In August, Emma drives to pick up her seventeen-year-old son Sam from art camp at a converted hippie commune in Massachusetts. When she walks up, Sam is sitting cross-legged in the shade of a sprawling oak, eyes closed, possibly meditating. Emma immediately notices Sam’s neck is encircled in a turtleneck of hickeys. Not one cute little bruise, not a sweet purple ghost of a kiss — this looks like an infestation, an attack. Someone has worked hard to leave their mark.
Emma taps him on the shoulder.
“Yo,” Sam says opening his eyes and nodding at her. He stands, stretches, and runs his hand through his new bleached buzz cut with fingers painted an ombre of pink: fuchsia, rose, then the sweet ballet slipper shade favored by brides and debutantes. An army of bracelets marches up his arm: macrame, silver, then multicolored beads.
“Yo to you,” Emma responds, reaching up to hug his lanky six-foot-two frame.
He is an amalgamation of bony angles and lean muscles, reeking of sweat and confidence with an undernote of pot and unwashed laundry. Don’t say anything, Emma says to herself. It’s her mantra these days.
“I have to say goodbye to some people,” Sam says. He walks across a field to a dilapidated barn where he has spent the summer sweating and silversmithing, in between whatever else has been going on. His beauty leaves her breathless. She wonders if all parents feel this way: absurdly in love upon seeing a child after a long absence.
Sam leans in like a movie star and kisses a girl with a profusion of blond dreads that spiral down to her waist, each lock embellished with silver and gold beads. Then Sam turns and locks lips with a short, muscular boy who is wearing a batik sarong. All three of them hug, clinging to each other. They are as beautiful, mythical and unknowable as fairies. Emma takes a deep breath and leans against the car door listening to the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song playing anachronistically through the camp loudspeaker.
When Sam finally gets into the car Emma finds herself saying, “You do realize we are stopping at your grandmother’s country club on the way back to DC?”
“So?” Sam says.
“Nice neck.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Tell her it was a girl who did it; she’ll be happy about that.”
“Even if it wasn’t a girl?”
Sam sighs, laden with the universal exhaustion of teens dealing with idiotic parents. With exaggerated patience he says, “Yes, even if. Just tell Nana what she can handle.”
Fuck. What is wrong with her? She cannot help herself. “And was it a girl? It looked like it could have been either of them.”
“Player gotta play,” says Sam, not answering as he turns to look out the window, smiling.
* * *
Emma knows that she made mistakes. When first Sam came out to her and her husband Chris as bisexual back in ninth grade, she mishandled so many things. The first weekend after Sam told her, his best friend of five years Jax was coming to their house to play video games and sleep over as usual.
“I don’t know how Dad and I feel about a sleepover with Jax given this new information,” Emma had said.
“What? Gross. Jax? No, I’m not interested in Jax. Mom. Don’t make me regret telling you,” he said, deploying the ultimate teenage threat of shut down.
“It just all seems complicated.” Emma mused.
“What’s complicated? I like girls and boys.”
“That’s like me saying I like skydiving. I won’t know until I actually skydive.” Emma said.
Sam had looked at her disappointed, like she failed some test she didn’t know she was taking. “Well, I guess I owe it to myself to jump out of a plane then,” he said.
* * *
As they drive up to her mother’s country club in Westchester, Emma reaches into the back seat and grabs a bright pink polo shirt, tossing it into Sam’s lap. “Collared shirt required, remember?” Emma says.
“Whatever. Love the color,” Sam says.
“Also try not to purposely shock your grandmother.”
“Shock? Preppy guys dress the gay-est. Like bow ties worn unironically?”
Emma has laid the groundwork with her conservative Park Avenue-born-and-bred mother. She has dropped hints. But in the last three years, she hasn’t come out and said anything definitive about Sam’s sexuality. She feels like a coward, but this is a mother with whom Emma has never discussed her own boring, straight sex life. A mother who, when Emma was in high school in the mid 90’s, did not allow boys over on weekend nights, but who did allow boys over to “study” after school, even when no one was home. It was a failure of imagination. Her mother could not fathom anyone fucking during the day with the lights on.
Sam and Emma find her mother sitting by the pool, her giant black and white striped sun hat clashing magnificently with her pink and green caftan.
“Darlings!” Emma’s mother cheek-kisses both of them, avoiding touching them with her pink shellacked lips.
Even though his Nana has always been a handful, Sam clearly adores her. He finds her both ridiculous and fabulous and Emma is terrified her mother will say something to hurt him when she finds out.
