Later that day, at lunch, I found Jeanine and told her the news. She was almost as shocked as I was at first, but then she took a sick fascination in the whole thing. I told her not to tell anyone and she swore, but somehow I knew that meant nothing. By tomorrow everyone would know. I had made a big mistake. I crawled home from school that day pondering over telling my parents or not, and decided not to. They would merely make a scene and do something drastic. Carol wasn’t my friend but I felt like she had trusted me with something that she didn’t trust anyone else with and it weighed heavily on me. I gingerly opened the front door and tiptoed through the kitchen to my bedroom, I didn’t want my parents to know that I was home quite yet.
The next morning at school I found my predictions to be right, everyone knew. It wasn’t this I cared about, it was speaking to Carol that I dreaded, for I knew that I would have to at some point. Again I proved to be correct. Carol came and sat next to me at lunch. The clatter of her tray on the table sounded very much to me like the sort of sound one hears in a prison. Perhaps I was just being melodramatic. The large storm occurring in my stomach at that time subsided when I saw the tears that were streaming down Carol’s cheeks. I did all I could that day to comfort her. I said anything to make her stop crying, even if that anything happened to be ‘Of course what you did wasn’t wrong.’ I knew very well that it was. I cursed myself when I found out that she did it again. The whole class was talking meaning to us. We didn’t know what was happening really, and many of us didn’t even believe that what Carol was saying was true. None of us quite understood what was going on, or knew the full extent of it. Behind the ‘harmless gossip’ that we were spreading lie something much more sinister. I remained Carol’s about it and even the older years knew, but what we were talking about had no comforter and adviser and the fountain of all knowledge to everyone else for many weeks before the principle found out.
One morning, during registration I was called in to the principle's office. As I got up from my desk and left the room I was accompanied by the shouts of the other children, 'Oooh Mary's in trouble!!' and 'What did you do?' I wanted to die of shame. I sat down in the large leather chair and felt like this large room and chair were going to engulf me and no one would ever be able to find me, as I was so small. The principle sat behind his desk in a similarly large leather chair. 'Good morning, Miss Bracher. I assume you know why you have been called in here.' I told him that I understood quite well why I was there. Although my words were confident and assured they came out of my mouth without much sound and I was sure they should have been emitted from someone much larger than myself. After a brief chat I was asked whether what Carol told me was really correct. I replied, ' I'm not entirely sure whether it is true, but that is what she told me. Besides, surely a lie like that is almost as bad as the truth.' I felt that these were wise words and was quite proud of myself. Suddenly the room felt much smaller and I sat upright in my large leather chair. The principle told me that Carol was what he termed a 'simple' girl, meaning she was well below average intelligence, and that what she told me might well have been accurate. Of course I knew that it could have been, but even now I didn't quite believe it. I walked back to my classroom with a feeling of emptiness and somehow I didn't feel quite clean. I blamed this entirely on Carol. She was abhorrent and I shouldn't associate myself with her anymore. Carol was sent away for many weeks over which time we found out that what she said was true. When I heard this news it felt like someone had slapped me, unexpectedly, right in the face. For all the time Carol was telling me these sordid tales of her and her brother, I had stopped myself from believing them. Such a thing was not possible in my world and therefore I convinced myself of their fallacy. The buzz of gossip died down, there seemed to have been something lost when we found out the reality of the matter; no one wanted to speak of it anymore. Carol was being erased from our entire memory.
Then one day Carol came back. We were shocked, how dare she come back after what she did. I refused to talk to her, to even look at her. She was damaged; a reminder of what life outside of our suburban one could be like. Many, if not all, took my approach of handling the situation and ignored her entire presence, more from fear than anything else. At the end of the day a few of my friends and I were collecting our coats and books from the classroom when our teacher came up to us. We all admired her, for she was our only teacher that wasn’t a nun. We all looked up at her in awe until we heard the rage in her voice, at which point we stared at the floor. ‘How dare you?’ she yelled, ‘How dare you do such a thing to that poor girl. I want you to talk to her like a normal person, like nothing has happened. Do you understand me?’ We each of us nodded our heads emphatically. Although I didn’t quite understand what she meant at the time, the respect of this teacher meant a lot to me and I would have done anything to gain it. So for the rest of my days at school I treated Carol as if nothing had happened and nothing was ever said about the incident.
Carol married Jeanine’s brother and is an interior designer. I learned a valuable lesson from her that year. I learnt when to keep and when to tell a secret.
Based on a true story. Hillside, New Jersey 1963.