particular. During jury selection he appears clever and strategic. In the end they seat four men and eight women. There are some seeming inequities. The prosecution does not dismiss one woman who, during questioning, asserts that a young lady, seventeen years of age, should have known better. However, she adds, she feels she can keep an open mind while listening to the facts of the case. She is the kind of woman who says young lady as though young ladies are at fault for being under thirty. This woman becomes a juror.
During the defense’s opening statement, the defense lawyer, Hoy, stands before the jury and tells them that “it is highly, highly, highly unlikely” for a man as decorated and loved and respected as Aaron Knodel to do the things the victim claims he has done. Decorated men do not perform oral sex on young women to whom they are attracted. Decorated men do not tell young women that they love their small hands.
He says this will all be based on her word. There is no rape kit. No snail’s trail of semen on a dress.
As Maggie makes her way into the courtroom, she’s warned by her victim advocate that Marie Knodel is out in the hallway, where Maggie will have to walk past her. From one hundred feet away, they see her. Her victim advocate says, Do you want to wait until she’s gone?
No, says Maggie, I’m not scared of her.
Maggie walks by, staring at Marie the whole time. Maggie knows it’s wrong, but she’s angry at this woman for standing by her man. Marie looks up at the ceiling, then down at her shoes.
In his opening statement Hoy says that Aaron Knodel went the extra mile to help Maggie. He addresses the phone records that have been recovered, which show the number of calls between Aaron and Maggie. The reason, Hoy says, that Aaron was on the line with her for hours and hours and some of those hours well past midnight was that she was a troubled girl. Her parents were alcoholics. There are few other details about what the actual troubles entailed. Once the rumors spread, Aaron Knodel put an end to the contact.
Under cross-examination, Maggie doesn’t dispute that Aaron Knodel is a good teacher who helped her.
“He looked out for the kids he thought had problems, and I was one of those kids,” she says. She holds her father’s scapular in her hand. She grips it so tightly her hands feel as if they may bleed. It was on his person when he was found. She wears a white lace top with scalloped sleeves and a silk scarf. She says, “I was trying to hide my phone so they wouldn’t look at my text messages and I remember Aaron said that he liked my hands because they were small and petite and young.”
Everybody in the room looks at her hands, expecting to find the glowing hands of a supermodel. Her fingernails are cut short. Her hands tremble.
Aaron wears a gray suit and a wide-striped tie and his eyes are squinting at Maggie as though he’s trying to solve a math problem.
Hoy asks if Maggie has any plans to file a civil lawsuit. He knows that she did, in fact, because, as Maggie will find out later, his son worked for the firm that Maggie consulted with. She didn’t sign a contract with that firm, because its lawyers told her she didn’t have a case. The consult was therefore not protected under attorney-client privilege.
Maggie says that yes, she had spoken to an attorney about filing a civil lawsuit against Knodel and possibly a suit against the West Fargo School District. There is an audible snicker from Aaron’s gallery, as though this is now confirmation that it’s always been about money.
Hoy asks why she thinks Knodel took an interest in her. Maggie considers how she’s put on weight. She is not the high school girl she was. She drinks sugary alcohol. She is not motivated to be fit. She dates boys who don’t treat her well. Hoy says, as though he simply cannot conceive of it, “Out of the blue, one of the most popular teachers at the high school starts sending you text messages, professing his love for you?”
Even Maggie, at the time, when she was thinner and younger and happier, couldn’t believe it. It’s hard for her to answer him because she agrees with him. She never felt good enough for Aaron.
“It didn’t start out