Sam eats his inhumanly large meal of a club sandwich, fries and a huge chocolate chip shake, chewing enthusiastically, exploding with stories of campfires and skinny dipping.Thankfully, Sam does not share any truly risqué topics about his “friends.” Emma basks in the glow of his happiness, his verbosity.
As Sam leaves them to leap into the pool with a kamikaze splash, Emma’s mother immediately turns to her and says, “Well, he was clearly busy with things other than art.” Emma is embarrassed; she didn’t think her mother would go there.
“Clearly.”
“Is it a boy?” her mother asks. “I wasn’t born yesterday you know. He lets me follow him on Instagram.”
“He’s bi, Mom.” Emma feels relieved, but somehow ashamed of her own discomfort.
“Well, you always encouraged it,” her mother says. “The design classes. The jewelry making, the hippie school.”
“I encouraged it?” Emma feels enraged and defensive at the same time, a specific reaction only her mother can inspire.
“You and Chris both did.” He mother takes a long sip of her omnipresent gin and tonic, its glass sweating in the sun. “Bi, Pan, LGBT-whatever. It’s an awful lot of choices.”
* * *
For Sam’s eighteenth birthday present in early September, he asks Emma and his dad Chris to pay to have a hairdresser dye a black and white checkerboard pattern into his hair. When Sam’s sister, 15-year-old Lilah, gets home from pre-season field hockey practice, he is preening in front of the hall mirror, checking out his hair from different angles. Emma watches as Lilah points at Sam’s head with her field hockey stick and says, “Rook moves to h7.”
Emma agrees the checkerboard hair is hideous, but Sam is jubilant. The next morning Emma lurks in the kitchen watching as Sam’s friend Jax picks him up for the first day of junior year. “That’s a lot of look, man,” Jax says grabbing one of the blueberry muffins she has just made out of the hot pan.
“But I pull it off.”
“You pull it off.”
Jax looks through his phone as Sam stops to wolf down a muffin. “No way,” Jax holds up the screen for Emma and Sam to see.
“Unreal,” Sam says, reading over Jax’s shoulder. Emma’s having trouble seeing things on her phone but refuses to give into reading glasses, so she walks over to look. Squinting, she leans in, breathing in a whiff of Axe body spray and teenage boy sweat, metallic yet sweet. Emma takes the phone from Jax and extends her arm as far away from her as possible.
It’s an article from a local news site about a trio of zebras that escaped from a wildlife refuge in upper Montgomery County, Maryland, just twenty miles from them. The zebras are on the lam, and wildlife officials haven’t been able to catch them. According to the article, the creatures have been able to dodge, circumvent, and hide in the endless acres of farmland and national forest that surround the refuge. The article is accompanied by a blurry amateur photo taken of the zebras at some distance happily munching on the hostas at the edge of someone’s backyard.
* * *
In the weeks after school starts. Emma notices Sam is Snapping, exchanging texts and pictures with different kids, day and night. Both she and Chris are sick of the incessant secret smiles whenever Sam’s phone pings.
“Who are you talking to?” Emma asks over their Sunday night family dinner of take-out Chinese.
“People,” Sam grins. “It’s not easy being this gorgeous. Need to keep up with demand.”
Emma indulges herself in a self-congratulatory moment. She feels happy her son is at a school that accepts him. Montgomery Day School is a place where they call their teachers by their first names and there are rainbow flags in all the classrooms. The DC private school is costing them a painful amount every year, and politically independent Chris has complained the school is a one-note liberal echo chamber. But these days, it’s clearly better than the alternative.
Sam plows through the mountain of Lo Mein he has served himself, taking breaks to periodically check his phone. “No way,” he yells and shows Lilah the screen of his phone, tilting it so only she can see.
“Don’t be such a man-whore all the time,” Lilah says, biting onto her eggroll.
“Jealous much?” crows Sam.
* * *
In October, it’s Halloween and Sam, worryingly and uncharacteristically, is not celebrating with friends, instead spending the night home alone handing out candy to neighborhood kids. Emma watches as he gently, and with interest, asks each kid about their costume. Chris and Emma are concerned. Sam has been withdrawn for a few weeks. He has stopped hanging out with his close, if motley, group of friends, and even Jax seems to be inexplicably out of his life. When she delicately probes, all she can get for an answer from Sam is “friend stuff.”
