WARNING: Contains explicit language, slurs, mentions of domestic abuse, rape, and suicide.
Despite being tucked in the triangle of land between 3 of Ohio’s major highways, Williamstown did not get much traffic. One reason for this might have been because it was not close enough to an exit for any wayward travelers to feel so inclined to pass through. Of course, the residents didn’t make much of an effort to draw in newcomers to Billtown (as they called it), as no chain restaurants or truck stops would have been welcome additions. The locals there had carefully constructed what many of its historic, recitative residents considered paradise, where everything you could ever truly need could be found there in its little businesses like the IGA, the shoddy little sports bar, the diner over by the baseball fields, or at most twenty minutes up the road in Hardinsburg. For them, searching for ambition beyond raising a family in your own neighborhood was cold, empty, and practically ungrateful, and looking for beauty past the wind waves in the flat fields of grain or the dew drops in the sunrise after a thin fog was unnecessary.
Ariel McKinnon could see a fog starting to wisp up from the ground in the dim light of the evening as she crossed her yard over to Donna Spitzer’s back patio with half a bottle of a merlot in her hand. Ariel was not one of those old town’s folk whose family names litter the graveyards of their five local churches, and she did not share in their idealization of the little farm town that seemed to hold itself together out of a stoic stubbornness, but she did happen to be the new president of the school board. After their meeting this afternoon, the only thing she had wanted to do was change into comfier clothes, drink a large glass of wine, and vent to her friend, who was now waiting for her in a cushioned chair with a bottle of her own, a lit fire at her feet.
“I still can’t get used to how early it’s getting dark,” Ariel said as she sunk into the empty chair beside her and popped the stopper out of the neck of the merlot.
“What, you mean this thing that happens every single fall?” Donna raised her dark eyebrows and a small smirk rose across her round face.
“Oh, shut it,” Ariel’s mouth cracked into a grin, slight age lines along the corners of her lips. Her smooth and painted fingernails, which she had manicured herself at her salon the day before, tapped ever so slightly against the glass Donna had set out, but just as she started to tip the bottle, she stopped herself, “Well, hell,” and instead took a sip straight from the source.
Donna’s laugh sounded like smooth gravel, “Damn, you’re really dippin into the sauce then tonight.”
“I’m not driving,” Ariel smiled and shrugged, brushing a few small brown hairs behind her ear “and lord knows I need it.”
“Board meeting with the good-ole-boys didn’t go over so well, huh?”
“You have no clue…” Ariel had to press her eyes tight and let her head fall back over the chair for a moment before she could go on, “In hindsight, I probably should have seen it coming. I brought up the petition that the high school girls gave us last month, the one about the dress code, to finally have it resolved. I figured they wouldn’t give on much but I had at least a little hope that they might make a couple concessions.”
“I’m guessing they didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about it.”
“Oh god no,” she took another swig, “they brought up Kaleigh and the Baker boy.”
Donna stopped mid-sip and lowered her glass to her lap, eyes wide and disgust curling on her lips, “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”
Ariel shook her head. The conversation was still swimming around in her mind, and she could taste the venom in the back of her throat from all the choice words she had to hold back for the sake of decorum, and Ariel was not usually one for choice words. Anger was genuinely something she had learned to hold back. It had consumed her once, after her divorce some years back, when she was angry with him. Angry with the world. Angry with herself. So now it was something she always tried to tamper down, striving instead for empathy and understanding. There was no empathy to be had, though, for those fuckers who tried to argue that that poor girl was asking for it.
It had been a year since Kaleigh Rodgers, a very close friend of Ariel’s daughter, Laine, had accused Logan Baker of rape. From what her daughter had told her, it had happened at a party at one of the volleyball girls’ houses while the parents were out on an anniversary weekend. She didn’t know a lot of the details, in part because much of the information was to be kept closed for the trial, but more so because she couldn’t bare to hear about it even after the fact. She didn’t want to know the particulars of how the young girl who she had watched grow up beside her daughter had been abused. And besides, she had heard enough from the old locals in town. She shouldn’t have gone by herself. That boy would never. They were drunk. I heard that girl’s a bit too loose with boys. The Bakers are good people. She shouldn’t have dressed the way she did.
