Page 51 of I Will Ruin You

Marta smiled. “I will, I promise. But I’m fine, really.”

We headed home shortly after that. Rachel showed off what she had in the spaghetti jar: a stick-like green insect that was nearly three inches long. Ginny had told her it was a European praying mantis, the state insect of Connecticut. “He can stand on his back legs and he puts his hands together like he’s praying.”

I could think of a few things it could pray for.

If Bonnie was still angry with me about selling the boat, she was hiding it well. Her sister’s situation had put everything else on the back burner. I gave an excellent performance of someone who had things under control, even if below the surface I was pretty much going out of my mind. And any time Bonnie observed that I seemed distracted, not quite there, she attributed it to a holdover from my LeDrew encounter.

And before we knew it, it was Monday.

Midday, when I had a free moment, I popped into the high school office. There was a counter at the entrance where you could usually find a student in crisis—couldn’t get into their locker, lost a phone, thought they were going to throw up—but the teachers scooted around the end of it like they had special visas.

It wasn’t often a staff member came in here looking for Trent. He was only the principal. If you really wanted some student’s academic records, a contact for a parents’ group, an on-call dentist who could help a kid who’d fallen and chipped a tooth, you went to Belinda. Her title was “head secretary” but that did her a disservice. A better one would be “head honcho” or “field commander” or maybe just “chief executive officer.” She’d been at the school for the better part of two decades, outlasted five principals, kind of the way the Queen of England had dealt with fifteen prime ministers during her reign before passing on. Belinda, as they like to say, knew where the bodies were buried.

Trent was smart enough to know his place. “I work for Belinda,” he’d told me more than once. “If there’s one person you don’t want to cross, it’s her. She will gut you like a fish.” But he’d made the comment with a wry grin, and no shortage of respect and affection.

We all loved her. She was tough and firm and I’d even heard her use a few f-bombs under her breath when things became chaotic, but beneath that thick hide was a woman who would do anything for you.

When I came around the corner and caught her eye, she said, “Hey, Richard.”

“Belinda.”

“How you doing?”

It was only my second day back since the incident, so many on staff were still inquiring as to my state of mind, wondering whether I was on the verge of some kind of PTSD attack.

“I’ve been worse,” I said.

“Good to hear. Trent’s out.”

“Looking for you. You keep all the old yearbooks around here someplace?”

“Sure,” she said, nodding toward a shelf than ran along one wall. She got up from her desk. “What year do you want?”

“Maybe 2015 through ’17?”

She went to the shelf, scanned the spines, pulled out the three books I was looking for and handed them to me. “Anything else I can do for you?”

She didn’t ask what I wanted them for, nor had I expected her to. Belinda had enough on her plate without getting the details on matters that were none of her concern. But that didn’t mean she didn’t know just about everything.

“You have any recollection of a kid named Billy Finster?” I asked.

Belinda’s brain had more memory than a MacBook. She took two seconds to retrieve the data, then said, “Yes. Bit of a jock, not a great student. Always looking for shortcuts, the easy way out. Suspended once for smoking pot in the boys’ bathroom. Also some health issues. Missed several weeks one year with mononucleosis, as I recall. We had a wave of it that year. And another year, a sports injury. Shoulder dislocation playing football. Played basketball, was on the wrestling team. Parents were kind of ditzy, not in the picture all that much.”

“What was his shoe size?”

Belinda’s mouth opened, as if she expected she would know the answer to that question, then stopped, looked at me, and said, “Wise guy.”

I smiled.

Even though she hadn’t asked, I felt I needed a reason to be making inquiries about a former student.

“Ran into him the other day, he came up, said hello. I couldn’t quite place him, but I knew the name.” I held up the books. “Was going to look through these, see if I remember him.”

Belinda had gone back to her desk and dismissed me with a wave of her hand. “Enjoy.”

I took the books back to my room and started going through them, starting with 2017. Billy Finster wasn’t in it anywhere, which led me to think that he’d graduated the previous year.

So I went through the 2016 book. I couldn’t find a headshot of him as I looked through the graduating class, but spotted a list of those absent when the profile shots were taken. Finster was on it. But I still went through the book looking at pictures of the school’s various athletic teams, and found him in a couple of those, a blurry face in a cluster of others. I even found a picture taken during one of our wrestling tournaments, at an away game, and there I was, standing in the background.