After the trick-or-treaters dry up, Sam retreats to his room and Chris and Emma drive to pick up Lilah from a tenth grade Halloween party. Lilah has dressed for the party as a sexy pirate. All the girls are sexy something now. Sexy cat, sexy nurse, sexy Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’s a big change: just last year Lilah went as cookies and milk with a friend. She wore a giant inflatable chocolate chip cookie costume. Lilah is a late bloomer but since sprouting breasts and hips, it’s all short shorts and bustiers. Right on time, Emma supposes.
At pickup, as soon as Emma and Chris roll to a stop, Lilah gets in the car clearly drunk. Emma feels she should say something: fifteen is young, Lilah should not be drinking, where did they get the alcohol? But she remembers her New York City 1990’s adolescence — a time when if you were a pretty girl and could see over the bar, they would serve you. She remembers being in tenth grade, wearing micro-mini skirts and black eyeliner for nights out when getting forty-year-old finance guys to buy them drinks was a fun game, nights that often ended with snorting free lines of coke from the back of a bathroom sink. So, yes, a Halloween party with teen drinking at a suburban house seems safer, even prosaic.
Before Emma can figure out a strategy for talking to her drunk child, Lilah begins sobbing. “They’re saying Sam is an S.A.” She is babbling, slurring, mascara and glitter eye shadow smudging her cheeks.
“Wait, what is an S.A?” says Emma.
“Sexual Assaulter.”
“What?” Emma yells.
Chris is an ER doctor and is good in a crisis. He carefully pulls the car over and puts it in park. He looks at Emma and their eyes meet in one of those rare moments of perfect marital understanding. She knows they are on this; they are one, they are unified.
“Calm down. Just tell us what you heard,” Chris says.
“Sam hooked up with Annie.”
“Annie?” Emma is confused.
Annie had been Sam’s first girlfriend last year in tenth grade. A petite girl with long, thin dirty blond hair and fashionably large tortoiseshell glasses, who when she came to the house, never spoke and stared at the floor with her owl eyes in what was either shyness or embarrassment, Emma was never sure. Sam and Annie’s relationship had jumped into warp speed, transitioning in a nanosecond from holding hands to slipping silently up the stairs to spend time alone in Sam’s room, door locked. Then one day, Annie was gone, disappearing like the fox that had taken up residence under their porch one spring — skulking around the yard before quietly slipping away in the fall. When Emma had gently probed Sam he had only said, “Annie has issues.”
“Annie is still, like, obsessed with him,” Lilah says, then pauses for a moment. “I heard she texted him to hook up but anyways, she was, apparently giving him, you know, head and he put his hand on the back of her head.”
“And?” Chris says.
“And?” Emma says, her throat tight with fear.
“He pushed her head, Mom.”
“How do you know? Annie is saying this?”
“She didn’t say it to me. Her best friend told me. She is telling everyone, though.”
“Ok, wait,” Chris says calmly. “So, her friends say she was voluntarily giving him oral sex and he guided her head, correct?”
“Pushed, apparently,” says Lilah.
“OK, pushed. That’s it?” Chris is laughing inappropriately, tapping the steering wheel with his long fingers in a nervous staccato.
“That’s not assault,” Emma says immediately.
“It’s what people are saying,” says Lilah sniffing. “People are upset about it. I believe women,” Lilah adds reflexively.
“Oh, I believe women too.” Emma spits, turning to look at Lilah. “But that’s not fucking assault.”
“Calm down,” Chris says.
“Did you stand up for him? Did you say your brother did not do anything wrong?” Emma is yelling, furious.
“I did, I tried.” Lilah starts crying again, her huge gold hoop earrings swaying as she sobs. “But people at our school will cancel you, Mom. For anything. He’s canceled. And I don’t want to be.”
* * *
That night she and Chris lay in bed strategizing. “The fucking cancel police at that fucking school.” Emma knows she curses when she is pissed. “They are acting like he’s fucking Kavanaugh. He’s a queer kid for fuck’s sake.”
Chris laughs, a dark static sound. “It’s a blessing the parents haven’t gone to the school. Or the police. You know this could go sideways for him, fast, right?”
“The police?”
“Emma, he may have… his ADHD, the impulsivity, he may have gotten caught up in the moment.” Chris sighs and pushes his hands through his hair, a habit that drives Emma crazy, the way that makes it stand up on end like he was electrocuted.
“I cannot believe you are even contemplating this.”
“Maybe he should stick to boys, it’s probably safer.” Chris says. It’s not like Chris and it’s unworthy of him.
