When I didn’t go to school again on Thursday, Mr. Watley called and left a message. “Hello, this is the principal at Princess Margaret Secondary, Ronald Watley.” Ronald. How had I never known his first name? “I’m concerned that Petula hasn’t been at school for three days in a row. Please call me back at your earliest convenience.”
I deleted the message and put a reminder in my phone to call the school back at five p.m., when the office would be closed. Then I left my own message. “Hello, Ronald, this is Virginia De Wilde. Petula’s been home sick with the flu this week. My apologies for not calling earlier.”
Rachel’s texts got more persistent throughout the day. She called a few times. Koula’s texts got angrier. They started with Where u? and ended with Bitch, answer me!!
At three-thirty, someone buzzed the apartment. I was curled up on the couch, surrounded by cats, in the middle of another marathon session of daytime TV. A large woman was throwing a chair at another large woman on a talk show. The theme was “Is Your Husband a Serial Cheater?”
It was far too riveting for me to bother getting up.
On Friday morning at eight, the buzzer sounded again. I was still in bed, but my parents were up and about, so I couldn’t stop them from letting the person in.
What if it’s Jacob? I thought. I buried myself under the covers.
“She’s in her room,” I heard my dad say from the hall.
A moment later my door opened. “I am not letting you shut yourself off from me again, Petula. You need to tell me what’s going on.”
Rachel.
I told her everything.
When I was finished, she said, “Poor Jacob.”
“Really? That’s the best you’ve got?”
“I’m just saying. Imagine what it must be like for him, living with what he’s done.”
“I guess.”
“He hasn’t been at school, either.”
“I kind of figured.”
She squeezed my hand. “I’m really sorry, Petula. What a lousy week you’ve had.”
“My mind just won’t shut up. Now I think everything he told me was a lie. Everything.”
She got my meaning. “I don’t believe that. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He’s crazy about you. He couldn’t fake that.”
There was a knock on the door. “Get a move on, girls,” Dad said. “Or you’ll be late for school.”
“He’s right,” Rachel said.
“I’m not going.”
Rachel turned around and dug into her bag. When she turned back, she was wearing her Little House on the Prairie bonnet. “You know something, Mary?” she said in her best Laura Ingalls voice.
“No…what?” I answered as Mary.
“Life sure is a lot easier when you don’t like boys!”
That made me laugh, just a little.
Rachel stood up and held out her hands. “Let’s go.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. I’m not leaving till you do.” She grabbed my wrists and pulled me upright. Her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Gross. You reek.” With the bonnet still on her head, she switched to her Nellie Oleson voice. “Half the time, you don’t even smell like a girl, Laura Ingalls! You’re either sweaty, or you stink of fish!”
“Well, I sweat a lot and I fish a lot!” I answered, or rather, Laura Ingalls did.
“Seriously,” Rachel said in her own voice. “Shower. Now.”
I looked at her in her bonnet.
I wasn’t going to blow it this time, so I did as I was told.
One good thing about being unpopular is that no one seemed to notice I hadn’t been at school all week.
Except Mr. Watley. He spotted me as I was heading to YART. “Petula. You need to come see me after school.”
“Okay, Ronald,” I said without thinking.
His eyebrows shot up.
When I walked into YART, Koula, Alonzo, and Ivan were already at the table. Koula leapt up and barreled toward me. At first I thought she was coming in for another awkward hug. But no. She slugged me really hard on the arm. “Ow!”
“That’s for not answering my texts.” Then she slugged me again. “I was worried!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Tears sprang to my eyes. “It’s been a truly lousy time. First my parents. And Jacob—”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you—”
“Would you two cut it out,” Alonzo said. “We do. Jacob sent all of us a long email. He told us everything.”
Oh.
Betty stepped out of her office. She wore a bright blue suit with yellow buttons down the front.
“Holy crap, you’re like a living, breathing ad for Ikea,” blurted Koula. Without being told, she dug into her pocket and tossed a quarter onto the table. Betty put it in the almost-full mason jar.
“Jacob contacted me, too,” Betty told us. “We had a long phone chat earlier today.” She hooked up her laptop to the TV monitor. “He also sent me Koula’s finished video. I thought we could watch it.”
Jacob had edited the video to “All Apologies,” by Nirvana. Koula’s signs and facial expressions had us laughing one moment, tearing up the next.
When it was over, Betty turned up the lights. Koula grabbed a Kleenex and blew her nose. “That was really freaking good.”
“No matter what, he’s a great storyteller,” said Alonzo.
“And a great liar,” I said.
“Let’s talk about that,” said Betty. “Who would like to go first? Ivan? How are you feeling?”
Ivan had been silent until now. “Mad.” He rocked back and forth in his chair, a scowl on his face.
“Why mad?”
“Because he lied. Because he did something dumb.” I had the unkind thought that Ivan would never grow up to be a speechwriter.
“Alonzo?”
