Neil would have dealt with the whole thing a lot better if he hadn’t known for a fact that his father was lying. As it was, when kids on the bus would say, “Hey, Beart, how’s your dirty old man?” and laugh like that was hilarious, he’d feel all the blood go to his face, but there was nothing really for him to say. He’d hunch down farther in his seat and draw designs in the mist his breath left on the school bus window.
Neil had taken Professor Piot’s “Methods of Historical Analysis” class while he was in London, and they’d talked about the theory of path dependence, in which events happened in a chain reaction, like a domino effect. One event caused a second, which caused a third, which made it all but impossible that a fourth could be avoided, which led, by necessity, to a fifth, and so on, history hurtling toward a foregone conclusion. It was a way of looking at things that Professor Piot, and, one gathered, all serious historians, looked down on, because a path-dependent explanation of, say, why the Fourth Crusade ended up sacking Constantinople rather than reclaiming the Holy Land didn’t take into account the thousand unpredictable nuances of how, why, and when, much less the decision-making role of individuals involved. The schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches may have set the stage for a confrontation between East and West, but who was to say that the Crusaders would have plundered their fellow Christians if their leader hadn’t been charmed at a dinner party by a pretender to the Byzantine throne? “Doubt all claims of the inevitable,” Professor Piot liked to say.
Neil, of course, agreed. But path dependence was the only way to explain how things had happened with Becca Gallegos. If Neil’s mother hadn’t insisted on having NPR on in the car in the mornings as she drove him to school, then he never would have heard about an effort to require House of Commons–style elections for Britain’s House of Lords. If he’d never heard the story, he wouldn’t have known the answer to the question “The British parliament includes which two bodies of legislators?” which allowed Neil’s team to win the district-wide Knowledge Bowl competition and go on to the state finals. If they hadn’t qualified for state, Neil wouldn’t have had to get parental permission to go on an overnight trip to Colorado Springs. And if he hadn’t had to get that permission form signed, he wouldn’t have gone to his father’s classroom after school one afternoon. He wouldn’t have found the door shut, and when he opened it a crack to see if his father was in there, he wouldn’t have seen his dad and Becca Gallegos, Becca sitting at one of the classroom desks and his father with his back to the door, bending over her like he was correcting her paper. Neil had been about to ask if he could interrupt for just a second to get his form signed when he heard his father say something like “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” and he smoothed his hand over Becca’s hair, then squatted down next to her and rolled down the cuff of her shorts to cover an inch more of her thigh, as if he were personally enforcing the school dress code. Just as he did, the door handle that Neil was holding onto made a noise. Becca looked up, and for what could only have been a fraction of a second but felt much longer she stared straight at Neil in the doorway. Until the girl behind the door in Swindon, Neil had only seen a look like that one other time, when he was a kid and he found a deer with its leg caught in a fence. Eyes frantic, calculating the chance of escape but coming up short, flicking away. Neil closed the classroom door as quietly as possible, and he almost missed going to the Knowledge Bowl finals because he had to wait until his mom got back from a conference she was attending to get his permission form signed. Because he did not want his father to ever, ever know what he’d seen.
None of it was necessarily all that bad in its own right, but it was a whole lot more than what Neil’s father said had happened. There had been no physical contact between them, absolutely none, Neil’s father said. And as for the things Becca said, about how he’d told her she was a beautiful young girl with talents he was going to help her realize, it was all a big misunderstanding. He’d meant to be encouraging, to give her a bit of self-esteem, and she’d taken it the wrong way.
Neil never told his father that he didn’t believe him. He didn’t want to admit to knowing anything more than what people were saying in the halls at school, but the look on Becca’s face had made it obvious that things had been happening that shouldn’t be, and his dad had had no good reason to be messing with her shorts.
Things ended even worse for Becca than for his father, with the very same people who wrote letters to the editor calling Neil’s dad a letch and a predator saying that she was an opportunist and her father was using the whole thing as an excuse to get money out of the school district. It might have been true, because pretty soon after the school board hearing, social services got involved and put Becca and her sisters in foster care. “Couldn’t have happened too soon,” Neil’s mother said. Neil’s mom wasn’t inclined to take his father’s side on anything, but she worked as a domestic violence counselor, and though she was pretty strict about patient confidentiality, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the Gallegos kids had it rough.
Only Neil knew that Becca wasn’t lying, at least not entirely, and he kept waiting for Becca to tell the school board that Neil had seen her and his father together in the classroom that afternoon. Neil spent whole days not hearing a word of what was said in class, waiting for an announcement to summon him to the principal’s office. But even though Becca could have used a witness on her side, she never told. That made the whole thing even worse, thinking of Becca protecting him, as if they were kids again and she was answering Neil’s mom’s questions about where all the boxes of cherry Jell-O had gone so Neil wouldn’t have to open his bright red mouth. Neil stood outside the principal’s office one afternoon after it had become a big scandal, trying to convince himself to go in and tell what he’d seen. But in the end he couldn’t do it—not out of loyalty to his father so much as out of eighth-grade embarrassment at the thought of having to tell Ms. Schisler that he’d seen his father’s hand on Becca’s leg.
It was all really stressful, Neil’s stomach was in knots for weeks, and when she noticed he wasn’t eating, Neil’s mom tried to get him to go see one of her therapist friends. She even offered to let him change schools mid-year, which would have meant driving him to Pueblo each day, because she figured that being Mr. Beart’s son was making things tough. But Neil said no. He wasn’t about to talk to some hippie therapist, and changing schools wouldn’t make his dad any less of a liar or Neil any less of a coward. Plus, Becca Gallegos had transferred to Pueblo after someone wrote a big S-L-U-T all over her locker. The last thing Neil wanted was to have to avoid making eye contact with a reminder of his lack of personal heroism each time he passed her in the hall.