“If his penis was in her mouth, couldn’t she have bitten him or just stopped? How is a hand on her head fucking assault?” Emma can’t make herself picture the scene, not with her son. But Emma thinks she knows what assault is. Assault is when she had to pick Rebecca Frank up off the floor of SAE’s. She was unconscious and naked from the waist down and two drunk fraternity brothers had fucked her anyway. Assault was when her dad’s business partner put his hand up her new Benetton shirt and fondled her new pointy braless breasts. She was fourteen. She thinks of all the guys who have gone down on her, and done it badly, how she grabbed their heads: a little to the left, no up, no there. Yes.
She thinks about the limits of the body. About being a woman today. About how girls’ bodies are as vulnerable as ever. So many openings, orifices, so many demands. She feels sorry for a sixteen-year-old girl, wanting to be loved, performing with her body, trying to please, being rejected.
But this is her son. Her boy. This is his life for fuck’s sake. And she knows, whatever happened, it’s not possible that it came from malice.
She will call the school, call the school counselor. She will call Annie out on Instagram. She will shame her, eviscerate her. Force her in a room in front of the principal to explain exactly how and why she felt comfortable accusing Sam of something that could ruin his life.
* * *
The next day she calls her best friend from college, Amy, who was a guidance counselor at a school in LA and is now in private practice making five hundred dollars an hour helping the children of celebrities with names like Ebadiah and Tangerine work through their privilege and abandonment issues.
Amy, in an appropriate ride-or-die-friend fashion, listens patiently; she is on their side, but is also realistic. “It sucks, but don’t do anything,” says Amy. “Don’t call the school. Just hope it goes away. The kids will move onto the next issue.”
“But he is miserable. The PC police are ostracizing him. Most of his friends are not talking to him. For fucking nothing.”
“I get it. Support him, but do not go nuclear. It can easily go wrong for the boy involved. Thank God the girl hasn’t gone to the school.”
“But it wasn’t assault.”
“Doesn’t matter. And you weren’t there.” Amy says carefully, her tone mild. “Have you asked Sam what happened?”
Emma suddenly realizes she is being managed, and she can tell Amy is good at her job. “He would never. I mean, being bad at sex is not assault.”
Amy laughs. “Bad at Sex. I should have that printed on t-shirts and hand them out to all my kids. Yes, they are all pretty bad at sex. I blame porn. Just tell him from now on, anything he sees a guy do in a porn, do the opposite.”
Just eight hours later, Amy, who knows Emma all too well, texts Delete any crazy emails or texts you have written or are thinking about sending!
No promises, Emma texts back as she watches Sam eat his breakfast — a pile of leftover Halloween candy. She’s too drained to mount a nutritional protest as he methodically unwraps the peanut butter cups into a pile, which she knows he will then microwave and devour with a spoon.
“What are your plans today?” Emma asks.
“Not much.”
She is unable to stop herself. “No Jax?”
Sam’s voice quavers for a moment. “No Jax, Mom.”
She cannot believe this is happening. She doesn’t allow herself to think of the blow job, the girl, the intricacies of adolescent sex. Instead, she’s had those runaway zebras on her mind. And she can’t stop thinking about Sam at seven at the National Zoo. Forget the pandas, he always insisted on visiting the petting farm. Lilah wanted to feed the glamorous goats, with their showy jumping around and aggressive begging. Sam liked to visit the rabbits. They were shy, required patience. He would sit holding kibble pellets, coaxing the bunnies from their hutches, and gently petting their long, soft ears when they finally emerged.
Emma’s phone pings with a text. Let’s wait and see, nothing needs to happen today, It’s Chris. Her husband knows Emma likes action; long-term crisis management is not her specialty. Emma owns a catering company, Relish, and is an expert at executing a big event, pulling off miracles on a dime. This morning, more than ever, Emma longs for things that can be simply solved with a big gesture, a ceremony, a getaway car with tin cans trailing behind.
When Chris gets home that night, Emma is on him before he gets his coat off. “Amy says we need to talk to Sam. To find out what happened.”
“We’ll talk to him after dinner.”
“Lilah says there was an issue with that girl you dated, Annie?” Emma ventures an hour later as they wash dishes side by side.
“I don’t want to do this,” Sam says.
“We’re doing it,” Chris calls from the kitchen table.
Sam shakes his head no and wipes the same plate over and over, looking down at the sink, but Emma she can see his eyes are teary. He used to tear up as a kid when he was frustrated. She remembers him in Little League, before he abandoned baseball for making bracelets; he sobbed when he dropped the ball, struck out. He cried because he wanted to do the right thing for the team.
