Christi Moore raised a panic on her return to class. Her screams echoed through the empty hallway; the sound of her running made Dan stop and listen mid-lecture. Every head in sophomore Earth Sciences turned to watch the door. The stillness of that moment was something he would recall later.
There came the clatter of the wooden hall pass as she fiddled with the knob, then she burst in and addressed them collectively: “There’s a baby in the girls’ room!”
At first, he envisioned a bloody mess. A new birth. Some poor, scared girl with toilet tissue wadded in her underwear, in need of medical care, returned to her seat in one of these high school classrooms where she was pretending all was well. The last girl you would expect, probably. Shy and mousy. Religious, maybe. Lexi Owens or Marybeth Stuckey—one of that type.
He led Christi by her shoulder back into the hall, closing the door to the ears of his titillated classroom. Mrs. Faraway was heading toward them, brought out of her room by the commotion. Dan locked eyes with her. They debriefed the girl together.
The baby was clean, Christi told them, swaddled and left in a sink by someone. Tears streamed down her face throughout her telling, as if it had been a murder she’d stumbled upon, rather than an infant. She was inconsolable in a way that was taught to her by the movies and television. He thought of old gangster films, where the remedy for such dramatics was a slug of brandy or a slap across the cheek. Mrs. Faraway, bless her, swiftly headed off with the girl to investigate. Dan agreed to inform Principal Brown.
The bell rang when he was halfway down the stairs.
***
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Faraway said as if answering a question he hadn’t asked. “The baby was a week old, maybe two?” She shook her head and stared out at the wooded field.
They were around the back of the abandoned gas station, three blocks from the high school, where they sometimes met after school for a smoke. The day had continued normally, for Dan at least. Because of his trip to see the principal, he was ten minutes late for his next class; otherwise, the proceedings had not involved him.
He’d shown up at the gas station hoping she would know to meet him there. She had, just as he was lighting his second American Spirit. “We’ll find her, surely,” he told her. “How many girls lost ten pounds overnight?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell,” she said. Mr. and Mrs. Faraway had two boys; Dan and Hillary didn’t have children. “The baby was tiny, the poor thing. Probably the mother confided in some of the other girls. One of them might get scared and come forward. If not, I wouldn’t be surprised if we never find out.”
He shook his head at the unbelievability of it all. “I just can’t imagine how someone could hide something like this. I mean, for nine months?”
“With good reason, I would guess. A fundamentalist family or an abusive home life? You just never know what goes on in people’s lives.”
“I know that,” he said, and he believed he did. “Still. There are cameras outside the school, for crying out loud. How would she have even sneaked it in?”
“I don’t want to think about that.”
“A backpack, I guess.”
She shook the image from her head and took a drag.
They didn’t discuss it further. When it was time for them to head home, she touched his arm, then continued to her car without another word.
***
He told Hillary that evening while their dinner was heating, being sure to mention the silence in his classroom during those last seconds before Christi returned, the drama of that moment. “My first thought was an active shooter; that’s probably what everyone was thinking when they heard her screaming like she was. But it was just someone’s little unwanted reminder.”
“Well,” she said.
He waited before asking, “Well, what?”
“Nothing. It’s just that people are going to do what they’re going to do. There’s nothing anyone can say to stop them.”
“Sure,” he allowed. “Naturally.” He sat for a moment, recalling it all again. “Luckily, another teacher was there, and she took Christi away to deal with the baby and everything.”
“Who was? Who was there with you?”
“Mrs. Faraway,” he said. “Why?”
In the kitchen, the oven chimed. He rose from the sofa to address it.
“You smell like smoke, Dan,” she told him.
***
The next morning, Thursday, Principal Brown assembled the faculty for an update.
The foundling had been taken into state custody; the police were involved, but the identity of the mother remained unknown. Rumors would abound, so it was best to quash them. Teachers should run their classrooms as if nothing were out of the ordinary because, for all but one or two of them, nothing was.
Dan nodded along, knowing that any attempts at containment would be futile.
Just as he expected, the kids were lit up. He could hear the cumulative crackle of electricity as they worked their unpracticed brains trying to solve it, or so he later told Mrs. Faraway.
In his classroom, he ignored the chatter to a point, only drawing the line when speculations turned cruel—slut-shaming girls who were seen as apt to get knocked up or else the opposite: comically theorizing that the parents were specific kids who were understood by their peers to be sexually untouchable.
