In the afternoons, after the end of the school day, she goes up the hidden access ladder onto the roof. And up there, behind a ventilation drum above the dining room, a teacher can stand and look out across almost the whole of Beartown and have a cigarette without anyone seeing. That’s the worst habit of all.
She can see the tunnel from there, the one built under the main road to keep the children safe. She sees Leo and the girl go in. Only the girl runs out. Jeanette sees William and his guys approach from both directions. She drops her cigarette and runs for the ladder. This is a small school in a small town, but the building feels endless when you’re running through it in panic.
* * *
Kira and Maya arrive home. When Maya goes into her room, Kira sees the concert tickets on her wall. She can still remember the very first one, possibly more clearly than her daughter, and how Maya and Ana carried the tickets in their pockets for weeks. They secretly bought eye shadow and put far too much on, then cut off their denim shorts until they were way too revealing. Kira dropped them off outside the concert and made them promise to come straight out the moment it was over, and they promised and laughed, and they were only children but Kira knew she’d lost them, ever so slightly, at that moment. They ran off toward the stage hand in hand, along with hundreds of other screaming girls, and that first taste of freedom is something you can never take away from someone. Music transformed Maya and Ana, and even if they chose completely different styles of music later in life and did nothing but argue about what was “junkie music” and what was “bleep-bleep music,” they still had that in common: music saved something inside them that might otherwise have been lost. Imagination, power, a glowing spark in their chests that always reminded them: “Don’t let the bastards tell you what to be, go your own way, dance badly and sing loudly and become the best!”
Now Maya is sixteen years old and she kisses her mom on the cheek and goes into her room. Her mom sits in the kitchen thinking about all the stories about girls being trampled and crushed at concerts in recent years, about terrorists bombing arenas. What if she had known all that back then? Would she have let the girls go? Not a chance. How can you ever do that again when you know that the whole world wants to hurt your child?
* * *
Jeanette will always wonder what would have happened if she’d gotten there faster. Would William have found it easier to back down then? Would Leo have been less full of hate? Would the guys at the ends of the tunnel have been able to admit to themselves that things had gone too far?
She yanks William’s heavy body out of the way. He’s lucky; he recognizes her quickly enough to stop himself taking a swing at her, too. There’s a wild look in her eyes; they’re a fighter’s eyes, not a teacher’s. William gasps for breath and doesn’t even look at Leo when he splutters, “It was him who started it! He was asking for it!”
Jeanette will always feel ashamed of what she does next. She has no excuse. But everything that happened in the spring, the rape and silence toward one of the girls in Jeanette’s own school and the vile behavior that this community demonstrated afterward filled Jeanette with shame and anger. She’s not alone; the whole town is angry. She sees the same thing in William Lyt; he’s just angry at different things than she is. We rarely take out our anger on those who deserve it; we just take it out on whoever is standing closest.
“What did you say?” Jeanette hisses.
“He was asking for it!” William Lyt repeats.
Her kick hits him so hard in the side of his knee that his body disappears; he falls as if he’s been shot. Her balance is so perfect that she’s already standing on both feet by the time he hits the ground, so relaxed that she could have started whistling.
But when she realizes what she’s just done, her lungs tighten. Her martial arts coach always used to stress, “Never lose control! Never let your feeling grab the wheel, Jeanette. Because that’s when you do really stupid things!”
* * *
Kira is sobbing helplessly in the kitchen, hiding her face in her sweater so her daughter won’t hear her. On the other side of the door her daughter is lying on her bed beneath walls covered with concert tickets, crying hard under the covers so her mom won’t hear her. She’s grateful that it’s so easy to fool your parents. That they’re so desperate for you to be happy that they believe you even when you’re lying.
Maya knows that her mom and dad need to be allowed to regain control of their lives, in their own ways. And take back what Kevin took from them, too. Her mom needs to feel that she’s good enough, her dad needs to rescue his hockey club, because they need to feel they can succeed at something. Stand up, hit back, win. They mustn’t end up afraid of the dark, because it won’t be possible to survive together then. Their daughter can hear them arguing, even when they aren’t saying a word. Where there used to be two wineglasses in the kitchen she now sees only one. She knows her dad is getting home later and later, sees him stand outside the door for longer and longer before coming inside. She notices the envelopes containing invitations to conferences that her mom never asks if she can attend. Maya knows that if her parents split up they’ll say it wasn’t her fault. And she’ll know that they’re lying.
* * *
She was the one Kevin broke. But they were the ones who snapped.
* * *
William Lyt gets hesitantly to his feet. “Lucky for you I don’t hit women,” he pants.
“I’d advise you not to try!” Jeanette replies even though all the voices of reason in her head are yelling “Keep quiet, Jeanette!”
“I’m going to report you, you—” Lyt begins, but Jeanette snaps back, “And say what?”
She’s an idiot, she knows that, but she’s an angry woman in an angry town, and normal rules no longer seem to apply around here. The youths at the ends of the tunnel have backed away. They’re not fighters, just bullies, tough only when they’ve got the upper hand. William is different, Jeanette can see that, he’s got something inside him that makes him worse. He spits on the ground but doesn’t say anything else. Perhaps he’s worried that he’s killed Leo when he turns and walks away, unless perhaps his brain is suppressing it, finding excuses: “He shouldn’t have provoked me. He knew what would happen.”
When the tunnel is empty, Jeanette bends over Leo. His face is bloody but his breathing is regular, and to Jeanette’s surprise his eyes are open. Calm and alert. William stamped and kicked him, but something must have restrained him, because Leo’s face hasn’t been smashed in. Nothing is broken, His body is covered in bruises, but those can be concealed by clothing, just like the scratch marks, and the swelling around his eyes and nose is no worse than for him to be able to lie to his mother and say he was hit in the face by a ball during a gym class.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” the boy tells the teacher.
“No,” she agrees.
She interprets it as a mark of consideration, but that’s not what Leo means.
“Don’t you ever watch wildlife documentaries? Wild animals are always at their most dangerous when they’ve been wounded,” Leo gurgles, tasting blood in his mouth.
As soon as the blows stopped raining down on the twelve-year-old, he started to think about how he could get his revenge. He could feel William choosing to stamp on his thighs instead of his kneecaps, aiming for the softer parts of his body instead of knocking his teeth out, giving him bruises on his shoulder instead of trying to break his arm. Leo won’t regard William’s display of mercy as goodness, merely as weakness. He’s going to get his own back.
When the twelve-year-old crawls to his feet, Jeanette says dutifully, “We have to report this to—”