*
The school headmaster hardly has time to put the phone down before it rings again. Voice after voice, parent after parent. What answers do they want? What do they expect? This is a police matter, let the courts decide, as if running a school isn’t hard enough. The girl’s mother is a lawyer, the boy’s father one of the most powerful men in the entire district, one person’s word against another’s. Who’d want to get in the middle of that? That can’t be the task of the school, surely? So the headmaster says the same thing again, over and over again, to everyone:
“Please, let’s not make this political. Whatever you do, don’t make this political!”
*
One advantage of having a brother who works for the security company is that all her nocturnal outings as a result of false alarms have given Jeanette a specialist’s knowledge of the architecture of the school. For instance, she knows where on the top floor to find the small cubbyhole containing the narrow staircase that the chimney sweeps once used to reach the roof. And up there, behind an air vent just above the dining room, a teacher can have a cigarette without being spotted by either the headmaster or any students. And that’s needed more on some days than others.
That’s how Jeanette happens to see Benji walking across the schoolyard just after lunch. All the other players in the junior team are playing truant to be with Kevin, so the fact that Benji is here of his own volition can only mean that he’s looking for the opposite.
*
Ana is sitting alone in a classroom full of students who are talking about nothing but Maya and Kevin. Maya is sitting alone in another classroom where no one is talking at all. She sees the notes they pass across each other’s desks, the phones they conceal on their laps.
She will always be this to them now: at best the girl who got raped, at worst the girl who lied. They will never let her be anyone but that. In every room, on every street, in the supermarket and at the rink, she will walk in like an explosive device. They will be scared to touch her, even the ones who believe her, because they don’t want to risk getting hit by shrapnel when she detonates. They will back away in silence, turn in a different direction. They will wish that she would just disappear, that she had never been here. Not because they hate her, because they don’t, not all of them: they don’t all scrawl BITCH on her locker, they don’t all rape her, they aren’t all evil. But they’re all silent. Because that’s easier.
She gets up in the middle of the class and leaves the room without a word of protest from her teacher. She crosses an empty hallway, goes into a bathroom, stands in front of the mirror, and smashes her fist into it as hard as she can. The glass shatters and it takes a few seconds for the pain to reach her brain, and she has time to see the blood before it actually hurts.
*
Benji sees her go in. He does his best to persuade himself to go in the other direction. Keep quiet. Don’t get involved. But then he hears the crash and the tinkling sound as pieces of glass hit the porcelain sink, and he’s broken enough mirrors himself to recognize the noise.
He knocks on the door. When she doesn’t answer he says:
“I can kick it in, or you can unlock it, your choice.”
She’s standing there with toilet paper wrapped clumsily around her knuckles. It’s slowly turning red. Benji closes the door behind him, nods toward the mirror:
“Seven years’ bad luck.”
Perhaps Maya ought to be frightened, but she hasn’t got the energy. She can’t even be bothered to feel hate. She doesn’t feel anything at all.
“Hardly makes any difference to me now, does it?”
Benji sticks his hands in his pockets. They stand in silence, the victim and the best friend. The bitch and the brother. Maya clears her throat to stifle her sobs and says:
“I don’t care what you want. I get that you hate me. You think I’m lying to get your best friend in trouble. But you’re wrong. You’re fucking wrong.”
Benji takes his hands out of his pockets, carefully picks some pieces of glass out of the sink, and drops them, one by one, into the trash.
“You’re the one who’s wrong.”
“Screw you,” Maya hisses, and moves toward the door, and the boy slips nimbly out of the way so she doesn’t have to come into physical contact with him, and only much later will she realize what a considerate gesture that was.
Benji utters the words so quietly that at first she thinks she’s misheard:
“You’re the one who’s wrong, Maya. Because you think he’s still my best friend.”
*
Jeanette has an hour between lessons. She takes the opportunity to go to the bathroom to wash the smell of cigarettes off her fingers while the hallway is empty. She stops when she sees Maya come out, in tears and with her knuckles bleeding, as if she’s smashed something. The girl doesn’t see the teacher, just runs off in the other direction, toward the exit.
The next moment the washroom explodes with noise as a sink is torn from the wall and thrown to the floor, a toilet is kicked to pieces, a trash can thrown straight through the window. It doesn’t take long for the hallway to fill with adults and pupils, but by then everything inside the bathroom has already been systematically smashed and demolished. It takes one headmaster, one caretaker, and two gym teachers to grab hold of Benji and get him out of the bathroom.
The school will describe this later as “an emotional outburst from a student with a well-documented history of problems with aggression.” They will say that it is “understandable, considering his relationship to the boy who had been accused of . . . you know.”
Jeanette stands and stares at the wreckage, meets Benji’s gaze, and watches as he is led away. The boy smashed up an entire bathroom and accepted both suspension and liability for the cost of repairs without blinking, all because he didn’t want anyone to know that Maya had smashed a mirror. He decided that she had already bled enough. The only adult who will know this is Jeanette, and she will never say anything. She knows a thing or two about keeping secrets herself.
She goes back up onto the roof. Smokes the rest of the pack.
*
Kira is in her office, buried in printouts of previous judgments and precedents from sexual assault cases, in constant discussion with her colleagues, total mobilization for war. She is feeling everything all at the same time: rage, grief, impotence, a desire for vengeance, hatred, terror. Yet it still falls away from her in an instant when her phone vibrates and her daughter’s name illuminates the screen. Four little words. “Can you come home?” Never has a mother driven a car faster through that forest.