Dissonance - Chapter 37

Although there was no way Kat could have missed what was going on, what with living in the same house as me and the multiple private conversations I kept having with Mrs. Phillips, she hadn’t asked me about it yet. At first, I just wanted adult opinions and then I almost didn’t want to face what I’d done, so I kept pretending everything was fine. After Mom left, I realized I couldn’t keep doing that.

Things would get a lot more serious very soon, and I needed to face up to that. Part of facing up to it was telling my best friends what was going on.

I knew that Hanna had mostly morning classes on Tuesday and Thursday, so when Kat got home, I told her I wanted us to get on a call with Hanna. While there are a lot of problems living with someone like Kat, what with her condition and all, especially when I was the one she was fixated on, it did make things like this easier. She didn’t ask questions or say she was busy. She just set aside what she was doing and waited for me to call Hanna.

“Hey, how’s the rock star? I just got out of class.”

It felt so odd to hear her being chipper and happy. I guess when your life is falling apart, you want to believe it’s happening to the rest of the world too. Someone else being happy almost made it feel like my life wasn’t all that important. I knew that wasn’t fair to Hanna, but it was hard not to have that feeling.

“Do you have a second to talk? I have Kat with me, and I wanted to talk to both of you at the same time.”

“This sounds serious,” she said, the playful tone gone.

“It is.”

“Hold on,” she said, and I heard rustling and the noise in the background started to fade away as I waited. “Okay. What’s up?”

“You both know I’ve been having problems with my dad. I spent a lot of time this week talking to Chef and your mother, and I’ve decided to file for emancipation. I talked to Mr. Eaves and after going over everything that could happen, I asked him to file the petition. He filed this morning, and I told my mom earlier tonight.”

“What does that mean, exactly?” Hanna asked, sounding very serious. “I know what emancipation is, but what is it going to mean for you.”

“If I’m granted it, my parents lose guardianship over me, and for all legal matters I’ll be treated as an adult. I will be able to sign contracts in my name, open bank accounts, and so on.”

“Have you talked to Kent?”

“Not yet, but he’s already started making comments about Dad interfering with my schedule. He said they don’t normally sign minors for this very reason, so if they are able to start dealing with me directly, instead of through my parents, and especially my Dad, I think they’ll be happy.”

“How did your mom take it?” Kat asked, looking at me with sad eyes.

It wasn’t surprising that Hanna’s first thought was about what this would to do my career and Kat’s was about my family. Hanna was always the more serious of the two, focused on practical matters, while Kat had always been more sensitive. Considering the parallels with her own family problems, including having to face her father in court, it made sense she’d go there first.

“Not well. She was mostly angry at me for not finding another way to work things out and thinks I should find a way to live with things the way they are.”

“She said that?” Hanna asked, incredulously.

“Not directly. She said she didn’t think this was necessary. When I pointed out all the ways it was necessary and how the only other solution was for her to kick Dad out for good, she said that wasn’t possible. She left here angry.”

“I’m so sorry, Charlie,” Kat said, putting an arm around me.

“Thanks, although right now I’m more angry about it than sad. I was sad all this week, but I gave Mom one last chance to see my side, and she still won’t. I can’t force her to be responsible.”

“No, you can’t. What did Chef and Mr. Eaves think?” Hanna asked.

“Chef is the one who brought up the idea, but didn’t want me to rush into it. He’s more concerned with how I will handle the fallout. I believe Mr. Eaves thinks we have a good case, but you know how he is. He won’t commit to anything specific, just in case it’s taken as a promise or something. He also warned me that things were going to get worse. Dad should get the official summons tomorrow or Monday, but he probably already knows by now.”

“How long will this take?” Hanna asked.

“About six weeks.”

“That’s a very long time. He can cause a lot of damage between now and then.”

“I know. I asked Mr. Eaves if there was anything we could do about it, but he said there was a limit to how much we could do while they are still my guardians. I’m basically screwed. The best I can do is try to keep everything patched together and going until I get the emancipation.”

“Have you thought about what happens if they say no?” Hanna, ever practical, asked.

