Chapter 8 #2
I had Benjamin screened for autism at his next appointment with a pediatrician, who found nothing worth noting and didn’t recommend extended testing. The story of the sledding day had already changed by then, anyway. Later, Benjamin insisted he’d gone home before Jacob got hurt.
I wasn’t going to let a story get warped this time.
“So, Benjamin. Why did you steal Izzy’s diary?”
He had his eyeglasses off. The planes of his changing face were clearer to me that way.
Cheekbones where there used to be only round, soft flesh.
A few stubbly, light-colored missed hairs along his jawline.
I tried to ignore the resemblance. I hoped that by looking and telling myself, This is Benjamin, this is my son, I could overwrite other associations.
At some point, in three or five or ten years, the thoughts would go away.
“You knew Izzy well, after all?” I asked, when he didn’t answer me. “Obviously, you knew that she kept a diary.” I laughed. “Who even keeps diaries anymore?”
“Girls.”
“Okay. But what were you expecting to find in her diary? Why was it important enough to risk breaking into her house?”
“I didn’t break in. The back door was open.”
“But you knew in advance the house would be open, or you wouldn’t have bothered to run to their house. How?”
“I told you tonight, when you left! No one here locks their doors!”
“Okay,” I said, checking my own memory, confirming. “Noted. But it must have been hard to find her diary unless you’ve been in her house before.” The improbabilities were multiplying. “Have you been in her house before? Were you friends? Did you hang out with her?”
“Not friends. She pretended to like me.”
“Pretended?”
“When we weren’t in school.”
“Then, when? Where?”
“At the pool. Dartmoor. She wrote me notes. I wrote her notes.”
“Like, texts?”
“Not usually. She didn’t want me to text too often, because her boyfriend always looked at her phone. We wrote notes on paper. I know she showed them to Sidney. I’m sure they both laughed at them. But Sidney was okay. She knew what Izzy was doing.”
“And what was she doing?”
“Using me.”
A muscle flickered at his jaw, but he wasn’t getting that faraway look he used to get when he was fourteen and we’d start arguing. He wasn’t looking past me, over my shoulder. He was looking me straight in the eye.
I asked, “Did you have any big fights with Izzy?”
“I wouldn’t call them big fights. Arguments, maybe.”
Izzy was gorgeous, wealthy, and smart. Out of Benjamin’s league. I shouldn’t have thought that, but I did. “You didn’t ever . . . spend any time with her, intimately?”
He scoffed so loudly it came out more like an angry huff.
“So she really was more of an acquaintance then,” I said. “But she did pass notes to you.”
“She was just doing what girls do.”
“And what’s that?”
“Like I said. They use guys.”
His cold certainty troubled me.
“Would you say that she bullied you?”
“No,” he said flatly. “Bullying? Really, Mom?”
I waited.
“She never threatened me. She didn’t intimidate me. She used me. If you don’t know the difference between using and bullying, then I guess you don’t know anything.”
“Oh come on, Benjamin,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Do we have to draw Venn diagrams? Using? Bullying? Teasing? Humiliating? Isn’t there some overlap?”
He didn’t laugh. Slowly and pedantically, he said, “Women . . . use . . . men. Even when they’re trying to act sweet and soft and virtuous. They want things. They get things.”
“What things, Benjamin? What things?”
The air had grown charged between us. My scalp was tingling. I knew if I looked in a mirror I’d soon see a psoriasis stress flare-up of scaly red streaks along my hairline.
“In any case,” I said when it was clear he didn’t plan to answer, “Izzy was mean. You implied it. Chandra said it—”
“Who?”
“Chandra,” I repeated. “She works at Giuliano’s. You know, Chandra Kapoor?”
His eyes narrowed. “Chandra is the Queen Bitch. She’s way meaner than Izzy could ever be. Why was she talking to you? Why were you talking to her?”
“Relax.” I didn’t want to get stuck analyzing girl cliques, especially ones with no direct connection to Izzy or Sidney. “We barely talked. Chandra just said to say hello to you.”
“She did not.”
“She did.” His cold glare flustered me. “Just in passing. We weren’t talking about you mainly, we were talking about Izzy.”
“Chandra Kapoor didn’t tell you to say hello to me.”
There was that certainty again, fortified by righteous anger.
He said, “You’re a liar. You’re a liar and I caught you, red-handed.”
“Fine. I may have misremembered. Chandra gave me the impression that Izzy was mean to boys, and I found myself wondering if you knew anything about that, and she didn’t specifically say hello—”
“She didn’t say hello at all. Chandra would never say hello. I don’t exist to Chandra. I don’t exist to half the kids at Summit and I don’t give a shit. They leave me alone. I leave them alone. Peaceful coexistence. That’s good enough.”
I interlaced my fingers in my lap and looked down, forcing myself to breathe deeply.
He said, “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.”
“You have one exam left?”
“Chemistry.”
“Then go to school. Take the exam. Come home.”
“And then what.”
“Then you’ll be done with exams.” He blinked. Except for the anger and the superiority—yes, those were easy to spot—I couldn’t read him. And I still didn’t understand about Izzy.
“Benjamin, did you read the diary?”
“I didn’t have time.”
He closed his eyes and rubbed his face hard, which felt like a reset for both of us.
