This time I couldn’t help it—I giggled at the irony of a teacher saying that to a bunch of students. I immediately regretted it, though, when I saw how sad Mark was. “Before you go, do you have any ideas about what we should do now?” I asked. He was an adult, after all. Maybe he’d come up with something better than we could.
“I don’t really know what you can do,” he said. “I tried to think of ways out myself—she’s smart enough to know she’s walking a real tightrope here, and I’d thought it would be easy to push her off. But then I went through the options, and they all involved getting myself in trouble too. I’m not sure how much she even cares about getting caught; if she got arrested she’d be off the hook for the bills, and there’s always a chance she could turn on all of you to get a lighter sentence. You guys care a lot more about your futures than she does.”
He made it sound so hopeless, and I said so.
“I wish it weren’t the case, but I think that’s where we are,” he said. “Justin, I hope when the dust settles we can talk. We went through a lot to be together—don’t let Samantha ruin it.” He waited to see if Justin would say anything, but when there was nothing but crickets, he left.
“You sure you don’t want to go after him?” Raj asked, ever the romantic.
“He can wait,” Justin said. “It’s more important for us to talk about what’s next.”
Alex got out her phone and pulled up a still of Ms. Davenport and Mark and the pills. It was a pretty good picture, really—Mark’s face was in shadow, but Ms. Davenport’s was clear as day, and the streetlights glinted off the orange bottle. “We’ve got her, and she’s got us,” she said. “So what do we do now?”
25.
I knew what I wanted to do now, which was to have a complete meltdown. But I wasn’t about to do it in front of everyone. I excused myself and went to the restroom.
I almost turned around and walked out as soon as I opened the door. The ladies’ room had three stalls, all with broken locks, and two were clogged. I got that this wasn’t the most popular place, but did they not even think it was worth cleaning the bathrooms at all? It made me furious.
Except of course that wasn’t why I was furious. I wanted to scream or run or hit something, but if I punched the concrete bathroom wall I’d probably break my hand, and someone had already taken a shot at the paper towel holder—its metal had a fist-shaped dent in it. I had so much anger and nowhere to put it, and it made me so frustrated that I finally started crying.
I hated crying.
It wasn’t just the snot and the sniffles and the smeared makeup that I’d have to fix before I went back out to the group; it was the embarrassment of knowing that something had broken me. Or, in this case, someone.
Ms. Davenport was everyone’s favorite teacher. She was so young, so supportive, so good at explaining even the hardest concepts. She’d been counseling me ever since freshman year. She was the only teacher I’d ever exchanged cell phone numbers with. I’d told her about my skin, about my panic attacks. I’d told her everything.
And what I hadn’t told her, Justin had.
She was Blocked Sender.
I choked back another sob. How could she do this to me? I’d trusted her. She was an adult; she was one of the people who were supposed to be looking after us. And I wanted her to pay.
The door opened behind me, slowly. I was still facing the dented paper towel holder, so I grabbed a towel and dotted my face with it before I turned around, hoping my waterproof foundation had held up.
It was Alex, of course.
“Are you okay?” she asked. She hesitated before taking another step toward me, then stretched out her arms as if to give me a hug.
I pulled back a little. “I’ll manage,” I said. “This all just kind of threw me.”
“Kind of?” She moved back too, but I couldn’t tell if she was hurt. “That’s quite an understatement. But I know you guys are close, so I get that this would hit you pretty hard.”
“Were close,” I said. “That’s over now. I want to take her down.”
“I know you do. We all do. You ready to come back and talk about it?”
I looked in the mirror. My mascara had run but I fixed it quickly; otherwise, I needed one more blot with those horrible stiff brown paper towels and I’d be good to go. “Okay,” I said.
When we got back to the table, I didn’t waste any time. “I really think we should go to the police,” I said.
“I thought we agreed—” Justin said.
“Hear me out. It was one thing when we thought we were dealing with another high school kid. We’d all be in the same boat; some of us did worse things than others”—I avoided looking at Raj—“but basically we’re in a similar position, and we’re all minors, right?”