“Tell me what, Timothy? You’re not going to get in trouble, but let’s get it out in the open.”
“I was online, okay?”
I ignored the sarcasm. “Good, thanks for telling me. Did you try to call anyone before you went online?”
We’d set up a buddy system, and each kid was supposed to call and at least discuss his urge to go into a chat room or porn site before giving in to it. To date, we hadn’t had much success. In other addiction-therapy programs the act of stopping to make the call worked well and I was still hoping it would have some effect here if I could get the kids to make the calls. The problem was these boys couldn’t understand what was wrong with what they were doing other than that adults were telling them they shouldn’t be doing it.
“No, I didn’t try to call anyone.” Timothy sounded irritated.
“Did you even think about calling?”
“What happened…wasn’t about me getting off. It was about what I saw.”
“What did you see?”
He was, once again, silent.
Amanda was playing with the edge of the Band-Aid she’d just affixed.
“Timothy, what did Jodi think you should tell me?”
“I saw something freaky online, okay? It was bad. Now, can we drop it?”
“Bad?”
“Oh, Jesus. No matter what anyone says, you have another question,” Hugh said impatiently.
“None of you have to answer any of my questions. Most of the time, you don’t. I know some of you guys don’t want to be here. In fact, I know you’d rather be anywhere else. But it’s nonnegotiable. Hugh, why do you think you’re here?”
“Because we go online.”
“Just go online?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“We go online too much. You think, everyone thinks, that we have no control.”
“When you are sitting there and you haven’t clicked the mouse yet, but you’ve typed in the URL of the porn site, what are you thinking about?”
He shrugged.
“It’s not a test, it’s just a question. Think about sitting there. The screen is on your homework, but the Web address of a porn site is typed in… You don’t have to click over…you don’t have to give in… What are you thinking?”
“It’s not about giving in,” Hugh said. “It’s just there. It’s so easy. Why shouldn’t I go? Who the hell am I hurting? That’s what I just don’t get about this. Who cares so much?”
I looked around the room, waiting to see if anyone was going to respond.
Ellen was watching him. They’d gone out. She was frowning. Pressing her lips together. Wanting to say something, holding back. “Ellen? Is there something you want to say?”
“If you can control it, how come you don’t?”
He didn’t answer.
Amanda lifted the corner of the Band-Aid and then pressed it back down. It was Barry who blurted out a response, his voice strident. “I’m not hurting anyone. None of us are. I like watching who’s online and there’s nothing wrong with it.”
He’d said hurting anyone.
Amanda continued her picking at the outer edges of the adhesive strip, lifting, pressing down, lifting.
“I know you’re not hurting anyone, Barry. I know none of you is intentionally hurting anyone.” I looked around the room, trying to make eye contact with each of them. Merry inched forward in her chair.
“I can’t…it’s hard to…I mean, I don’t want to have to do that stuff all the time to get someone to like me.”
“Do you mean sexual stuff?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Does it hurt, Merry?”
“Well, not like someone cut me. But even with what I did, it was still better to look at those girls than me. I don’t know. That sorta sucks.”
No one responded.
“You’re not hurting anyone, are you, Timothy?”
He didn’t respond.
“Do you think you’ve ever hurt anyone by going online?”
“Maybe,” he blurted out.
“How?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
His answer made no sense to me, but I didn’t want to stop and make him explain himself and risk damming him up.
“What should you have done?”
“I couldn’t. If I told anyone what I saw they’d know I’d gone online. Three strikes and I’m out. That’s my father’s fucking stupid rule. Shit. If you tell them now, I’ll be thrown out of here.”
“But I won’t. We have a deal in here, right? You can talk about whatever you want and I keep it confidential. I promised you all that in our first session and I haven’t broken that promise.”
Someone to Timothy’s left murmured something, but I ignored it.
“Timothy, what did you see?”
“No.” He said it too quickly.
The rest of them knew what he’d seen. They’d talked about it before the group, I sensed.
“Leave him alone,” Hugh said loudly.
“Why?”
Hugh, Timothy and Barry invariably looked out for one another in our sessions, defending one another if they felt I was being too tough on one of them. This time, both of the others were quiet.
“Why do you feel the need to protect Timothy from me?” I asked, pushing Hugh harder than I normally would.
Now Barry leaned forward; he clenched his hands together. “Leave him alone. He’s been going crazy.”
“I don’t want to leave him alone, I want to help.”
“It’s too late to help.” It was Amanda. “Again.”
“Why? What do you mean ‘again’?”
She turned to Timothy and they exchanged a pained glance.
“Amanda?”
Her fingers hadn’t stopped fussing with the Band-Aid.
“Do you think it would help Timothy if he told us what he saw?” I asked her.
“It doesn’t matter.” Her finger stopped playing with the Band-Aid. “Not anymore. No one can help.”
“You know, this is stupid,” Ellen said. “These guys don’t want us to help them. They don’t want anything from us. Except blowjobs. And even then, they keep watching the girls online. Right while we’re doing it to them. You might as well be dead…” She was hissing now.
Amanda’s eyes widened, frightened, pained. Her fingers worked the edge of the strip of plastic.
“Amanda, what is it?”
She shook her head back and forth. “Nothing.” And then with one fast jerk, she pulled off the adhesive, baring the line of dried blood.
Fourteen
Five hours later, my daughter was sitting at the island in the middle of the kitchen while I went through the refrigerator looking for something ready-made that I couldn’t ruin.
Having a late-night snack after Dulcie got home from the theater had replaced having dinner together. Now we talked over the day while she tried to come down after the performance.
“Hot chocolate or hot cider?” I asked.
“Hot chocolate. Definitely.”
I took out the milk and grabbed the powdered mix from the cabinet.
“Can’t we make it the real way?” She meant the way Nina taught her-melting quality chocolate and then adding enough milk to give it the right consistency.
She was already pulling out the double boiler. When I had remodeled the kitchen, I updated all the pots, pans and utensils. Everything was state-of-the-art. The appliances had stainless fronts, the floor and splashboard were white tiles with black diamond accents, and the countertops were granite. It was all very elegant. A chef’s dream. Except I wasn’t a chef. Far from it. In fact, I could barely manage to broil a chicken and hardly used a double boiler.
That’s the problem with being a Martha-wannabe but not having any intuitive homemaker skills. Sure, everything gleamed in my kitchen. You just stepped inside and imagined fresh pies cooling on a rack and homemade tomato sauce simmering on the stove. In reality, I ruined tuna fish out of a can with too much lemon juice, and overcooked frozen food.
Dulcie, on the other hand, was gifted in the kitchen, a talent she’d inherited from her paternal grandmother, and which her aunt Nina encouraged. Since the play had opened, I’d missed having her in the kitchen, egging me on, teasing me and saving dinner on more than one occasion.