“Come on Sam,” Emma says.
Sam walks to the table, dragging his feet, face expressionless, a tough mask Emma does not recognize.
“She texted me,” he sighs. “She wanted to hook up again. I mean, we broke up months ago, and we were chill. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“No, you fucking should not have,” says Chris, who unlike Emma, never curses.
“I felt bad about doing it, okay? Right after it happened, I texted her and said I was sorry but didn’t want to get back together.”
Emma just looks at him, exasperation and fear overwhelming her in a wave of exhaustion. She wants to shake Sam, to wrap him in bubble wrap, to lock him in his room until the part of his brain responsible for executive functioning kicks in at twenty-five.
“She texted back we were cool, but she must have told her friends some B.S.” Sam’s knee is bobbing up and down, a nervous ADHD tic from childhood, that causes the cups on the table to shake with tiny tremors.
“You realize, ‘true’” — Chris makes air quotes — “or not, kids get put in jail for this stuff?”
“I know, okay?” Sam is crying now. “I should never have hooked up with her in the first place because I wasn’t into her, but, like, it was her idea.”
“Says you,” Chris says, shaking his head. Sam flinches at the punch of his father’s words, gulps, then sobs, tears silently streaming down his cheeks. Chris sighs and leans over to try to hug Sam and Emma pats his back in circles, like she did when he was small. Sam cries quietly, his arms around Chris’ neck, hanging onto his father like a life raft.
* * *
Emma keeps hoping things will go back to normal, but Sam’s still spending weekends alone, reading manga, acting quieter and more subdued by the day. In contrast Emma feels preternaturally awake, energized, panicked. She has done a deep dive online into the socio-emotional effects of false accusations on teenage boys. She is haunted by the case of the boy from New Jersey. A fabricated story that he raped a girl he had never actually met went viral on social media. The boy killed himself after a girl at his boarding school sent him a rape whistle as a Secret Santa present. His peers’ unrelenting belief in his guilt and their righteous bullying wove themselves into his noose.
It is not lost on Emma that as a “survivor” herself, as her kids would say, this dive into the murky deep of defending men is, perhaps, unexpected. She thinks of the rich handsome man she almost married in her twenties, the one who asked her if she liked it rough and did not wait for an answer, the one who liked to leave bruises. But her own experiences float and bob in the background, their edges softened by time like stones. Because now this is her son, standing accused and fading away before her eyes. In fact, she finds herself enraged at Lilah, as if she was somehow responsible for or capable of saving her ostracized brother.
* * *
Three weeks later, one crisp November afternoon, Emma decides to hold a Soviet-style interrogation of her sweating, exhausted daughter after field hockey practice.
Emma launches in as soon as Lilah gets in the car and clicks her seatbelt. “So, I’m interested, do you ever actually defend your brother to these people?”
Lilah slams her sweaty braided hair against the Volvo headrest. “O.M.G. It’s not like people are going around daily saying ‘your brother is an assaulter’ to me.”
“Well, have you tried to intervene in the narrative,” Emma spits.
“Have you, like, ever been to high school?” Lilah turns her body as far away from Emma as possible.
“Yes, and I behaved with integrity.”
Not strictly true, a little voice in Emma’s head reminds her. There were stolen boyfriends, whispered gossip, some light shoplifting. But things were so different then — without the blue-white light of the internet everything was greyer, more opaque, more private and, perhaps, forgiving.
“I heard from someone he, like, pulled her hair.” Lilah puts her feet up on the dashboard and slinks lower in her seat, chin on her chest. “While she was doing it. Is that enough integrity for you?
“It is, if she wanted it,” Emma mumbles and again wonders how she got here into this car in this conversation with her teenage daughter. Maybe she was at fault, trying to be “sex-positive” — avoiding shame, fear. She should have been scared of allowing two 15-year-olds to be alone in Sam’s room all those times. Maybe instead of all the open conversations, she should have required open doors.
* * *
That night, Emma makes her irresistible brown butter chocolate chip cookies after dinner and the kids are drawn downstairs by the scent, floating in on the waves of baking butter and sugar. Chris in on call working in the ER and Emma is ready for her ambush. “I want to talk to you both about porn,” she says patting the sofa next to her.
The kids turn to each other and grimace. Lilah mimes walking up the stairs in slow motion raising her knees high. Sam waves at Emma and says, “Peace out.”
