Page 31 of I Will Ruin You
He was a thirteen-year-old kid in my ninth-grade English class. Small for his age, barely five feet tall, freckled, with reddish brown hair. And he was, whatever this word means these days, gifted. The only one in the class who’d read Moby-Dick, and that included the teacher. He devoured books the way his classmates went through pizza. He took oboe lessons. He collected vintage SF digest magazines like Analog, Galaxy, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. He had at least fifty different models of robots from movies and TV shows. He could multiply three figures by two figures in his head. I once saw him solve a jumbled Rubik’s Cube in under a minute. He was quiet and hard to read emotionally. Not a demonstrative kid.
Lyall was an original, and I had some familiarity with his sense of being an outsider. When I was his age, I didn’t feel that I fit in. Few of my contemporaries shared my obsessive, albeit passing, interests in Ed Wood movies, or the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, or real-life sightings of UFOs.
But my heart really went out to him when his father, coming back from a business trip in Buffalo, was cut off by a tractor-trailer on the New York Thruway and went into a bridge abutment at seventy miles per hour west of Albany. He died instantly. He was forty-nine.
Lyall was off school for more than a week. There was a funeral, of course, which Bonnie and I attended. When he returned, he tried to act as though nothing had happened. He’d never been one to show his feelings. He was quiet before, and he was quiet now.
At the end of one class, he came to me as I sat at my desk and asked what assignments he needed to get caught up on. I told him not to worry about them. But he was insistent. I was going through my lesson planner, looking for a couple of token things he could do that would make him feel better, when he whispered something to me.
“I heard them say his brains were on the windshield.”
I put aside my lesson planner and shifted around to face him. He was a dam ready to burst.
“I’m so sorry, Lyall.”
Still whispering, he said, “It’s in my head.”
“It’ll take time,” I said. “You’re a strong kid. But holding it together is hard. You may have to let it out sometime. You can’t keep everything bottled up. When you get home—”
His arms went around my neck and he began to sob. Instinctively, I put my arms around him. Held him. Felt his body shake.
My door happened to be open, and it was at that moment that Evan Hayle, an eleventh-grade student and a true shit if there ever was one, caught sight of my attempt to console Lyall, fired off a couple of quick shots with his phone. Within minutes he had shared it online with the comment How to get an A from Mr. Boyle!
My face was clearly visible in the shot, but Lyall, visible only from behind, could have been anyone. It was the next morning when I learned how widely the picture had been distributed. It had gone viral, at least within the Lodge High School community. And as it spread, it garnered more salacious comments. Mr Boyle LOVES his kids and Boyle’s Butt Boy and Gives new meaning to sucking up to the teacher were some of the milder ones.
It was another student who brought it to my attention the following morning. I was seething with anger, not so much for myself but for Lyall. What a cruel thing to do to someone who’d already been through so much. Trent had me come down to the office, said he was already getting calls from parents wanting to know what the hell was going on.
It got cleared up, eventually. Lyall himself told Trent what had happened. Evan, tracked down as the culprit, said he was only goofing around, that he didn’t know it was Lyall, claimed to not even be aware that Lyall’s father had died. He was suspended for a week. The dust settled, the truth came out.
That didn’t stop people I didn’t even know, for some time, from giving me the side-eye. At the grocery store, the gas station. Not everyone got the follow-up memo. Which was why I was struggling with what to do now. I could stand fast. Let this son of a bitch go public. State my denials, fire back with accusations.
But something always sticks. Especially when there’s a history.
I needed to talk to somebody. Bonnie would normally have been the most obvious, logical one, but this shit couldn’t have come at a worse time.
My personal entanglements, despite the best of intentions, had consistently backfired. That episode with Lyall. That kid who stole my wallet. And most spectacularly, my near-death experience with Mark LeDrew.
Add Billy the Blackmailer to the list.
It wouldn’t matter that it wasn’t my fault. It’d be one more stupid mess I’d gotten myself into, as far as Bonnie was concerned. And what if, somehow, I was to blame? I certainly hadn’t abused this guy in the way he’d alleged, but you see a thousand students in your time and make more than your share of mistakes. Had I wrongly accused him of cheating on a test? Given him a D when he’d earned a B in some class I couldn’t recall?
There was another reason not to tell Bonnie. The professional one. Considering her position, was it fair to involve her? Could this blow back on her if this whole mess ever did become public, and she had to admit she’d known about it from the beginning?
And, really, did I want to have to sit Bonnie down and tell her what someone was alleging I’d done?
There was her sister, Marta. A police detective. Could I tell her? Would she believe my side of the story, or be more concerned about how this would affect Bonnie?
A lawyer, maybe. Or Trent. But I’d be putting him in a tough spot, too.
God, what a clusterfuck.
Was paying my blackmailer the worst option, except for not paying him? And how would I go about it? Bonnie and I had joint accounts. She kept a close eye on where the money went.
A lot of people might think ten thousand dollars doesn’t sound like a lot, at least when it comes to blackmail. If this were a movie, or if I were a politician in the real world, any extortionist worth his salt would ask for a hundred thousand, maybe a million.
But this wasn’t the movies, and I wasn’t running for office. For regular people, ten grand was a fair chunk of change, no question, even for Bonnie and me, and we both had good jobs and a house and two cars in the driveway. But we’d just paid off the mortgage on that house, scraping together most of our savings to make it happen. We’d had to redo the roof five months earlier when a powerful storm swept through Milford and ripped off half the shingles. And then there was that three grand I gave to my cousin Stan without running it past Bonnie first.
We were not, at this point in time, awash in cash. Banks didn’t typically extend loans to blackmail victims.