What Boys Learn

Prologue

I never meant to see what was in his drawer.

I was never a mother who snooped.

Not even when I thought a little snooping would help me better understand my stoic son. No—I’d drawn the line. Trust was more important.

In our household of two, trust meant that drawers and doors stayed closed. And yet, there I was on an unseasonably warm spring day, sweating through my tank top and baggy gym shorts as I packed up the apartment, alone, venturing into Benjamin’s room to take care of the chore he’d neglected while he was off at the pool attending a lifeguard-hiring information session. It was all he talked about—when he talked. Improving his swimming. Getting a pool job. Saving money, most likely for a car, though any expenditure that promised greater independence would do.

I pushed the toothed edge of the tape dispenser against the newly assembled box to bite off the final piece of tape, feeling irritated by how little he’d done but also guilty that we had to move at all. The new place was only two miles away from our old apartment, and it wasn’t a step up by any measure. No backyard. Smaller bedrooms. One bathroom instead of one and a half. Dark.

I dragged the empty box next to Benjamin’s bureau and pulled the drawer open. The T-shirts inside were folded more neatly than my own. He’d been selectively tidy since turning fourteen, insistent on doing his own laundry, obsessive about showers.

I pulled out a stack of shirts and flopped them into the big box, grabbed the next stack . . . and then I looked down, puzzled by a satiny feel. I held up the skimpy fabric with two fingers. Sexy. Small. Barely enough to cover any woman’s private parts, front or back.

I winced, wishing I’d left this box untouched. But then the feeling shifted, from embarrassment to something even less comfortable. As far as I knew, Benjamin had never had a girlfriend.

On closer inspection, the underwear didn’t look new. Possibly not clean, either. I didn’t think—not that it would have alarmed me—that he was curious about cross-dressing. Maybe he’d ordered them online from some woman who wore them for five minutes and then sold them at ten times their value. But Benjamin always laughed at people who fell for online gambits like that. Plus, he was broke. Like his mom.

The more likely answer was one I didn’t want to name. With the underwear still in my hand, I took three steps back, trying to block the picture that was forming. It was my fault for looking. My fault for thinking . . . and there was that ringing again, the edges of my vision beginning to darken.

A truck rattled past the open bedroom window and I startled, fist closing tighter around the satin souvenir, if that’s what it was. I didn’t like that word. Souvenir. Or trophy. Even so, I left Benjamin’s room and hurried to my own, headed for the closet and that shoebox I’d kept for years, the place for things that couldn’t be forgotten.


Chapter 1

“Think of it as a mental health break,” our dean, Kimberly Duplass, told me ten minutes into our private emergency meeting, tugging at the lapels of her white bouclé cardigan as she boosted herself higher in her chair.

“I’m sorry. A mental health break for who?”

“For you, Abby.”

I loosened my grip on the dented folder in my lap. Inside was the printout of a speech I expected to deliver to an all-school assembly the next morning, reminding students to be kind and observant, to watch out especially for anyone who needed to talk. Summit High was a community, albeit a new one. The death of a student was a shock, but we’d get through this.

“I’m confused,” I said to Duplass. “You want me to go home early? We have a lot to do, the sooner the better.”

Glancing at her cell phone, which was vibrating for the third time in several minutes, she said, “A well-executed plan is better than a hasty one.”

I could hear the air quotes around that phrase, like she was repeating a line from an entrepreneur’s how-to book. Summit was like that—businessy, private, highly focused on the bottom line.

“Hold on, let me take this.”

Behind the dean, tall windows framed a sun-dappled lawn backed by giant oak trees. Students on break from their exams gathered in loose circles. Girls laughed and brushed back long strands of gleaming hair. Boys roughhoused and fist-bumped. None of them looked devastated. But wait until they went home and lost themselves in their phones, where gossip and misinformation would distort their first suppressed pangs of grief. They hadn’t assimilated the news yet. I hadn’t, either. Come back, I wanted to say. Never mind an assembly tomorrow. We needed to round them up and answer their questions now.

Duplass gave short, reassuring replies during her phone call—yes, of course, absolutely. After hanging up, she explained, “Worried parent. A mother who was texted a few minutes ago by her daughter. She wants to know that we’re doing enough.”

“My concern exactly.”

I started to open the folder, but Duplass held up a hand. “Don’t forget, you’re not the only one our students can turn to. You’re part of a team. A growing team.”

A good friend of the dean’s, Dr. Shields—an MD/PhD, Duplass had already said twice, as if I didn’t understand what psychiatrist meant—would be sharing my office beginning tomorrow. To prepare for his arrival, I’d been asked to empty one drawer and half of a small bookcase. I still didn’t understand how we’d collaborate or why he needed shelf space for only four more days of school, unless it was to display honors or publications to impress visiting parents.

“Is he a grief expert?” I asked. “Does he work with teens?”

“He’s a friend of the board.”

That’s what mattered. Not just his pedigree, which outshone my recent master’s degree in counseling.

“Graduation is days away,” I reminded her, as if she needed reminding. “There isn’t enough time for him to establish trust. A lot of kids won’t talk to him.”

I paused, on the edge of an uncomfortable insight. A lot of kids won’t talk to him. Is that what Duplass and the board actually wanted? To prevent a long line to the counseling office from forming, so she could assure parents that every needy student was being seen and there was nothing more to be done?

“You’re being defensive,” she said. “That’s not helpful. Take the afternoon. Go home. I imagine you need some time to think about your role in this.”

I folded my hands across my lap to stop them from trembling. “I didn’t have any suspicions that Sidney Mayfield was considering harming herself.”

“As you’ve made clear.”

“No. I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not saying I missed the signs. I’m saying there were no signs.”

“Every kid has problems.”

“Small ones. Nothing she couldn’t handle.”

“But she had weekly sessions with you.”

“Which is why I can say it with confidence.” I kept remembering the way Sidney looked when she dropped into the comfy blue chair in my office corner, looking relaxed and content, like she’d only come to show me her latest high-cadence Spotify playlist so that I’d have better music for my biweekly runs. “No apparent depression or anxiety. No agitation. No long-term preconditions. No self-injuring behaviors, not even . . . not even—”

“Abby.”

“Not even promiscuity. No sign that she wanted attention.”

“Wasn’t meeting with you regularly exactly that—a sign of wanting attention?”

Grace, the dean’s secretary, rapped on the door once, opening it a crack to whisper, “He’s here.”