“Yes … No … I don’t know. If the courts say no, things will get very bad for me for the next year and a half. I almost certainly will lose my record contract. Maybe I end up in CPS, since one of the things the court might do is have them look into the abuse allegations, or I guess attempted abuse allegations, I’ve made. If that happens, hopefully they’ll decide to place me with Mrs. Phillips, since Kat was already placed here.”

“Or they might not. That could all be very bad,” Hanna said.

“I know, but if I do nothing, that’s what’s going to happen anyway, or I’ll take it a step too far and actually kill him, and end up in prison.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Kat said.

“You don’t know how close I came last weekend. I was very, very close. If I hadn’t pulled back at that last second, I’d be in jail right now.”

“You need to stay away from him,” Hanna said.

“I know. I knew it then. I just lost my head.”

“Next time something happens, call me first. Or get Kat. We’ll keep you from doing something stupid.”

“I’ll try. It’s just getting harder to keep myself under control.”

“Have you talked to Chef about that?” Hanna asked.

“Yes. He’s started me on a whole meditation thing. At this moment I’m not sure it will work, but we’ll see.”

“You know we love you, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, as Kat squeezed me with her arm around me, letting me know she agreed with Hanna.

“I know this is going to be really hard, but we’re here for you. If you need me to come home, just say the word. If you want me to ask for some kind of pause on my enrollment or whatever, so I can come home and be there full-time, I’ll do it.”

“The hell you will. I feel guilty enough over my family falling apart and you messing up your plans would kill me. Besides, I have your mom here. She’s been a big help.”

“Charlie, I’m serious. You are more important than college or anything else. I’m not talking about your music career. I’m talking about your life. Your father is a violent man and this is the kind of thing that could push him off the wagon. If he starts drinking again, it will get very bad, very fast. I don’t want you hurt or in jail, and considering how this is going to make him feel threatened, either could happen.”

“I know, but I think it will be okay. I’ll keep my distance from him as best I can. I asked Mom to come over and talk to me today, but your mother would call the cops if he showed up at our door. If I see him, I’ll go the other way.”

“Do it. I’m serious Charlie. You need to keep your head on straight, and stay away from him.”

“I’ll try.”

We stayed on the phone for another hour, just chatting. Thankfully, the topic moved away from my family crisis, after a while, and on to Hanna’s life at college. Things were going great for her at UNC. She liked her classes, most of her professors, and even her roommate. She’d also met a guy in the cafeteria the other day, and they’d been talking on and off. With all the drama here, it was nice to hear about someone’s life going well for a change.

***

The next news came from an unlikely source, however. Monday came and went, and I hadn’t heard from either Mom or Dad. Mr. Eaves texted me, while I was in school and my phone was off, to confirm that they’d been served with the summons, so the clock had started. I half expected Dad to show up at school ready to fight or demanding I take it back, but it was radio silence.

Instead, Cameron scared me out of my skin when he came up behind me in the parking lot as I was getting into my car. I didn’t see him when I’d looked around a moment before that, so he must have been running across the lot and I just missed him. I was already twisting his wrist and was a breath away from kneeing him in the face as he doubled over to relieve the pressure on that joint and I realized it was him, not someone attacking me.

“Sorry,” I said, letting him go and helping him pick up the stuff he’d dropped.

“Holy crap you’re fast,” he said, rubbing his wrist and taking a step back. “I knew that you know karate or whatever, but I hadn’t expected you to be like … wham! Next time I shouldn’t sneak up on you.”

“It’s my fault. I normally keep my head on a swivel, ever since last year with Aaron, but I’ve … anyway, I should have seen you and not overreacted. You must have hustled. Is everything okay?”

“I don’t know. You know how we had to take that SALT thing last week?”

I did, because it had taken the entire afternoon, which meant we got twice as much homework for the classes we missed. It had been set up like a test, with a question sheet and a Scantron, but instead of a test it was a huge number of questions about student habits. The whole first page, plus a lecture by the teacher administering the test, repeated over and over that everything in it was anonymous and it was important to give honest answers, because it determined how some money from the state would be applied to social programs and how much each school got from those programs.

