We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [181]
“And, uh—,” I stood, “the rumors about Vicki Pagorski. Think there’s anything to them?”
Ms. Rocco’s eyes clouded. “I don’t think that’s been established.”
“I mean, off the record. Is it credible. Assuming you know her.”
“Vicki is a friend of mine, so I don’t feel impartial—.” She once more put that eraser on her chin. “This has been a painful time for her.” That was all she would say.
Ms. Rocco saw me to the door. “I want you to give Kevin a message for me,” she said with a smile. “You tell him I’m onto him.”
I’d often nursed the same conviction, but I’d never have asserted it in such a cheerful tone of voice.
Anxious to avert legal action, the Nyack School Board held a closed disciplinary hearing at Gladstone High, to which only the parents of four of Vicki Pagorski’s students were invited. Trying to keep the event casual, they put the meeting in a regular classroom. Still the room sizzled with a sense of occasion, and the other three mothers had dressed up. (I realized I’d made terribly classist assumptions about Lenny Pugh’s parents, whom we’d never met, when I found myself scanning for overweight trailer-park trash in loud polyester to no avail. I later discerned that he was the banker-type in chalk-stripe, she the stunning, intelligent-looking redhead in understated gear that was clearly designer label, because it didn’t show any buttons. So we all have our crosses to bear.) The school board and that beefy principal, Donald Bevons, had assumed a set of folding chairs along one wall, and they were all scowling with rectitude, while we parents were stuck in those infantilizing school desks. Four other folding chairs were arranged on one side of the teacher’s desk at the front, where there sat two nervous-looking boys I didn’t know, along with Kevin and Lenny Pugh, who kept leaning over toward Kevin and whispering behind his hand. On the other side of the desk was seated, I could only assume, Vicki Pagorski.
So much for the powers of adolescent description. She was hardly a hag; I doubt she was even thirty. I would never have depicted her breasts as large or her keister as wide, for she had the agreeably solid figure of a woman who ate her Wheaties. Attractive? Hard to say. With that snub nose and freckles, she had a lost, girlish, innocent look that some men like. The drab dun suit was doubtless donned for the event; her friend Dana Rocco would have counseled against tight jeans and a low-cut shirt. But it’s too bad she hadn’t done anything about her hair, which was thick and kinky; it frizzed from her head in all directions and suggested a ditzy, frazzled state of mind. The glasses, too, were unfortunate: The round oversized frames gave her a pop-eyed appearance, inducing the impression of dumb shock. Hands twisting in her lap, knees locked tightly together under the straight wool skirt, she reminded me a bit of let-us-call-her-Alice at that eighth-grade dance immediately after Kevin whispered I-didn’t-want-to-know.
When the chairman of the school board, Alan Strickland, called the little group to order, the room was already unpleasantly quiet. Strickland said that they hoped to clear up these allegations one way or the other without landing this business in court. He talked about how seriously the board took this sort of thing and blathered on about teaching and trust. He emphasized that he didn’t want anything we said that evening leaving this room until the board decided what action to take, if any; the stenographer was taking notes for internal purposes only. Belying the rhetoric of informal chitchat, he explained that Miss Pagorski had declined to ask her attorney to be present. And then he asked Kevin to have a seat in the chair placed in front of the teacher’s desk and to just tell us in his own words what happened that afternoon in October in Miss Pagorski’s classroom.