Ariel could only imagine what people had told Kaleigh herself. What had been both whispered and yelled at her through the halls of the school. She had always been a very bold and lively girl, sometimes, Ariel had to admit, a little obnoxiously so. She was a very honest child, and very true to herself. If she didn’t like something, or if she thought something was dumb, she would tell you so, and it took some years for her to learn the social grace of knowing when she should hold back. She was a good friend for Laine though, loyal to a fault and always encouraging her into more daring things. But after last September, it was as if Kaleigh had locked herself away. In the little Ariel saw of her, she never seemed to be totally present, always reserved, sitting back in her own head. It was painful to simply witness. Whatever words might have been thrown at her, it must have been worse than she could imagine, because she couldn’t imagine the amount of cruelty that girl must have gone through to have killed herself that Halloween.
Donna pursed her lips and shook her head in deep resentment, “They have no business saying shit about that poor girl.”
“Nope, but that didn’t stop them from using that whole mess as an example for why students should be ‘maintaining respectable appearances in the classroom.’”
“Who said that?”
“Oh, the high school principal of course.”
“Ugh,” Donna recoiled in disgust, “What a fucking creep.”
Ariel sighed and sunk into her chair, “Why did I bother running for this job?”
“Cause these assholes think their shit don’t stink,” Donna said as she rolled her broad shoulders, “and you know that just ‘cause their great granddaddies used to be on the school board too doesn’t mean that they deserve to be there. And you’re not the only one. Everyone who voted you in knows full well that things need to change.”
“No, I got elected because nobody could bear to vote for John Baker right after Kaleigh died.”
“Don’t say that. That’s not true.”
“Mm…” Ariel took two long sips of wine and stared into the rippling gold and red embers at the base of the fire. “I still can’t believe he was acquitted. After everything.”
Donna sighed, “It was he-said-she-said. And she ain’t around anymore to tell her side.”
The two friends fell into a sad silence and watched the sparks from the fire float up into the starlit sky. The cicadas were gone by then, but September was early enough in the fall for the crickets to still be chirping. There was the sound of a not so distant engine growing closer, and a red truck rolled by on the little road that curved around the corner of the property.
John Baker glanced out of his passenger window, eyes drawn to the glow of the fire, but he had to double take in his rear-view mirror, furrowing his thinning, gray brow. He could have sworn that that was Ariel McKinnon sitting out there. Considering that he turned past Donna Spitzer’s house he wouldn’t be at all surprised. Those two were probably the two women he liked the least in his town. He had never liked Donna. She was loud and crass, and she talked like the white trash that she was. She’d only gotten more intolerable after her husband died six years back. Ariel, however, he never used to have much to say about her. For ages he barely heard a word about her, except maybe a thing or two from his wife, Wendy, when she went up to get her hair done at the salon she owned in Hardinsburg.
He couldn’t believe she’d won that election. Really, what he couldn’t believe was that she had the audacity to think she knew how to run that school better than him. Her. Some divorcee beautician. He had actually grown up in Billtown. He sat in each of those classrooms as a child just as his parents had, and just as he had his own sons do. He worked the land around it and paid the property taxes that kept it going. So what,? Because he didn’t want to raise those taxes to build some sterile, new building with no history outside of town, that made her more qualified? That was his school, and anytime he saw that woman, he felt the bitterness of the loss boil in his stomach.
He blinked his thoughts away, turning his attention back to the road. He nearly missed the exit that would take him up to Hardinsburg. He offered to go pick up the cinnamon chips that Wendy forgot to buy. She was making cookies for their niece who was doing the cheerleader’s bake sale at the homecoming game tomorrow, and he was looking for any excuse to get out of the house. Lately she had been nagging at him for any little thing she could find. She had a ritual to it.