I understood the need to make sure everyone knew the survey was anonymous once I looked at the questions. There were a bunch that were either innocuous or stuff the school would know anyway, like class choices, what kind of lunch program the kid used, extracurriculars, use of social services through the school, use of the reduced fee lunch program, and the like, but there was also a full page of questions that were anything but routine. How much drinking we did, drug use, sex, pregnancy, abortions, and birth control. Stuff I’m sure a lot of kids would not want to become common knowledge, especially if their parents might see it.

I didn’t drink, use drugs, or anything else that might raise eyebrows, but I did have to list a lot of other stuff that showed how very poor my family was, since the payments from the label had just started, so technically we were still living off of just Mom’s salary.

All-in-all, though, I couldn’t figure out why Cameron would be particularly interested in that. It all got bundled up and was sent to the state, according to the teacher, so it didn’t really matter what we put on it.

“Yeah. So?”

“They wanted me to do a story about it for the paper. Get a copy of the questions, talk about what the state would do with it, how they were assured us it was anonymous, how they sent it back out that day sealed by each teacher so no one’s information was identified, and so on. The office was slammed when I got there during newspaper class to ask about it and Mrs. Morgan had a bunch of people in there, trying to get everything sorted, so she just pointed me to the room they use for keeping documents or whatever, and told me where to look for the unused copies of the survey. I was in there by myself and I saw something that looked like one of the surveys in this folder on top of one of the file cabinets. I thought it might be what I was looking for, so I peeked inside. I mean, what harm could it do? They told us all of the filled-out sheets were sent out to the state the same day.”

“Okay, what was in the folder?”

“The survey Scantron in the folder actually had SALT Survey written at the top of it, unlike the random blank ones we were given to fill out, so that’s how I knew what it was. And it was a photocopy of one of those surveys, with the pages stapled together since it wasn’t printed on the front and back. There wasn’t only one, either. There were like two dozen of them.”

“Maybe they were trial tests or something, examples for the teachers of how they were to be filled out.”

“Nope. They were all different. They also had NCS numbers handwritten on each one, and I mean written on the copy, since the number was in ink and not a photocopy of the writing.”

Each student was given an NCS number, which I thought stood for North Carolina Student number, which was used instead of social security numbers to track students through the system. I guess they used it instead of social security numbers because, besides being used for a student’s file, we also used it to log onto the online portal where we could check our grades as well as our school email account or basically anything else involving the school.

“I thought they were anonymous? Why would that be written on each Scantron? Were they all different?”

“I don’t know, and yes, they were all different. I don’t have a list of IDs, so I don’t know whose Scantrons these are, but someone made copies of several kids’ answers and labeled them so they knew which belonged to who.”

“Could it have been an accident? Maybe a test of some kind before we actually did it? Or maybe they needed extra Scantrons and used those for a class or something.”

“Maybe. I don’t know, although those scenarios all sound really flimsy.”

“Yeah. So what are you going to do?”

“That’s what I came here to ask you. What should I do?”

“How the hell should I know?! Have you talked to anyone in administration?”

“Wouldn’t someone in the administration have to have done this? I mean, besides the fact that we watched the teachers seal them inside envelopes, they would have kept them all together and taken them to the office. These were in the office storeroom. Students aren’t normally in there. I wouldn’t have been if Mrs. Morgan wasn’t so busy.”

“That’s a good point. I guess I’d like to think it was something innocent, because any other explanation would be very bad.”

“I know.”

“Man, this is something for you to figure out. I’m really sorry. Normally I’d be right there trying to help you, but you’ve come to me during one of the worst weeks of my life, and I have too much going on. I’m really sorry, but I just can’t deal with anything else right now.”

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

That’s what I liked about Cameron. He could have something he was incredibly focused on, but if a friend needed help, he’d drop everything and give them his attention.

