Whisper Down the Lane, Clay Chapman [best short books to read txt] 📗

I had three skin grafts before I turned eight, she’d told me. The scars never went away. At some point, I decided to turn all that scar tissue into something powerful.

Tamara’s serpent slithers along my fingertips. I feel the scar, the scales of the snake’s body gliding up, winding around my neck, finally reaching my chin, my lips, forcing itself through.

DAMNED IF YOU DO

  SEAN: 1982

It began with a game of telephone.

Mr. Woodhouse called it something else to his kindergarteners. Whisper down the lane. That made him sound old, like some kind of fuddy-duddy. Then again, Mr. Woodhouse always had a funny way of talking. He made stuff sound more important than it was. He found poetry in the little things nobody else seemed to care about. You just had to look deeper. Look closely and see the potential for more.

The rules were simple: During circle time, everyone in class sat in a ring. One student whispered a phrase—Sean only eats the marshmallows in his Lucky Charms, for instance—into the ear of the student sitting next to them. That student then whispered what they heard into the ear of the next person. Then onto the next, and the next, a daisy chain of whispers, until the last student in the circle said the sentence to the student who initiated it. That first student then said the sentence out loud for the whole class to hear—Sean eats marsh men on the farm. Then the kids would all laugh and laugh at how a sentence could become something new. A fresh start.

These kids didn’t know that there had been a letter campaign against Lucky Charms. Some of their mothers had complained to the local Safeway that the marshmallows included symbols mixed in among the horseshoes and clovers. What kind of supermarket sells a breakfast cereal that peddles pagan propaganda? It’s right there on the shelves, next to the more wholesome cereals—like Frosted Flakes. These motivated mothers demanded that Safeway pull this satanic brand of breakfast food. They spent their Sunday afternoons after church in the parking lot, passing out flyers.

how safe are your children at safeway?

safeway is not the only way.

safeway is not safe.

There was a different game of telephone going on with the parents of Greenfield, spread through actual telephones. And the sentence had consequences.

Mr. Woodhouse bad-touched Matthew Saperstein.

When Matthew complained to his mother that Mr. Woodhouse had been mean to him in class, she sat her son down and insisted he explain. Matthew—Matty, as his mom always called him—was irritated at first. He had assumed he could gripe about Mr. Woodhouse and his stupid way of talking at the dinner table. She asked him if Mr. Woodhouse had yelled at him. Matty said no. She asked if he had been unfair. Matty said no. She asked if he had touched him. At that point, Matty asked if they could talk about something else, but Mrs. Saperstein was on high alert. She had been watching the news lately.

Matty’s best friend, Tommy, was also in Mr. Woodhouse’s class. Mrs. Saperstein and Mrs. Dennings were relatively close acquaintances, tied together by the occasional Saturday afternoon playdate. Mrs. Dennings’s phone number was written on their refrigerator door, along with several other mothers from the PTA. After The A-Team was over and Mrs. Saperstein had put Matty to bed, she picked up the phone and called straightaway.

Mrs. Saperstein and Mrs. Dennings talked for close to an hour. Tommy had wet his bed a few nights ago, which was so unlike him, and now Mrs. Dennings wondered out loud if Tommy might be anxious about something.

“Has anything changed at home?” Mrs. Saperstein asked.

“Not a thing,” Mrs. Dennings said. But as soon as the words left her mouth, she changed her mind. “You don’t think…” She couldn’t finish the sentence, the words curdling.

Mrs. Dennings knew two other mothers in their class, thanks to their tennis socials. She spoke to both Mrs. Cardiff and Mrs. Gilmore after she’d dropped Tommy off at his bus stop the following morning.

Mrs. Dennings’s conversation with Mrs. Cardiff didn’t last longer than twenty minutes. She mentioned Mr. Woodhouse, then asked if Mrs. Cardiff had noticed anything peculiar in her daughter’s behavior. Mrs. Cardiff thought it was strange and rather coincidental that Mrs. Dennings would mention it because, yes, as a matter of fact, she had noticed the slightest shift in Jenny’s behavior lately. She had begun waking up in the middle of the night from terrible dreams. Two nights in a row now. Never mind that Jenny had just watched Michael Jackson’s Thriller on MTV in the basement of her friend’s house while her parents were upstairs. The girls had asked if it was all right to watch it together. And why shouldn’t they? It was one of the Jackson 5. Wasn’t he that talented boy who sang “ABC” and “I’ll Be There”? Completely harmless.

Mrs. Dennings waited until after lunch to call Mrs. Gilmore, but Mrs. Cardiff got right on the phone with her husband at work. She pulled Mr. Cardiff out of a meeting in a complete panic. Mr. Cardiff did his best to calm his wife down, cooing soothing words into the receiver, but she was adamant that he call the headmaster immediately. No, she wouldn’t take it easy. She wanted Mr. Cardiff to fix this! This was their daughter’s safety they were talking about!

Mr. Cardiff had never been a fan of Mr. Woodhouse. He considered his daughter’s kindergarten teacher to be, as he explained to his golf buddies…well, a bit swishy. He griped on the green about what the headmaster should do about it. This fruity fella in their children’s midst. Teaching them lord knows what. Was he just going to let some faggot manhandle their kids?

By the time Mr. Cardiff had put in a call to the headmaster at Greenfield Academy, Mrs. Gilmore had personally phoned Mrs. Dellacort, Mrs. Blackmer, and Mrs. Evans.

By the time Mrs. Dellacort had gotten