He’d hear her pacing back and forth in the kitchen from where he sat below her in the basement. Then there’d be the creak of the door at the top of the open cedar stairs. Sometimes she’d even say something about those. When do you think you can finish the last of the basement? He usually grunted, or told her he’d get to it when he’d get to it. He just wanted her to leave him alone in his recliner to watch the game in peace. Whatever the reason, she’d find some silly question or excuse to go back downstairs to chastise him, and he needed a break from it.
It was partly for this reason that he was looking forward to tomorrow’s game, but also because he missed going each week and seeing his boys on the team. It was something he had in common with all of them, something simple and meaningful from his own childhood that he could share with them. His middle son even looked like him at his age, with the same barrel-chest and high, sandy-blond hairline. Unfortunately, his two older boys had already graduated college and put their football years behind them. And Logan… with the accusation, Logan never even got the chance to play in college.
He was blessed to still have his son with him, of course. He and his wife had prayed for that acquittal since their son was charged, and last month those prayers had been answered, but merely the accusation was enough to keep him from being recruited. They had hoped for more scholarships, offers from better schools, but the best they could get was from the state college the next county over, and that was only for school, not for football.
He knew it was the accusation that cost him his position on the school board, that was quite clear. And then the girl went and killed herself… it was just a disaster. Certainly the worst year in their family’s life. Wendy had cried herself to sleep so many times. Thankfully there had been the support at church. A few quiet donations to help with the legal fees, prayers said on their behalf. God had been on their side, they were blessed.
With no football, talking to his son was harder now, though. Neither of them seemed to have much to say to each other, especially after everything that had happened. Logan didn’t seem to want to go to the games at the school, and if he was being honest with himself, John wasn’t sure if he wanted him to either. He didn’t like to see people staring at his son. Even from those who meant well, he could feel their thoughts hazing through the air around them. They were judging him for one stupid mistake, and the words of a confused girl who didn’t know how to keep her legs shut. Some of them actually believed her. And sometimes, even though he knew no son of his could ever do something like that, sometimes they made him wonder if it was true. But it couldn’t be. He would never.
John rolled into Hardinsburg off the highway and headed towards the closest grocery. On his way, he passed the line of carbon copy chain restaurants, including the Stake and Shake, where Sarah Bower, Aaron Insley, Bracken Cooper, Laine McKinnon, and Cassie Webb were seated at one of the long booths along the window. They had nearly empty milkshake glasses sitting on the table in front of them, and the small laughs and the occasional yawns signaled that they were nearly ready to leave. Cassie was swiping aimlessly up her phone, not really reading or looking at anything.
A year was not enough time for Cassie to become used to the empty space that she often found near her. Sometimes it was the table in the cafeteria, with its lack of that signature laugh that would grow into a cackle. Sometimes it was along the rack of instruments in the band room where that battered old school trombone sat untouched, or a seat on the bus where there might have been crude drawings left in the window condensation. Right then, it was the sixth seat in the booth, and she could not stop her eyes from drifting to the space on the table where there would have been a Reese’s shake, where a straw wrapper that got blown across the table would have hit a smooth curtain of blonde hair, where Kaleigh’s fingers would be rhythmically tapping away at the table.
Cassie wondered if the others were thinking the same thing. How many of them, if any, had been able to move on? Considering that they still couldn’t manage to talk about her much, she figured none. Enough time had passed at least for the tension to stop being palpable. Grief no longer laid heavy in the air when they were together and left a sickly taste in their mouths anytime someone spoke. That was really the reason they had moved their go-to for milkshakes from the diner in town to the more disingenuous franchise 20 minutes away. It was never as satisfying, but the presence of her absence was too much to handle.
She didn’t cry about it anymore, but rather sunk into these dark, grasping moments of would-have. She had run out of tears a while back. Even when they could still pour from her eyes, they had always been something that others did not see. With the exception of the night she found out. Parents were notified first. Her father had apparently already gotten a call, but not having met Kaleigh more than a couple times and having never known how to approach her on any potentially emotional issue, he had probably intended to skirt telling her until the next morning.
