Exposure (19 page)

“Maybe.” Her voice thickened as she said, “You can’t imagine how she’s been today. I told her the Winter boy got arrested, and she looked at me like I said I’d just run over the dog.”

Harlan shook his head. That Amelia could be reduced to this state over anyone, and especially over someone with so little actual worth, made him wonder where he’d gone wrong—and, more to the point, what Winter had said, what he’d done to trap her. Some poetic bullshit, probably. Amelia, sweet as she was, was probably vulnerable to that. He should’ve seen it coming. Amelia wouldn’t fall for the bad-boy type that had entranced his mother. For her it’d be the artsy guy with the high IQ, who could easily identify a doe like Amelia, draw her in, and hypnotize her with his spotlight eyes.

He said, “I’m sure it must be rough for you both. Maybe take her out for lunch. Go to that nail place you like and get your toes done. I want to thank you, by the way, for putting all your things on hold while we straighten this out. I’d do the same if I could.”

“Would you?” she said flatly. “See you at dinner.”

As soon as he ended that call, he was on the phone again. The woman he spoke with at the newspaper listened politely, asked him three different times to identify himself, then told him she’d let the appropriate reporter know, but made no promises about running a story. She said, “Frankly, I’m not sure I can see how this is newsworthy.”

“You want someone like him preying on
your
daughter?”

“If I had a daughter, I would not want her preyed upon, no. But honestly, Mr. Whoever You Are, I can’t say that the behavior you’ve described is predatory.”

“The DA thinks so.”

“The DA thinks prayer should be made mandatory in public schools.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?”

“Thank you so much for your call,” she said.

11

OR
A
NTHONY, SCHOOL ON TUESDAY WAS STILL SCHOOL AND
not the rumor circus it would soon become. Except for the occasional question from a friend either verifying Amelia’s having mono, or asking whether he’d heard that she did, no one behaved out of the ordinary. Word hadn’t gotten out. No one looked at him, yet, as if he’d grown a third eye on his forehead. No one avoided him in the halls. The teachers did not view him as an object of pity, nor an object of scorn, and Mr. Rickman did not yet treat him as if he were a scourge and the school in desperate need of disinfectant.

Amelia’s absence, though, was a stain on the day.

Third period was four minutes from ending when Anthony heard the crackle of the room’s intercom, then the secretary’s voice saying, “Mr. Rickman, please dismiss Anthony Winter to Mr. Braddock’s office.”

“Whoa, Winter,” his classmates hooted, while Rickman raised an eyebrow and waved him off.

Though his anxiety made him want to run—not to Braddock’s office, necessarily, but somewhere, anywhere—Anthony made himself move at a normal pace down the hall to the stairs, and then to the administrative offices.

Braddock’s secretary avoided looking at him as she said, “Go on in, he’s waiting for you.”

He grasped the handle and turned it, expecting nothing good as he pushed open the door. A lecture probably. Advice, if he was luckier.

“You rang?” he said, as if this visit was another request to script some jokes for morning announcements, or act as ambassador to a prospective student from upstate New York.

“Hi, Anthony,” Braddock said. He was sitting on the corner of his desk, one pant leg hitched up high enough that Anthony could see the top of a brown-on-brown argyle sock. “Tough week, huh?”

“I’ve had better.”

“Take a seat. Let’s talk for a minute about you and Amelia Wilkes.”

Anthony sat in the proffered seat, one of four padded leather captain’s chairs. He said, “What do you want to know?”

“You’ve been accused of providing her with … inappropriate materials. I spoke to your mother; she says you sent the pictures at Amelia’s request. I’m curious as to why Amelia would do that.”

“Did my mom tell you that I’ve been going out with Amelia for the past year?”

Braddock’s mouth tightened before he said, “She just mentioned that you’d been dating, in secret, yes.”

Anthony rubbed the chair’s polished arms. “Well.”

“Well?”

“What goes on between Amelia and me is private, okay? It would be … ungentlemanly to say more.”

“While I admire your sense of honor, the fact is I can’t make informed decisions unless I have information.” He clasped his hands in front of him.

Anthony considered what he might say that would satisfy Braddock. “It’s like this: she likes the way I look, and I didn’t mind her having pictures of me. Pretty simple. Older generations are too hung up on nudity.”

“I think maybe honesty is as much the problem here.”

“You think that if her parents had known we were dating they wouldn’t have called the cops? I doubt that. If Amelia thought they’d be rational about it, she’d have told them right from the start.”

Braddock took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He looked younger without them, Anthony thought. Less like a headmaster and more like a guy who might show up in Anthony’s kitchen some Sunday morning in a T-shirt and pajama pants, sitting across the table from his mother—something that in all of Anthony’s eighteen years had never occurred. Not that he thought about it much, but he figured his mother must have been intimate with a few guys over the years and must have kept it from him. Maybe she and Braddock were keeping that kind of secret right now. Not every secret was harmful or shameful; sometimes secrets were practical. Necessary.

After replacing his glasses, Braddock said, “I wanted to discuss this with you personally because I think it’s only fair to give you a heads-up. The fact is, I’ve got a parent who’s out for blood right now and who will, I expect, become vindictive if he doesn’t find satisfaction anywhere.”

Anthony said, “Mr. Wilkes.”

“Yes. He’s convinced that you’re a danger—”

“Come on,” Anthony protested. “A
danger
? I didn’t rape someone. I didn’t beat someone up.”

