Caplan tastes that idea. He nods his head. The man is stripped down to his bare nervous system, losing more of his comb-over every day. “Yes. Are you?”
Katy runs her hands across her belly. She’s the largest. The skin is tight. She scratches and the other girls catch on, adding friction to their own bellies, basketing their fingers underneath to cradle the heft. All hands on deck. Caplan studies the roundness. Thirteen moons in the sky would be less surprising. He struggles to read the meaning in these bodies, like attempting braille for the first time. Frustration bugs his eyes out. Pregnancies as protolanguage, saying things the girls can’t.
“No.”
But what? And why can’t the girls just say whatever they need to say? I give my own stomach a rub. Maybe they are too young to know what they need to say. Or maybe nobody taught them how.
Caplan slaps his hand on the desk. “Your parents are talking to lawyers and detectives. They’re talking to your doctors. I just want you to tell me who did this to you.”
Circled as wagons, the girls say nothing. Their toes twist. I tuck my face into the collar of my blouse, smell the fabric softener there. There’s an insult confused with Caplan’s question, making it clear how little he understands the girls in his care. They did this themselves. These bodies belong to them.
Caplan slaps his desk a second time and after a silence long enough to pour a cup of coffee in, he stands and opens his office door. He allows the district psychiatric counselor to enter. Caplan does not care much for Ellen. She wears turquoise jewelry. She used to be the drama coach but the town cut that program.
Ellen swoons and drops to her left knee in the midst of the thirteen. One pregnant teenager is a broken home. Thirteen pregnant teenagers is a Category 5 hurricane barreling toward Galveston.
Ellen asks the girls simple questions. “Do you eat breakfast? Have you seen a recent film?”
I record her words.
She asks, “Which subject in school is your favorite? What kind of music do you enjoy?” And then she asks, “Did you know that ‘teen porn’ is the most Googled search term on the Internet?”
The thirteen remain silent. Caplan boils. Ellen fingers her chunky bracelets.
“Really?” I ask. The room is so quiet. And all Ellen wants is to be able to talk to girls who won’t talk. Ellen expands her gaze to include me. The girls bite their cheeks to not giggle. No one says a thing, so I have nothing to record. Ellen refreshes her face of anguish.
“Teen porn” floats in the room, flicking its fins.
It’s hard getting old. Hard on a body, a mind, hard on a country. I formulate a fantasy of Ellen in a red, white, and blue negligee, clasping her chest like some neglected housewife, crying, If it is porn they need, take me! Spare these young ones and use my forty-year-old, semiprecious body instead. Sub/dom, bondage? Fine. Facials, pee play? Horrors I’ll endure to protect our young girls. Take me. Use me. I insist!
Caplan breaks the quiet. “Thank you for your guidance, Ellen.” He tries to excuse her.
But Ellen dusts off her slacks. “I’m not done yet.” She stands with a hand on one hip. “Is it the law requiring a probe and a heartbeat that’s preventing you from enjoying a normal high school experience?”
Caplan coughs wildly, as if by hacking loudly enough, he can travel a few seconds backward in time and erase the school’s connection to the procedure Ellen has just suggested. Even if, privately, he’d counsel the same. This is Texas and he’d like to have a job in the morning, though the chances of that are getting slimmer and slimmer.
Some of the girls have polite smiles. Five of them check their cell phones in a chain reaction. Caplan gulps from a glass of ancient water on his desk until Amy or Grace—I think it is Amy—finally asks, “Sir, may we be excused?”
Caplan stops gulping. I’ve never seen the man so sad. He stares at his hands as if they are now the size of paddles or tabletops—useless in the delicate work of raising children, braiding hair, tying shoelaces. Worse than useless—dangerous, bruising, deaf.
Caplan nods. Thirteen pregnant girls waddle their way out of his office. I plug in our hot pot for two more cups of coffee, but then I notice the last cup I made him untouched on his desk, cold. It’s too much for one man, particularly one with old-fashioned ideas about protecting the children in his care.
With the girls gone, like some sort of palate cleanser or smelling salts, Caplan allows himself to watch a YouTube video of Jerry Lee Lewis pounding away on a poor Baldwin.
“I love him,” Caplan says. “I love the Killer. Just look at him.”
I was never a huge fan. That business with the cousins and the dead wives. But together we watch “Crazy Arms” and “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous.” Jerry Lee’s up. He’s down. His fingers look like jumping spiders covered with gaudy gems big as babies’ fists. He plays piano with one foot on the keys. He plays piano with his elbows.
“Someday the only reference to us in the newspaper will be the field hockey scores.”
“Absolutely.” I try to cheer Caplan with a smile.
He switches off his monitor. “There are reports of three girls in Boling-Iago and five in Manvel. The governor’s calling me in the morning.”
“The governor? Why?”
“He wants someone to blame.”
“For every pregnant teen in Texas?” I hadn’t thought of that angle yet, a contagion, airborne spores we propagated.
Caplan follows something outside the window. “It’s not my fault.”
“Of course it’s not.”
He lifts his head, looking like a boy, asking permission. “I’m taking the afternoon off, okay? I need to think about what I’m going to tell the governor.”
“Good idea.”
Principal Caplan grabs his windbreaker from the coatrack and blows a raspberry as goodbye on his way out.
The files on my desk are stuffed to bursting. I touch the newspaper clippings and the sweetly scented insurance forms. There are op-eds and PTA minutes in which concerned community members blame Gardasil, high-fructose corn syrup in cafeteria lunches, loose relationships with biological fathers, Democrats, yoga, Republicans, dioxin-steeped feminine products. In all that paper, all those words, the girls say nothing. And I suppose that is the point.
*
The quiet of afternoon nature films pervades the hallways. At the end of a long row of lockers the thirteen gather together undisturbed. With the sun just so, buffed circles of wax are visible on the vinyl flooring. The girls speak softly, huddled in a whirlpool. The light is full of dust particles. One asks the others, “Have your feet swelled? None of my shoes fit anymore.”
“No, but I haven’t pooped in weeks.”
A round of giggles.
“And all this extra spit in my mouth. How come no one ever told us about that?”