“You’ll prove it. I know. I’m tired. It’s been a big day. See you.”
“You will,” he assured me. Or he was assuring himself.
However, he wasn’t too far off with his concerns, nor was my father with his fears.
5
They didn’t wait for me to get to school. My sister, Andrea, saw it first when she opened our front door that morning. Her scream resonated through the house and was so shrill that it made my spine vibrate and stole my breath away for a moment. I was just finishing brushing my hair. I froze and listened, and then I heard my mother shout for my father. I rushed to the front door and found my parents, Andrea, and Randall staring at the short front portico.
A dead pigeon was lying there, the string used to choke it still around its neck. My father looked at me and then pushed my mother, brother, and sister away as he stepped out and closed the door behind him. My mother brought her closed fist to her mouth.
“Who did that to the bird?” Randall asked.
“Go sit in the living room until Daddy tells you it’s all right to leave,” my mother replied.
I moved forward quickly to take their hands and lead them away. No one spoke. We heard my father come back in quickly and go to the kitchen. My mother followed him. We could hear my father calling the police. After another minute or so, my mother came to the living room.
“You all go to school now,” she said. “Don’t say anything to anyone about this. Let your daddy handle it. Understand?”
Randall and Andrea, still quite shaken, nodded quickly.
I looked at the floor to avoid my mother’s eyes. This was entirely my fault. All I had done was bring terror and fear to our doorstep. Andrea and Randall got up slowly and headed out, moving like they had to walk over hot coals.
“You wait for us,” my mother told me. “We’re going with you to school. Your daddy wants to talk to Dean Becker.”
“That will just make things worse,” I said.
“Corliss!” she snapped. I looked down again and waited for my parents to get ready to go with me. My father would drive us.
One way I could always tell when my father was on the verge of absolute rage was by how the backs of his hands looked when he squeezed them into fists so tight that they paled. The veins would become embossed, and his knuckles pushed out so hard that I thought they would tear through his skin. He grasped the steering wheel like that. All the way to the school, he was silent. My mother sat looking out the window but seeing nothing. I thought my heart had stopped twenty minutes ago. My chest felt full of cement.
After we arrived at school, I tried to avoid eye contact with the other students en route to Dean Becker’s office. He was standing outside his inner office, talking to his secretary, when we appeared. My father seemed to swell in size as he entered first. The dean took one look at him and my mother and me and quickly opened his inner office door. He didn’t even say “Good morning” or “How can I help you?”
We entered, and he followed quickly, closing the door behind him and rushing to get behind his desk. Perhaps he thought that was protection. He was a slim man, maybe five foot nine, with short reddish-brown hair. Before he could say a word, my father held out his smartphone. Dean Becker took it gingerly and looked at the picture on the screen.
“Where was this?” he asked.
“Our front door. Just now,” my father said. “I’ve informed the police. They’re coming by to get it and see what they can find out, but you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know who did it and why.”
Dean Becker nodded and looked at me.
“You call those girls in, and you read them the riot act,” my father ordered.
“The ones involved in the drug deal yesterday have been expelled. I don’t have any jurisdiction over them.”
“They have friends, and you know who they are. I don’t want my daughter harassed or threatened. Or harmed!” he added, raising his voice.
The dean sat slowly. “I’ll bring the principal in on this and wait for what the police tell you. I’ll inform all of Corliss’s teachers to stay alert to anyone threatening her in any way, and I’ll personally stay on it,” he promised. He turned to my mother. “For a while, you might want to escort her to and from school, Mrs. Simon.”
“My wife works, and so do I,” my father said. “I expect that you and this institution can handle some nasty teenage girls.”
Dean Becker almost smiled. “I’ll do what I can. We all will.” He turned to me again. “Don’t regret helping us rid this school of drugs.”
“That’s not her job,” my father said. “If everyone had given her the benefit of the doubt when she was abused, she wouldn’t have done what she did.”
That surprised me. He was actually criticizing himself as well. The dean nodded.
“We have to get back to the house and then to work,” my father said. “You come to the dean if anyone bothers you, Corliss. Understand?”