“I know, okay, but for your sake, it might be best for us to take action that respects Mr. Wilkes’s concern, and keeps you out of harm’s way. I have a meeting Thursday evening with my advisory team—”

“What action?”

“Most likely it would be suspension from school and extracurriculars, until after your court appearance.”

Anthony said, “I don’t see how suspending me makes sense. My situation has nothing to do with school—and Amelia’s not even here, so it isn’t like you’d be preventing us from having contact.”

“Mr. Wilkes believes you’re a danger to young ladies in general. And despite my personal feelings,” Braddock said, with enough emphasis on “personal” that Anthony could hear the subtext, “it’s possible that I’ll be compelled to take action so that—”

“So that your ass is covered,” Anthony spat. “There—I’ll give you a real reason to suspend me.”

Braddock looked at him evenly. “I’ll know more on Thursday, and I’ll give you and your mom a call afterward, to let you know how things went. Now go on, get some lunch,” he said, “and hang in there.”

“Oh, gosh, thank you so
much
, Mr. Braddock, sir. I feel immensely better.”

“Anthony—”

“Save it,” he said. He wiped his palms on his pants legs, stood up calmly, then left the office and headed for the student parking lot.

When he got to his car, he climbed onto the hood and lay there, reclined against the windshield, eyes closed, soaking up the sun. He was not really angry at Braddock, just angry in general. He recalled a line from the play
Henry VI
, a summer stock production he’d done two years earlier, and recited it aloud: “What fates impose, that men must needs abide; It boots not to resist both wind and tide.”

As if that helped in the least.

While Anthony might have been said to be a decent actor when onstage, playing a role all day—a role he hadn’t wanted, hadn’t tried out for—wore him down until, at three o’clock, he hardly cared that the rest of his afternoon and a portion of his evening were going to be taken up by legal consultations. They had to choose a lawyer, and fast, or he’d be at the courthouse next Wednesday morning with little idea about what was going to happen or how he was supposed to handle it. The court had a website, and he’d found an FAQ page on what to expect, but that was geared to people who’d been arrested for DWI or speeding or other misdemeanors that, if you pled guilty, could result in fines, and maybe license points lost, but not jail time.

The site presumed that most defendants would appear without counsel. He didn’t have the first clue on how to represent himself, or whether he’d get a chance to explain to the judge what was really going on, or whether if he did, the judge would give a damn. Probably Amelia’s father played poker with all the judges. He almost certainly sold them their cars, and likely had contributed money to a lot of political campaigns. Without a lawyer looking after his interests, Anthony would be as vulnerable as an orchid in a blizzard, to use one of his grandfather’s sayings. He was sorry his grandfather wasn’t around to lend his wisdom directly.

Anthony’s mother met him at home. He’d changed clothes, not into shorts and a T-shirt, which he’d usually choose after ditching his school uniform, but into the pressed khakis and golf shirt she’d bought last night and left on his bed. The combination of the outfit and the reason for wearing it made him a prep and a perp at the same time. Shakespeare, he thought, could have had a lot of fun with that wordplay setup.

“You look great,” his mother said, trying to smile; the furrows between her eyes were more truthful than her words or tone.

“So do you,” he said honestly. She was in a conservative black-and-white outfit: tailored pants, white blouse, black ribbed cardigan, simple silver hoops in her ears. A confident woman, not at all the type whose son could need a criminal attorney.

The white-knuckled way she clutched the notebook, though, in which she’d jotted the names, addresses, phone numbers, and appointment times, told a different story. He wanted to tell her to relax, and would have, if he’d had less guilt working on him. As it was, that she’d tried talking to the Wilkeses, that she’d made the appointments with the lawyers, that she’d bought him the new clothes he was wearing, that she’d run interference with Braddock, all on his behalf, made him feel that he was, to say the least, a disappointing and unworthy son.

She said, “We’ll have to take advantage of our appearance and get dinner someplace nice when we’re done.” This statement, so reasonable-sounding when she made it, would become more of a rueful joke once they were through.

The first of the lawyers they saw was a partner in a law firm comprised of four names so ordinary that the firm’s name could have been a joke. Misters Jones, Johnson, Peterson, and Brown had offices as nondescript as their names, and Brady Johnson, when he came into the conference room wearing a dark gray suit with a light gray shirt and a tie with a background of blue so pale that it was almost white, was bland as well. His face was round and smooth and, though he didn’t seem that large overall, his chin merged into his neck without even a line of separation. His voice, when he spoke, was monotone.

“You’re Andy?” he said, extending his hand across the faux-mahogany table.

“Anthony.”

“Right.” They shook hands, then Johnson tugged his jacket straight, undid its button, and sat down at the head of the table.

“This is my mom, Kim Winter.”

Johnson nodded at her. “Unfortunate situation,” he said, glancing at the legal pad he’d carried in. “Tell me what happened.”

Anthony gave a short summary, saying that Amelia was his girlfriend, that she’d asked for the photos—though not when, or why, and he didn’t describe them except to say he’d been undressed.

The attorney made notes as he listened, then said, “Do you have your arrest warrant?”

Anthony looked at his mother; she shook her head. “Nobody said to bring it. I gave all the details to the woman who answered my call and made the appointment.”

Johnson skimmed the legal pad again, then lifted its top page, to find nothing written beneath. He folded his hands atop the pad. “What’s the statute they pegged you with?”