Chapter 42
DEBBIE
It seems like Lexi has broken up with Zane.
Ordinarily, this would be cause for great celebration. I do not like that boy, and I’m grateful that he won’t be in my house again or blasting his horn in our driveway. Lexi could do way better. Nobody would be way better.
But it’s hard to celebrate when Lexi is clearly upset. She’s barely said five words during dinner, and she took only a few bites of the pasta I made. It wasn’t exactly a gourmet meal, but she usually eats what I put in front of her. Tonight, she’s completely uninterested.
Cooper also seems distracted. He went upstairs with an excuse about checking something for work, but his laptop is sitting on our coffee table. So what was he checking? All I know is that when he came back downstairs, he looked pale.
Only Izzy is happily scarfing down her food. One out of three isn’t bad, but it could be better.
“I have to do homework,” Lexi mumbles as she pushes her chair back.
“You barely ate anything,” I point out. “Didn’t you like the dinner?”
She lifts a shoulder. “I’m not hungry.”
“Do you want me to make you something else?”
“Oh my God, Mom.” Lexi glares at me. “I told you, I’m not hungry. Stop asking me a million times if I want to eat something else.”
I bite my lip to keep from pointing out that I only, in fact, asked once. “Fine. Go do your homework.”
Izzy announces she has homework too, although at least her plate has been practically licked clean. I’m thrilled she’s eating normally again, but it’s hard to celebrate when Cooper is at the table, pushing a clump of noodles around his plate.
“Not hungry either?” I ask him as the girls climb the stairs to go to their respective rooms.
Cooper lifts his eyes, blinking as if surprised to see me still sitting at the table with him. “Oh,” he says. “I, uh, I guess not.”
“Are you okay?”
Of course he’s not okay. Instead of getting a promotion, he just lost his job.
He’s got to be worried sick about how we’re going to pay the mortgage and afford Lexi’s college tuition.
But there’s a look in his eyes that makes me think there’s something more going on.
Something that he hasn’t shared with me.
He opens his mouth as if to reply, but before he can, his phone’s familiar generic ringtone fills the room. It’s the same chimes the phone came with, because he doesn’t know how to change it. He digs it out of his pocket, angling the screen so I can’t see it. He sucks in a breath.
Who is calling him? What is he hiding from me?
“I, uh…” He jumps from his seat, an uncomfortable smile on his face. “I better take this.”
He rushes away from the table, his phone pressed to his ear. As he’s leaving the room, I can just barely make out the sound of a voice on the other end of the line. A female voice. A few seconds later, the door to our bedroom slams shut.
Hmm.
I rise from my own chair to clear the table.
Not one person in my family thought to take their dishes to the sink.
Cooper will occasionally load or unload the dishwasher, but the kids never do.
Do they think there’s poison fumes trapped inside and if they open it to put a dish inside, the fumes will be released, killing us all?
Based on their behavior, I have to assume that yes, they do think this.
I scrape the uneaten pasta off the plates and into the garbage disposal, wondering what’s going on with Lexi.
She’s never in a good mood, but she seemed even more upset than usual tonight.
Should I try to talk to her? Unfortunately, it never goes well when I initiate conversations with my daughter about her love life.
Yesterday, she practically bit my head off when I mentioned Zane.
Also, I have enough problems of my own. I was fired from my job, although that wasn’t much of a loss.
Cooper also just quit his longtime job, and even before that, he was acting incredibly strange.
And that mysterious phone call that made him dash off to our bedroom has made me uneasy.
Really, I should be sitting him down for a talk.
(Although I also think it would be better to keep my mouth shut when it comes to my husband.
At least until I’m ready to share my own secrets.)
Something about Lexi keeps tugging at me. There are times when the best thing to do is leave her alone, but my gut is telling me something more is going on right now.
I’m going to try to talk to her.
I load the dishes into the dishwasher, then walk through the kitchen to the stairwell.
I climb the stairs to the second floor, and when I get to the door of Lexi’s room, my fist poised to knock on the door, I hesitate.
The door to the master bedroom is at the other end of the hallway.
Cooper is likely still on the phone, and if I press my ear against the door, I’ll be able to hear his end of the conversation.
Maybe I should do it. There’s something going on with Cooper that he is reluctant to talk to me about, and a little spy work is the only way to find out the truth.
And it’s not like Lexi is going to spill her guts to me if I try to talk to her.
She’ll likely be mad at me, because she’ll have decided I’m not allowed to talk to her when the moon is in waning gibbous or something along those lines.
I’ll try this weekend. I’ll offer to take her shopping, and I can gently probe about what happened with Zane. Not that we have a lot of money to drop on a shopping trip, but maybe we can go to that thrift store she likes. We can probably get her a whole wardrobe there for two dollars.
I drop my arm, ready to walk away. And I almost do, but at that moment, something stops me. Something makes me freeze in my tracks.
It’s the sound of sobs coming from Lexi’s room.
I turn around, and this time, I knock on Lexi’s door without hesitation. The crying immediately ceases, and she calls out. “What is it?”
“Lexi, honey?” I say. “Can I come in?”
There’s a long silence on the other side of the door. I suspect she’s debating whether she should tell me to get lost. But then she calls out in a voice laced with resignation, “Fine.”
