Chapter 7
BIRDIE
“Wait here,” Bell had told me. Sternly even, as if I were his to instruct, as if I were the student.
After the group had left with a pointed we’ll be waiting in Father Alvarez’s office from the department chair, Bell had zipped himself up and ruffled his curls with impatient irritation.
I remember thinking that King David himself must have been exactly like this.
Young and arrogant and so entitled to anything he wanted that no consequence could possibly matter to him.
When I hadn’t responded quickly enough, he’d found my chin. “Birdie,” he’d said. It was nearly dark in the studio by then, but what little light there was had found his eyes. “I mean it. Stay here. Let me handle this. And do not run away.”
“Who do you think you are?” I’d whispered back to him.
I hadn’t said it as an insult or an attack. I’d been genuinely asking. Who did he think he was that he could just handle this? Who did he think he was to me that I should let him? That I should listen?
He hadn’t answered like he thought I’d insulted him.
He’d answered almost like he’d been glad I asked.
“I’m the rest of your life,” he’d said with an awful, eerie certainty, and then he grabbed his satchel and left through the door.
The sound of rain had filled the studio, along with a wash of orange light from the lamppost outside.
The light threw long shadows from the unfinished statues scattered around the space and, just for a moment, made visible the leaking, glimmering ruins of the pomegranate on the floor.
I didn’t wait.
Whatever Bell thought he could handle was completely irrelevant to me, and I had my own concerns to manage—my conscience and then, as a close second, my job.
I packed up my things and walked through the heavy sheets of rain to Father Alvarez’s office, arriving completely soaked through and chilled.
Every gust of wind had reminded me that I had no underwear on, that a slick arousal still lingered where Bell had touched me.
It was just as well that Father Alvarez’s office was empty when I got there because I probably wouldn’t have helped my case arriving there in a soaking wet T-shirt that showed the plain white bra underneath or trying not to fidget in the chair as the awareness of my shamefully underwear-less state gnawed on my mind.
I didn’t know what it meant that no one was actually in the office—perhaps Bell had caught up with them on their way and had them pinned in place elsewhere—but whatever the reason, it took nearly an hour for someone to show up.
It was Kaitlyn.
She came in with her eyes down on her phone, where her thumb was rapidly moving over the screen, a vape pen tucked in her other hand. She was wearing wrinkled black work pants, a cardigan wrap, and tennis shoes, like she’d been at home and had to get dressed again in a hurry.
“Kaitlyn,” I said, and her eyes snapped up from her phone.
“Birdie, thank God.” She flung herself into the chair across from me and brought her vape to her lips.
A cloud puffed around her as she exhaled and held up her phone to wave it at me.
“They are saying the most ridiculous stuff. That they caught you having sex with a student. You. Birdie Cooper! I told the dean of students that she got it wrong, that there was no possible way, but she’s insisting we bring in the president and do a full investigation.
” Another pull off her vape, another cloud of condensed air.
She sat forward, her tone confiding and comforting both as she spoke next.
“I have a fiduciary duty to Evelyn, so once this gets started, I’m Evelyn’s lawyer, not yours.
But right now, off the clock, I can tell you that you’ve got nothing to worry about.
They’ll get in here, see it was all a big mistake, and we’ll be home within the hour. ”
I became aware that I was shaking, my hands worst of all, and I pressed one hand on top of the other to hide it. “It’s not a mistake.”
Curves appeared near the insides of Kaitlyn’s eyebrows. She’d just started doing Botox that spring, and a full furrow above her nose was no longer possible. But I could tell she was deeply baffled.
“I don’t think you know what they’re saying,” she said slowly.
“They’re saying that they caught you having sex with a student on campus grounds.
It’s a violation of the student safety policy and the faculty morality clause.
That would be two reasons for termination and two reasons why your carvings might never sell again. ”
“Right,” I said, and my chin trembled. “Okay.”
She stared at me with those curved eyebrows, bringing her vape pen to her mouth. After a minute, she breathed, “Birdie. No.”
