Dreaming of Antigone (10 page)

I squeeze Mom's hand. This is not the same, I remind myself.

“Can you tell me exactly what my husband is accused of?” Mom asks.

But the female cop is looking at me. “Sweetie, I need to speak with you for a moment about your stepfather. Alone.”

“Why?” Mom clutches my hand now. “She hasn't done anything wrong.”

“Of course not, Mrs. Williams. But we need to ask her a few questions about her relationship with Mr. Williams.”

“Relationship?” I let go of Mom's hand. “Do you mean what I think you mean? Gross. He's a normal stepdad. I can tell you that right here.”

“He picked you up from your friend's house this morning and brought you home, right?”

“Have you been following him?” Mom asks. Craig must be in serious trouble if this investigation has been going on for a while.

“Yes.”

“Andria, has Craig ever been inappropriate with you or anyone else that you've witnessed? You don't have to talk about this in front of your mom if it's uncomfortable.”

“Ew. No.” Nothing I've ever noticed. “Are you saying he's molesting girls on the soccer team?” I think of Natalie and Trista and can't imagine it. Trista would never let something happen to her without fighting back. She'd kick Craig's ass. Unless—ew. “Or is someone sleeping with him?” I ask before thinking. Mom gasps.

The younger policeman comes out of the den with Craig's desktop. He glances at his partner.

She hands Mom a business card with a phone number and a badge number written on it. “Mr. Williams needs to speak with us. It would be better if he cooperates and comes in willingly.”

But as they open the front door to leave, Craig pulls up in his convertible. I move to follow the cops outside, but Mom grabs my arm. Hard. “Don't. The neighbors will see you.”

Mr. Nosy Old Guy is probably already camped out on his porch, looking at the cop car. The neighbors will know what happens whether we attempt to hide it or not. I try not to think about school on Monday. I still don't know what is happening. Whose parents are accusing Craig?

The female cop pokes her head back inside. “Mr. Williams has agreed to come with us to the police station willingly.”

Craig is standing on the porch with them. “I'm sorry, Patrice.” He doesn't look at either of us, but turns and follows the police to their car. They don't handcuff him, but he slides into the backseat, where bad people go. Is he a bad person?

What does “I'm sorry” mean? I close the front door and turn around to find Mom sinking down onto the floor, sobbing.

“Andria, baby. Did he touch you? I swear to Christ I will kill him myself.”

“What? No!” I put my arms around her. “Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe he made one of the players mad and she's just trying to cause him trouble.”

Mom shakes her head. “What if it's not a mistake? That bastard! He's been . . . different lately. Distant. Working late. Extra out-of-town trips.” She wipes her face, with a bitter laugh. “And here I was worried he was sleeping with his secretary.”

A million different things are flying through my head right now. I don't know what to do. What to say to Mom. How are we going to get through this? If Craig was sleeping with one of the girls on the team, Mom will be devastated. The cops were so worried about him doing something with me. A nasty thought slithers up from deep inside my brain. It stops my blood cold.

What if he was doing something with Iris?

CHAPTER 17

 

I can't remember the last time I had a decent night's sleep. I toss and turn, my worries tumbling over and over inside my head. Mostly I worry about my mother. How much more sadness can she handle?

Sophie whimpers and tries to climb up on my bed. She knows better, but this morning I let her snuggle with me. I need her right now.

It's not even five in the morning, and I hear Mom rummaging in Iris's room. She can't sleep either. She's looking for my sister's diary. Mom looked six months ago but never found it. It was navy blue with a silver unicorn on the cover. She'd had it since she was thirteen.

I know I'm not going to sleep anymore, so I get up and go to help Mom look.

“Do you have any idea where she hid it?” she asks. She looks like she's been crying, but she's not crying now. She's calm. Determined. On a mission.

“Did you look under her mattress?”

“Of course. That's the first place I looked six months ago. And the closet shelves, and in her dresser drawers.”

“Look again. The last time I ever saw her write in it, she was lying in bed.”

