Chapter 7: Ryan's Message
The message read: *You think you won something tonight.
You didn't.
Drop this now or I will make sure everyone knows exactly why you were really excluded.
There are things about you that never came out.
Things I kept quiet.
I won't keep them quiet anymore.*
My son read it twice.
Then he handed me the phone.
I read it.
My hands were steady but my chest wasn't.
"What does he mean?" I said.
"What things?"
"There are no things," my son said.
"He's doing what he always did.
When he couldn't control a situation, he invented something.
Made you afraid of a threat that didn't exist." He took the phone back.
"He did it to me in ninth grade.
Told people I'd said something about the principal.
I hadn't.
But I spent two weeks trying to prove a negative."
"What are you going to do?"
He looked at the message again.
"Screenshot it," he said.
"Forward it to the lawyer."
He did both, right there in the parking lot.
Then he typed a single reply to Ryan.
*This message has been forwarded to legal counsel.
Please direct any further communication to them.*
He put the phone in his pocket.
"That's it?" I said.
"That's it," he said.
But it wasn't.
Because forty minutes later, while we were sitting in a diner two miles away — my son eating pie, me drinking coffee I didn't need — his phone rang.
Not a message this time.
A call.
The same number.
He let it ring.
It rang again.
On the third call, he answered and put it on speaker, low enough that only I could hear.
"You made a mistake tonight," Ryan said.
His voice was different now.
The performance was gone.
He just sounded tired and angry and a little desperate.
"You don't know what you've started."
"I think I do," my son said.
"The lawyer, the reporter, the filing — none of that is going to go anywhere.
You know that, right?
School districts settle these things quietly.
Nothing happens.
Nobody gets held accountable.
You embarrassed some people at a party and that's all you did."
"Maybe," my son said.
"So why?" Ryan said.
"Seriously.
Why?
What did you think was going to happen?"
My son looked at me across the table.
"I thought Bethany's mother was going to be heard," he said into the phone.
"I thought Dana was going to ask a question she'd been afraid to ask for ten years.
I thought Greg was going to walk out of that room and think about why he did." He paused.
"I thought you were going to send me a threatening message that I could forward to a lawyer."
Silence on the line.
"You planned that," Ryan said.
"I planned for you to be yourself," my son said.
"You made it easy."
"You think this is over," Ryan said.
"It's not over."
"Ryan," my son said, and his voice was very calm, "I spent ten years getting over what you did.
You've got about ten days before the story runs.
I'd use the time wisely."
He ended the call.
He picked up his fork.
"Eat your pie," he said to me.
I laughed.
I don't know why.
It just came out of me — a real laugh, the kind that's half relief and half something that had been waiting a long time to be released.
He looked up, and then he smiled too, and for a moment he looked exactly like the boy who used to sit at our kitchen table after school, pretending everything was fine.
Except now everything actually was.
Or almost.
May you like
Because when we got home that night, there was a voicemail on my landline.
It was Stacy.
