Stood up.
That’s where I was last night, I was home. Stood up.
My name is Maddie. It’s short for Madelyn Canfield. I live in Southbridge, New York, up in the hills on Lake Road. I’ve lived there as long as I can remember. The road got its name from the lake at the end of it. On the shore of that lake is a small private school, kindergarten through high, with the name of—guess what?—Lakeside School.
Because it was so convenient, even though expensive, that was the school I attended for most of my life. So did my brother, Ben. Just last year, each for reasons of our own, both of us transferred to the public school in town. Ben was a senior and I a junior. Now he’s graduated and I am about to start my senior year.
Ben’s graduation was a couple of months ago. Last night his former Lakeside class held a get-together before they all went off to college. Ben was invited but chose not to go. He’s not much of a socializer, and he had his reasons. I, too, was invited, because of Ben and also I knew most of the people. I had planned to show up briefly and show off my boyfriend, Rick Falco, but he stood me up.
It wasn’t his fault, and he did call to let me know, but all the same, I was devastated.
Okay, let’s not go overboard. “Disappointed” might be a more reasonable word. Very disappointed. It’s what I get for dating a cop. Something always “comes up.” It’s the nature of the job.
Every time it happened, my mother would give a sigh of relief. She thought that, at seventeen, I was too young to be dating a twenty-three-year-old police officer. Never mind that it was the same age span as between her and Daddy, but in their case it was okay. It was not okay for me.
My parents rented a movie and invited me to watch it with them but I wasn’t in the mood. Instead, I watched an old DVD on my computer, and went to bed early.
Good thing I did. The early part, I mean. I woke to the chirping of my cell phone. The sun was up, but just barely. Was I missing something? Had school started already and they were only now calling to tell me? On Sunday?
The readout on my phone said Glyn. That would be Glynis Goode, my old best bud when I went to Lakeside. She was still my bud but I didn’t see her so often anymore.
I started to ask her about the party when she interrupted me. “Oh, Maddie.”
That sounded serious. I said, “Hello to you, too. What’s up?”
She plunged right in. “You know that girl your brother was stalking?”
“Ben did not stalk anybody!” I said. “She misunderstood and so did the school because they’re all too stupid to know or care anything about Asperger syndrome.”
It dawned on me that all that was last year and probably not why she called. Could Kelsey Fritz be dead, or something?
“What about her?” I asked.
“That party last night. I missed you.”
“I told you, Rick couldn’t—”
She interrupted, again. “You were right not to go. Evan was there.”
“Evan Steffers? What was he doing there? Okay, I know it was his class but I thought he was long gone.”
“You knew he was back, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess. I’m glad I couldn’t go.”
“They were all there, him and the other jocks. Kelsey got drunk and—”
“Kelsey? Drunk?” I was amazed Kelsey even went to the party. It didn’t seem like her kind of thing.
“I think it was the first time for her,” Glyn said. “I—I—I’m afraid I—I—sort of encouraged it.”
“You didn’t!”
“I thought it would help her relax. She was very tense. I knew it was hard for her just to be there. She had to force herself. I was trying, Maddie. I just didn’t know.”
This was taking forever. “Didn’t know what?”
“How it would turn out.”
“How did it turn out?” The way she was going, I still thought Kelsey must be dead.
“It was Evan,” Glyn said.
No surprise there. If something bad happened, you could count on Evan being involved.
“Glyn, would you please just tell me?”
“I didn’t mean that about your brother. I should have said ‘accused of stalking.’”
“That’s a little better, but right now we’re talking about Kelsey. And Evan. Would you please, please tell me what happened?” I braced myself by sitting up and putting my feet on the floor. If somebody I knew had died, I didn’t want to hear about it lying in bed—
Glynis had such trouble getting it out, I figured whatever happened was because of Kelsey being drunk and Glyn took all the guilt on herself.
“Just tell me what it’s about,” I said. “Twenty-five words or less. Nobody’s blaming you.”
“I’m blaming me. And you will, too, when you hear the rest of it.”
“When will that be?”
“Okay, okay. She had a Tom Collins and it made her feel so relaxed, she had another. And another. And I got up to go to the bathroom and Evan came along. He must have seen his advantage.”
“Evan?” That was an unlikely combination. “Evan and Kelsey?”