But only about 20 minutes after she heard the landline ring from the kitchen wall of their trailer, she felt her own phone buzzing. When she opened the call, Laine was practically choking through the speaker, and it took a few moments before she could manage to share the details. The note on her mirror. The running car. The closed garage door. And then it was Cassie who couldn’t breathe through her sobs, which drew her father into her room, and he could only hold her to him while she wailed.
Fingers snapped suddenly in front of her and she looked up wide-eyed, jolted back into reality.
“Hey,” Aaron dipped his head down to catch her eyes from across the table, “You good?”
“Yeah,” she said flatly, trying to reassume focus, brushing her nearly black bangs to the side. From the way his hazel eyes flicked back to the empty seat and the small hints of sadness that showed from them, she figured he knew what she was thinking.
“Y’all, who do you think’s gonna win court?” Bracken asked everyone from the other end of the booth, pushing the sleeves of his gray track T-shirt up to his elbows.
“Does it matter?” Sarah rolled her eyes and slurped the last of her mint shake, “They’re all jackasses.”
“Grace isn’t terrible,” Laine interjected.
“No, she’s just a lacey idiot.” With no more milkshake, she occupied her hands by reaching up and readjusting her brown ponytail into a bun.
“Well someone’s feeling extra bitchy tonight.” Aaron turned his gaze to her. On the surface the comment seemed catty and playful, but underneath, Cassie could sense the sincere caution, the subtextual warning to her that her disdain was starting to become misdirected.
“A little jealous are we, Sarah?” Bracken grinned and narrowed his eyes, oblivious as always to tension.
“No,” She narrowed her eyes back and leaned a little into the table, “I just think this whole spirit week, homecoming fanfare is pointless bullshit.”
“You just say that cause you have to wear a dress and be all girly to go to the dance.”
Bracken was teasing her, but still Cassie tensed at the jab and noticed that Laine did the same.
Sarah’s face revealed nothing, “Why don’t you try wearing heels, asshole, see how you like them.”
While she had never said a word to either of them, Cassie and Laine had both long suspected that Sarah was not one hundred percent straight, and indeed did believe that that was the root cause of her dislike for school dances. For them, that was not something that would ever make a difference about how they thought and felt about her, but they worried that Bracken’s often thoughtless remarks gave her the impression that he, or even the whole group, would. Aaron, who was in fact gay and had told Cassie so six months ago, was cautious to come out for the same reason. Cassie had spoken about it once when she had stayed over at Laine’s, speaking low and hushed in her bedroom as if speaking about it loudly might reveal it to the world. Both of them had been waiting with open eyes and ears for further signs, hoping Sarah might someday confide in them.
Bracken smiled and flashed his bright, blue eyes down the group, and seeing that everyone had finished, stood and swiped his keys and check from the table, “Is that a challenge Bower?”
Sarah narrowed her eyes and grinned, “Oh, you shouldn’t have said anything, cause now if I don’t see you show up for pictures Saturday night in stilettos, I’m gonna be real sad.”
“Watch me,” he said, snapping his black hat over his wavy blonde hair as they all followed suit out of the booth. As they stood in line to pay, Sarah fell in next to Cassie.
“You still want me to drive you home?” Sarah asked.
“Yes please,” Cassie replied with a cheeky smile.
“I gotchu.”
On the drive back, Sarah let her fiddle with the playlist with her feet up on the dashboard, thick fog licking at the windshield and giving them the illusion that they were driving through a raincloud. Cassie pulled down the sun visor and inspected a soon-to-be pimple beside her nose in the mirror, and after a few quiet moments, she cast her eyes to the side and noticed the scowl on Sarah’s lips and the furrow to her brow.
“Are you sure you’re okay, you know, with going to homecoming?”
“Uh… yeah?” Sarah glanced suspiciously at her for a moment, and Cassie could see her hands tensing around the steering wheel ever so slightly.
“It’s just, like, I know it’s senior year and everything, but you don’t have to do something you’re not comfortable with.”
“Why wouldn’t I be comfortable going?” There was a sharpness to Sarah’s voice.
“Well, you said you think its dumb, so… and it’s okay… if you don’t want to. I won’t judge you.”
