Final Assignment

Seven

‘You plagiarized it?’ Malcolm asked.

Chandler shook his head violently. ‘No! I didn’t do that. I would never do that.’ He paused. ‘But someone else wrote it for me.’

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘Joel Blakelock,’ he said.

Lucy and the Carsons couldn’t have looked more surprised if the boy had told them Ernest Hemingway had come back from the dead to do his homework.

‘Chandler,’ Lucy said skeptically, ‘you can’t be serious.’

It took me a second to remember that Joel Blakelock was the kid Michael and Chandler had photographed making out with another boy, and then posted the photo on social media.

‘Honest,’ Chandler said. ‘He wrote it.’

‘Wait, I’m not getting this,’ Greta said. ‘You somehow got hold of a story Joel had written and passed it off as yours?’

‘The last part, yeah,’ he admitted. ‘But I didn’t steal it or anything. He offered to write it for me.’

We all exchanged looks at that point.

‘Why would he do that for you, after what you did to him?’ I asked.

‘It was a kind of peace offering,’ he said. ‘Like, I guess he knows I’m not the best student in the world.’

He waited a second, maybe hoping someone would offer to contradict him, but when no one did, he continued. ‘I’m not that good at getting assignments in, and I haven’t been doing that good well in Ms Hamlin’s class, so he offered to write a story for me that I could hand in. And in return, Michael and I would leave him alone and never make fun of him again or anything. I mean, we weren’t going to anyway, because we got in so much trouble, but if he wanted to write something for me, I wasn’t going to say no.’

‘Did you tell him what kind of story you wanted?’ Lucy asked.

Chandler shook his head. ‘I didn’t even look at it before I handed it in.’

That explained a lot.

I said, ‘Where would I find this Joel Blakelock?’

‘Hold on,’ Lucy said. ‘Who are you anyway?’

‘I’m a friend of the Vaughns,’ I said.

‘The way you’re asking questions, I wondered if you were from the police.’

‘I’m a licensed investigator,’ I said. ‘All I’m trying to do now is get to the bottom of this.’

‘Well you’re not talking to Joel without me there.’

The way she said it, the subject was not up for debate.

We decided to leave her car at the Carsons’ house and go to the Blakelocks’ in mine.

‘Joel’s a sensitive kid,’ Lucy Brighton said. ‘Someone like you throwing your weight around, badgering him, that’s not going to be good. Not for him, that’s for sure.’

‘I don’t badger,’ I said.

‘How about throw your weight around?’

‘Not that either.’

‘Well I’m going to make sure you don’t. Do you have any idea what Chandler and Mike put him through?’

‘I know what they did, but I can only imagine the impact it would have had on him. Was Mike a bad kid? Is Chandler?’

She glanced at me. ‘Bad? No. A lot of kids at that age do bad things, but I don’t think that makes them bad kids. They do things without thinking of the repercussions. They don’t consider how what they do will affect others. They haven’t developed a strong sense of empathy yet. They’ll go along with what the rest of the crowd is doing, even if it’s hateful, because they need so much to belong. I think we all did things as teens that we wish we could go back and undo. Cruel, thoughtless things.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but some kids are bad and stay that way.’

‘I know.’

‘Tell me about what they did to Joel.’

‘After they took that picture of him, they posted it in the usual places, and then others reposted it, and before you knew it, everyone in the school, and probably thousands beyond, had seen it. Joel was humiliated. People wrote things like “faggot” on his locker. His home got egged. He didn’t come to school for a week. His parents threatened to sue the boys, their parents, even the school. Chandler and Michael agreed to a full public apology. They were required to put it all in writing. There was a face-to-face sit-down. Joel’s parents agreed to drop their threats of a lawsuit. Things settled down after that, but that hardly made up for what Joel went through. At one point, I’m told, he was thinking of taking his own life, he was so humiliated. I’m sure he’s getting some kind of counseling.’

‘Do you think the boys were genuinely remorseful?’

‘I’d like to think so,’ Lucy said. ‘I don’t think they foresaw how quickly things would get out of hand.’

‘No wonder you looked stunned at the idea that Joel would write a story for Chandler,’ I said, heading toward the address we had for the Blakelock home.

‘Even if Joel were able to find it in his heart to forgive them for what they did, it’s quite a stretch to think he’d help either one of them do their homework.’

‘Unless Chandler isn’t telling it the way it happened,’ I said. ‘Maybe he threatened Joel, intimidated him into doing it.’

But even if that were true, it didn’t explain the story’s content, or how prescient it was.

‘Who was the other boy?’ I asked. ‘How did this affect him?’

‘He couldn’t be seen in the picture,’ Lucy said, ‘and Joel never revealed who it was.’

‘You think it was another student from your school?’

‘Most likely. You’d think by now that people would have moved past this.’ She shook her head. ‘But you’d be so wrong. The country’s still split on same-sex issues. There are still people who think it’s a sickness or a choice. Some people are just born the way they’re born.’

There was something in the way she said it that suggested this was personal.

‘Is there someone close to you who’s gay?’ I asked.

Lucy glanced my way. ‘No, actually. I mean, I have a cousin. She’s gay, but she’s cool with it and doesn’t care what anyone thinks. It’s just I was thinking that so many of us are born wired a certain way. It’s who we are, and there’s nothing we can do to change it. Sexual orientation is just one thing. My daughter...’

When she didn’t continue after a few seconds, I said, ‘What about your daughter?’

‘Crystal. Her name is Crystal. She’s eleven. And she has... sometimes I don’t know if it’s a learning disability, or a tremendous gift. But she’s not like the other kids. She’s withdrawn, very much in her own world. And she draws all the time. Like comic books, or graphic novels they call them. She’s always escaping into her imagination.’

‘She sounds interesting,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well, she is that,’ Lucy said, and tried to laugh. She pointed. ‘I think the Blakelocks live just up here.’

‘Okay.’

‘You’re not talking to Joel without one or both of his parents there.’

‘Okay.’

‘I won’t let you badger him.’

‘Okay.’

‘I just wanted to make that clear,’ Lucy said.

‘Message received.’