“Both of you sit down. If you’re this immature, you definitely need to hear this. First, in all cases, consent is paramount.”
Sam sighs and slumps into the sofa cushions. Lilah sits, but studiously stares down, picking the secret ingredient peanuts out of her cookie and feeding them to their ancient golden retriever, Lorraine, under the coffee table.
“So, like are we talking BDSM or orgies?” Sam asks.
Emma digs her nails into her palm. She remembers with longing the times when Sam was out of control as a toddler and she could put him on the naughty step, make him wait in time-out.
“Sam, I just want to tell you whatever you see in porn like choking, spanking, slapping, anything aggressive… girls, real girls, don’t want that.” She pauses, “I don’t think most boys do either.”
He glances up at her and offers a half-smile. “How would you know that?”
Lilah laughs, a knowing and strangely womanly sound.
“And you,” Emma points at Lilah, her voice raising, “do not ever have to do the things you see in porn. The way women are treated…” She is sputtering, out of her depth. Her therapist friend Amy told her way back, four long years ago, that whatever you think your kids are doing, they are three years ahead of you. At the time, Sam was obsessively playing Minecraft and Lilah still owned American Girl dolls. The idea of them looking at porn — much-the-less being sexual — seemed absurd. But now it seems she has somehow missed the window. “I’m just saying with sex it’s better to be with someone who you are actually in a relationship with. There needs to be trust and understanding.”
“Are we done?” says Sam, his mouth full of cookie.
“Honey, sex in general, it’s all so dangerous now. Anyone can accuse you of anything. I actually prefer you, both of you, get any partner on tape saying I consent to the following,” Emma says half-joking. Not kidding, she thinks.
* * *
By late November, blessedly, thankfully, there has been total radio silence about Annie. No calls from the school, no noises of, God forbid, a legal investigation. But also, none of Sam’s friends seem to have stood by him. He no longer constantly checks his texts, and his isolation has escalated to the point that he is willingly spending an alarming amount of time with her and Chris. As parents of teenagers, they are simultaneously savoring the together time and are frightened by it. They have all watched the classics, the Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Pulp Fiction; they have eaten weekend take-out dinners of Thai and Indian around the kitchen table, just the three of them as Lilah’s social life chugs along seemingly unaffected. Emma’s anger and fear for Sam have metastasized into something wet, sticky, soggy. She cannot stop obsessing, plotting different strategies to fix his life. She has drafted and deleted five emails to the school: Dear fucking useless, clueless educators. Dear blind asshole school counselor.
* * *
They have decided Thanksgiving this year will just be the four of them; Emma cannot muster the energy to drive to New York and deal with Chris’s parents’ benign helplessness or her mother’s laser-focused questions. At the holiday dinner, Sam is sneaking turkey to Lorraine, and Emma notices Sam only picks at all his favorites, pushing her famous candied sweet potatoes and chorizo stuffing to the edges of his plate.
Lilah is looking down at her phone which is specifically not allowed at the table, especially at Thanksgiving, but Chris and Emma have been cutting her slack because she has been doing more than her share of talking as Sam has become more silent and still by the day.
“Look another zebras pic! Go zebras!” Lilah says holding up her phone. The three runaway zebras have been spotted grazing in a culvert near a Touch & Go station just outside the district. They are still evading authorities and have become a local, and now even national meme. The whole family in invested: Emma and the kids are firmly “Team Zebra”, happy that they are running wild and free. But Chris says he worries about the winter, to say nothing of highway traffic and hunters who might mistake them for deer, and wants them back safe in their warm, gated refuge with the rest of the herd.
“Cool, right?” Emma tries to catch Sam’s eye.
Sam just shrugs and pushes his potatoes to the edge of his plate.
“What’s wrong?”
Sam laughs, a knowing and dismissive bark as if he should not have to explain himself. They have never come out and discussed it as a family, but the rumor about Sam drags them all down, a weight around their collective ankles. These days everything feels muted, heavy, wrong.
“I’m calling Annie’s parents,” Emma hears herself announcing. She knows she is about to ruin the holiday and is powerless to stop herself.
“Wait, what?” Lilah says. Chris is shaking his head no at her.
“Enough is enough. They also have a son; I looked in the directory. It’s time for a conversation.” Sam is looking down at his plate, slowly shaking his head, gripping his fork and knife in a white-knuckled squeeze.
“Are. You. Literally. Insane?” Lilah asks.
“You’ll make everything worse,” Sam says.
“That girl needs to take back what she said.”