“I already bought a dress, Cassie, I’m gonna go.”
“Okay.” she leaned her head against her window and stayed silent for a moment, taking the hint that Sarah wanted her to drop it. Not really thinking about what she was saying, Cassie tried to change the subject quickly. “I’ve been feeling kinda reluctant about taking pictures beforehand. It’s gonna be weird enough, without her there… but then to do a group photo – ”
Cassie was cut off by the sudden slow of the engine and Sarah pulling onto the side of the road, one tire getting engulfed by the tall grass along the ditch. She gasped and quickly pulled her feet off the dashboard, and snapped her gaze back to Sarah. She was holding back tears.
“Jesus, Sarah, what- I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you so upset…” Cassie reached her hand up as if to touch her, but hesitated, and instead let it fall back against her mouth.
Taking in a sharp breath, Sarah pulled down her own sun visor and pulled a thin strip of crinkled notebook paper from where it was tucked under the button for her garage door. With an unsteady hand, she held it out for Cassie to take, her eyes locked on the dashboard in front of her as she did so. Confused and concerned, Cassie gently took the paper from her and turned on the overhead light. Written in rushed blue pen, Cassie notice Kaleigh’s signature, pretty handwriting.
And to Sarah, I love you. I’m sorry. I hope you forgive me.
- K
“Cassie,” as she opened her mouth, Sarah gave way to sobs, “the reason that – I don’t want – to go… is because… I would’ve gone – with her.”
“Oh…” Cassie could feel a lump form in her own throat for the first time in months. She pulled Sarah into her shoulder and let her shirt get stained with tears while a few of her own dripped from the corners of her eyes.
So, Sarah wasn’t straight. And neither was Kaleigh.
After a short while, Sarah lifted her head away from Cassie and tried to compose herself, inhaling heavily in through her nose and steadying her breath as she exhaled through her mouth. Cassie rubbed her hand under her eyes, taking one last look at the last thing Kaleigh ever wrote before handing the paper back to Sarah.
“How did you get that?” Cassie asked. She had never seen the note herself. Kaleigh’s parents had kept it to themselves, and when Laine had asked about it, they told her they didn’t feel comfortable sharing it with anyone outside of family. She had always assumed it was addressed just to them, or was too dark for it to be seen by anyone else. Now she wasn’t so sure.
“Her parents let me have it after the cops gave it back. I saw the whole thing…” Sarah’s voice cracked again, but she breathed in again and kept herself together, “She didn’t have a lot to say, just that it was too hard to keep going. They said that I should have the part addressed to me, though.”
Cassie was silent for a moment longer, “How long were you guys a thing?”
Sarah pursed her lips into something almost like a smile, but her eyes were too sad for that to be what it was, “Since a little before that summer… She wanted to come out, she didn’t care what people thought.”
Cassie almost smiled, too. “She never did.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t ready… but sometimes I wonder if we had, maybe she would have –
“Sarah, no.” Cassie’s face hardened and she made sure to look right into her friend’s eyes, “There isn’t anything you could have done. You have nothing to do with anything she did, or anything anyone else did.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know, and so do you, deep down.”
“Okay.”
They sat a while longer, not sure what to say to each other. Once they had composed themselves enough to get back on the road and head home, though, they passed by an aged and hardy farmhouse at the end of a gravel driveway that was in numerous states of superficial disrepair. Mildew along the gutters and lower panels of siding. A garden overrun by thistles and wintercreeper. Bits and pieces of farm equipment, scattered and rusting across the property or lined along the sides of its outbuildings. Inside things were not much different. The kitchen lived in a constant state between filthy and clean, where more anal visitors would scrunch their noses in disgust, but never reaching a state of neglect so severe that anyone would feel justified in pointing it out. The rest of the house carried this characteristic, where everything seemed to be misplaced and forgotten, and no rooms seemed to be truly separated by function. All the rooms downstairs had the smell of dogs who didn’t get bathed enough saturated into the carpet, and flakes of dried mud could always be found in corners or stuck between floorboards.