“You know Evan,” Glyn said. “He’s a predator. Either Kelsey didn’t know how to get rid of him or she was flattered by his attention. He’s good at that.”
She didn’t have to tell me about Evan’s wiles. But what could he have done— “He raped her?”
“Um—yes. Upstairs. In a bedroom. With the other guys. I think they all did. They got her clothes off and took pictures.”
I snatched up my pillow and screamed into it. Not Kelsey, of all people! This was a whole lot worse than the Evan I used to know. “Was she conscious?”
“Not much, but she might have been, a little. She’ll find out anyway. Jerks like that usually put those pictures on the Internet, just to prove what jerks they are.”
Kelsey was the sort of person who would die. Just die. I couldn’t imagine this happening to her. Not that I liked her very much after what she did to Ben, but it shouldn’t happen to anybody. Especially a person like Kelsey who freaked out just because Ben wanted to talk to her. Okay, he might’ve pushed a little hard, and she thought that was bad. Now along comes Evan. . . .
“What’s that crud doing here, anyway?” I said. “Why couldn’t he stay in New Hampshire?”
“What would they want him for? I heard he got readmitted to Lakeside.”
“He didn’t. How come he’s still in high school? He should’ve graduated by now.”
“I think he screwed up there, too, so he has to repeat his senior year. And Lakeside wants him, of course, for the team.”
“He’s allowed to play football? They kicked him off, you know, after that time he broke into my house and tried to drag me away.”
“Yeah,” Glyn remembered. “I guess they got over that.”
“But I didn’t. I hate to think what would’ve happened if it weren’t for Ben and our dogs.”
“Yeah,” she said again. “But you know how Lakeside is about football. It has to do with getting alumni money.”
“That’s what colleges do! Lakeside’s just a stupid little—oh, sorry. I forgot you still go there.”
“That’s okay,” Glyn said. “I sort of agree with you about the football. It makes people like Evan think they’re bigger than they are.”
That brought me back to the latest mess. “They took pictures? How do you know?”
“They bragged about it. I heard them say something about Facebook. They weren’t too sober themselves at that point. I asked them what the hell they thought they were doing and they asked did I want some. They said Kelsey wanted it. That she begged for it.”
“Capital B capital S. Glyn, you’re a witness that she was in no condition to do that.”
The depth of Evan’s depravity appalled me. And to think, I once—I can’t use the word “love” in the same sentence with Evan. Okay, I once dated him.
“Sick,” I said. “They’re all sick. What is there to brag about? Do they think it makes them heroes or something, to rape a passed-out drunk girl? And everybody’s going to say it was her fault for getting drunk.”
“It’s my fault!” Glyn wailed. “I shouldn’t have gone to pee.”
“When nature calls, you gotta answer.”
“Yes, but I saw him get her another drink. I tried to let her know she shouldn’t take it but she didn’t catch on. Then I really had to go. I didn’t know what he was doing till he got her upstairs. I would’ve stopped him.”
“He’d have brushed you aside and done it anyway. Or gotten you, too. Okay, where do we go from here?”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Boil it in oil.”
“Boil what?”
“It. What else? Okay, that’s not realistic. It’s too bad Rick wasn’t there. But I’ll tell him all about it. Do you think Kelsey would be able to testify?”
“I think Kelsey would rather die,” said Glyn. “But those pictures. How do you get pictures off the Internet if you’re not the one who put them there?”
“I’ll ask Ben. Or maybe Rick would know.” Although Rick was not the computer geek, that Ben was. But Rick knew crime, and rape was a crime. Taking pictures of it must have been sort of a crime.
“I’m sure Ben has the know-how,” Glyn said. “But would he do anything? After what happened between them?”
An aroma of cinnamon wafted up from the kitchen and through my closed door. My mother was baking her Sunday morning coffeecake. In honor of Ben’s leaving for college in a few days.
“I’ve never known Ben to hold a grudge,” I said. “He puts things in perspective. He knows she didn’t understand about Asperger’s. Most people don’t know what it’s really like. And she’s such a wimp. Anyway, it’s an interesting technological problem. He likes those.”
Ben’s door was closed. He might have been sleeping late, having quit his summer job because he was going off to MIT. That’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You had to be really smart to get in, and Ben was.