“Emma,” cautions Chris.
“You can’t fix it,” Lilah pushes her chair back from the table.
“Tell me you won’t.” Sam mumbles. He looks so defeated, so tired.
“Nothing’s happening, no one’s doing anything.” Chis frowns at Emma, she knows she’ll hear about this later, and he leans over to pat Sam’s back, a gesture Sam immediately shrugs off.
“Why don’t you tell him to get off of Tinder if you are so involved,” Lilah opens her hand imitating a mic drop.
“Tinder?” Chris echoes. Emma sits in stunned silence. Sam glares at Lilah who smiles triumphantly at him. The exact same expression always lit up her face when she tattled on her brother as a preschooler.
“What?” Sam shrugs. “I’m eighteen. I’m just looking.” Emma puts her head on the table and the brocade fabric feels smooth and cool against her cheek.
* * *
The week after Thanksgiving Emma is browsing at Madewell when she spots her, across the street, sitting in the window of a Starbucks. Yes, she had been looking for her — she had seen her there, before, hunched over her writing journal as if she’d been shot in the guts — but, still, recognition comes as something of a shock. Annie wears a striped top with an oversized army jacket draped over her small shoulders, a jaunty red beanie on her head, two braids peeping out. She seems, above all else, young. Not much older than her own daughter. And what had Emma expected? That this eleventh grader would have transformed into a mature Jezebel? A live succubus? Watching her in the window Emma sees it, plain as day: For all of the gossip she has circulated undermining her son, Annie is still just a girl.
It’s a sign, she tells herself. It’s the universe. It’s time to talk. I know what you did, I know what you called my son, if you didn’t like it why didn’t you just stop?
Emma approaches Annie slowly as if stalking a wild animal that might bolt upon catching her scent. “Hi Annie.” Emma points at herself and says, “Sam’s mom.”
“Um, hi?” Annie blinks.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Emma’s gentle voice belies the acid in her gut.
Annie looks around, as if contemplating escape. Emma remembers Annie’s glasses and that nearsighted, myopic expression that always made the girl appear permanently confused, vulnerable to attack.
“What?” Annie just sits there blinking.
“About Sam,” Emma keeps her voice even, calm.
“I’m waiting for my mom,” Annie says.
“Great,” Emma says with forced cheerfulness. “Maybe it’s time we all talked.”
Annie blinks, nods, but says nothing.
Emma wants to remain gentle, but even more she wants clarification, a confession, a a slate wiped clean. She barrels ahead, “You know, thanks to you, kids are saying Sam is an assaulter.”
“I never said that.” Annie says. Emma does not know if she wants to slap this girl or record her and post it on TikTok.
“And?” Emma presses.
Annie makes small piles of the spilled granulated sugar on her table but remains silent. Annie’s passivity, her contained quiet, is kindling for Emma’s frustration.
“You know there’s a kid in New Jersey that killed himself over a rumor like this?” Emma feels her voice rising. “And you – you could stop this?”
Annie twists her paper napkin in her hands, which Emma notices are shaking. It occurs to Emma that Annie may be afraid of her.
“I just said what happened.”
“To be clear,” Emma is over-enunciating, “You did not say Sam forced you to do something against your will?”
“I really need to go,” Annie says.
“You can go just as soon as you give me a little clarification,” Emma says.
“I just said what he did,” Annie whispers, her eyes tearing up. “People talk. I feel bad.”
“You feel bad,” Emma mocks. “Nice. Annie feels bad. Annie can give blow jobs, but Annie can’t speak out?” Emma feels the spit flying from her mouth, her vein popping out on her forehead in righteous indignation. Emma realizes people are staring — looking at a middle-aged woman screaming about oral sex at a small teenager who is backing away from her. Annie tries to pick up her cup but misses and spills iced coffee all over her jeans, a dark stain spreading across her lap and down her thighs. Emma just watches for a moment, then grabs paper napkins, tries to help dab it, but Annie just steps back and shakes her head, no.
“I’m sorry. I have to go.” Annie stands and rushes for the door. As she crosses the street against the light, she breaks into a run.
What he did. Emma thinks. Unwelcome, unrelenting images of Sam and Annie together surface and swim in her head, circling like minnows, darting here and there in the flickering light. And Emma knows no matter how hard she yells, even if she catches up and throttles this girl, strings her up in the high school auditorium to testify, the truth lives somewhere else, forever alone in dark room with this saucer-eyed girl and her beautiful boy.