Alonzo looked at his fingernails, which were painted dark red. “I’m…I can’t compute what I know now with the guy I thought I knew. One minute I feel really angry with him. I mean, drunk driving, who does that anymore? The next minute I feel awful for him. For what it must be like to live with this. And then…then I think about his victims. The boy who died. What that must be like for the family.”
Koula nodded. “I felt super angry when I first read his email. Like I’d just been sucker punched. For twenty-four hours I wanted to kill him. I couldn’t figure out why I was so angry, like, rage angry. So, um.” She mumbled the next part.
I leaned forward. “Pardon?”
“I came to see Betty,” she said.
Betty smiled. “We had a good talk, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, we did.” Koula looked at the rest of us. “You’d be surprised. She’s pretty good one-on-one. Not the total idiot you’d expect.”
Betty coughed. “Do you want to share what you told me?”
Koula tugged at her fishnets. “Once, when I was high, I stole my dad’s car. I hit a mailbox and broke one of the headlights.
“But that mailbox could have been a kid, you know? I was mad at Jacob, sure, but I was also mad at myself. It so easily could have been me in his shoes. I didn’t set out to hurt anyone, but I was just lucky I didn’t. He wasn’t so lucky. But he also wasn’t malicious. He didn’t mean to hurt anyone, either.”
“But he did,” Ivan said.
“Yes. He did,” said Alonzo. “It was an idiotic thing to do.”
“Remember when we talked about guilt that one night?” asked Koula. “Imagine his guilt.”
“Petula?” said Betty. “Is there anything you’d like to add?”
I tried to gather my thoughts. “I feel for him, too. But he lied to us. Repeatedly. We told him everything. He told us only what he wanted us to hear.”
“Have any of you spoken to Jacob since he shared his story?”
We all shook our heads.
Betty looked at each of us. “He must be feeling very isolated.” I couldn’t tell whether or not she was giving us a slap on the wrist.
We all fell silent. Eventually Alonzo spoke. “I’m leaning toward forgiveness. I mean, there are a lot of people who will never be able to forgive him. And he’ll never be able to forgive himself. Maybe we don’t need to punish him too.”
Koula leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m with Alonzo.”
I shook my head. “Really? It’s that simple? After everything he did to us?”
“What, exactly, did he do to us?” said Alonzo. “Bring us closer together? Make us feel happy and proud and creative once in a while?”
“What a monster,” added Koula.
I did not appreciate the sarcasm.
“Plus there’s everything he did for you,” said Koula, looking at me.
“What did he do for me except lie and lead me on?”
Koula guffawed. “Seriously? You need me to spell it out? You were this paranoid little freak. Constantly dousing yourself in hand sanitizer. Leading this narrow, sad little life.”
“Scared of everything,” Alonzo added.
Ivan nodded. “You were weird, Petula.” This from the boy who sometimes answered questions with farts.
“Jacob resuscitated you,” said Koula.
“It’s true,” said Alonzo. “We’re all witnesses. He brought you back to life.”
I couldn’t believe it. I felt completely ganged up on. I looked at Betty, to see if she was going to do something, chastise them, maybe, or make them put a quarter in the Jar.
She was nodding agreement. Highly unprofessional.
Easy for all of you to talk about forgiveness, I wanted to shout. You didn’t have sex with him. You didn’t have sex with a boy who forgot to tell you he’d killed someone, and who treated you as a pity project.
You didn’t tell him you loved him, over and over again.
Fifteen minutes later I sat across from Mr. Watley in the chair with the nubby multicolored fabric. The grooves didn’t mold quite so perfectly to my bum anymore.
I tried to focus. I was still reeling from the pile-on at YART.
Mr. Watley steepled his hands under his chin. “So. The flu.”
“That’s right.” I coughed a few times for effect.
“The voice mail your mother left yesterday. It sounded a lot like you.”
“People confuse the two of us on the phone all the time.”
He stared at me with his watery eyes. “Mr. Cohen hasn’t been here all week, either.”
“I don’t know anything about that.” I sat back in the nubby chair. It was rather nice being back in Mr. Watley’s office. Comforting and familiar, like a pair of old slippers.
But I did notice one change. A pottery bowl with a lid had taken the place of my mason jar snow globe on his desk. I felt a tug of envy that someone else’s craft had usurped mine.
Mr. Watley picked up a thick folder. “I’d like you to take him his homework.”
“What? Why me?”
“Because you’re friends.”
“Not anymore.”
“Petula, I’m not asking you to marry him and raise a family.” He pushed the folder across the desk. “Just take him his darn homework.”
I didn’t pick the folder up. “Who gave you the pottery, sir?”
“It’s an urn. It holds Martha’s ashes.”
My heart sank. “Your wife?”
“Goodness, no! Our pug. She lived a good, long life. But still…her absence is keenly felt.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Thank you. Now will you please take Mr. Cohen’s homework and go? I have a golf game in half an hour and I don’t want to miss my tee time.”
I looked at the folder. I looked at the urn. “Tell you what.”
“What?”
“I’ll bring Jacob his homework if you do something for me in return.”
He sighed. “Petula, are you trying to bribe me?”
I thought for a moment. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it, yes.”