Page 90 of Mad Mabel

“I’ve spoken with my lawyer, who is on his way. He has advised that you may not speak with my niece—a minor—under any circumstances without my permission. Do you understand?”

“Her father has given permission, ma’am.”

The policemen had finally stopped talking about football. I saw them exchange a look. “This way, please,” one of them said, attempting to move me down the corridor.

I dug in my heels and looked around. I wasn’t imagining it. Cess was here.

“Her father?” I heard Cess exclaim. “Her father doesn’t live with her. The only claim he has to her is biological, and frankly, given how intelligent she is, I’ve long suspected that my sister was spending time elsewhere…”

“Cess?” I called.

“Mabel?”

The policeman grabbed my shoulder and tried once again to direct me down the corridor, but I broke away and ran toward her voice. Around a corner, I saw a desk and three exasperated-looking police officers. Then I saw Cess.

“Mabel!”

There was a desk between us. Immediately Cess bent down and began to crawl under it.

“Ma’am? Ma’am, you can’t come in here… ma’am?”

Cess ignored him, crawling under the desk to get to me. On the other side, she got to her feet, and ran.

That feeling I’d had earlier, the intensely lonely one? The feeling I had then was the exact opposite. It wasn’t just the fact that she’d crawled under the desk to get to me. It was the fact that in that moment, I believed she would have done anything.

There was another thing about that moment too, and it was what she said to me when she got her arms around me. Not “are you all right?” or “what happened?” In true Cess style, she cut right to the chase and said, loud enough for everyone to hear:

“I’m going to kill your father.”

We both began to cry.

58

The cops didn’t ask me to give a statement again. Cess said it was because her lawyer scared the bejeezers out of them, and she might have been right, but after going to the trouble of coming to my school in a police car, it felt strange that now they didn’t need to talk to me at all.

In any case, the damage, as far as my reputation went, was done. News of the relationship I’d had with Mr. Loukas had spread far and wide since Tessa had given her statement, which included my visit there that night. Judgment was swift. I was labeled a tart, hussy, or harlot, depending on who was talking.

The journey from social outcast to harlot was more treacherous than I could have anticipated. Before, I’d been merely unfortunate and possibly dangerous, but now I was a woman of loose morals, a victim of my own poor choices, which offered a convenient justification to anyone who wanted to pass judgment.

There’d been a time when I hadn’t thought my life could get anysmaller. I’d been wrong. There were no more bike rides, or bonfires, or long walks. The mothers stopped looking at me at Mass, even Lucy Ormonde, one of my mother’s closest friends, who’d hugged me every time she saw me since my mother’s death and called me a dear girl. The fathers, on the other hand, started looking at me, eyeballs wide and curious that the strange tall girl was the one to cause all this ruckus—it was always the ones you didn’t expect.

Mr. Stephens, the father of Dolly and Tammy, spat at me while passing me on the street. Cess said it likely had nothing to do with me, that Mr. Stephens had always been vulgar and hadn’t been raised to understand that one shouldn’t spit in the street, but I wasn’t so sure. It felt directed. Intentional. I’d come to notice the difference.

Billy Harris, unsurprisingly, wasn’t one to quietly ignore what had happened. Whenever I passed him in the corridor he’d make a kissing noise, and ask if I was looking for a new boyfriend, or did I only like older men? One horrible day he even followed me into the girls’ bathroom between classes, pushed me into a cubicle, and put my hand on his crotch—a kindness, he said, because I was probably missing it. I stopped using the school bathrooms after that.

I did what I could to stay out of people’s way. I volunteered to reshelve books in the library at lunchtime, I picked up litter after school. Unfortunately, I couldn’t cease to exist, which appeared to be the only possible way I could avoid the wrath of the community. My name was on everyone’s lips, all the time. Apparently, there was no need to whisper it anymore. I heard it in the schoolyard, in the library, on the street. At least I wasn’t invisible anymore. I was everywhere.

Mad Mabel.

Mad Mabel.

Mad Mabel.

Through the aftermath of Mr. Loukas’s death, and all the accusations that came with it, Christos was the only person who kept talking to me. In fact, he made a point of talking to me, more than he had before. His friendship made me feel wonderful and terrible all at once. Wonderful, because I was unused to having anyone stand beside me like that, other than Daphne. Terrible because Christos suffered for his solidarity with me, and any hard-won inroads he had made in the social sphere appeared to be lost. Instead, as he walked the hallways, he received the same taunts that all the Greek kids did. Mostly from Billy Harris.

“Wog.”

“Dirty Dago.”