What Mr. Mattero Did (3 page)

It's confusing sometimes. Because up until the day Dad was accused by those seventh-graders, I figured my father's greatest weakness was just in being a little forgetful and disorganized. But over the next few months, I would come to know many things, good and bad, about my dad. Things that I might otherwise have never known.

And I can say the same about myself.

3

Claire

“YOU WAIT
—
THEY WILL GO FREAKING BALLISTIC!”

That was Jenna saying that—all the way down the hall to the school office. All the way grabbing my wrist and predicting—like she almost
enjoyed
this—what was going to happen when we three walked in.

But a lot of stuff goes down in middle school every day, and we hadn't counted on walking into another crisis when we went to report ours.

Everyone in the office that morning was busy—the secretary with a deliveryman and teachers walking in and out getting their mail out of their little boxes. So we stood at the counter and looked toward where the yelling was coming from: Mrs. Fernandez's office. The door was not closed all the way, so I was able to see part of a denim jacket and an ugly little rattail, and I knew right off who it was.

“Jason,” I whispered to Jenna. “Jason's in there.”

“Jason?”

Like how many Jasons did she know? Because I could only think of one. “Jason
Hershel,
” I told her.

And we all nodded—you know, “aha!”—on account of we knew why he was in there. It was for bringing those firecrackers on our bus that morning.

Actually, if you want to know the truth, I'm glad he got hauled in. I don't much like Jason. He still calls me “Tubs” even after all the weight I've lost. But more than that, those firecrackers sounded just like a gun going off, and that's not funny. We all dove down in our seats and little Madeline Ott cut her lip hitting the floor and was bleeding all over the place, including on my new sandals when I went over to help her up. When the bus pulled over, we all saw Jason laughing his head off. But in a weird kind of way that was a relief. Because then we all knew it was just Jason and not like real bullets flying around in there.

Jason is so over the top. I remember in first grade how he and his older brother rented out
Playboy
magazines on the bus. For a quarter you got to look at one for, like, five minutes before Jason grabbed it back and hid it in his backpack. Not that I ever paid to look at one, but I did catch a glimpse.

You know, I always wondered what those girls got paid for posing in those
Playboy
pictures. I mean, exposing their privates like that, did they like get paid a lot? I'll tell you this. Those pictures were
provocative.
I know that word now, and I am here to tell you that no matter what those parents said, none of us could ever be called
provocative
compared with those
Playboy
pictures!

Anyway, a narrow view is all I had of Jason. Enough to see his dumb head nodding slowly, like on automatic. “Yes, ma'am . . . yes, ma'am.” Even Jason would not want to take on Mrs. Fernandez or give her any crap because she is one tough, bull moose of a woman. I think she could've picked up Jason with one hand and stuffed him in her wastebasket if she had wanted. When the yelling was over, Jason shuffled out with Mrs. Fernandez right on his heels.

“Remember, that's a warning, Jason,” Mrs. Fernandez called after him.

I started getting cold feet then—and butterflies in my stomach—seeing Mrs. Fernandez all red-faced and worked up after yelling at Jason. But Jenna didn't wait for her to cool down.

“Mrs. Fernandez!” she called out.

The principal turned her head toward us.

“We need to talk to you,” Jenna said quickly. “Suzanne and Claire and me.”

I swallowed hard, and Suzanne shot me a desperate look.

Jenna sucked in her breath. “Something's happened, and we need to report it.”

Mrs. Fernandez frowned and came over. When she stood on the other side of the counter from us, Suzanne and I scooted close together.

Jenna raced on. “Something happened in the music room, Mrs. Fernandez. A teacher did something that we don't feel very good about . . .”

Mrs. Fernandez sighed. You could tell she did not want to deal with us. “Girls, if you're having a problem in class, then we need to arrange a parent-teacher conference—”

“No!” Jenna stopped her. “We need to tell you because we're pretty sure it was abuse. We think it was sexual abuse.”