The basement of this house was where Chase Addison had made himself his own space, filled with old, worn furniture, a frayed rag rug that his mother had put down for him, and a wide, decade-old TV that had been expelled from the living room. This was where he sat with his friends, Kyle Spyer, and Casey Inbody. He flipped his thumbs back and forth across the controller that he gripped tightly between thick fingers, working pizza grease into the divots of the plastic. His knee shook rapidly as he moved the camo-clad avatar across the screen, stalking the last of his friends who had yet to fall at his virtual assault rifle.
He was much better at this than them, and he relished anytime he had friends over so that he could demolish them. That’s what comes from playing the same things over and over again. He’d stopped buying new video games when he got his license, as from that point forward, what money he earned from this and that farm job he got called up for went towards his truck. Nothing in his life brought him the same pride and satisfaction as his modified Chevy, each addition making it a greater spectacle of machinery that incited a delicious combination of awe and disgust from those who saw it. So, it was a trade that he was glad to make, and he didn’t mind replaying the same game more than a few times.
“Fuck!” Kyle yelled as Chase triggered the killing shot. He leaned over the arm of his chair where Alex sat disgruntled in a bean bag and wiggled his finger close to his cheek.
“Liiiitle bitch,” he taunted in a mousy, childish tone, “someone’s a liiiiitle bitch!”
Kyle grinned sourly and threw his controller into Chase’s chest. “You’re a fuckin queer.”
Chase laughed a kind of dull giggle, getting up from the chair and grabbing another few squares of pizza from the box on the floor.
“Hey, Inbody,” Kyle said, unscrewing the top off a mountain dew, an arrogant smile on his lips. “You see if I won Homecoming King yet?”
“Oh Christ, just suck your own dick already, Spyer,” Chase complained as Kyle took his controller back from the chair. Kyle was the pretty boy with shaggy brown hair he kept back with a bandana, the tallest one in their class, and he thought he was hot shit. Chase couldn’t stand it when people thought they were better than they were, and he not-so-secretly hoped that he’d lose Homecoming King. If they hadn’t grown up half a mile away from each other, they probably wouldn’t even be friends, and if Kyle didn’t stop talking about himself, they wouldn’t be much longer.
“Nope,” said Casey, “Student Council doesn’t count ballots ‘til tomorrow when we decorate.”
Casey had always been a curious person to Chase. He rarely seemed to let go like his other friends— like he was still trying to maintain that façade of school expected decorum. But in those rare moments that he did let go, let you see the real judgement and truth that he kept to himself, the shock of it was always hilarious.
“Damn,” Kyle said, “I wanna know if I’m gonna have to dance with Grace, it would be so fucking weird.”
“That’d be fucking funny,” Chase cackled.
Casey rolled his eyes. “Everyone knows y’all broke up, I don’t think they’d vote for you both.”
“At least there aren’t any weirdos or pity nominees this year,” Chase said with his mouth full of pizza. “Just the hot girls.”
“They were almost gonna give the honorary crown to Kaleigh Rogers and call off court all together,” said Casey, scrolling through the game menu, and then added more quietly “Thank fucking Christ they didn’t.”
Chase smiled at the little loosening of Casey’s mask, but something dark hardened in his stomach at the mention of her name.
“God, cry me a fuckin river.” Kyle absentmindedly filtered through the weapons selection. “Can everyone stop fucking pretending that they were her best friend or some shit? Nobody liked her.”
Casey shook his head and sighed. “She was just some lying psycho. Don’t see why anyone should give a shit.”
Kyle raised his hands in relieved agreement. “The only people she hung out with were a bunch a queers, who caaaares.”
The corners of Casey’s mouth curled up into a devious grin. “I mean, you know Sarah Bower is a dyke.”
Chase let them carry on, nodding in agreement, but otherwise distracted by his thoughts. Logan Baker was his cousin, his favorite cousin, the one who was closest to him in age and therefore the one he had stuck like glue to as a kid. His uncle John was probably the person he most looked up to in the entire world. He had no intention to ever tell his friends this, but when he was young, when his father was still living in their house and leaving bruises across his mother’s body, he would often stay overnight at his uncle’s. Once for three weeks straight. Each time his uncle would take him and his cousin out somewhere, shooting, fishing, whatever, and made him feel as welcome and at home as possible. Those moments were his favorite memories as a child, and probably the most stable moments as well.