He didn’t join in with them, of course, but he privately played the same game—mentally rating the likelihood that one or the other of them might be the baby’s parent based on attractiveness and considerations of social hierarchy. Tawny Herndon, for example, wore those long skirts and frumpy sweaters; if it were truly possible to hide a full-term pregnancy, such a getup might help. Or Jance Greene. He was a football dickhead who Dan could easily imagine impregnating any number of girls before ghosting them, putting them in a state where they felt compelled to abandon their child in a bathroom sink. He could make an argument for several others as well, and despite himself, this way of thinking colored his interactions with them. The less well-to-do girls received his empathy, as did those whom he identified as gullible or simple-minded, or those who were low enough in the looks-based caste system of American high school to be at risk of manipulation by popular boys seeking sexual gratification that they would later deny. Toward the popular girls—those with family resources and expensive clothes, those who ran the halls of the school and had other means available to them—he was frigid. That Thursday was not a banner day for Dan as an educator.
As it turned out, this issue was pervasive. “I been at this a long time,” said Mr. Chambers, the gym teacher and golf coach, “and I can honestly say that I have never consciously considered the hotness of these students until now. Like, I’m standing there in second period watching the kids run laps and thinking, It couldn’t have been Lizzy Griggs, not with that frizzy mop on her head… It’s starting to make me feel like a creeper.”
“It’s natural,” Dan said. They were sitting together at a round table in the teacher’s lounge. Dan and Chambers were there, along with Mrs. Faraway and Mrs. Birch, one of the two art teachers. “Human beings instinctively want to solve puzzles. Understanding the world is key to survival. It’s an evolved trait.”
“Well, that might be, but it doesn’t make me feel any less like a pervert. What race was this child, anyway?”
“Caucasian,” Mrs. Faraway said.
Dan hadn’t known this either, hadn’t thought to ask. The revelation cut several potential parents from the roster he was building in his head.
“That Christi Moore is certainly having a celebrity moment,” said Mrs. Birch. “I had to stop her from telling the story in class and then again in the hallway. There was a gaggle around her. An honest-to-God gaggle of girls.”
“Twist: Christi was the mother all along,” said Mr. Chambers. He opened his eyes wide as if in revelation.
Dan smiled, humoring him. “No, I gave her the hall pass. When she left my room, there were no babies in her possession.”
“It was in her locker, maybe,” Chambers said. “Or she’d stowed it somewhere else, then had a change of heart during your class and went to move it to a more prominent place.”
“I think I’m ready to talk about anything other than this,” Mrs. Faraway said.
“Sorry,” said Chambers. “I can’t help it; it’s evolution. I’m just a curious ape.”
***
At home that night, Hillary asked him if the mother had been found.
“Not yet,” Dan told her.
“Well,” she said, “if she hasn’t had a change of heart by now, you’ll likely never identify her. People tend to keep their secrets if they have a good enough reason.”
***
By Friday afternoon, the students’ speculations had shifted to their teachers. The roles were cast in any number of ways depending on the teller’s grudges, but the story remained consistent: Mr. _____ impregnated Mrs./Ms. _____, so they dumped the baby to frame a student and keep their partners from finding out. He didn’t hear much of it directly, but Dan was aware that he and Mrs. Faraway were at the top of the kids’ lists.
At the football game against Lakota South that evening, the kids on the Lakota side of the stands arrived carrying plastic doll babies, which they raised and shook to taunt the home team. Word spread quickly.
***
Rumors persisted for another week or two. Graffiti appeared on lockers and in the stalls of the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, identifying one couple or another as the culprits. Mr. Feeny, the janitor, whose job it was to remove those messages, became a subject of the speculation, himself—either as a molester who forced girls into his utility closet/sex dungeon or else as the secret lover of a girl whose peers judged her to be so untouchable that she was forced into the arms of a man whose job was unimaginably far beneath them all. Sometimes, that girl was also speculated to be his own secret daughter, lending the rumor an even greater salacious texture.
No additional details were given by the authorities, and, to Dan’s knowledge, they made no real effort to identify the mother. When Principal Brown had informed staff that the local police were involved, he’d envisioned them having a presence at the school, doing systematic interviews and other detective work to crack the case. Nothing like that occurred. He didn’t know just what measures they employed to find her, if any.
