Chapter 38
ABBY
Robert wasn’t answering my texts. That wasn’t a real surprise, considering how pissed off I’d been with him at Ray’s.
Even when I texted in the morning to say I was concerned about Benjamin—that I thought I’d discovered something new and important, the reason Benjamin had been acting up—Robert still didn’t reply.
Fine. I was alone with this, just as I’d been alone with the hypnosis transcript. I needed to stuff those old memories back where they belonged, and I needed to find a way to contact Benjamin, not to confront him but to reassure myself he was okay.
But first, I had to get through my day at Grove.
I made a fifth call to the number I had for Curtis, but it always went to voicemail.
I’d sent him an email as well. He’d never said he was taking his own break from screens or phones.
Maybe his father had a landline. I’d feel better if I knew where Benjamin was, precisely.
An address, an alternate phone number. I couldn’t remember Curtis’s father’s first name.
With only a common surname, I couldn’t find any contact information online.
All of this was keeping me from my teaching obligations.
My students had just left for lunch and I hadn’t finished adding captions to the “Mental Resiliency During the College Application Process” presentation I planned to show them at the end of the day.
When I inserted a thumb drive, I was surprised by the document names that popped up.
Where I expected to see slideshows and PDFs I’d developed for Summit, I instead saw a dozen unfamiliar documents.
Not completely unfamiliar. There was the file, WBL52024, that I’d printed for Curtis. I pulled out the thumb drive to inspect it closer. It was white and generic-looking, with nothing to distinguish it from several I owned. I’d accidentally given Curtis the wrong thumb drive back.
I opened the file and started scrolling quickly in search of the acknowledgments, where I hoped he would thank someone local with a distinctive name—a close colleague or relative I could track down as a way of finding Curtis.
But I was only halfway there when my eye started to fall on certain phrases.
The war on masculinity. Halfway down the page: Honest talk about boys’ libido. Next paragraph: Defending primal urges.
I slowed down, reading more carefully, waiting for the moment Curtis would explain these were the ideas of misogynist influencers—arguments he was detailing in order to dismiss them. But the dismissal never came.
“Are you kidding me?”
The book was called What Boys Learn. But Curtis wasn’t saying that boys learn the wrong lessons from social media or each other.
He was saying they learn the wrong lessons from an “overly feminized culture, one that actively denies and suppresses the natural drives and rites of passage by which boys become men.”
He was blaming the #MeToo movement. Accusing girls and women of making false rape charges. Criticizing consent culture for prioritizing women’s “need to be coddled” over men’s “need for sexual expression and empowerment.”
I couldn’t believe this was the Curtis I knew. I didn’t have time to read any more. I scrolled to the end but there were no personal acknowledgments, only a dozen pages of endnotes justifying his claims. Lunch period was halfway over.
I recalled the other files I’d seen on the thumb drive. One of them was about Benjamin. I no longer gave a shit about confidentiality.
I found the Rosso2024 file and started reading. The first paragraph didn’t surprise me—“below average student”—yes, a fair-enough description of Benjamin.
Yesterday, when we met again by chance . . .
A little odd, that he had started entering notes just after we all re-met at the pool, many days before Benjamin had his first session.
. . . she disregarded cues that I was occupied reading and working . . .
She?
. . . moved a magazine I had placed on a lounge chair to maintain space intentionally between us so that I could focus on the work I’d brought, but she disregarded those and other cues.
What the . . . ?
He didn’t want to talk? The person who asked about Benjamin’s flip turns and talked about his divorce? The one who recounted a long story about meeting Benjamin when he was a grade schooler? The one who asked me out for a glass of wine?
Given what I recalled from the last time I knew her—elements of antisocial personality disorder but with significant traits missing and without the positive attributes we expect from non-impulsive ASPD (high degree of success, confidence, charm), I was admittedly curious from a research standpoint, especially given the possibility of making familial and even multigenerational comparisons.
Multigenerational comparisons.
I had to go back to the top and read again.
This wasn’t a document about Benjamin. It was about me. And not just about me, but about our whole family. Curtis had seen something in me, in college, and he saw something in Benjamin. It made him curious.
But if he’d thought I had antisocial personality disorder, it hadn’t stopped him from asking me out for wine. Or flirting. Or going to lunch. Or seeming on the verge of starting an affair that day in Ray’s that only fizzled out at the last moment.
I stared at the screen, remembering. He’d mentioned the hypnosis manuscript, challenging me to read it. That’s when things cooled off.
No, that wasn’t quite right. It cooled off minutes earlier, when he asked me to release Benjamin into his charge for the rest of the summer, and I said no. My refusal to grant him full control was the pivot point when charming Curtis became severe Curtis.
I reread the last sentence on the screen.
. . . I was admittedly curious from a research standpoint, especially given the possibility of making familial and even multigenerational comparisons.
Multigenerational.
I thought about the day I came home with Benjamin after his night in jail. The intervention by Curtis. The kindness, and the patience, and the pad thai. The question, And your brother, was he the same way?
But Curtis didn’t know about my brother.
I hadn’t talked about my brother. Twenty minutes at the pool, and less than a week later, twenty minutes eating takeout.
There wasn’t time, never mind the fact that I didn’t discuss my biggest source of familial shame with just anyone.
I hadn’t even told Robert why Ewan had gone to prison until we’d been dating half a year.
Curtis knew about Ewan. Maybe he’d heard about him from another psychologist, or maybe he’d met him long ago, at Menkoka, when Ewan was first held there.
I tried to picture that day at the pool. Curtis watching Benjamin with such interest.
And then I thought farther back, to that day in college when I’d brought Benjamin with me, because he’d gotten in trouble at school and I couldn’t find anyone to watch him and I couldn’t risk failing a psych class, either.
All of which I’d explained to Curtis, feeling embarrassed that I had a disobedient young child and a chaotic life, unlike most of the other undergrads.
I pictured the look on Dr. Curtis Campbell’s face, then—the tilt of his head, the softening of his features, that moment when my crush started, because it was just incredible that this professor cared, that he was interested—really interested. In me. In my son.
Especially in my son.