Page 111 of What Boys Learn

“Okay. I get it.”

“Do you really, Benjamin? Do youget it?”

“They’d know you gave her a ride. You don’t want people to know you gave a teenage girl a ride. Because she’s too young. Maybe a runaway.”

He pinches the very middle of his forehead with two fingers, like he’s trying to find patience.

“She took a photo. Did you, also, take a photo?”

“No.”

“You left your phone at home, is that correct?”

I nod. It was the agreement. A stupid fucking agreement, but I understand. I don’t like social media, either.

“It’s my fault,” he says after he’s calmed down and he’s no longer got a death grip on the steering wheel. “I didn’t give you adequate instructions. I thought you might have . . .intuition.”

At least he’s apologizing.

“Christopher Weber had intuition,” he says. “Good looks. Charisma. Without that he wouldn’t have appealed to two pretty girls like Sidney and Izzy. But he was undisciplined. He didn’t understand hisextra. He went after two girls in the same social circle. Girls who lived close to where he worked. He left digital trails and visited one in a public motel where people could see them, for Christ’s sake, when he could have just as easily been in a car or in a park, at least until he knew what he wanted, at least until he knew what he was doing, what he needed from those girls, whether it was for them to lie still or not breathe or to be on the edge, almost not breathing, warm or cold. I don’t judge. What I can’t condone is a lack of self-knowledge, patience, caution. He was shitting where he planned to eat, Benjamin, do you understand what that means?”

It’s the longest thing he’s said all day.

“Shitting where he . . . planned to eat?”

“His work. His play. The two sides of his life. Too close. That foul motel was a mistake but it wasn’t the worst part. The worst part is where you first meet, that’s where people will first look. I shouldn’t have let him stay in the carriage house, even for a few nights. And the clothes and the weights he left behind—I never told him he could do that. I spent hours wiping down prints. I should have put a knife between his ribs the moment he showed up at the pool, looking for work. You’re not the only one who makes mistakes, Benjamin. I made the biggest mistake: investing in a loser.”

A state trooper passes on our left, slowly. No wonder all the cars in our lane have been going the speed limit.

“Wait. Sowereyou trying to help Christopher Weber get better?”

That’s why he’s so mad. His old patient did bad things. Stuff he wasn’t supposed to do.

Dr. C—I can’t keep calling himMatt—rolls his eyes. “Yes, I was trying to help him, Benjamin. Do better.Be better.”

“As in—not going after girls?”

He pinches his forehead again and does a strange sort of nasal groan.

“I’m sorry!”

He glares at me. “Don’t. Just, don’t. I know you’re smarter than you’re pretending to be.”

“Maybe I’m . . . not?”

He exhales through his nose. “Okay. Everything’s okay. We’ll take this more slowly.”

40

ABBY

“You’re being paranoid,” Robert said over the phone when I finally got him to pick up, halfway through Grove’s forty-minute lunch period. “I’m almost sorry I ever bad-mouthed him, if it’s just going to make you obsess.”

“You said something at Ray’s about his ex-wife.”

“There was some talk about their various disputes. She filed a restraining order.”

Curtis’s story had seemed credible when he first told me, but now it seemed like a typical abuser’s elaborate, selfserving lie.