In time, with no new information to fuel it, the rumor mill began to taper off. It ceased to be a topic of conversation in the teachers’ lounge or on Dan’s after-school smoking sessions with Mrs. Faraway. New topics emerged to occupy the students’ minds. Todd Blankenship was arrested for selling marijuana vape cartridges from his locker, inside of which several hundred dollars of product was found. Missy Nickles was suspended for throwing her dissection frog at Mrs. Raskins, the freshman biology teacher. As she was marched out of Principal Brown’s office by her parents, it was said that she held up her fist and defiantly preached about animal rights and environmental destruction. The issue was finally and fully laid to rest when Tessa Harcum, a junior, became obviously and openly pregnant. She soberly discussed adoption and her boyfriend from Bainbridge High with anyone who asked, teachers or students alike. Her T-shirts stretched boldly across her growing belly, and she walked through the halls without shame, offering the kids a different framework for understanding teen motherhood. Heroic. Inspiring. Whoever the foundling’s mother was, Dan thought, she owed a debt of gratitude to Tessa. By the weekend of the homecoming dance, the bathroom baby was as good as forgotten.
Dan agreed to stay late that Friday, along with a few other teachers, to help the Events Club decorate the gymnasium. He hung so much bunting that he joked with the kids about how swole his calves would become by morning. “Stand back!” he announced to them as he ascended the ladder for the umpteenth time. “You don’t want these monsters to hit you in the face!” He was near the top of the ladder, still smiling at his put-on dorkiness, when his foot slipped, and he fell backward to the gymnasium floor, bringing the ladder down on top of him. They told him that he blacked out for nearly a full minute. Hillary was at an end-of-day budget meeting and couldn’t be reached. Mrs. Faraway drove him to the hospital.
***
Three months later, Dan took a two-week leave of absence from school. He cited personal matters. On a random Tuesday evening, while they were streaming the new season of their current show, Hillary burst into tears and confessed to him that she had been having an affair with Mr. Faraway, a suspicion that had long been the topic of conversation at the afternoon smoke sessions. Dan introduced the two himself at last year’s Fall Festival. “You were wrong,” he told her early on, when her admission was still fresh and raw. “People can’t keep secrets, even when they have a good reason.”
Things were touch-and-go for weeks. Hillary moved to a motel, but only for a few days. They ultimately decided to stay together. Dan would transfer to a new district to facilitate a fresh start. Hillary would find a new job too, if only for the spiritual renewal it might bring them.
For the first half of the new school year, he commuted, but by then things were going well enough between them that they decided to move closer to his job and to their new social circle. He didn’t know how things fared for Mrs. Faraway because he no longer spoke to her. Doing so would have been painful for them both, and anyway, now that their partners’ actions were known and named, there seemed to be nothing strong enough between them to hold their friendship together.
***
A good while after all this occurred, on a Saturday, Dan was at the supermarket buying supplies for a Super Bowl watch-party with some of Hillary’s new coworkers when he ran into Mr. Chambers. They stood in the freezer section for ages, catching up. The reason for Dan’s departure hung between them but was never mentioned. Principal Brown had gotten promoted to Superintendent at a neighboring district, and the jury was still out on his replacement. The shop teacher had died. Some other new faces had arrived.
When they were through chatting, preparing to push their carts in different directions, Chambers said, “Oh! I can’t believe I almost forgot this: do you remember that baby in the bathroom?” Dan said. Of course, he did. “The mother came forward. You’ll never guess who she was: Christi Moore. Yeah, apparently, she laid the kid in the empty auditorium just before your class, thinking Feeney would find it at some point during his daily cleaning. Then she got scared it would die before anyone found it, so she asked you for the hall pass and moved it to the sink, where she could claim to have found it. It’s exactly like I said. Do you remember? I mean, it’s crazy, right?”
It was. Dan was stunned to hear it. “But, I mean, who was the father?”
Chambers rolled his eyes as if it were a story as old as time. “Some older guy, a twenty-something. That was why she had to dump it, I guess. I think her parents were considering pressing charges, but I don’t know if they ever did.”
He stood with Dan for a moment as he processed what he’d been told. “Did she get the kid back?”
“I don’t know, man. Who can say? She transferred. Look, though, I got to get out of here; Janice will think I got kidnapped. It was good seeing you, Dan.”
The two men shook hands and exchanged a few parting words. Dan moved on to continue his shopping.
The supermarket was busy, filled with his new neighbors whom he didn’t yet recognize. He smiled politely as he passed them, wondering how many of them were in situations like his and Hillary’s, healing from betrayal; and how many had once been stupid teens, facing a pregnancy scare; and how many of them had secrets even bigger than these, bigger than he could imagine. Some of them, surely. Life was messy. And, after all, they were only people.
