“I’d feel better if I accompanied you to the library. You can call me from your classroom whenever you need, and I’ll come. I’ll walk with you, just until this is all sorted out. Until everything’s back to normal.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” I said. “Besides, there are cameras in the halls.”
Mitch tilted his head. “There are no cameras in the halls. Those are motion sensors for the lights. That’s just what we tell the students, Leah.”
“Oh,” I said. Oh. “Listen, thanks for the offer, but I don’t want anyone to make a big deal of it. A bigger deal of it, at least. I don’t want people to think I need the escort. I have a hard enough time getting my students to take me seriously as it is.”
He smiled at that. “Don’t take it personally. It’s all in the reputation, and you don’t have one yet. It’ll come.” Just like in my last job. Reputation is everything, everywhere.
I waited outside the library until Mitch disappeared around the corner, and then I switched direction and walked down the history wing, where the classroom doors were open, the teachers’ voices resounding down the hall. I peered inside until I saw Izzy, sitting at the desk beside the window, looking out.
I angled myself so the other students wouldn’t turn to see, and then I coughed once in the hall. She turned her head at the noise, and she blinked when she saw me, her face frozen as if I’d caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing.
I stared at her until she turned back around and raised her hand. “Bathroom,” she said, and then she picked up her purse and slung it over her shoulder. I heard her footsteps following as I walked down the hall, veering into the alcove just inside the women’s bathroom.
I did a quick check of the stalls, throwing open the doors, but I was alone. And then I wasn’t. Izzy stood just behind me at the entrance, her body stiff, and I didn’t know what to say, what to ask, after all. But she was here, and that was proof.
“Whatever you’re trying to tell me, I need to know,” I whispered. To hell with protocol.
She looked panicked, cornered. “It can’t come from me.”
“What can’t come from you?” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Please, Izzy.”
Her eyes darted around the bathroom, trailing over our reflections in the distorted mirrors. “Ms. Stevens, please. Please, you can’t say it was me. I know you won’t, right? You have to protect the source, right? I read your old articles, I saw how you do nameless sources. Can you do that for me?”
I froze, reimagining the scene. My paper showing up on my porch. A question. Can I be a girl like this? I have something to say. Watching me, seeing if I was someone to be trusted, because she had reached that point and she didn’t yet know.
“Yes, Izzy. I’ll never tell.” But she looked unconvinced. You have to give to get. “You know why I’m here, Izzy? Why I’m no longer there, being a journalist? Because I protected a source. Because I wouldn’t give her name. A girl not much older than you are now. You saw that in the paper you left for me, didn’t you?”
Her fingers raised to her mouth, her brown eyes growing shiny with tears.
“It’s okay,” I said.
And then she spoke, in a voice just above a whisper. “We ride together to school sometimes because we’re neighbors. Some days I have to come in early to finish work. So we hang out at the library. I saw an email screen once. I only read it because of the name. Because it said TeachingLeahStevens, and I thought that you were, you know, having some affair or something.” She looked to the side, to the mirror. “That’s what I thought.”
She thought I was messing around with a student. That aura of I have one over on you that I could always feel coming off her. The way she’d bait me, as if to say I dare you to say something to me—because she thought she had me beat.
All those emails I thought had come from Cobb. I saw them all in a different light now. Theo sitting at the library computer, breathing heavily at the screen. Typing vigorously, knowingly, waiting to see my reaction.
“Everyone thinks Coach Cobb is stalking you, right? That’s why the police called you down to the office that day? Why they arrested him? Only it’s not him.” IT WASN’T COBB.
The emails, referencing what I was wearing. The phone calls, down to a whisper. The prepaid phone that had probably been purchased with no identification. That I had believed was Davis Cobb—had imagined as I listened to his breathing on the other end, imagined the words whispered from his mouth, pictured his eyes watching through the window. Had I made him up all along? I felt sick to my stomach, dizzy and outside myself.
“You need to tell someone.” And then I realized she was, that was exactly what she was doing, because I was that person. How to explain that I was not a reliable source any longer? That she needed to go to the front office, to Mitch Sheldon, to Kate Turner instead?
“I don’t want him to know. Please. He’s my neighbor. If he can do this to someone else . . .” She let the thought trail, and I tried to focus my thoughts. “Ms. Stevens?” she asked, as if wondering what I was going to do. Whether I was going to keep my promise to her.
“I’ll take care of it, Izzy. I promise.”
And then I let her go. Let her disappear out the bathroom entrance while I waited for all the pieces within me to realign.
* * *
I SCROLLED THROUGH MY phone, to the number I ignored so often, pressed send, held it to my ear. It rang once, then cut over to an out-of-service message. Ditched when Davis Cobb got taken in by the police. The emails had stopped back then, too, until this last one after Davis Cobb had been cleared. I’d been called down to the office, and Theo had heard. He’d overheard the rumors, too. That Davis Cobb was stalking me. That Davis Cobb had hurt that woman by the lake. Was it possible that all along it had been someone else?
The end-of-class bell rang, and I stood in the atrium, letting the crowd move around me. I closed my eyes, imagined getting lost within them, hearing all the voices around me—I could blend right in, I knew I could.
So many bodies pressing together, so much noise. And then Charlotte said—
Did you see what she did in—
No fucking way, I’m not—
So much goddamn work, if he thinks—
“Ms. Stevens?” A cool voice in my ear. I opened my eyes, spun around to see Theo standing before me. “Are you okay? Ms. Stevens?”
I stared at Theo, seeing him as someone new. Someone worse. All those messages I deleted, sent from down the hall in the school library.
He’s the one who knows. He’s the one who sees.
I opened my mouth, closed it again. Remembered Izzy’s eyes, her face, the fear in her words. “Yes, thanks,” I said, and then I continued on my way back to my classroom. Trying not to let it show how the words got to me, how they circled my head as I felt him watching, even now.
CHAPTER 31