The Homecoming

“Sue,” someone said. “That’s fish and chips, coleslaw, garlic toast.” Cliff put an enormous brown bag on the bar.

She passed him a credit card but glared at Seth. “Are you laughing at me? At my hair?”

He sobered instantly, though the laughter stayed right there, right behind his lips. He sought an excuse. “Your hair? No, of course not. I was just thinking, remember when we were about sixteen? Remember when you were cheering a hockey game? Out on the ice? And you were skating backward and got rammed by Robbie Delaney? And he sent you flying across the ice at about fifty miles an hour?” He didn’t add, The same guy you cheated on me with.

“It wasn’t that funny,” she said. She leaned on the bar to sign the charge slip.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sure if you’re the one getting hit, it’s not. Sorry.”

“I had problems with my tailbone for years....”

“Ah, there’s Mac!” he said. “You know Mac, right?”

“I don’t spend a lot of time with the law,” she said stiffly.

Still struggling not to laugh, Seth stuck out his hand. “Hey, Mac. You know Sassy...I mean, Sue Marie Sontag, right?”

“Delaney,” she corrected. She shook Mac’s hand but gave him a tight smile.

“You married Robbie Delaney?” Seth asked. “Wow.”

“I’d better get this home to the kids.” She lifted her wineglass and gulped down what was left.

“Kids?” Seth echoed. And then in spite of himself he started to laugh again, picturing her with a hockey-player’s smile. He was going to kill Iris.

“Three,” she said, greatly irritated with him. “See you around.”

When she’d cleared the door, Seth sat at the bar and started to laugh again. He put his elbow on the bar, his head resting on his hand and just shook his head.

“That must have been some joke,” Mac said.

“That damn Iris,” Seth said.

“Iris is here?”

“No. No, she’s not,” Seth said. “Iris and Sassy—I mean Sue Marie—were kind of competitive in high school. It’s a long and complicated story, but I accidentally asked Sue and Iris both to the prom, but I went with Sue. And I had a horrible time, but I never did have good instincts about stuff like that. Iris apparently still hates her. I was surprised to hear Sue was still around Thunder Point and Iris told me...” He stopped to laugh a little more. “She told me Sue had gotten fat and was missing a tooth right in front. She didn’t mention the pink hair.”

“Cliff, two beers, whatever is on tap,” Mac said. Then he turned to Seth. “You’re an idiot.”

“I know,” he said.

He remembered the last time he and Iris had had that problem—out-of-control laughter. They’d been seventeen and in English class. They sat at the same table for two. Their teacher, the dowdy and homely Ms. Freund, had noticed Mr. Gaither, the new, slightly younger and handsome advanced algebra teacher in the classroom next door. Ms. Freund had been seen staring and nearly swooning. He and Iris had been joking about how easily Ms. Freund could be had if Mr. Gaither played his cards right. And then she came to school with her hair streaked and, boy, was it streaked, nearly striped in yellow, and in some bizarre updraft style that looked lacquered together. Her eyelids were blue and she damn near killed herself in her spike heels. She wore a new outfit—a skirt so tight she could hardly move and a fitted sweater with a low neckline so she had some pathetic cleavage. In fact, they thought it looked like there might be cotton peeking out. And before class was over, after all that action at the blackboard, Ms. Freund’s left boob slid to her rib cage. Iris and Seth lost it. They started to laugh so hard they almost had to be physically removed from the classroom. They could not get things under control in the principal’s office. They had been completely consumed by the stupids and couldn’t even talk about it weeks later without losing control. Every hour of detention was worth it.

Damn, he had missed her.

* * *

Since John Garvey, the senior guidance counselor, had taken his retirement from the school district, Iris was left in charge of the counseling office in the high school. Garvey said it was an early retirement but if you asked most of the teachers, and Iris for that matter, it wasn’t quite early enough. Garvey had an antiquated notion of what high school students needed and often he did more harm than good. He was quite famous for telling young girls they “weren’t college material.” As if these girls didn’t have self-esteem problems enough!

It did leave Iris with an awful lot on her plate. A new counselor was being sought to work with her and, in the meantime, she was promised an intern from the college. It was going to take time to find another counselor—the requirements were steep and the pay wasn’t great. Iris needed that intern yesterday—it was testing time in the high school and she was setting up SAT and ACT test schedules. Doing this without help left precious little time for actual counseling. And everywhere she looked, she saw the need. She was on the lookout for behavioral problems, academic struggles, self-esteem issues that led to things like anorexia and bulimia, bullying—and that wasn’t just students bullying each other. Sometimes teachers were far too corporal or verbally abusive and sometimes they suffered the same from students. She kept vigilant for signs of depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol issues, unstable home lives. Her days were long and she worked at home on evenings and weekends—no spare brain cell was unused.

