The Good Ones by Polly Stewart

Author:Polly Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

16

October had come and gone before I realized that I was avoiding Sean at work. It had started as instinct, a passive merge into the track of my inclinations rather than a conscious choice. If I saw him coming down the hall, I would turn to the nearest staircase, telling myself that it was the quickest route back to my classroom. When we both had cafeteria duty, I managed to stay on the other side of the room, migrating toward a rowdy table whenever he seemed to be coming my way. He must have picked up on it, because he never popped into my classroom to crack jokes and remind the kids that the principal was their P-A-L, as he did with some of the other teachers. It seemed we kept our distance by mutual agreement, and I liked it that way.

Could things have turned out differently with us if I hadn’t been such an asshole? he’d asked that night at the Hideout, and I could admit now that the answer was probably yes. We might not have stayed a couple, but we would have kept in touch. After Lauren’s disappearance, we could have helped each other. I wasn’t naive enough to believe I could have saved him from addiction, but in those years when he was in and out of rehab, perhaps I could have been a support, some kind of stable, steady presence to set against the chaos.

Maybe we’d had a chance at that again when we’d come back into each other’s lives this summer, but I’d chosen Warren instead, and I knew the old Sean would have found that unforgivable. I was convinced that he’d find some way to make me feel his resentment, so I ducked him when I could, right up until Warren and I broke up.

Break up was how I thought of it, though the words were never said—no I need some space, no I guess we jumped into this too quickly. When Warren went upstairs without me after the visit from the detective, I walked back to my mom’s house in the dark and hadn’t seen him since. The story of the diamond earring, short on details, was covered on the front page of the local newspaper the next morning, and when I found an excuse to drive down Blue Ridge Road after school, I saw that the driveway had been blocked off with police tape. Lauren’s disappearance might not have been a national story, but the locals remembered it just fine, and now everyone had an opinion. “Somebody beat the shit out of her,” I heard Glenda Morris saying as I walked into the teachers’ lounge, echoing my own thought. “You got to hit a woman pretty hard to make her earring pop out.”

I waited for Detective McRae to make some kind of public statement, but weeks went by and no new stories appeared. Tender_Medusa didn’t respond to my private message, and Warren never apologized, his name moving farther and farther down on my list of recent texts.

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