Period 8 - By Chris Crutcher Page 0,22
thought. She didn’t deny any of it. If somebody says your dad’s a beast and he’s not, you deny it.”
Taylor scans the room; doesn’t catch any looks of disagreement. She shakes her head. “That shit is poison.”
Silence.
She shrugs. “My mom’s been bringing control freaks into me and my brother’s lives for fucking ever, excuse my shitty language. They’re all the same. Look good at first, start to take over and try to convince you the crap they want you to do is for your own good. I don’t know how it works in Mary Wells’s house, but the more they get burrowed in the more power they get. If you’ve got a mom like ours, she’s so glad to have a man around the house she’ll believe anything. Pretty soon she’s just the gravy train for a pig. Good thing about my mother is, she finally recognizes it and gets rid of the bastard. Like I said, I don’t know what Mary Wells’s mom is like, but I see Mr. Wells and I get a feeling in my gut that is way familiar. And if you’d have seen her in the bathroom that day, you wouldn’t start asking me a bunch of dumb questions or telling me why my situation is different.”
Nobody is about to do that.
“And by the way,” Taylor adds, “after she gets rid of the bastard? She goes and gets another one. But that’s a story for another time.” She puts her head down on her arms. “Anyway, that’s why I thought she was lucky. Any escape is an escape. She was out.”
“I’m with Taylor,” Hannah says. “Anybody who has that much control over his kid is creepy. And I’d say that if Mary were in the room.”
Arney Stack stands. “Maybe you guys are right,” he says. “Maybe I do have it wrong, and this is going to sound like some geeky ASB president . . .”
Justin says, “Tell us somethin’ we don’t know.”
“We have to do something about this,” Arney says. “I don’t mean just about Mary, but all of it. There’s not much a student body officer can do in a school, it’s not like we influence educational policy or anything. But we ought to at least figure out how to have each other’s backs.”
Paulie glances at Justin.
“A lot of us have been in school together four years, some even longer than that. No offense, Bobby, but if your family wasn’t in the paper for receiving Christmas charity I wouldn’t even know who you are.”
Bobby looks stricken. His family’s picture on the front of the Regional section of the local newspaper is the embarrassment of his high school career.
Arney catches Bobby’s look. “I didn’t mean . . . Hey, man, I just meant we don’t have each other’s backs like we should.”
Justin puts his head down.
“Look, we’re in this together. I get to be student body president because no matter how much I pump iron, I lack the skills to be what I really want to be, which is a super-jock. So I teach myself to speak in public and do the political thing. Hell, Bobby, you’re every bit as smart as I am and twice as sensitive, given what you just told us, but somebody’s been pushing you around making you think all you can do is survive. Man, go check it out with your parents . . . okay, not your parents, but some adult, maybe Mr. Logs, and get him to tell you how many of the cool guys and girls in high school turned out to be duds once they got out in the real world. My dad makes over a half-million a year in one of the most prestigious law firms in this town and he was voted ‘Kid Most Likely to Get Beat Up By Someone from a Lower Grade’ in high school. I just meant . . .”
“It’s okay,” Bobby says. “I know you didn’t mean anything.”
“My point is,” Arney continues, “that one thing the whole student body can do is start recognizing who we all are. I’m ticked off at myself because I’ve been judging the people who come in here every day and don’t say anything. I mean, if I hadn’t started getting to know Mary . . . well, I’m just saying we need some kind of decency campaign in this school. That’s what I’m going to shoot for the rest of my time.”
Paulie thinks, Arney just fucked Bobby and got Bobby to let him