Somewhere Between Luck and Trust

“She’s still not planning to bring him with her, then?”

“For now he’s settled with her cousin in Mars Hill, but she’ll be close enough to visit. She has a car. It’s already parked at the Goddess House. Taylor and I drove to Yancey County and got it, along with her clothes and everything else that had been stored for her. There wasn’t a lot. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anybody who has so little to show for her life. She’s so alone.”

Georgia knew exactly how that felt, although for three decades now, she hadn’t been alone herself. She had Samantha and Edna, and in the past year, she had developed strong friendships with a small group of women who had banded together to see what kind of difference they could make in the world. The difference was extraordinary, but nobody who had faced the world without support ever forgot how frightening a place it could be.

She was nodding, which she realized didn’t help. “Then get her settled, and Edna and I will drive up after school. We’ll bring groceries.”

“I like her,” Samantha said, just before she hung up. “Cristy’s hard to get to know, and she shares as little as she can get away with. But there’s something about her.”

Georgia dropped her cell phone back in her purse just as the noise in the hallway began again. Shaking her head she made her way through the tidy outer office, lifted the pass-through at the end of the counter and headed out the door, just in time to see Dawson Nedley skateboarding toward the front entrance.

She stood in the middle of the hallway, arms folded, and when he turned and started back, he saw her.

For a moment it looked as if Dawson planned to simply scoot to one side and continue to the other end without so much as a hello, but at the last moment he jumped off the board and grabbed it before it could continue the trip without him. He jammed it, wheels still spinning, under an arm and cocked his head, as if to ask, Is there a problem?

“There are so many things wrong here,” she said.

He shrugged. Dawson, a junior, was dark-haired, dark-eyed and tan from hours working on his family’s farm. On the rare occasions when he smiled, he was a pleasure to look at, lean and strong and growing taller every day. She imagined he would easily top six foot this year and just keep going.

Most of the time, though, Dawson’s scowl was the most noticeable aspect of his face. Lots of teenagers were angry, for a variety of reasons, some of them as mundane as curfews or zits. Dawson took anger to a new level, or at least he seemed to. To look at him, anyone would think the boy’s fury was about to boil over into something destructive. Today no one who walked through school doors anywhere had forgotten the lessons of Columbine.

Georgia knew better than to be taken in by appearances. She believed, backed up by psychological testing and the careful monitoring of his teachers, that Dawson was only a threat to himself. Not that the boy was suicidal. There was no hint of that. He was simply determined to destroy any possible hope for a satisfying future.

Dawson’s IQ was in the genius range. He read voraciously and could, if it suited him, quote long passages from Sartre and Camus, as well as Bob Dylan and entire episodes of South Park. When he wasn’t harvesting hay or feeding chickens, he was teaching himself Latin or Chinese for fun. His parents were pleasant, churchgoing people who wanted the best for him, but so far nobody had been able to get through to him. Dawson sabotaged every effort. He refused to turn in papers or homework. He never completed projects. If a test seemed silly, he turned in a blank page. He was determined to ruin his life.

The skateboarding was an excellent example.

“How did you get in?” Georgia asked.

“The way I always do.” He paused, and when she didn’t respond, he elaborated. “Through the front door.”

“Our fault, then. But what are you doing here so early?”

“You know us farmer types. Up with the roosters.”

“There are no roosters in this hallway.”

“I figured if I got here early, my father couldn’t find anything else for me to do at home.”

That, she suspected, was the truth.

“So you came complete with skateboard?” she asked.

He shrugged again.

She held out her hand. “No skateboards at BCAS.”

“The rules here get dumber and dumber.”

“Don’t hang yourself on this one.”

“Who am I hurting, anyway?”

“Dawson, it’s clear to everybody at this school that you try to deflect your bad behavior by arguing. I won’t play that game, and neither will your teachers. Hand me the skateboard.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to store it for you until the end of next week, when you can petition me to get it back.”

“Are you fu—” He caught himself. “Are you kidding me?”

“Pay attention. I don’t kid.”

She watched him debate with himself. She imagined the colorful conversation inside his head. The boy was rapidly going through all the alternatives and consequences, and he wouldn’t miss a one.

Scowling, he held out the board.

“Here’s an alternate solution,” she said when the skateboard, scuffed and well used, was tucked under her arm. “Tony, the custodian, is mopping the kitchen. I’m sure the lunchroom could use a good mopping, too. Ask him to bring out another mop, and the two of you can finish the job together.”

“If I wanted to do stupid chores, I would have stayed home.”

“If you want to get your skateboard back a couple of days earlier, you’ll make the effort. Otherwise I’ll escort you outside now, where you can wait until the doors open officially.”

“It’s cold out there.” He was wearing a thin flannel shirt. If he had a jacket, he’d left it in the pickup he drove to school.

“Then I’d factor that into my decision,” she said.

“You don’t like me, do you?”

“What have you shown me that I could like?” She asked the question without rancor.

“Don’t they pay you for that?”

“They pay me to educate you.”

“I—”

She held up her hand. She’d let Dawson engage her when she shouldn’t have. The boy was a master, but she was back on track.

“We’re done here,” she said. “Make your decision.”

Muttering, he started toward the hallway that bisected this one and led to the kitchen. She considered following to be sure he arrived at his destination, but she decided when she saw Tony later in the day, she would ask him.

Hopefully when he was emptying her trash.

The clock overhead claimed it wasn’t yet 7:00 a.m. She’d had two confrontations, and the day ahead of her promised more. But her day wouldn’t be as difficult as Samantha’s, or for that matter, the young woman Cristy’s, who would be leaving the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women after eight months. She wondered what Cristy was thinking now. She wondered what Samantha had seen in Cristy that had convinced her that living at the Goddess House would be the right thing to help the girl heal.

She wondered if Cristy Haviland felt any remorse for walking out of a jewelry store in Yancey County with a diamond engagement ring concealed in her shopping bag. Had giving birth to a son in prison, a son quickly taken away from her, helped her see that the straight and narrow might be a better path through life?