in-law probably would be upset to learn the truth, it might be a relief as well. At least they would know Ronnie hadn’t been using drugs.
But then, as Phyllis sat at the desk in the now empty classroom and frowned, she realized that she didn’t know that. Everything Chase had told her could be absolutely true, and none of it eliminated the possibility of Ronnie having a drug problem. Phyllis closed her eyes, raised a hand to her temple, and moaned slightly.
“What’s wrong? Got a headache?”
Sam’s voice, speaking unexpectedly from the doorway, made her give a little start and jerk her head up. “What?” she said, then realized what he’d asked and went on, “No, I’m fine. Nothing at all to worry about. It was just a long day, that’s all.”
“Most of ’em are. And yet when you get to be our age, time seems to shoot by so fast.”
“Yes, that’s a paradox, isn’t it?” Phyllis started gathering up the papers stacked in various places around the desk. This was Friday afternoon, and she’d have some grading to do over the weekend. But at least she didn’t have to get all of it done by the next morning.
“One week until the Friday the Thirteenth dance, too,” Sam said, reminding Phyllis that she probably should do some recipe experimenting over the weekend, to go along with the grading. “Still lookin’ forward to it?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’m not really superstitious. I hope Friday the Thirteenth turns out lucky for all of us.”