Instantly, and I mean
instantly,
the office became silent. The secretary stopped keyboarding. The receptionist put a hand over the mouthpiece of her phone. Even the FedEx man froze with a package in his hand. For a minute there, we must have looked like we were in a commercial or something. At least that's how it felt. Like it wasn't real somehow. Like we were outside ourselves, watching it.

At first Mrs. Fernandez seemed confused. But then she motioned for us to come around the counter—and she separated us! “You in here, in my office,” she said to Jenna as she took her by the arm.

We three glanced at one another, our eyes saying what we could not say out loud:
Remember everything. Be strong. We're best friends.

After Jenna disappeared behind the office door, Mrs. Fernandez pointed her index finger at the room next door, the office of our assistant principal, and told Suzanne to go in there. But Suzanne just stared at her, like she was paralyzed. Then she started doing her lip-sucking thing, and there was a terrible, awkward moment when neither one of them moved. Mrs. Fernandez stood with her finger pointing and her gold charm bracelet dangling off her beefy wrist until Suzanne finally obeyed.

“And
you,
” Mrs. Fernandez said, motioning to me. She put a hand on my shoulder and looked around. Mrs. Sidley, my English teacher, was coming toward us with a bunch of papers in her hands. The principal asked her, “Could you please escort this young lady down to the guidance office?”

Mrs. Sidley's surprised eyes caught mine. “Certainly,” she said.

I followed my English teacher's big butt down a narrow hallway in the back of the office to the guidance counselor's office and sat down on a hard plastic chair. The room didn't have a real window in it, but the guidance counselor had made a fake one so it looked like it did. She put curtains up around a poster of a pretty-phony-looking mountain scene from Switzerland or someplace. Someplace with chalet houses. I mean, who is she kidding? We know that there is not a snow-capped mountain with chalets and cows grazing in the meadow across the street from Oakdale Middle School. There's no
oak
and there's no
dale
either. Just a trashy two-lane highway with a traffic light in front of the school driveway that blinks yellow all the time. And on the other side is a dry cleaner's run by a Chinese family and Frank's Auto Body Shop, where my cousin, Herky, works.

EAGLES SOAR. YOU CAN TOO, another poster shouted. Boy, I wished I was an eagle and could've soared right out of there.

Nervous, my eyes flicked to yet another poster, all fancy writing:
To thine own self be true . . .—William Shakespeare.

I wondered what that meant, that Shakespeare quote. I thought about it while I was waiting on the hard chair to tell Mrs. Fernandez what Mr. Mattero did. And I thought I had that quote figured out, that it meant to always be the kind of person on the outside that you were on the inside. Or vice versa. In other words, to not be a big fat hypocrite or anything.

And
that
made me think back to when I was new in middle school. To sixth grade, how I was myself—and how that didn't do me a lick of good because nobody liked me. I was a little bit chunky then—that was before my diet—and all my old friends from fifth grade, suddenly they were wearing really sexy clothes all the time—like tight jeans and crop tops—and talking to boys online after school and planning to hook up at the movies, and I didn't want to do that stuff. (Of course, it's not like I turned them down because they never even called me anymore.)

Suzanne was the only friend who stayed a friend in sixth grade. Those girls didn't much like Suzanne either, but I don't know why. Because of her asthma? Because she has to use an inhaler and she can't run and do all the things we do in gym? Because she's shy? Because of her bad skin? What? I don't know. But we stuck together. We ate lunch together every day, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Cheetos, Oreos—a lot of junk food, come to think of it. Then, after school, after Suzanne and me got off the bus, we'd hang out at her house or my house and do our homework together. We played basketball Wednesday nights at the rec center, and on weekends we hooked up and went to the mall, even if it was just to visit the puppies in the pet store or squirt stuff on each other at Bath & Body Works.

Still, it was a lonely year. At school all the time we had to listen to those other girls—girls who used to be our friends—whispering and giggling about their sleepovers and boys they liked and stuff like that. I didn't like sixth grade, and I didn't much like myself either. I stopped eating in sixth grade.

