Chapter 51
I make great time driving to the school, but as soon as I get there, it’s a mess. There are cars backed up several blocks away, and it only seems to be getting worse. I could have walked to the school ten times over in the time it takes me to drive there.
It looks like they have evacuated the kids from the building, but now they’re standing in clusters outside the school with their teachers. When I finally get to the pickup area, a teacher comes to my car window and asks me the names of my children and their grades.
“Isabel Mullen, tenth grade, and Alexa Mullen, twelfth grade,” I tell her.
The woman has a clipboard in her hand, and the process happens faster and more efficiently than I anticipated.
I thought I’d receive a few wrong kids before my own showed up, but only a minute later, Lexi and Izzy are being herded in the direction of my car.
I expect the usual fight for the passenger seat in front, but Lexi goes right for the back seat without a word. Izzy slides into the seat next to me.
I peer in the rearview mirror at my older daughter. Like last night, her eyes are swollen.
“It was Zane!” Izzy announces, her eyes wide. “Zane was the kid who crashed his car!”
“He…he was?”
Despite everything, I’m stunned. After my conversation with Zane, he must have found something to drink and got toasted.
“I heard he got an email calling him to the principal’s office,” Izzy continues her story without missing a beat. “I guess he was in trouble for something—I don’t know what. But we all heard the crash when his car hit. The whole school shook.”
Wow, I must have really freaked him out with my story about being a sex offender.
“Is he dead?” I ask.
Izzy just shakes her head, and I can hear Lexi sniffling quietly in the back seat. I guess nobody knows. But the fact that an ambulance came seems to indicate that he’s probably still alive. For the moment.
“Lexi honey?” I say. “Are you all right?”
She doesn’t answer me. Instead, she just sobs, tucked in on herself. I don’t understand why she’s crying. That asshole was blackmailing her. He was threatening to ruin her whole life.
We drive in silence the rest of the way home, broken only by the sound of Lexi’s sobs.
I don’t know what to say, and my experience as the mother of teenage girls is that everything I say is always wrong, so it’s better to keep my mouth shut.
As they say, it’s better to remain quiet and have your teenagers think you’re an idiot than open your mouth and say something they can text their friends about.
When we get back into the house, Izzy does that thing where she walks through the door and scrolls through her phone at the same time. After a moment, she looks up.
“He’s alive,” she says as she perches herself on the edge of the sofa. “They took him to the hospital.”
“That’s good,” I say, and I mean it. Well, kind of.
“But he’s badly hurt,” she reports. “Jana says he broke his neck.”
At this new revelation, Lexi bursts into hysterical tears. Shockingly, she’s even more upset than she was last night. Her face is buried in her hands, and her whole body is shaking with sobs.
I don’t understand it. Zane was horrible. He tricked her into giving him naked pictures of her, and he threatened to show them to the whole school. He was blackmailing her into having sex with him. What part of this makes her sad that he’s hurt?
“Lexi honey.” I put my arm around her shoulders to attempt to comfort her. “Why are you crying?”
“Why am I crying?” she repeats incredulously. “My boyfriend has a broken neck!”
“But last night, you had a problem,” I point out, “and now it’s fixed.”
Lexi looks up at me with her tearstained face, which is frozen in an expression of horror. “Not like this,” she chokes out.
With those words, she squirms out of my half embrace and runs up the stairs two at a time. The last thing I hear is the door to her room slamming shut so hard that the windows rattle.
Well, I don’t get it. She had a problem, and I fixed it. I wish somebody had done that for me when I was in trouble. Maybe my whole life would have been different.
In any case, I don’t regret what I did. I never told Zane to get drunk and smash his car into the school, for God’s sake.
Yes, I did indicate how bad it would be to be labeled a sex offender, and I’m sure when he got that email from the principal, it spooked him.
But he was the one who crashed his car. I didn’t have my foot on the gas.
Everything that happened was simply…karma.