He glanced at my screen, then twisted away. “Ugh, who takes a photo of that? I know about the rabbit, I saw Dad hosing down the drive. That child of the corn probably left it, whatshisname who lives in the blue house.”
“Peter.”
“Right. Peter. But if you’re worried, talk to Aunt Fee.”
“I texted her. She’s gonna call me later.”
“Good.” He watched me for a second, eyes clouded. Then he shook his head. “She’ll tell you if things aren’t okay. Mom wouldn’t, but she will.”
“I guess,” I said, and hesitated. Tell him about the safe in the closet, yes or no?
Not yet, I decided. He’d want to break in again, see for himself. Or he’d underplay it completely. Either way I’d end up annoyed.
Hank held up the joint he’d finished rolling. “You want?”
“I’m good.”
“Cool.” He stashed it in an empty Altoids tin, swatting skunky flecks from his knees like he was about to stand. But I wasn’t done talking, so I opened my mouth and said the first thing I thought of. One of the drain holes my thoughts had been swirling around.
“Do you remember Hattie Carter?”
“Oh, god.” He laughed a little. “Everyone remembers Hattie Carter.”
“Right, but did you know she was my bully?”
“You had a bully?”
“Everyone has one at some point. Unless they are the bully.” I made my voice light, but it was bad. Cherry Coke poured into the slats of my locker bad. Rumors about my invented sluttiness bad. Aching stomach, Sunday-night dread bad. The worst part was, it was completely random. She was just some dick in my gym class who terrorized me for weeks, for no reason, until our teacher caught her texting a locker-room photo of me in my underwear to her friends. That skated close enough to lawsuit territory that the school got off its ass and did something about it.
Something: We were pulled from class one day, made to sit with our parents in the principal’s office. The principal delivered a nonspecific lecture that seemed damning of me as well, about cliques and responsible phone use and accepting our differences. I thought my mom would laser her into pieces with her eyes. Hattie presented me with an apology letter written in green gel pen and covered with shiny puppy stickers, which the principal took as a sweet gesture but I knew to be the passive-aggressive act of an unrepentant monster who’d spent half our freshman year barking at me in the halls.
My dad blustered and brooded through it, one hand protective on my shoulder, while hers didn’t even pretend not to be scrolling on his phone. Her mom wasn’t there. Mine sat in a civilized rictus, nails in her knees and an odd little smile playing over her mouth. At the end she stood and smoothed herself down and with that same slight smile told the principal her intervention was a travesty and she’d be out of a job within the year, before transferring her nails into my upper arm and guiding me out the door.
My mom was right. A couple of months later the principal “resigned” on a wave of rumors having to do with inappropriate texts sent to a very recent graduate. Her departure was my mom’s lucky guess, or maybe the texts had saved her from having to plant heroin in the woman’s car. I wouldn’t put a thing past Dana Nowak.
Hattie’s downfall came sooner. The high school talent show fell on a balmy April night, just a week after she’d flashed her crocodile smile at me in the principal’s office. Along with the rest of the choir I had a bit part backing up a cute tenth-grader’s pitch-agnostic rendition of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” I was back in the audience, covered in polyester-choir-robe sweat, when Hattie took the stage.
She was performing a lip synch of “bad guy,” her blue eyes ringed like Saturn with glitter liner and her hair combed into a wet curtain. I knew how rotten she was inside. That she could look so pretty anyway made me want to cry.
Her performance was wooden and surprisingly graceless, though her friends whooped it up the entire time anyway. Until she stopped cold at center stage. The song went on, but her lips weren’t moving. When she wrapped both arms around her middle, I thought she might throw up.
She didn’t. She did this awkward, cowboy-legged run off stage left, her eyes panicked spotlights in their circles of liner. And it didn’t matter that no one could actually tell what had happened then and there. By the start of the next school day, roughly every kid in every grade knew that cool Hattie Carter had shit her pants onstage.