———-
Part 5
“He really did call?” John asked Alexis the next day in school. “My folks didn’t say anything to me.”
“I was with my dad while he was on the phone,” Alexis said. “Your dad picked up, I think.”
“What did he say?”
“I couldn’t hear your dad, but it sounded like he was cool with it. I guess he didn’t feel like telling you.”
“My mom gave me ‘the talk’,” Nancy chimed in. “She told me sex wasn’t really like what we saw, but she told me that it wasn’t really like what was in her books, either. I can’t wait till we take sex ed next year so I can find out what it’s really like.”
“I don’t think sex ed will tell you much,” Alexis said, “except the science behind it. I don’t think they’ll teach you what it feels like. I mean, it’s not like it’s a hands-on course!”
“Ooh, that’d be so fun!” Nancy said. She still had not tried masturbation yet, but it was in the back of her mind more often that not. At this moment, she was visualizing a sex ed class where she and Scott got to go up to the front of the room to give an in-class demonstration of sex. She did not yet realize that that was called exhibitionism. She didn’t know yet that it was a fetish, a taboo, something that lots of people were interested in, and something that others thought was sick and weird. In her mind, having sex in a sex ed class as perfectly logical as playing with chemicals in a chemistry class.
“Where’s Scott today?” John asked.
“I don’t know,” Nancy said. “I got kicked out of his house when his mom hung up with your dad,” she said, looking at Alexis.
Alexis looked away, avoiding Nancy’s eyes. ‘Maybe it’s my fault Scott isn’t here,’ Alexis thought to herself, and felt ashamed. ‘It wasn’t right to push him to be there, it wasn’t right to make him come. He knew he’d be in trouble, and we shouldn’t have made him come.’
“I’ll go to his house after school and see what’s up,” Nancy said. “Maybe he’s just sick.” But nobody really thought so.
—–
Nancy did not find out why Scott had been absent that day. She had gone to Scott’s house to find out, but she had been shooed away before she was allowed to come in. The next day yielded no further results, but she never told Alexis and John the specifics of what had happened on those occasions. It was the topic that Nancy did not want to talk about.
On Thursday, John decided to go to Scott’s house and ask himself. When he knocked, Scott’s mother answered the door.
“Are you one of Scott’s friends?” she asked.
“Y-“
“Scott cannot come out.”
“May I ask why?” John asked.
“I don’t even want to tell you. Just saying what he’s done is not good for you. You might get ideas and I don’t want to be responsible for it.”
“This isn’t about the um, the thing at Alexis’ house is it?”
“Oh, so you know?”
“I was-“
“I’ll bet that boy told everyone in school. Scott’s so ashamed he’ll never be able to show his face in school again, and I don’t blame him. I’ve arranged to have the rest of his schoolwork mailed to us, and I’ll be sending him to a private school next year, like I should’ve done from the first. I’m sorry, but Scott will not be coming to school anymore, and he can’t play with you right now. I’m sure he doesn’t want to see anyone anyway. I can’t blame him, though, not completely. I think it’s those weirdoes fault more than my boy’s.”
“‘Weirdoes’, ma’am?”
“The Williams’s, the ones with the boy that looks like a girl, I’m sure you know the one.”
“Are you talking about Alexis?” John said, starting to get angry.
“Yes, that’s his name. Poor boy, I can’t even blame him so much, growing up with such parents.”
“They are NOT weirdoes, and Alexis is NOT a boy.”
“Ask your parents about it, they know. Dreadful thing.”
“That ‘dreadful thing’ is my girlfriend!”
Scott’s mother let out a soft wail. “Oh! So you’re the ‘boyfriend’, well you’re in for a surprise, because your ‘girlfriend’ is a boy. Tell your parents that quickly, before you do anything you regret, I hope you haven’t kissed him yet?”
“Alexis is a girl!” John shouted. He was ready to break something.
“Don’t shout at me, boy. I know you’re shocked, but yelling at me won’t do anything.”
“I am NOT shocked.”
“Clearly you are if you can’t keep your voice down. Run along and tell your parents what I’ve told you.”
“I think I will,” John said, trying to keep his temper down.
“Good boy,” Scott’s mother said, and closed the door in John’s face.
—–
John did, in fact, tell his parents, but he didn’t tell them what Scott’s mother wanted them to know. He told them the entire conversation as best as he could recall, interjecting with his own comments about how she was such a bitch, which was the only way he could describe her ignorance, which he got yelled at for. His parents understood him though, and didn’t like what they heard.
“I know it sounds like what Mrs. Turner said was bad,” John’s mother said, even and calm, “but there’s nothing we can do about it. I don’t like the fact that Scott can’t see you anymore, but she has to raise her son the way she thinks is best, just as we do for you.”
“But she’s NOT raising him best!” John objected.
“That may be so. But it’s not our place to change that. She has the right to take him out of school if she wants.”
“She shouldn’t have the right,” John mumbled.
—–
That was the end of John, Alexis, and Nancy’s relations with Scott. None of them were allowed to communicate with Scott at all, they never even saw him. It was like he was a prisoner in his own house, but they couldn’t do anything about it. John felt helpless, and Alexis cried in bed at night, when she thought of Scott, believing herself to be the cause of his imprisonment. On the last day of school, Alexis wrote a little note to Scott reading simply “We miss you so much,” and signed her name, as well as John’s and Nancy’s for them, even though they knew nothing about it. She stuck the note in Scott’s mailbox and walked away. She did not know that Scott would never see it, because Scott’s mother would find it first, rip it up, and throw it out.
Nancy reacted much differently. She got angry at first, standing in front of Scott’s house and calling Scott’s mother nasty names for all the neighbors to hear. When she tired of that, she would run around the block, or work extra hard in gym class. At night, she wrote in her diary some of the vilest things she wanted to do to Scott’s mother. And then, just as school ended for the summer, Nancy went through a short grieving phase, feeling sad and sorry for herself, and wishing she still had Scott.
But summer was, after all, beach season, and by the end of the first week of summer vacation, Scott was officially out of her life and off her mind, and she took in all the beautiful sights of summer.
Life had changed for all of them, but life went on.
———-
End of Season 1