“And how many boys on the team have corroborated this story?”
“I didn’t hear it from any of them, Mrs. Bates-McAllister.”
“Well, there you go.” Sylvie’s heart was beating fast. “Someone made this up. You know how teenagers get with rumors. You know how they embellish things. Something is whispered to one person and by lunch it’s a huge scandal.”
There was a long pause. “I’m not suggesting I believe it,” the headmaster said. “I’m just explaining what I’ve heard. We take everything seriously, as you know. For now, I’m arranging for a few people to meet with Scott. It will be an independent council of teachers, none of your colleagues on the board. I don’t want this to get out of hand, either for us or for you. Your family has done so much for the school, after all. And I know there have been some attempts at … how shall I put this? Some attempts at character assassination, I suppose, regarding certain members of your family in the past. I assure you that I intend to be discreet.”
Sylvie ground her nails into the fabric of the sofa. Character assassination. Discreet. He had a way of making the words sound so dirty. “This is unprofessional.” She paced around the room. “You can’t call a coach in to talk to them about a ridiculous rumor. And you shouldn’t come to me with something like this unless you know.”
“Calling Scott in to talk seems fair. If there was a rumor going around about someone else on the staff, another teacher, another coach, you would want us to feel that person out about it, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Bates-McAllister?”
When Sylvie pressed her hand to her forehead, she felt a muscle in her temple throb, a tiny flutter under her skin. She glanced out the window in the kitchen; Scott’s car wasn’t in the driveway. She dared to think of what he was doing: lifting weights at the gym, playing video games, driving the Mercedes too fast, whipping around the turns and grinding the gears. She thought of the jobs he’d held: the stint as an auto mechanic, mostly learning the ropes so he could soup up his own car, which he’d since crashed. Pouring concrete, coming home covered in gray film. Even that time he caddied at James’s golf club, though that had lasted only a day; he’d said the golfers were racist, giving him accusing looks as if he was going to walk off with their clubs. She’d felt urgently optimistic with each job he took, praying that this one would be his true path, the thing that set him straight. He quit each job after only a matter of weeks.
Something else appeared in her mind, too. When Scott was ten or eleven, she had come upon him in the basement. He was crouched in the corner, watching something. A mouse was trapped under a large glass vase, slowly suffocating. It clawed the sides of the vase, its little paws scrambling. How had it gotten there? It took her a few moments to understand. “Scott!” she’d cried out, but her voice was so weak, so ineffectual. Always so ineffectual. When he didn’t do anything, she’d pushed him aside, lifted the vase, and let the mouse go. Scott had looked at her like she was crazy. She complained about mice in the basement all the time—didn’t she want them dead? But it was Scott’s expression, as he’d watched the mouse flail under the dome that had made her set it free. The look on his face was one of iron-cold indifference, as if he’d almost enjoyed the poor creature’s suffering.
Oh God, she thought now, a rushing feeling between her ears. Oh God.
“Mrs. Bates-McAllister?” the new headmaster said softly into the phone. “Are you still there?”
“Thank you for calling,” she said in the strongest voice she could muster. “But I think what you’re suggesting—”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” he broke in. “You’ve misunderstood—”
“—is a mistake,” she finished and hung up.