* * *
The next morning, Emma wakes with the distinct feeling of shame mixed with a dollop of fear, a feeling oddly reminiscent of many mornings in New York in her twenties, when she drank so much that she lost the memory of the night before. However, in this case, she does remember exactly what she said to Annie. Surprisingly, it hadn’t been cathartic, in fact, she may have made everything worse. Checking her phone for texts from unknown numbers Emma wonders if Annie’s mother will call her? She would, were their roles reversed.
By the following week, when nothing has happened, Emma feels like she has dodged a bullet, except Sam is now avoiding her like the plague. He walks out of the kitchen without a word when she enters and is boycotting family meals. One morning, Sam comes down to grab food from the fridge to bring to his room and he makes breakfast like it’s his enemy: slamming cabinets, throwing cereal into a bowl, using up the last of the milk, crushing the paper box leaving it smashed and empty on the counter as Emma and Lilah watch in silence.
Emma is fed up. “Is there something I can do for you?”
Sam snorts, turns his back on her and walks up the stairs, milk sloshing aggressively from his cereal bowl.
Emma turns to Lilah who has been strangely sanguine about her brother’s on-going tantrum. “What’s his problem?”
Lilah shrugs. “I’d leave him alone if I were you.”
* * *
Two weeks later, it’s mid-December and Emma and Sam are sitting on a chilly metal bench adjacent to a parking lot outside Montgomery Day School waiting for Lilah to finish practice. Lately, Sam seems soft, shell-less, like an insect that has shed its exoskeleton. His angular, handsome face is thin, even drawn. There are large circles under his eyes, and he has stopped dying his hair, growing it out to its natural auburn. But there have been moments of hope, of brightness: Sam checking his phone, texting. Emma does not dare ask who he is talking to.
As they wait, Emma looks over the football field, past the five green tennis bubbles that popped up at the school over the weekend, bulbous and round, strange as an alien encampment, to the wooded area by the silty stream that winds its way through their suburban Maryland neighborhood. There, fifty yards away by the water, like a mirage, like a hallucination, stand three zebras placidly dipping their heads to delicately drink from the stream. Squinting, Emma shakes her head like a dog or an actor in a sitcom. She has seen the pictures, but here in person, black and white stripes glinting in the late afternoon sun, the zebras seem nothing short of miraculous.
“Look,” she says to Sam, pointing.
“Holy crap,” whispers Sam, jumping up and down like a little kid as he sees them.
At that moment, Emma glances up to the rear doors of the gym and spots Annie, walking out. Seeing Sam and Emma, she hesitates, frozen, looking left and right. Sam, though, waves at Annie pointing towards the zebras in an exaggerated pantomime. Annie puts her hands on her hips, waiting, assessing. Undeterred, Sam mouths, “Look.”
He points again, goggling his eyes, mouthing, “Come here.” Emma notes with relief that Annie looks skeptical, but not fearful. Then, Annie shrugs, slings her backpack over her shoulder, and walks over, eyes downcast, converse sneakers dragging. Sam touches her shoulder gently and points, guiding her gaze up and into the distance.
“Whaaaat?” Annie whispers, finally seeing them. The zebras look over at them warily but continue casually winding their way along the bank. Emma tries to catch Annie’s eye, to share a smile, but the girl pointedly ignores her.
Sam pulls out his phone and gestures for a selfie. Annie leans in, their heads side-by-side, touching, as the zebras wander like deer in the background. Sam takes the picture, and they jump apart as if shocked, surprised they had gotten so close. Annie steps from one foot to another, watching as the zebras nibble the last remaining tendrils of fall foliage.
Later, Emma would learn from Lilah that Annie had texted Sam immediately after the confrontation at Starbucks to complain, to notify Sam of his mother’s “outrageous” (Annie’s words) and “fucking unhinged” (Lilah’s words) behavior. Apparently, Sam was furious at Emma, had called to profusely apologize to Annie and to roast his mother over a giant bonfire of adolescent outrage. That first conversation, that moment of shared disgust concerning Emma, was apparently the beginning of some sort of invisible rapprochement, a movement towards mending fences, that had happened right under her nose.
“I’ll text you the pic,” Sam whispers to Annie pointing at his phone. Annie nods and walks away, shaking her head but smiling a little. When Emma sees Sam’s shoulders relax in something like relief, she realizes she has been holding her breath. Suddenly, a door slams. The zebras look up in alarm and sprint off, disappearing into the dense greenway as if they had never been there at all.
Image: by Fabrizio Frigeni on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