“Help me, then.” Together we throw the pillows off the bed and tug the mattress over. There's a folded-up poster board from an elementary school project. The science fair project she won a blue ribbon for in sixth grade. I helped her make an astrolabe.

I lift up the poster board and find her diary. Mom is shaking. Either with anger or fear, or a little of both. “You knew it was here?”

I shake my head. I've always had a pretty good idea where it might be, but I never went searching for it.

“And you never told me.”

“Honestly, I hadn't thought about it. I haven't seen her write in it in years.” For the longest time, we knew everything about one another. It never occurred to me that she had any secrets. Because I didn't.

I live a boring life. Other than the time I tried to steal Craig's motorcycle. Or drink Mom's brandy. For that, Iris yelled at me for days. She knew alcohol and my meds didn't mix. She took the brandy away and finished it herself.

“What if there was something in here about Craig?” Mom asks.

A sick feeling grows in my stomach. She is right. Whatever secrets Iris kept in this diary might have saved someone else a lot of pain. She picks up the diary.

“I don't want to read this,” she says. “This is probably just full of in-depth descriptions of her dates.”

Alex is probably in there, I think, staring at the unicorn on the cover. I don't want to read it either. “We could read it together,” I say. Even though I dread it as much as she does.

We let the mattress fall back down and both sit on the side of the bed. “Ready?” Mom asks as she opens the book.

I scoot closer to her and crane my neck to see.

It's more awful than I imagined. Craig began touching Iris when we were twelve. Right after Mom gave us our own bedrooms. She wonders early on if he visits my room too, and at first is relieved when he tells her I'm too sickly for him. Later, she gets paranoid and decides she has to be jealous of me. One day it's because I'm not the one being abused. The next day it's because she fears she will have to share Craig with me.

I can't believe the way that monster warped her mind. I want to throw up as I read.

Mom gasps as she sees the same words I see on the page. “But she had boyfriends. She'd been dating since ninth grade,” she says. She's trying to convince herself that what we're reading isn't true.

“And he fought you on that, remember?” I say. “Craig thought we were both too young to date.” Not that anyone ever asked me out. But Craig never liked Noah, Iris's first boyfriend. And he certainly didn't like Alex.

Mom begins to flip through the pages. Iris and Craig's relationship (ick, I hate to use that word) became something more consensual as the years went by. Even though she still knew it was wrong. She thought that he loved her. And she wrote last Christmas that she loved him. “Who was the boy she dated before Alex? The one with the El Camino?”

“Mike?” Mike was a drug dealer. I know this now, but didn't the first time I met him. Now I'm not even sure if his name really is Mike. She was dating him last summer, but it's evident from the diary that she was just using him to get drugs. By this time, she was depressed and believed she needed to make Craig leave her alone, but he wouldn't.

My stomach feels queasy as I think about the last time I saw Mike. The night Iris died. She'd taken me with her to his party somewhere on the other side of the university. Out near the edge of town. I had had a seizure earlier that evening and had made her promise not to tell anyone. In exchange for her silence, I had to go with her and drive her home in case she got too drunk.

She was more than happy to keep my secret about the seizure, because she knew I'd be obligated to keep that night's party a secret too. I had trapped myself. And her. And in the end, it didn't help me at all.

Iris has filled these pages with her pain. The things she couldn't tell me, she poured out into this book. My cheeks are wet with my tears as I read page after page. How could we have not known this was going on?

Mom throws the book down and runs to the bathroom between our bedrooms. I can hear her being violently ill.

I pick up the diary, so full of poison and suffering. I flip through the pages, searching for her last entry. There's no date, but it must have been written sometime within the last week or two that she was alive.

 

 

I don't know if he really knew it or not. I guess I know now how she felt about him, but how did Alex feel about her?

 

Mom is reluctant to let me go to school. She thinks my classmates are going to harass me. Or ask me stupid questions. Or at the very least, stare at me with pity.

