Reading Online Novel

The Silver Star(56)







I was shocked. I thought the story was a big deal, certainly bigger news than a five-pound tomato, and it involved a Byler heavyweight. Sure, people were gossiping about it, but they didn’t know the real story. I’d been counting on the whole town reading in official detail exactly what had happened. I thought that was one way to punish Maddox and make sure he never did it again.

The article didn’t even say “attempted rape,” as if the editors were afraid of spelling it out. “Assault.” What did that mean? It could mean anything or nothing. From what people were going to read in the Byler Daily News, Maddox might as well have shoved some girl who sassed him in a parking-lot argument over a fender bender.

The rest of the day was just awful. In the halls, kids stared at me, looking away as soon as I caught their eye. Girls whispered and giggled and pointed. Guys smirked and in mocking, cheeping voices said things like “Help! Help! I’m being molested!”

On my way to English class, I ran into Vanessa. She saw me and shook her head. “Going to the law,” she said. “Such a white thing to do.”

“What would you do?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t be getting into no car with Mr. Maddox in the first place,” she said. “You climb in the backseat with the boss man, you got to expect something’s going to happen. That’s just the way it is.”


Liz decided she wasn’t going back to school the next day, either. In fact, she said, she was not leaving the house until the bruises on her face had gone away. It was Friday, the day after the article, and things in the halls at school went from bad to worse. Kids kept snickering behind my back, throwing wadded-up paper at my head, and tripping me.

The football game that night was against the Orange Hornets. I hadn’t been much help to the pep squad that week, and Liz had hardly been in the mood to concoct any crowd-rousing rhymes or puns. At the beginning of the week, I had come up with “Orange You Scared?” but Terri Pruitt, the pep squad adviser, thought it might leave some kids scratching their heads. Still, the posters got made—the slogan was “Swat the Hornets”—and on Friday the whole school gathered in the gym for the weekly pep rally.

When it came time for me and Vanessa to rile up the seventh-graders so our class could win the spirit stick, we walked out onto the gym floor and started pumping our fists in the air. We got no reaction from the crowd. Most of the kids sitting in the bleachers were just staring, as if they couldn’t believe I had the nerve to be out there. I kept trying to rev them up, and a few kids cheered halfheartedly, but then there was a boo, then a few more boos. Then the trash started coming—spit wads, a bag of Corn Nuts, pennies, a roll of Certs. I glanced at Vanessa. She was pushing right through it, wearing the same steely expression I’d seen on her sister’s face after she got hit with the soda cup during the football game. I tried to follow Vanessa’s example, ignoring the trash and the booing, but it only got louder and the cheering died out altogether, and I could see it was pointless to continue. I walked off the floor, leaving Vanessa to shake the spirit stick on her own.

Terri Pruitt was standing by the door. “Are you all right, Bean?” she asked.

I nodded. “But I think I’m quitting the pep squad.”

She squeezed my shoulder. “It’s probably for the best,” she said.


That afternoon, before I boarded the bus in the parking lot for the ride home, a few boys from the hill started crowding around me, shoving me with their shoulders, and saying things like “I’m Jerry Maddox. Are you scared of me?” A teacher saw what was happening but looked away. Joe Wyatt also saw what was happening, and he came over.

“Hey, cuz, how you doing?” he said. Then he turned to the boys. “You all know she’s my cousin, don’t you?”

The boys backed off, but they had kept me from catching my bus, so Joe offered to walk me home. “Some people are jerks,” he said.

We walked along in silence for a while. It was a crisp November afternoon, and out of town, on the road to Mayfield, you could smell the woodsmoke drifting from the farmhouse chimneys. “If you want to talk about it all, you can,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk about it all, we can talk about chestnuts.”

By then the last thing I wanted to do was rehash the whole mess. “Let’s talk about chestnuts,” I said.

It was the time of the year for gathering chestnuts, Joe said. Most chestnut trees had died out during the great blight, but he knew where a few survivors were holding on up in the hills. After he gathered the chestnuts, his mom roasted them over a fire he made in an old oil drum. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, “we should go get us some chestnuts.”