And he nearly lost his cousin. If the jury had actually believed what that fucking cunt said about him, he could have spent years in prison. Who knows how many. He couldn’t stand all the moping and crying that everyone pulled when she offed herself, like that fake, ultra-religious memorial they were forced to sit through in the auditorium. As if she ever believed in God. And even now, a year after the fact, after Logan was found innocent, Chase still found himself making fists at the mention of her name.
Williamstown Local School was located dead center in the tiny rural town, its literal, as well as figurative, heart. From there, all its buildings surrounded school in a lop-sided U shape, with the back side of the old, brick, K-12 building overlooking the baseball, soccer, and football fields. The sun had started to sink lower in the sky, and all the early spectators who had found their seats in the rickety, wooden bleachers were suddenly bathed in a stark brightness from the stadium lights.
The marching band curled in a synchronized gait around the corner of the field and took their places for their opening routine. Ariel, who had just stirred the cream into her coffee at the condiment table at the concession stand, jerked her head up at the sudden sound of the horns. She slapped the lid back over the steaming Styrofoam cup and hurried back to her seat in the bleachers, waving to three different women who were regulars at the salon on the way. The bleachers rattled as she made her way up next to Donna to cheer her daughter on.
John had just pulled into the parking lot on the other side of the chain-link fence that encircled the field, Wendy in the passenger seat, holding a paper bag full of pairs of oatmeal raisin cinnamon chip cookies, and trying to recall all the court nominees with justification as to who deserved the crown more. John was not paying attention, and neither was Logan, who was sitting quietly in the back, his unkempt college beard freshly trimmed at the insistence of his mother. In the rearview mirror, John thought he even looked, maybe, a little nervous.
Cassie, Aaron, Bracken and the other trumpets led the band off the field as they concluded their routine, blue berets and white spats moving perfectly aligned in rows of four until Sarah and the other drummers hit the halting cadence behind the bleachers. They all stood perfectly still, heads high, shoulders stiff, feet together. The director dismissed them, and they unwound into disorder as they climbed into their designated seats, Laine trying not to whack anyone with the end of her trombone.
Chase and the other members of the team gathered in their usual place along the side of the bleachers, while Kyle and two others peeled off to the visitor’s side where student council members and the rest of the court were waiting to begin the ceremony. They all filed into the order in which they were to be announced, linking arms with their nominated pair, and Kyle was relieved to see that his was not going to be Grace.
The announcer in the wood, slat-sided box above the bleachers called the audience to attention and welcomed them all to the Williamstown Homecoming Game and Royalty Announcement. Donna rolled her eyes, sighed, and murmured into Ariel’s ear, “Oh god, here come the clones.” Ariel, nearly spitting out her coffee, swallowed it back and giggle-whispered shh back at her. But she was right, of course. All the boys were either in their football jerseys or wearing school colors, and all the girls wore the same style of church-appropriate lace dress, hair straightened flat.
John and Logan, not reaching the stands before they started the ceremony, sidled up to the edge of the low fence that separated the spectators from the field on the band’s side. They noticed Chase, shoulder pads making him look even stockier, standing just a few yards away. During a break in the announcer’s words, Logan cupped his hands around his mouth and whispered as loud as possible, “Chase Addison is a piece of shit!” Chase turned his raised eyebrows behind him and smiled when he realized who it was, throwing up his middle finger in response. John, feeling eyes on the back of his neck, turned his head to the right and realized that several people from the band were glaring at them.
“How fucking dare he,” Laine growled between gritted teeth. Most of the band had by then noticed Kaleigh’s rapist standing free and nonchalant along the fence below them. Cassie’s face was scowled in revolt and a visceral disgust when Aaron’s arm reached over her shoulder, his fingers outstretched.
