Chapter 6: What Bethany's Mother Said
I was waiting in the car when he came out.
He hadn't told me everything before he went in.
He'd told me enough — the letters, the lawyer, the reporter — but he hadn't told me about Bethany.
I only learned her name when he sat down in the passenger seat and said it quietly, like he'd been carrying it for a while.
"Who is she?" I asked.
"She was two years below me," he said.
"I didn't know her well.
But the principal's assistant did.
She said Bethany was one of the worst cases.
The letters, the photos, the exclusion — it was more sustained with her.
More organized."
"What happened to her?"
He looked out the window.
"She's okay now," he said.
"She moved away.
She's got a family.
But her mother never let it go.
She's been trying to get the school district to acknowledge what happened for years.
Nobody would listen."
A woman was standing near the building entrance, a little apart from the reporter.
She was in her sixties, I guessed.
Gray coat.
Hands folded in front of her.
She had the look of someone who had been patient for a very long time and had finally stopped being patient.
"Is that her?" I asked.
"Yes," my son said.
I got out of the car.
I don't know what made me do it.
I hadn't planned to.
But I walked over to her, and she looked at me, and I said, "My son is the one who went in."
She nodded slowly.
"He called me two weeks ago," she said.
"When he found out about the letters.
He didn't have to do that."
"He wanted to," I said.
"Most people don't want to," she said.
"Most people find out something like this and they think about their own situation and they move on.
He thought about Bethany."
I didn't know what to say to that.
"She doesn't know he's here tonight," the woman continued.
"I didn't tell her.
I didn't want her to feel like she had to be part of it if she wasn't ready." She paused.
"But I think she'll want to know."
Inside, through the tall windows of the venue, I could see the room had fractured.
Small groups.
Turned backs.
Someone had their phone to their ear.
Stacy was nowhere I could see.
Ryan was visible near the bar.
He wasn't drinking.
He was standing very still, looking at nothing.
The reporter — a young woman with a notebook, not a camera crew, just a notebook — came over to my son.
They spoke quietly for several minutes.
He showed her the documents.
She photographed them with her phone.
When she finished, she looked up and said, "Can I quote you by name?"
My son thought about it for exactly one second.
"Yes," he said.
She wrote something down.
"One more question," she said.
"Why tonight?
Why come here in person instead of just giving me the documents?"
My son looked back at the building.
"Because they needed to see it," he said.
"Not read about it later.
See it.
In the same room where they decided, ten years ago, that some people didn't belong."
The reporter nodded and wrote that down too.
My son's phone buzzed in his pocket.
He looked at the screen.
His face changed.
"What is it?" I asked.
He turned the phone so I could see.
It was a message from a number he hadn't saved.
But the name at the top of the message was one I recognized from the letters.
May you like
It was Ryan.
And what Ryan had written was not an apology.
