Right. Anyway, I thought you told me you wanted out of this place. Juvenile delinquents don’t go anywhere except jail.”
“She’s fifteen!” Logan says, disparagingly. “She’s a black girl on a white man’s farm! She has no idea who or what she is or wants to be!”
“I’m sixteen!”
“Well, I’ll tell you what she is: no match for persuasive, personable scum like you!”
He gives a sardonic laugh and shakes his head about my ignorance.
“True. Had I wanted to fuck her. But guess what: I didn’t! And you know why not? Two reasons! One, I have no mind to be sent down for statutory rape! She’s fifteen! Sorry, sixteen—whatever. I can do sums! And two, my kid sister went down that road. She’s eighteen now, and she’s already chalked up one abortion, one gang rape, and one bout of STD. You may think I’m scum, but I’m scum with principles!”
I look around me. “Yeah, you make Mahatma Gandhi look like a pimp!”
He scratches his cheek, grins, and shrugs.
“Jules, is he telling the truth?” I demand of her.
“About what?” she asks cautiously.
“What do you think? Did you have sex with him?”
“No! Not…really.”
I groan, more impatient with her cageyness than with his chuzpah.
Logan comes clean. “Somewhere between second and third base. Dr. Lieberman, ma’am.”
“I’m still waiting to hear that from you, Jules.”
She stares at me, in equal parts frightened and appalled.
“The thing is this, Jules, if I have any reason to suspect that Logan’s—or any other boy’s—penis or finger beyond the first knuckle has been inside you, I’m going to drag your sly, secretive little butt to the gynecologist before you can say contraception! Have I made myself clear?”
“Jesus, you are a ballbuster,” Logan says, half grinning, half annoyed. “Leave the kid alone!”
Jules has started crying again, and I give up.
“So whose idea was it to break into my house? You did that before, a few times, didn’t you?”
He shrugs again.
“Logan, how can I take you seriously if you behave like a fifteen-year-old, too?”
“I have a key! It was my idea!” Jules speaks up. “And I was sixteen last Sunday!”
“Well, at last you’re standing by your man! Simple rule, Jules: you don’t make out, let alone have sex, with a boy you don’t really, really like! And if you really, really like someone, you help them when they’re in trouble!”
This shames her, and I’m not sorry.
“Did you or the others take anything? Apart from my eggs and my wine?”
“We replaced the eggs! We were cold and hungry!”
I remember Giles in his kitchen, in t-shirt and jogging pants, making vegetable frittata for me.
“No, we didn’t,” Logan says earnestly. “Unless the others took something when I wasn’t looking, but I don’t think so. I told them I’d beat the shit out if them if they did. Are you missing any valuables?”
“I’ll let you know. Now go away. Oh, and, Jules…” I hold out my hand, and she stares at it.
“Give her the key,” Logan orders her, and she digs her hand into her coat pocket and extracts a single key on a length of brown string.
“What will you tell my mom?” She wells up again, and I can’t decide whether I prefer her tearful or petulant.
“I don’t know yet, Jules. You’ll just have to wait and see. That goes for you, too, Logan. I guess I should be all pedagogical about this and make a deal with you, like, I won’t tell anyone if you write me nothing but A essays for the rest of your time at Ardrossan. But I really don’t know whether I want to be so magnanimous.”
“And I don’t know whether I’d take the deal.”
“Then we both have something to think about, don’t we?”
“It’s me.”
There is a short pause in the line. “So it is.”
“Giles, do you think I could come back tonight, with my essays, a change of clothes, and my PJs?”
He gives one of his spurts of laughter. “You won’t need PJs.”
While I’m waiting for the washing to be done, I wander around the cottage, checking it for theft or damage. It is a relief, in a way, to know that I wasn’t imagining the subtle changes I noticed around the house recently, and I lived in shared housing for too long to be very deeply upset about the idea of people using my stuff in the kitchen, or even sleeping in my bed. Still, all that is very different from a group of young people effectively breaking into my home to have sex parties there.