“Sarah.” His voice was small and worried as he brushed his hand over her arm, but she didn’t budge. Her eyes were locked on the Bakers, her hands clamped onto her drumstick, bending it, cracking it.
“Sarah.” Cassie grabbed her hands with her own, pulling her friend back to her, “Sarah, you’re gonna break it.” Her eyes snapped away to Cassie’s, and they instantly flooded with tears.
“He killed her,” she choked out. She was shaking, looking like she was going to fall over, and Cassie coaxed her to sit down. She looked quickly over her shoulder. They missed who won.
“Not here,” Cassie whispered. Laine reached over and grabbed the stick out of her hand, “Not right now.”
And then the announcer said something unexpected:
“Ladies and gentleman, in addition to our new royalty, the Williamstown High School Student Council would like to award an honorary title of nobility to Kaleigh Rodgers, a member of the Class of 2019 who was lost to the community nearly one year ago. We ask for a moment of silent prayer and remembrance.”
Not two seconds after the announcer finished speaking, Chase already had his hands cupped around his mouth.
“WHORE!”
Gasps erupted from across the stands, with the band members rising in shared outrage, and Sarah, thundering over the row of wide-eyed drummers in front of her, slamming against the rail, screamed back down at him, “THE FUCK DID YOU SAY?”
Chase recoiled for a second, as if he had stumbled upon a ragged animal, and shouted, “Fuck off, dyke!”
Further gasps and further outrage, and in the middle of all the commotion, Bracken had slid snake-like and undetected under the rail. Before anyone realized what he was doing, he grabbed Chase by the guard on his helmet, and slammed him into the old steel of the bleachers so hard that the ringing smack of the helmet echoed to the other end of the seats. Referees and coaches blew their whistles rapidly as football players and band members swarmed together, some to break up the fight, some to join. Ariel, Donna and some other members of school staff and administration barreled down the stands to help, while John and Logan had jumped the fence to pull Bracken off of Chase. As the mass of bodies stopped writhing and began to separate, Ariel saw her daughter on the ground, supporting herself with one arm and trying to stop the stream of blood pouring from her nose with the other.
“Lainey!” She slid through the railing and onto the field’s edge, joining her daughter’s friends in helping her back up.
John stood tall with stiff shoulders and red cheeks, Logan and Chase behind him, both of them looking overwhelmed at everyone’s hatred seeping into their skin. He took a step forward.
“Is this the kind of behavior that you encourage in your child and her friends? Acting like animals?”
Donna’s bullhorn rasp sounded from the rail above them, “Is that what you encourage your boys to be, John? Assholes and rapists?”
A mixed chorus of gasps, woahs, and way-out-of-line’s echoed across the stands, but Donna did not shift her stony gaze from John, who, to both her surprise and delight, looked like he had just been shot.
Then one of the coaches grabbed Chase by his jersey collar and growled, “Get your ass in that fucking locker room and stay there!” The tension through the rest of the crowd began to simmer out, school staff and referees pushing everyone back into the stands. Cassie, Aaron, and Bracken tried to guide the tear-swollen Sarah off the field and into the bathroom while Laine looked on painfully as her mother held tissues under her broken nose.
John clenched his son at his elbow and dragged him away from the scene, hurrying back around the field to the gate, through the parking lot, and finally to his truck. He yanked open the passenger door and pointed Logan into it before he circled back over to the driver’s side. Once both of them were in, doors closed, windows up, John slowly lifted his hands up to the top of the steering wheel, his fingers vice-like around it.
“I need you to answer me honestly,” John said in a voice so low, so horrifically measured, that Logan seemed to go pale, “Did you hurt that girl?”
“What?”
His fingers rippled over the steering wheel. “Did you. . . hurt. . . that girl?”
“Dad…” Logan’s throat was so tight that he could barely get out his words, “How could you ask me that – ”
“DID YOU HURT THAT GIRL?!” John’s eyes burned into his son’s face, while his own had grown as red as his truck.
Logan opened his mouth, like there were words waiting just at the back of his tongue, but there was no sound that escaped his lips.
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