“No. I appreciate it, but it’s really personal stuff and I don’t want to talk about it right now. Besides, this seems like it could be really important. You need to follow up on this. Just be careful. Some of the administration can be … let’s just say they don’t always do things in the best interest of the students.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Talk to your editor. If you trust him, talk to your teacher advisor. See what they say. You’re really smart, Cameron. I know you can investigate this and find out what’s going on.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea. I probably should have gone to them first, but when I saw those surveys I knew I needed to tell someone, and yours was the first name that came to mind.”

“I appreciate that. Like I said, any other week, I’d be Robin to your Batman.”

“We both know if one of us was the sidekick, it’d be me, but don’t worry about it. I appreciate you getting me pointed in the right direction.”

“Hey, I won’t be overwhelmed like this forever. If you run into any problems and want to bounce ideas off of someone, come find me. I’ll always at least listen.”

“Thanks, Charlie,” he said, taking the stuff I’d picked up from me and heading back to school with a little wave.

I stood there for a second watching him go, my brain churning. It was a weird mystery, that was for sure. Part of me wanted to go with him and find out what was going on, because if a teacher did have that information, it was a massive breach of trust. Instead, I just shook my head. No, I needed to get to practice. Dad knew what days we practiced and if he was going to do something today, he might decide to show up there to do it.

***

Someone was waiting at practice with everyone else, but it wasn’t Dad. There was a woman, who looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties, wearing dirty jeans, a mostly buttoned flannel shirt over a white undershirt, with tied back long brown hair, standing off by the amps when I walked into the garage.

“Sup?” she said with a head nod, I guess noticing me staring.

“Uhh … hey,” I said and looked to Seth who gave me an eye roll, which wasn’t particularly helpful in explaining who the hell this woman was.

What was helpful was Lyla walking out carrying a beer. She handed it to the woman, putting a hand on her waist so it rested on the older woman’s hip. The gesture was one of those not really overt forms of PDA but was still incredibly intimate, and not something you would do if you weren’t involved with the person.

Of course, considering Lyla was the person in question, involved had a very wide range of meanings.

“Hey, Charlie, this is Tabitha. Tabitha, this is Charlie.”

“Hey, man,” she said, reaching out her hand for a handshake. “I’ve seen you guys play at the Blue Ridge a bunch of times. You are really good.”

“Thanks,” I said, surprised by the strength of her grip.

“We started talking after the show on Sunday, at least until Chef kicked us out at two.”

“She’s something,” Tabitha said, giving Lyla a smile.

“She really is,” I agreed.

“I hope it’s okay I invited her to watch us practice,” Lyla said.

Lyla never asked permission for anything. Ever. I didn’t know what her asking now indicated, but it definitely meant something. The age difference was a little wider than I expected, although considering Lyla was over twenty, it probably wasn’t more than five or six years and definitely under ten. I had to hand it to Lyla; she didn’t seem to have a type. I’d watched her hit on the widest range of women I’d ever seen, crossing age, ethnicity, and socio-economic status without even seeming to notice.

“Hey, I’ve had Sydney sit in a ton of times and Cameron followed us around for like a week. Who am I to complain?”

“See, told you he’d be cool with it.”

It only took me a couple minutes to get over their age difference and that Tabitha was a bit more ‘rough and tumble’ than the girls Lyla usually liked to date. She was actually pretty funny and got along with everyone really well. We found out she worked the morning shift at the factory, which I guess explained the smudged clothes. Mom worked a crossover between the first and second shifts when the offices were open, and through her. I knew basically when the different shifts got off. She would have come here just after her shift ended. Considering how hard some of the people down there worked, that said something about how much this girl liked Lyla.

The thing that did throw me was how Lyla was responding to her. Lyla was usually very physical with the girls she brought around and wasn’t afraid of a PDA, but her physicality had always been sexual, or almost sexual, in nature, almost like she used it as foreplay. With Tabitha, she was still very touchy, but it was noticeably different. Gone was the hand on the butt. Instead, she would go to Tabitha, whenever we stopped to make changes or take a break, and lean into her, putting a hand on her shoulder or around her waist.

It was honestly kind of cute. Maybe our wild child was growing up.