Chapter 12

To Mindy, it was obvious why they couldn’t just continue being lovers. There were all kinds of reasons, and they were obvious.

Obvious to Mindy.

But they weren’t obvious to Bobby. Now the age and maturity differences between them came into play. His eyes looked out at the world from a vastly different perspective. Teenagers often miss the obvious. His pre-frontal cortex wasn’t finished growing, yet, and his capability to reason wasn’t fully developed. He reacted like many teens do when their dreams are crushed.

He withdrew into a dark world, where anger and cynicism were the norm.

That started when he got dressed. He didn’t even look at Mindy’s naked body as she moved around the room, doing the same thing. Then he left without a word.

She was distracted from the manner of his leaving as she went to her calendar and looked for the little “p” she marked on it every time her period started. She relaxed as she saw that this unplanned event had at least fallen at a moderately good time in her cycle. According the calendar, her last period had ended a week previously. It would be another week before things were truly dangerous. Of course that didn’t matter, because they weren’t going to do that again. She needed to make him see that.

Monday, he didn’t speak to her or look at her. It stayed that way for the rest of the week, at school. He didn’t cut music. He couldn’t do that. But he could stand there, mute.

Mindy noticed, of course. Her seasoned eyes saw the hurt, the anger, the ... rejection. But there wasn’t anything she could do. She tried to talk to him. She told him to stay after class one day.

“Bobby,” she said, her voice pleading.

He faced away from her.

“Bobby, please. We need to talk about this.”

He looked at his watch.

“I need to get to my next class,” he said, to his watch.

She sighed.

“Go,” she said.

He left.

She understood that he was angry and frustrated, and it had to have come from their momentary loss of control. But surely he saw the dangers of continuing that kind of relationship.

Bobby’s refusal to even begin negotiations frustrated her so much that it affected her day. She didn’t think about that, either, about the fact that a pouting boy was so important that he distracted her from her duties.

It was worse at night, alone in her bed. It was too easy to remember his pliable body under her hands, moving just so, rubbing just right, driving deep and crushing her clit.

She had to change the batteries in her rabbit twice in four days.

And then Saturday came again, and he didn’t show up for his tutoring session.

On Sunday, she got angry. He was being obstinate, illogical, unfeeling.

On Monday, she looked at the schedule and saw that Arlene Truesdale, the history teacher, had detention duty that week.

She went to Arlene and asked if she could trade for Mindy’s future date.

“I’m going to be working hard with the madrigals that week and I’ll want them to stay late,” she said.

“Sure,” said Arlene. It got her out of doing something she hated to do.

Later that day, during the music class Bobby was in, when he stood there mute, her anger just increased.

“Mr. Pendleton!” she barked, during a break. “If all you’re going to do is stand there like a post, you can stand in detention like a post all week.”

She wrote him up and handed him the slip as he left the class.

“If you don’t show, I’ll ask that you be suspended,” she said, softly.

He finally looked at her.

“That’s not fair and you know it.”

“You should have thought of that before you went on this ridiculous silent strike,” she said.

“This won’t change anything,” he said, his chin jutting out.

“We’ll see,” she said. “You just be there.”

Three kids showed up for detention that day. Two of them, Jerry Parker and Susie Beltone, were there because they’d been caught carving their initials into a counter top in the science lab. They were a couple. Mindy hadn’t thought about others being there, and now she thought furiously about what to do.

“You two,” she said, pointing at them. Neither was in choir, or took a class with her. “Since you undervalue the ecology in which you live, you can spend detention this week outside picking up trash. Report to the janitor to get bags and bring me the bags at the end of detention each day. We’ll save them and see how much you can become invested in the school your parents’ taxes help pay for.”

They complained, but she was a teacher, so they had to do what she said. It didn’t occur to them until they were outside, wandering around the campus, that they got to be alone together. That would cause them problems, but not until later.

Inside, Mindy sat and looked at Bobby, who had his head buried in a book, ignoring her. She went to stand beside him. She wanted to scream at him, and it was the depth of her anger that gave her pause.

Why was she so angry? Why was she so angry?

She stood there, thinking about her nights, about feeling alone, and lonely ... about all the masturbation. She thought of Bobby every time she masturbated. She thought about him a lot when she wasn’t desperately trying to get relief. The way he ignored her, hurt! She didn’t want him to ignore her. He was too important in her life, and his absence from it was ... agony.

The truth struck her like a slap to the face.

She was in love with him.

“No!” she said, aloud.

He ignored her.

“I can’t love you!” she wailed, as panic approached.

Tears blinded her, and when the fight or flight syndrome kicked in, and she fled, she ran into a desk. She bounced off of it and barked her shin on a chair. She went down hard, crying out and her head smacked onto the top of another desk like a meat tenderizing hammer slamming into a cut of steak.