I looked down at my shaking hands and pressed them even harder together. “One of my students came into the studio. I thought he might have a question about his final grade, but he didn’t, and he just kept…”
He just kept what? It was all getting so blurry. He kept talking. He kept coming closer. Every objection was negotiated away, every hesitation exploited, unfolded, until I was somehow having an orgasm with my face against the chalkboard.
“He asked to kiss me. I didn’t say yes.” This was spoken to my hands. “And then there was more, and he just kept pushing, and I don’t even know how it happened. I didn’t have time to think. I couldn’t think, and I just…”
Kaitlyn’s face had gone slack. Her vape pen now hovered below her mouth. “So it’s true?” The words were faint with horror.
“It’s not—” I couldn’t stop trembling. “It’s not like what they told you. It wasn’t like I was recklessly having sex with a student. He came in and he wouldn’t stop—”
“So you’re saying he forced you? You fought him off? Will he have defensive wounds? Or we can go to a hospital and do a rape kit—”
“It didn’t get that far.” Even my voice was quaking now. “There’s no…evidence. For a rape kit. I didn’t fight him.”
“But he did force you.”
My throat hurt. I was so close to crying. “It wasn’t violent. And I—”
She was my oldest friend. If I couldn’t explain it to her, how would I ever be able to explain it to anyone else?
“It made sense in the moment. Not just like he was persuading me but like I needed him to. Or wanted him to. But I also didn’t want him to, and I was scared he wouldn’t stop, and the things he said…”
The things he said. Frightening things. Obsessive things.
Intoxicating things.
“So it wasn’t force,” Kaitlyn said again. There was something in her words—later, I would know it was the lack of something, an absence, a withdrawal—but then it only barely registered, at least at first. “He just talked you into having sex with him.”
That made it sound so civilized, didn’t it?
Like Bell and I had a forum, and he’d been the better debater.
Like Bell had convinced me to get the extra warranty at a car dealership or to watch a movie I’d been putting off.
I’d been convinced by a superior argument or by some rapport building and had surrendered my position with grace.
“It wasn’t like that either,” I said. My nose stung now. It made the words wavering and thick. “I don’t know how to describe what it was like, but not like that.”
“Well, you’re not giving me much reason to believe otherwise,” Kaitlyn said.
She stared at me with a hard, unyielding gaze.
“It’s not like the department chair heard you screaming for help, and it sounds like you have no physical evidence that you were fighting him.
What else am I supposed to think but that you were fucking a student of your own free will? ”
Swearing—like many things for Kaitlyn—was something she despised in other people but that she did sporadically herself and felt justified in whenever she did it. Hearing it now was a slap of cold air. It meant I deserved the harshness in her mind.
“Are those the only two options?” I asked, chin trembling. “Rape or…or…”
“Whoredom?” she supplied. An old-fashioned kind of word. A biblical one. She didn’t say it viciously, but there was a sharpness to it.
With the first unfurling tendril of dread, I recognized that sharpness from the last twenty-some years of being her friend. It was the bite of efficiency. Of let’s get this over with.
“Rape or whoredom,” I said quietly. “There can be nothing other than those?”
She stared at me, and I could see the moment her stare slid into the future, into the problems that needed solving and how she would solve them.
Looking back, I know she was already working through how to evict me, how to separate her ascendant career as a Catholic lawyer from my now-poisoned life.
But at the time, I’d hoped she was really thinking about it.
I was hoping she’d say No, of course you’re right.
Of course there is something more than rape or whoredom.
Of course the truth is complicated, and we’ll listen to you as long as it takes to understand.
I was hoping she’d say I believe you. It’s not fair to punish you for what he did. Are you okay?
She didn’t say that. She didn’t ask me if I was okay, if I was trembling because I’d been caught or because the beautiful, golden-haired student everyone adored had pushed me against a wall and shoved my skirt up to my waist.
In fact, no one asked if I was okay that night; no one seemed to care.
Not Kaitlyn; not Father Alvarez; not Brianna Shotwell, the Fine Arts Department chair; not the residency director.
Not the dean of student affairs, not a senior lawyer from the Office of General Counsel.
It was like being orphaned all over again.