Helpless

Chapter 23

Jill was back in uniform. Tom couldn’t have been more proud of her.

Lindsey Wells took a perfect centering pass from Lauren Grass. She pushed the ball down the right wing and centered it into the middle of the penalty box. Jill Hawkins was in the right place at the right time.

Instincts.

Jill unleashed a rocket of a shot that landed in the back of the net.

“Nicely done, Jill! Very nicely done!” Tom called out.

Jill did her best to smile at the compliment, but Tom could see his daughter’s heart wasn’t in the game. How could it be?

With the social worker’s help, Tom had learned about the eight stages of grief. Shock, stage one, had allowed Jill to function physically in the days immediately following her mother’s death—which was now officially ruled a homicide. She succumbed to tears mixed with anger as she stumbled through the emotional release stage. She suffered frequent headaches and a seemingly endless upset stomach—the physical expression of distress. Now it was guilt’s turn to eat his poor daughter alive. He knew she felt guilty about playing soccer again. She felt guilty that she’d returned to school. She felt guilty trying to live her life. But nothing compared to the guilt she felt about letting her teammates down.

“I’ll dedicate the season to Mom’s memory,” Jill had said to Tom. “But I’m not going to quit the team.”

“You can come back to the squad anytime,” he had tried to reassure her. “There’s no reason to rush.”

Jill shook her head. “Shilo hasn’t been beaten in three seasons,” she said. “That’s tied for the state record.”

“I don’t care about records,” Tom had said. “I care about you.”

“Well, the team cares,” answered Jill. “And I don’t need that kind of guilt on me as well. We barely beat Dover last week. We’ve got Riverside coming up this week. I’m going to be on the field for that game. And we’re gonna win.”

My daughter’s a fighter, Tom thought, and he had never felt more proud. But hers was proving a hard battle to fight. Throughout the scrimmage, Jill ambled down the field without much urgency. Even at half effectiveness, however, she was still one of the best players on the field. Tom knew she was right about Riverside. Without Jill on the pitch, the much-hyped Shilo unbeaten streak was destined to end.

The girls were just starting to play with real intensity again. This was the best scrimmage Tom had seen since Powers and Murphy tag teamed Tom and nearly destroyed his team’s morale over some misguided prank.

It was Angie who had stepped in and pulled the team out of a tailspin. During a closed-door meeting, Angie gave both the varsity and JV squads a lengthy lecture about cyber bullying. A long period of silence followed the lecture. Afterward, Angie changed her tune and told Tom’s players to go out and win another state championship for Shilo. The cheers had lasted a good two minutes.

You can’t keep a good team down, Tom had thought.

This practice was proving his assessment to be true.

Lindsey Wells put one hand on her knee and raised the other high in the air—a signal to the coaches that she needed a rest. Vern Kalinowski blew his whistle and subbed in Jenny Fielder for Lindsey. Lindsey passed through a gauntlet of high fives before trotting over to where her head coach stood on the sidelines. She was all smiles, and her brown skin glistened with sweat from the warm September sun. Lindsey put her hands on her hips, still breathing hard from the workout.

She lay down on the ground and began to stretch. She formed a bridge with her body, feet flat on the grass, chest pressing skyward. Tom had seen Lindsey do this stretch a thousand times. But for Tom, it was no longer an innocuous way for a player to keep loose. The stretch, Tom realized, was strikingly similar to a pose made by a naked teenage girl in a picture somebody had sent him.

He had called the sender’s number, only to get a messaging service provider called TxtyChat.com. According to the TxtyChat Web site, the service was used to send text and images to mobile phones from a dedicated bank of phone numbers. Untraceable—that was one of TxtyChat’s featured selling points, as documented on the Web site.

Untraceable.

Tom had spent some of the previous day researching the legal and ethical issues around his thorny situation. He knew that what he’d received was a sext—digitally transmitted, sexually suggestive, nude or nearly nude photos. What he didn’t know was whether he could be charged with any crime for simply receiving an unsolicited image.

The blog posts had already cast suspicion on him. Complicating matters, the legal landscape of digital laws was in a near molten stage, changing and reforming as new precedents and cases cropped up. He concluded only that his receipt was unsolicited and therefore didn’t violate any sexual harassment or child pornography laws.

But the question still remained: what should he do about it?

The first thing Tom did was to delete the pictures from his phone. A girls’ soccer coach’s possessing naked pictures of a female minor was like walking around with a stick of dynamite in his pocket. Bringing it to the attention of any of the school staff would launch a formal inquiry. Lots of questions would get asked. The blog posts might not seem like a prank anymore. The additional attention wouldn’t do his already struggling daughter any good, either.

Tom decided to leave it alone.

He hadn’t received any more pictures. Perhaps the pictures and the blog post were unrelated coincidences. Maybe this mystery teenage girl had intended those pictures to be seen by somebody else. Maybe that person’s phone number was close to his own. If so, with luck she had realized her mistake and wouldn’t make it again.

Tom contemplated calling Marvin for legal advice.

Not yet, he decided.

Marvin might insist Tom make his concerns public. Document them in an official statement. There’d be a formal inquiry for sure if he went that route. And Jill would be caught in the middle.

No, for now, the best thing for Tom to do was wait and see.

Coincidence or attack?

Prank or something else?

He’d find out for certain before deciding his next move.

Another question still bothered Tom. Was Jill doing the same thing as the girl who texted him?

Tom couldn’t get his thoughts around that one. He’d gone from being the occasional father of a distant and disinterested daughter, to a full-time parent of a beautiful teenage girl with a stew of cooking hormones. How could he keep an eye on what she was doing without her feeling that he was intruding on her privacy?

Kelly had allowed Jill to keep a computer in her bedroom. Tom knew that wasn’t a wise decision. It made it harder to keep her safe from online predators. He hadn’t planned on battling Jill to establish new and far stricter limits. She had enough on her plate to deal with. But after seeing those images, Tom’s concerns intensified.

How could he know what his daughter was doing behind closed doors?

Tom blew his whistle to signal practice was over. The girls, as usual, dashed for their gym bags stacked on the sidelines. They didn’t go for water bottles or snacks; they went for the first thing they always went for when practice ended.

They took out their cell phones.

Tom was gathering his belongings when he heard a loud shriek. He looked and saw some of the girls huddled together, talking anxiously. He saw more girls being drawn toward the huddle. They were all looking at Lauren Grass’s cell phone.

He saw them pass her phone around. The chatter become more fevered. The girls made a sudden break, collected their bags, and took off for the locker room. Jill came over to Tom, panic on her face.

“Dad, what is going on?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know what that was all about?”

“No,” Tom said. “But I assume you’re going to tell me.”

Jill tilted her head back and looked up at the sky. Tom could tell she was trying to keep from crying. “Lauren said she friended somebody she didn’t know last night,” Jill said, her voice shaky.

“Friended, as in school?”

“No, friended as in Facebook.”

“Oh.”

Jill continued, “The friend request said, ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ She was curious. Normally, she doesn’t accept friend requests from people she doesn’t know.”

“And what was this secret?”

“They posted it on her wall during practice.”

“Wall?”

“Her Facebook wall,” Jill said with exasperation.

“Oh? And what did they post?”

Now the tears came. “That they know for a fact you’re sleeping with somebody on the team,” Jill sobbed. “And they know who it is, too.”