And she loved it.

Iris hadn’t known when she was in high school that this was the perfect direction for her, but then her counselor was John Garvey, who had not done one thing to help her discover her aptitude. At the time, neither Iris nor her mother had any idea what Garvey should have been doing with her—a student who’d not only graduated with honors but had done some serious damage to an SAT. Fortunately, Iris had had better guidance at the university and really took to social work. So began her driving need to get her master’s degree and return to her high school as a guidance counselor and do for the kids and teachers what John Garvey had not. Since she’d been at Thunder Point High they’d instituted a no-tolerance drug-and-alcohol program and a zero-tolerance-for-bullying program. And while it hadn’t exactly been an issue, there was also a no-tolerance-for-cheating program in place now. Three absolutely necessary and useful programs that Garvey had neglected if not ignored.

Her desk was awash in paper she’d been struggling to control for hours when Troy Headly gave a light tap on her open door and stuck his head in. “Hey,” he said. “Got a minute?”

She put her pen down and smiled at him. “Are you here on business?”

He didn’t smile, which was very unusual for Troy. Often his visits to her office had more to do with flirting, since they’d been a couple for a while last spring and she’d broken it off, to his extreme displeasure. Troy was a great guy, a lovely man, but it just wasn’t working for her. Troy had been looking for another try ever since. He fully expected her to come around and admit they were right for each other.

“Can I close the door?” he asked.

“Business, then,” she said.

He sat in the chair that faced her desk. “How well do you know Rachel Delaney?”

She shrugged. “I know her a little. She’s never been referred to me. I went to school with her mother.” She grinned. “Back in the day they called her mother Sassy. She was the most popular girl in the senior class.”

“I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Troy said.

“Sassy was kind of mean.”

“Rachel seems to be enjoying similar popular status, though she’s a junior this year. Beautiful girl and I’ve never seen her be mean. She’s very sweet. Know anything about her family? Home life?”

Iris folded her hands on top of her pile of papers. “Where’s this going?”

“Maybe nowhere. Just that I have this hunch...it’s possible she’s being abused.”

“In what way? What gave you your hunch?”

“Either she’s one of the klutziest girls in her class or someone’s knocking her around. A few weeks ago, I noticed some bruising on her neck and shoulder and asked her what happened. She said she got tackled playing football on the weekend. A few weeks later she claimed to have taken a volleyball in the face, causing her black eye. Since then she’s wearing lots of sweaters and high necks.”

“It’s getting cold,” Iris said.

“Yeah, I know. I touched her arm yesterday to stop her from leaving class so I could give her back her paper, which was very well done and I wanted to praise her. But she winced and jerked away. I asked her if anything was wrong and she said she was sore from a big workout. She was very nervous and not too convincing.”

“Do you have any experience with this sort of thing?” Iris asked.

“I have some experience at how people cover it up. When I was growing up our neighbor was physically abusive to his family. He was such a smooth-talking bastard, all smiles, always had the best of everything. Except his wife and kids had no freedom of movement and everything had to be perfect. The wife and mom—she couldn’t even visit at our house for a cup of coffee. My mother kept saying it was all wrong, my dad kept saying she had a wild imagination and should mind her own business. Then one day the police came. The oldest girl was taken away in the ambulance, the rest of them were bruised and shaken up and he was arrested. It had been going on a long time, we learned. My mother could tell. My father wanted her to leave it alone. That’s it,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got. Could be she’s really clumsy or maybe her father is hitting her.”

“Actually, her father isn’t in the picture just now. She, her mom and two younger brothers are living with her mom’s sister and brother-in-law and their kids. It’s very crowded and it’s not a big house. I suppose that could be an issue, but Sassy and her sister were always close. And if you knew Sassy—she wasn’t one to take any crap. From anyone.”

“Is there anything you can do about this?”

“Uh-huh. There’s lots I can do. I can give the PE teacher a heads-up to let me know if Rachel has signs of problems that include injuries. I can talk to her teachers from last year and ask if they had concerns about her. I can check for absences or illnesses, look over her grades, watch her movements around campus. If someone is hitting her or otherwise hurting her, there will be other signs. And then, of course, I can talk to her.”

“She’s a good student,” Troy said. “And she’s not isolated. Batterers usually isolate their punching bags. Rachel is popular and has quite a posse.”