I took a quick shower, put on clean shorts and shirt, and went downstairs.
Daddy was already there, enjoying his once-a-week bacon and eggs. The eggs were scrambled and I got some, too. As was my habit, I sprinkled them with grated parmesan. My mother, who I call Rhoda, thought that was atrocious.
“Any word about the party last night?” She knew I’d been stood up.
I didn’t want to tell her everything yet. It wasn’t breakfast table conversation. I felt a pang, thinking how Kelsey’s morning must be.
“Glyn called,” was all I said. “I’m glad I didn’t go. Evan was there.”
“I thought he left the area.”
“He’s ba-a-ack. Isn’t that nice?” How could Rhoda not know? “He’s been back for quite a while, as you must have noticed. Who do you think’s been plaguing me?”
Ben came down the stairs. Should I tell him now or later? I decided to let him eat in peace, but I had to catch him before he took off for somewhere.
My parents adopted Ben just before they found out they were having me. They didn’t know he had Asperger’s. It’s a high-functioning form of autism. But they were good parents for an Asperger kid. They were patient and understanding and, to top it off, Rhoda was a professional psychologist.
Ben and I didn’t look much alike. I was a middle European type with brown hair and green eyes. He was more a southern type, olive-skinned with hair almost black and eyes a deep chocolate. He had the kind of looks that set girls swooning. All except one, Kelsey Fritz.
Ben didn’t eat bacon, which left more for me. He was an on-again off-again vegetarian. When he first started that, Rhoda obliged him by planning special dishes that could be adapted either way. But the habit became so erratic, she lost track. He now had to do his own adapting, but he let it be known that it would benefit the rest of us to eat a more plant-based diet. For health reasons, he emphasized, if not out of regard for animals.
Daddy had no intention of changing his ways. He figured that six non-bacon days a week was good enough for his health.
Ben lingered over a second cup of coffee, so I started right in. “Guess who was at the Brandons’ party last night.”
“Can’t possibly.”
“Kelsey Fritz. I understand she’s been in therapy. Maybe she wanted to see if she was over her hang-ups.”
I didn’t need to explain what her hang-ups were. He’d had firsthand experience with that.
It all happened more than a year ago. They were classmates then, at Lakeside. Having a lot of the same interests, especially science fiction, they got to be great friends. Or so he thought. People with Asperger’s have trouble understanding where other people are coming from. To him it seemed as though he and Kelsey were on the same wavelength. When a sci-fi movie was playing in Hudson Hills, he asked her to go with him.
You’d have thought he threatened her with something ghastly. It was only an innocent movie date, but Kelsey freaked and literally ran away
It was the first time he ever asked a girl out and he thought he must have made some horrible mistake. He kept trying to find out what he’d done wrong.
I mean kept trying. He really wanted to know. It was part of his Asperger’s, the social awkwardness and the wanting to wrap things up with a neat bow. He could never be sure he was doing things right. An explanation would have helped, but she wouldn’t talk to him. She panicked if he so much as got near her. Being an Aspie, he had no idea that his persistence was having that effect. And she, being the terrified wimp that she was, had no idea that her running away caused him to persist—even though he told her he only wanted to apologize if he’d done something wrong.
Finally, she went whining to the school authorities. (If I sound biased—well heck, I am.) Even though it should have been in their records that he had Asperger’s, they seemed to have no clue as to what it was all about. It never entered their pea brains that they could have solved the whole problem if they got the two together and helped them understand each other.
Instead they suspended him from school, charged him with sexual harassment (which it wasn’t), and planned a big lawyer-oriented hearing. (Our daddy was a lawyer, but he did real estate law, which is relatively harmless.) The whole thing got Ben so sick and disgusted that he quit Lakeside and transferred to Southbridge High. I had made the same transfer just a short time earlier in a futile attempt to escape from Evan Steffers. So goodbye, Lakeside. From both of us.
I thought Ben would flinch when I mentioned Kelsey’s name. He didn’t. He drank his coffee and gazed out the window.
“It really surprised me,” I said. “She’s such a bashful wimp. And now she’ll have even more reason to be bashful.”
His eyes shifted to me. I hadn’t sounded charitable. And bashful was a gross understatement of how she must have felt. I told him the whole story of Kelsey getting drunk. And Evan. And the Internet.