That isn't anything new. Kids have stared at me since the day I had a seizure in kindergarten. “I want to make sure Natalie and Trista are okay,” I tell her. Mom's face pales when she realizes how many of my classmates might be affected by this.

I wear my favorite hoodie, favorite jeans, and black boots. I'm dressed for battle.

She is not going in to work today, so she drops me off at school. “I love you,” she says as I open the car door. She looks small this morning. Frail and terribly human.

“Love you too,” I say as I face the crowd in front of the main building. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. I ignore that twisty feeling I'm getting in my stomach. Make it to the library, I tell myself. I can hide out in there until the bell rings.

No one stares at me in the hallway. Perhaps the news hasn't gotten out yet. I sneak into the library just as Verla is unlocking the doors.

“Hey, how are you and your mom holding up?” she asks, her eyes sad.

The news is out there after all.

“When did you hear?” I ask.

“It was in the paper this morning online. Andria, I'm surprised your mother let you come to school today.”

Ugh. It won't be long before everyone knows. “I'll be fine.”

Verla plays with the silver necklace around her neck. “My door is always open, honey. If you ever need to talk, you know I'm here. I'll even share my chocolate.”

“I guess the paper didn't say the name of the student accusing Craig.”

“No, they won't be allowed to, since she's a minor.”

But gossip gets around the school quickly, and by the time we're seated in first block, Natalie knows. She reaches over and squeezes my hand. “Kimber isn't here today. They're saying her family took her out of school and sent her to stay with her cousins in Florida.”

Kimber is gorgeous. And extremely talented on the soccer field. I hope she is strong enough to survive this. “I wish I'd known.”

“How could you have?” Natalie says, shocked. “None of us ever suspected this. Craig was the best soccer coach ever. Do you think maybe he just went a little crazy after Iris's death?”

“She probably went after him,” Trista says. “That's what Thomas is saying.” Thomas dated Kimber briefly last year. But she dumped him when she found out he was messing around with two cheerleaders.

“No, Craig is the adult and he is the one to blame.” They both look taken aback by my sudden fierceness. I don't know if Iris's story will have to come out, but if it will help Kimber, then I know Mom is willing to turn in the diary. Until then, I promised her I wouldn't tell anyone about Iris and Craig.

By lunchtime, more people are beginning to talk and stare, so Natalie and Trista keep me company in the library. Verla ignores us as we eat fruit snacks from the vending machine in the periodical section.

In English, we are finishing up our Antigone unit. Mr. Dawkins wants an essay arguing either Creon's view or Antigone's view about her brother's death and burial. He's giving us the period to write, but I don't want to think about ancient Greek soap-opera drama right now. I have enough drama in present-day Athens, thank you very much.

I write poetry instead, lines that I copied from the desk in algebra. Lines from a Gary Snyder poem that Alex must have left for me.

I love the simple rhythm of the words, the smoky imagery of the Pleiades. I wonder if Alex was out running again last night. And then I wonder if he ran past my house. I think of Iris's diary entry. “He's too much for me to handle right now.” If he was too much then, what is he now?

He's not in the library after school. I don't know what he thinks about Craig's arrest, or if he even cares. Verla hauls the last tote of poetry books up to my table.

“You guys have done a really fantastic job cataloging these books for me,” she says. “The school has decided to hold a poetry fair in here since April is Poetry Month. Sort of like a reading fair but the displays have to be about poets.”

“Sounds awesome,” I tell her. “Will the projects be for a grade or will they be extra credit?”

She shrugs. “I'm waiting to hear back from the English department on that. Of all of these poets, have you found a favorite?”

There are too many, I think, looking at the stacks of books we've already cataloged. I still love Sylvia Plath, but now I'm also fond of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.

I shrug.

Verla grins. “I know, it's like trying to pick your favorite child.” But I don't have kids, and I'm pretty sure she doesn't either. “Have some chocolate before you get started. Just don't get fingerprints on the books.”

She doesn't mention the missing Alex Hammond, and I don't ask.