The next year, when school started, Suzanne and me and some other kids in our neighborhood got transferred to a different school because of overcrowding. I was glad, but it didn't make any difference, because the cool girls at Oakdale ignored us, too—even though I had lost all that weight over the summer. Then, pretty soon after school started, Jenna moved into our neighborhood and showed up on our bus. She was so hot, I remember thinking how Jenna could pick any of the popular girls at Oakdale and be, like, friends immediately. But she didn't. She decided she didn't like the popular girls at our new school. She said they were sluts. She picked us—Suzanne and me—instead. I couldn't believe it. I mean, who would have thought that could happen?

A couple of minutes passed while I was thinking back on how we became friends. I looked at the clock and wondered what we were missing in earth science. We were doing the chapter on weather, on wind and evaporation and stuff. Would the teacher notice we weren't there?

I was tired of reading posters on the wall, but there wasn't anything else to do. One of them said that getting respect starts with respecting yourself. I swung my head around to look out the door. Well, so far, Mrs. Fernandez hadn't shown much respect for any of us. We weren't bad kids like Jason Hershel, who brought firecrackers on the bus that could actually hurt someone. Besides, didn't she care about what we said? What one of her teachers did? Didn't she know what kind of courage it took for us to just walk in her office?

Mrs. Sidley, who had been very quiet, peeked back in looking a little sorry for me. “Claire, what happened?” she finally asked, stepping into the doorway.

I have always liked Mrs. Sidley. Even if she does fix her hair like someone out of the fifties, I like the books we read in her class, and I got halfway decent grades from her. I opened my mouth to explain, but the words wouldn't rise up. Suddenly she was shaking her head, saying, “No, no, don't. I'm probably not supposed to ask.”

So I closed my mouth, and while Mrs. Sidley kept watch, I sat there on that chair, hugging my backpack, chewing on what was left of my poor, torn-up fingernail, and feeling myself break out into little beads of sweat.

Finally, Mrs. Fernandez came in. Mrs. Sidley gave me a “good luck” look with a lift of her eyebrows and left. The principal closed the door.

“All right,” she began, sighing and taking a hard look at me. “What's
your
name?” She sounded tired.

“Claire,” I told her. “Claire Montague.”

“Claire Montague,” she repeated. I guess because she didn't know me. “You're new this year, Claire? Seventh grade?”

“Yes, ma'am. I'm new because of the districting.”

“You mean
re
districting,” she corrected me. “You got moved here from Herald Heights?”

I nodded.

Mrs. Fernandez started to shake her head, and I wondered if she thought that maybe we wanted to cause trouble because we were unhappy about the move.

“I like this school,” I quickly told her. “It's a whole lot better than my old one. At Herald Heights there is, like, a fight every day. You can't even take a regular backpack to that school—it has to be a clear one, you know? So they can see through to what you have in there, like a knife or something.”

Mrs. Fernandez did not react to that.

“Claire,” she continued, “often there are many sides to an incident.”

Why was she calling it an incident? Didn't she believe Jenna?

She handed me some lined notebook paper and said very slowly, “I want you to write me a letter. Take your time and tell me everything that happened, okay? What led up to it and all the details you can remember.”

I was surprised because I had thought we'd talk about it, that she would ask me some questions.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

I told her I did.

“All right then,” she said. “Go ahead. Take your time.” And she walked out. Just like that.

I was surprised, yes. But I was also relieved that I didn't have to talk to her about it. At that point, I just wanted to write it all down quickly and get out of there—maybe even fake a stomachache so I could go home.

After moving a couple books on the guidance counselor's desk so I had a flat space to write on, I smoothed out the paper.
Dear Mrs. Fernandez
, I wrote at the top in my neatest cursive.

We had notes—Jenna, Suzanne, and I—printed on pieces of bright pink Post-its that we'd stuffed into our jeans pockets. But I didn't need to look at those notes because I knew everything by heart.