Page 64 of Dear Debbie

“I heard he got an email calling him to the principal’s office,” Izzy continues her story without missing a beat. “I guess he was in trouble for something—I don’t know what. But we all heard the crash when his car hit. The whole school shook.”

Wow, I must have really freaked him out with my story about being a sex offender.

“Is he dead?” I ask.

Izzy just shakes her head, and I can hear Lexi sniffling quietly in the back seat. I guess nobody knows. But the fact that an ambulance came seems to indicate that he’s probably still alive. For the moment.

“Lexi honey?” I say. “Are you all right?”

She doesn’t answer me. Instead, she just sobs, tucked in on herself. I don’t understand why she’s crying. That asshole was blackmailing her. He was threatening to ruin her whole life.

We drive in silence the rest of the way home, broken only by the sound of Lexi’s sobs. I don’t know what to say, and my experience as the mother of teenage girls is that everything I say is always wrong, so it’s better to keep my mouth shut. As they say, it’s better to remain quiet and have your teenagers think you’re an idiot than open your mouth and say something they can text their friends about.

When we get back into the house, Izzy does that thing where she walks through the door and scrolls through her phone at the same time. After a moment, she looks up.

“He’s alive,” she says as she perches herself on the edge of the sofa. “They took him to the hospital.”

“That’s good,” I say, and I mean it. Well, kind of.

“But he’s badly hurt,” she reports. “Jana says he broke his neck.”

At this new revelation, Lexi bursts into hysterical tears. Shockingly, she’s even more upset than she was last night. Her face is buried in her hands, and her whole body is shaking with sobs.

I don’t understand it. Zane was horrible. He tricked her into giving him naked pictures of her, and he threatened to show them to the whole school. He was blackmailing her into having sex with him. What part of this makes her sad that he’s hurt?

“Lexi honey.” I put my arm around her shoulders to attempt to comfort her. “Why are you crying?”

“Why am I crying?” she repeats incredulously. “My boyfriend has a broken neck!”

“But last night, you had a problem,” I point out, “and now it’s fixed.”

Lexi looks up at me with her tearstained face, which is frozen in an expression of horror. “Not like this,” she chokes out.

With those words, she squirms out of my half embrace and runs up the stairs two at a time. The last thing I hear is the door to her room slamming shut so hard that the windows rattle.

Well, I don’t get it. She had a problem, and I fixed it. I wish somebody had done that for me when I was in trouble. Maybe my whole life would have been different.

In any case, I don’t regret what I did. I never told Zane to get drunk and smash his car into the school, for God’s sake. Yes, I did indicate how bad it would be to be labeled a sex offender, and I’m sure when he got that email from the principal, it spooked him. But he was the one who crashed his car. I didn’t have my foot on the gas. Everything that happened was simply…karma.

52

Lexi doesn’t leave her room for the rest of the morning and the early afternoon.

I check on her a few times. I knock on the door, and when she snaps at me to go away, I feel better. If she is angry at me, that’s a healthier emotion than feeling sad over that loser who she never should’ve been dating in the first place. He was never good enough for her. She’s an honor student taking four AP classes! As far as I can tell, he barely even bothered to go to class at all, and I overheard him mocking her for wanting to stay in to study.

Good riddance.

I intermittently check the news for updates on Zane. The website for the Hingham Household is still just porn, but there are plenty of other news articles about the accident. All the articles I find confirm the story I heard from Izzy. They don’t mention that Zane had been called to the principal’s office for a disciplinary issue, but I imagine that’s something they’re trying to keep quiet.

The articles also confirm that he is very much alive, although his injuries do sound serious. One of them mentions a broken neck and says that he has been rushed to emergency surgery.

At about two o’clock, I head upstairs to check on my girls.

I find Izzy studying in her bedroom. She is sitting cross-legged on her bed with a pencil in her mouth. It’s actually something that Cooper does, and I find it weirdly endearing that she has picked up this habit from him, either from environment or genetics.

“Izzy,” I say. “I have to run an errand. I’ll be back in about two hours.”

“Okay,” she says without looking up.