Lexi is curled up in her bed, her knees tucked close to her chest, her lanky arms wrapped around them. Her face is streaked with tears, her eyes bloodshot. It looks like she’s been crying for a while and was just managing to keep it quiet until now.
If Zane hurt her, I’ll kill him.
Actually, I won’t have to. Cooper would do it first. He may not know every detail of our children’s lives the way I do, but if anyone posed a threat to them, he’d risk his life to save them just like I would.
I close the door behind me. I approach her cautiously, like she’s a scared animal that might scurry off at any moment. I finally settle down at the edge of her bed, my right butt cheek half hovering in the air.
“Sweetheart,” I say as gently as I can, “what happened?”
She shakes her head, and a tidal wave of fresh tears falls from her eyes. Her shoulders shake with sobs, and I scoot down the length of the bed to wrap my arms around her. I rock her the way I did when she was small, and after a moment, she is clinging to me.
“Mom,” she sobs. “Mom…”
“It’s okay,” I tell her in my most soothing voice. “I promise, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay!” she gasps. “He…he has pictures!”
What?
I pull away from her, inspecting her red and swollen face. “Pictures?” I say in a voice I hope belies the sick sensation in the pit of my stomach.
She covers her eyes with both hands and bobs her head.
“What pictures?” I ask in that same gentle tone, even though what I really want to do is grab her shoulders and shake her until she tells me what the hell is going on.
“Zane…he…he has…” She gulps, struggling to catch her breath. “He has pictures of me. Pictures where I’m…”
I’m trying really hard not to react with horror. “Where you’re what?”
“You know,” she mumbles.
“Like…” I cringe. “Sex pictures?”
“No.” She shakes her head vigorously. Thank God. “But…you know…you can see my…my boobs.”
Oh no. Well, it could be worse. It could definitely be better, but it could be worse too.
“He said he’ll show everyone!” She buries her face in her hands. “He’s going to share it with all his friends unless I…”
“Unless you what?”
“Unless I…” She doesn’t lift her face. “Unless I…you know…”
If she says “you know” one more time, I might scream. “Unless you what?”
“Mom.” She finally raises her face, her eyes pleading. “We haven’t…and he wants to…”
That buzzing starts up again in the back of my head. I want to kill that bastard. “Are you saying,” I begin as I try to keep my voice from trembling, “if you don’t have sex with him, he’s going to send the naked photos of you to all his friends?”
She doesn’t answer, but another wave of tears spills over. Her shoulders start to shake. “My life is ruined!”
I grit my teeth. I don’t know if I’ve ever been this angry in my entire life, and I’ve been really angry. How dare he? This is my little girl! What sort of person would do something like that?
“What will I do?” she wails. “If he sends it to his friends, they’ll send it to their friends, and then the whole school will get it! How will I even get into college?”
“Maybe he’s lying,” I say, although I agree that Zane seems like the sort of person who would do something like that. “Maybe he won’t really send it to anyone.”
“He did it before!” she cries.
What?
“He transferred to our school between sophomore and junior year,” she explains. “His family moved here from Florida. And apparently, this girl he was dating during sophomore year sent him a naked picture, and he circulated it everywhere. He showed it to me.”
“Seriously? And he didn’t get turned in for doing that?”
“His friends all covered for him. Nobody would say where the photo came from. Eventually though, everyone was passing it around.”
Wow. I never liked Zane, but this is next level.
“My life is ruined!” Lexi reaches for me, and I wrap my arms around her, holding her tightly. “I can’t believe I was so stupid. How could I have let him take those pictures?”
“It’s not your fault,” I say.
I’m annoyed that it happened, but I mean what I’m saying. I can imagine the way Zane must have pressured her. She’s only a kid—seventeen is such a baby!—and she desperately wanted her cool boyfriend to like her. I understand exactly how it happened.
“Listen to me, Lexi,” I say. “I promise you, we will figure this out. We are not going to let Zane win.”
Her bloodshot eyes widen. “You’re not going to tell the principal, are you?”
“Lexi…”
“You can’t!” She grabs my arm. “Mom, if you tell them, everyone will find out! And he’ll circulate the photos anyway!”
“Lexi…”
“Promise me!”
I don’t know if she’s right, but the way Lexi is grabbing my arm, she certainly thinks so. And she has a point. If I go to the school, these things do have a way of getting around. Even if he doesn’t do anything with the photos, the mere existence of them will be a rumor that spreads like wildfire.
No, I’ve got to deal with this in a different way.
“I promise,” I say. “I won’t tell anyone at the school. But I need you to promise me something.”
She blinks at me, her eyes wet.
“I want you to promise me that you will trust me,” I say. “I want you to trust me when I say that I will make absolutely sure those photos of you never get out.”
“But how can you—”
“Trust me, Lexi.”
She hesitates for only a moment, but then she says, “I trust you.”
I see that trust in her eyes. Even though she’s not a little kid anymore, she still believes that I can fix things for her.
I am seized by the sudden almost irrepressible urge to tell her everything. I’ve never told anyone what happened to me. Not my parents, not Cooper, not anyone. I wish I could tell her, even though I know I can’t.
I just wish she knew that I used to be just like her.
I was carefree and intelligent, and yes, beautiful, even though I didn’t know it at the time.
And then something happened that ruined my life.
That’s why I refuse to let anything like that happen to her.
Because I love her more than anything, and I want her life to be as good as mine promised to be before I was raped during my second year of college.