When he dropped his hands, Benjamin looked like himself again.
Not quite so hard or embittered. Making an effort.
I always wanted him to make an effort. Those years in grade school, when he didn’t seem interested in anything; that freshman year in Waukegan, when he got called into the principal’s office so often I knew he’d be expelled if we didn’t move away soon; all the times he got in trouble and I was there to back him up, to believe him, to protect him.
“And Robert didn’t have time to read the diary, either,” I said.
Something changed in Benjamin’s face, then—a shift so subtle I couldn’t trace it to a furrowed brow or tensing jaw. Then his expression cleared again, like he was playing some internal meditation on a loop in his head, trying to bring himself back to some practiced state of mind.
“Robert ran back to the house,” I said, testing him. “He put the diary in the front door mail slot. You were in his patrol car. You would have seen him do it.”
“Yeah, Robert didn’t have time to read it,” he said, shrugging. It was an exaggerated shrug, like he was an actor reading from a script, but other than that, his expression and voice were convincing. “So, can I go to bed now?”
“Soon. I want to ask you about something else you took.”
“The women’s underwear,” he said, saving me the trouble.
“Okay.” I exhaled. We were getting through this. “Were they Izzy’s, too?”
He paused—only a few seconds, but it was a pause I’d be reviewing in my mind for days.
“Yeah. She gave them to me.”
“Gave them to you. But you laughed a few minutes ago when I asked if you were intimate with her.”
“We were in a public place. She was wearing a skirt. She stepped out of them and gave them to me.”
“Why on earth would a girl do that?”
“Because she wanted to. That was the only reason Izzy ever did anything.”
He gave me a flat, dark look, like he’d put up with my questions far longer than any teenager should.
And maybe he was telling me the truth. I’d talked with Izzy enough to form my own impression.
Chandra mentioned some photo that was going around—a photo that Izzy supposedly didn’t mind others seeing.
Maybe Izzy was flirting, or provoking, or accepting a dare.
It didn’t mean Benjamin had done anything wrong that day.
And as for later—stealing the diary, breaking and entering—they were all bad, and yet still not the worst things I worried about, where teenage boys were concerned.
My phone rang. It was late, and the caller was unidentified. I let it go to voicemail.
“Can we go to the pool tomorrow, after my last exam?” Benjamin asked.
“I don’t know . . .”
“I answered your questions.”
“Yes, you did.”
I went to the kitchen to get my own plate of pizza and when I came back, Benjamin was watching a video on his phone.
A male voice droned uninterrupted in a way that told me it wasn’t TikTok.
I didn’t assume it was a coincidence he’d pulled up that video and was playing it now, when he knew I could hear it.
I peered toward his phone. “Isn’t that the guy who believes climate change, white privilege, and the oppression of women are all lies?”
Benjamin shrugged. “He’s a psychologist, like you are.” He paused meaningfully. “Or almost are.”
I made an effort to sound less critical. “He seems bitter, but maybe there’s a reason. I wonder if some woman broke his heart.”
Benjamin started to smile. “Damaged goods. You think?”
He entered the man’s name followed by childhood photos into the search box. “Five-dollar bet he was an ugly kid. You up for it?” He held up a pointer finger, ready to search.
“No! That’s not the point. You shouldn’t be looking for reasons to shame him.”
“Who said I wanted to shame him? I wanted to see if he was weird looking. To see if other people shamed him.”
I turned away from the screen. “What an assumption.”
“And your assumption, that he was a failure with girls, is nicer?”
“Just stop watching his videos.”
He laughed. Of course he wasn’t going to stop watching any video just because I said so. He’d probably watch them more. For now, he slid the phone between his thigh and the couch cushion.
“You don’t want me to learn anything.”
“Of course I want you to learn things.”
I sighed, remembering the time I made him look up why a “Blue Lives Matter” T-shirt might be offensive, and explain it back to me, before I let him wear it to school on a casual Friday.
He ended up writing an English paper about it, pretending to defend the slogan.
When he got an A, he showed me the paper.
Then he told me it was all a joke, a put-on, and the teacher had bought it. Teachers are dumb. Cops are dumb, too.
I knew he felt that way about social media and just about everything else. He was too smart to be influenced. On top of that, he deplored trends. If I asked him about something specific—sigmas, “looksmaxxing”—he’d wince.
That’s cringe, Mom.
And I got that. If I saw some specific bit of teen slang decoded in People magazine, it was already three years out of date. Google searches could only take a parent so far.
When Benjamin left for the bathroom, I checked my voicemail.
“Mrs. Rosso? It’s Detective Hernández. I’d like to talk to you again. Call me?”
He sounded friendly, the way he’d been when I talked with him for fifteen minutes, at school. Young, twenty-five or so, which is young for a detective, I guess. Round cheeks and a dimple that flashed when he smiled. No wonder Robert was jealous of him.
I called back and got his voicemail. “Ms. Rosso here, the counselor from Summit.” I tried to sound helpful. No, I wanted to be helpful. “Given the terrible news, I imagine you’ll need anything I’ve got on Isabella Scarlatti. I’ll go through my notes and let you know what I find.”
I’d sounded confident enough on the voicemail, but the moment I disconnected, I felt different. Unsettled. Like every next choice was bound to be the wrong one.