Then, on a rainy night in late April of 2014, Tina came to his room again. Mrs. Beasley was long gone, and the footy pajamas had been replaced by an oversized Cleveland Browns football jersey, but to Pete she looked very much like the worried girl who had asked, during the Era of Bad Feelings, if their mother and father were going to get divorced. Her hair was in pigtails, and with her face cleansed of the little makeup Mom let her wear (Pete had an idea she put on fresh layers when she got to school), she looked closer to ten than going on thirteen. He thought, Teens is almost a teen. It was hard to believe.
“Can I come in for a minute?”
“Sure.”
He was lying on his bed, reading a novel by Philip Roth called When She Was Good. Tina sat on his desk chair, pulling her jersey nightshirt down over her shins and blowing a few errant hairs from her forehead, where a faint scattering of acne had appeared.
“Something on your mind?” Pete asked.
“Um . . . yeah.” But she didn’t go on.
He wrinkled his nose at her. “Go on, spill it. Some boy you’ve been crushing on told you to buzz off?”
“You sent that money,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
Pete stared at her, flabbergasted. He tried to speak and couldn’t. He tried to persuade himself she hadn’t said what she’d said, and couldn’t do that, either.
She nodded as if he had admitted it. “Yeah, you did. It’s all over your face.”
“It didn’t come from me, Teens, you just took me by surprise. Where would I get money like that?”
“I don’t know, but I remember the night you asked me what I’d do if I found a buried treasure.”
“I did?” Thinking, You were half-asleep. You can’t remember that.
“Doubloons, you said. Coins from olden days. I said I’d give it to Dad and Mom so they wouldn’t fight anymore, and that’s just what you did. Only it wasn’t pirate treasure, it was regular money.”
Pete put his book aside. “Don’t you go telling them that. They might actually believe you.”
She looked at him solemnly. “I never would. But I need to ask you . . . is it really all gone?”
“The note in the last envelope said it was,” Pete replied cautiously, “and there hasn’t been any more since, so I guess so.”
She sighed. “Yeah. What I figured. But I had to ask.” She got up to go.
“Tina?”
“What?”
“I’m really sorry about Chapel Ridge and all. I wish the money wasn’t gone.”
She sat down again. “I’ll keep your secret if you keep one Mom and I have. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Last November she took me to Chap—that’s what the girls call it—for one of their tour days. She didn’t want Dad to know, because she thought he’d be mad, but back then she thought they maybe could afford it, especially if I got a need scholarship. Do you know what that is?”
Pete nodded.
“Only the money hadn’t stopped coming then, and it was before all the snow and weird cold weather in December and January. We saw some of the classrooms, and the science labs. There’s like a jillion computers. We also saw the gym, which is humongous, and the showers. They have private changing booths, too, not just cattle stalls like at Northfield. At least they do for the girls. Guess who my tour group had for a guide?”
“Barbara Robinson?”
She smiled. “It was great to see her again.” Then the smile faded. “She said hello and gave me a hug and asked how everyone was, but I could tell she hardly remembered me. Why would she, right? Did you know her and Hilda and Betsy and a couple of other girls from back then were at the ’Round Here concert? The one the guy who ran over Dad tried to blow up?”
“Yeah.” Pete also knew that Barbara Robinson’s big brother had played a part in saving Barbara and Barbara’s friends and maybe thousands of others. He had gotten a medal or a key to the city, or something. That was real heroism, not sneaking around and mailing stolen money to your parents.
“Did you know I was invited to go with them that night?”
“What? No!”
Tina nodded. “I said I couldn’t because I was sick, but I wasn’t. It was because Mom said they couldn’t afford to buy me a ticket. We moved a couple of months later.”
“Jesus, how about that, huh?”
“Yeah, I missed all the excitement.”
“So how was the school tour?”
“Good, but not great, or anything. I’ll be fine at Northfield. Hey, once they find out I’m your sister, they’ll probably give me a free ride, Honor Roll Boy.”
Pete suddenly felt sad, almost like crying. It was the sweetness that had always been part of Tina’s nature combined with that ugly scatter of pimples on her forehead. He wondered if she got teased about those. If she didn’t yet, she would.
He held out his arms. “C’mere.” She did, and he gave her a strong hug. Then he held her by the shoulders and looked at her sternly. “But that money . . . it wasn’t me.”
“Uh-huh, okay. So was that notebook you were reading stuck in with the money? I bet it was.” She giggled. “You looked so guilty that night when I walked in on you.”
He rolled his eyes. “Go to bed, short stuff.”
“Okay.” At the door she turned back. “I liked those private changing booths, though. And something else. Want to know? You’ll think it’s weird.”
“Go ahead, lay it on me.”
“The kids wear uniforms. For the girls it’s gray skirts with white blouses and white kneesocks. There are also sweaters, if you want. Some gray like the skirts and some this pretty dark red—hunter red they call it, Barbara said.”
“Uniforms,” Pete said, bemused. “You like the idea of uniforms.”
“Knew you’d think it was weird. Because boys don’t know how girls are. Girls can be mean if you’re wearing the wrong clothes, or even if you wear the right ones too much. You can wear different blouses, or your sneakers on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you can do different things with your hair, but pretty soon they—the mean girls—figure out you’ve only got three jumpers and six good school skirts. Then they say stuff. But when everyone wears the same thing every day . . . except maybe the sweater’s a different color . . .” She blew back those few errant strands again. “Boys don’t have the same problem.”
“I actually do get it,” Pete said.
“Anyway, Mom’s going to teach me how to make my own clothes, then I’ll have more. Simplicity, Butterick. Also, I’ve got friends. Plenty of them.”
“Ellen, for instance.”
“Ellen’s okay.”
And headed for a rewarding job as a waitress or a drive-thru girl after high school, Pete thought but did not say. If she doesn’t get pregnant at sixteen, that is.
“I just wanted to tell you not to worry. If you were.”
“I wasn’t,” Pete said. “I know you’ll be fine. And it wasn’t me who sent the money. Honest.”
She gave him a smile, both sad and complicit, that made her look like anything but a little girl. “Okay. Gotcha.”
She left, closing the door gently behind her.
Pete lay awake for a long time that night. Not long after, he made the biggest mistake of his life.
1979–2014
Morris Randolph Bellamy was sentenced to life in prison on January 11th, 1979, and for a brief time things went fast before they went slow. And slow. And slow. His intake at Waynesville State Prison was completed by six PM the day of his sentencing. His cellmate, a convicted murderer named Roy Allgood, raped him for the first time forty-five minutes after lights-out.