“Good. You know, my family helps fund this place. It’s important to hear people are getting the help they need, even if some are more reluctant than others.”
Both our eyes fell upon a girl sitting across from us. She had her feet kicked up onto an empty chair, headphones over her ears. She couldn’t hear anything we were saying, but she fit Mrs. Parker’s description to a tee. In fact, she was one of the girls I’d seen yelling during my last visit.
“Amelia?” The receptionist called her by her first name, and just like that, Mrs. Parker was gone, disappearing into one of the counseling rooms on the other side of the wall.
Not long after, I had my meeting with Ms. Lang. I barely remember what our sessions were about. Probably we talked about my job at Buster’s and my relationship with Cliff and everything else going on in my life. Our conversations are a blur, and yet, all these years later, I can remember my exchange with Amelia Parker verbatim. That’s the kind of impact she had on me.
I thought about her for the rest of that day, as I worked my closing shift at Buster’s. I had been working there for almost two years at that point, my most serious job by far. The pay was good and the neighborhood was safe, but I know it was the people—mainly Jamie and Cliff—that kept me coming back. Not long after we went out for drinks, Cliff and I started dating, and Jamie became our best friend.
Most of my life I’d been a loner, but now I saw the benefit in talking to others. Really talking. Counseling wasn’t like that; that was just reciting facts, offering updates. With Jamie and Cliff, it was different. When I spoke to them, I felt heard. I told them about my abusive upbringing, which became easier to accept because they had their struggles, too.
Like Cliff, Jamie was more than her outward appearance. She had people in her past she was trying to forget. She told me about an aggressive teacher at her private school. A known predator, she said. We used to call him Fuzzy Sweater Gray Gums. As usual, she did her best to make light of the ordeal. He’d gotten away with it with students in the past. This teacher and his behavior had become a running joke at the school, half rumor, half ghost story.
Until he targeted Jamie.
“There was a line for the girl’s bathroom,” she said, exhaling a puff of smoke. It was one of those nights I’d offered to stay and help her close, but as usual, we wasted time talking. “This teacher tells me I can use the restroom in the employee lounge if I didn’t want to be late to class. So I thought, what the hell? Anything beats a call to my parents about too many tardies, right?
“I swear I locked the door behind me, but somehow he got inside. He walked up behind me while I was washing my hands. Tried to pull my skirt up.”
“My goodness, Jamie. At school? What did you do?”
“At first I froze. Wasn’t sure how to react. The guy was a teacher, after all. Then my fight kicked in. I pushed him off me. Tried to knee his crotch. We went back and forth for a while. In the end, I rammed him into the paper towel dispenser on the wall. It made a nasty cut on his forearm. That’s when he finally stopped.”
“Did you report him?”
Jamie scoffed. “No. Like I said, he’d been accused of doing things in the past. Nothing ever seemed to happen. I just left campus. Ended up grounded for two weeks for skipping school.”
“Why didn’t you tell your family?” I asked her, trying not to sound judgmental.
The biggest difference between Jamie and the rest of us was she actually had family. A big one. The talk around Buster’s was there were mafia connections, a rumor that seemed far-fetched at first, but became increasingly believable the longer I knew Jamie. I didn’t understand why she didn’t go to her family, tell them about what almost happened. She at least had people to turn to, which is more than I ever did.
“My family does things,” she told me. “I’ve had an uncle or two end up in prison. It’s nothing new, but if any of the men in my family found out what that asshole did to me, they’d be sent away for life. I don’t want to be the reason one of them gets locked up for good. I dodged the creep, even left him a nice little scar. That’s all that matters.”
And yet her explanation had holes. On nights I stayed at her place, she’d wake up with night terrors. Every now and then, during a smoke break, I’d catch her staring in the distance, as though the brick wall in front of her had something written on it.
An image.
A face.
A small, more mature voice inside me wanted to suggest she talk to someone about what happened, but I never did. Jamie was handling what happened in the best way she could. And counseling had done little for me.
Sometimes, she talked about the ordeal around Cliff, too. He listened, then would offer another yarn about the khaki pant pricks. We figured most of those guys grew up to do the type of thing that teacher did to Jamie. A different type of cycle, rooted in privilege and entitlement. Someone needs to give these people what they deserve, we’d say, trying to laugh about it.
These discussions were morbid, I knew that. But it seemed a natural way for us to explore our shared grief. We were all three tired of people never getting their comeuppance. The creepy teacher. The cruel bullies. My father and his abuse.
