Three Girls and their Brother. Theresa Rebeck
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I talked to him for something like three hours, Amelia was leaving. That whole biting thing was a total nonevent. He’s not even upset about it! I talked to him, this morning he called me, we’re going to dinner tomorrow? And he didn’t even mention it.” This last bit, obviously, was a terrific whopper.
Amelia’s life was a disaster. She has a bit of a temper, as I’ve mentioned, so all the kids surrounding her and screaming questions about why she bit Rex Wentworth set her off about every two minutes or so. She never got to take that chemistry test; there was so much chaos in the chemistry lab they finally told her she had to go to Dean Morton’s office. The chemistry teacher, Dr Nussbaum, was trying to explain to her that she could make the test up another day but that she needed to go see the dean and sort out the controversy. Amelia told me this later; she rather obsessively focused on being told that she had to go “sort out the controversy,” because that struck her as being an especially stupid thing for old Nussbaum to say. And in fact, if you think about it, it is a pretty stupid thing to say to a fourteen-year-old girl who was being harassed by absolutely everybody in her high school, because she had bitten a movie star who was trying to feel her up. Anyway, at that point Amelia was so frustrated she started to cry, and then argue about how hard she had studied, and then she started babbling on even more, apparently, about how she’s missed so much school and it wasn’t her fault and were they all a bunch of fucking idiots, blaming her for this mess?
I’m not being euphemistic; she did in fact call Dr Nussbaum a “fucking idiot,” which sort of finished off the question of whether or not she was going to the dean’s office.
By the time Amelia got down to Morton’s office, the whole situation—gorgeous redheads, the Daily News, a bitten movie star, screaming students everywhere—had exhausted the school so much that the dean instantly decided to simply send Amelia home. Which was not, technically, a brilliant solution, as the front sidewalk of the school was positively lousy with photographers, and had been since ten in the morning. So when Amelia stormed out the front door, alone, at noon, there were thirty or forty of them waiting there, crawling all over each other and ready to commit multiple acts of homicide on the off-chance that it might net them an out-of-focus photograph of the fourteen-year-old girl who bit Rex Wentworth.
I could see all of it from the third floor, where I was trapped in a Spanish lab. That dipshit Morton hadn’t even arranged for someone to come pick her up; it says in our files that we’re authorized to walk ourselves home, but wouldn’t you think he’d have a half a clue?
The paparazzi went haywire. I mean, as upsetting as it had been to be mobbed by our fellow students all morning, they were rank amateurs compared to these bozos. They descended as one, shouting questions, grabbing, pushing, shoving their cameras right into her face, acting really like she was some sort of stupid animal in a zoo, instead of just a little kid. Amelia stood on the front steps of the high school, frozen, and then she totally just disappeared. I mean, one minute she was there, and the next minute she wasn’t. It was like they had eaten her.
I bolted. I mean, what else are you going to do, just sit there and watch your sister get eaten? Señor Martine (his real name is Mr Martin, but he makes us call him Señor Martine) shouted something at me in Spanish, but I was truly in no mood. I made it outside in maybe ten seconds, but the situation was already way out of control. The shoving was unbelievable, it was like being at some insane British soccer match. Photographers were pushing and shoving and cursing wildly, and I had to literally pull at arms and legs and throw myself up against somebody to get him out of the way, just so I could clamber one or two inches further into the onion layers of photojournalists who had encrusted themselves around my little sister. People were screaming, “Fuck you, fucking asshole, get in line, fucker, hey who is this fucker?” while I pushed and shoved and yelled, “Amelia! Hey, Amelia, where are you?”
By the time I got to her she was just curled up in a little ball. Seriously, she was like all folded in on herself, a little turtle of a person, crouched down over her feet, her arms crossed over her head, down on the cement sidewalk. You got to wonder what’s wrong with those guys, why they thought this would be a cool picture to take, a little kid so scared she’s doing something that spooky. I mean, I wondered that about a minute later, but while I was surrounded by the crazy people with her, I was mostly just screaming at them to get away. Amelia was crying and hitting at me, because she didn’t want to move, that’s how freaked out she was, but I was pretty sure they’d just start stomping on her if I left her there, so I started dragging her back toward the front door of the school. They of course kept taking pictures and shoving at both of us. It was a ridiculous mess.
By the time we got back through the glass doors and into the security lobby, a whole bunch of teachers and students was gathering. Meanwhile, all those journalists were like in a feeding frenzy or something; it was like once they got started on the craziness they didn’t know how to turn it off, so they actually tried to come in after us. Which finally turned into a kind of a showdown. Señor Martine, Dean Morton and Luke, the black guy who sits at the front desk and makes you sign in if you’re tardy, charged the mob and started yelling at them.
“This is private property! I am asking you to leave! You are not allowed entrance to this building! This is a private high school!” yelled Morton. He was actually holding his arms out, sort of like he was being crucified, but more like he thought those photographers were actually chickens or pigeons or something he could just shoo away. “If you do not leave this property immediately, we are calling the police!”
This was not good enough for Luke. “Motherfuckers! Get out of here, you fuckheads! The police are coming to kick your ass—get out—GET OUT.” He grabbed one guy, a kind of short, fat guy with a big beard and a huge lens, who was shooting wildly at anything and everything.
“Don’t you fucking touch me, man!” the short photographer yelled. “I can sue you! That’s assault!”
“You take another picture of these kids, I’ll show you what assault looks like,” Luke told him, sticking his finger in the guy’s face. Meanwhile, two other photographers were deep in it with Morton.
“The police are coming. You are not permitted in this building,” Morton droned. These idiots started to argue about freedom of the press.
“You want to do that? Show these kids that the press can be silenced? What’s that teaching them? This is a free society. This isn’t fucking China, we’re covering a legitimate story.” Meanwhile the rest of the gang behind them kept clicking away.
It really was enough to make you sick. Luckily Luke is rather large, and when he gets mad enough to yell it’s rather undeniable. “GET OUT OF HERE,” he yelled. “I DON ‘T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, YOU SHITHEAD, YOU THINK I WON ‘T HIT YOU, YOU TRY IT, MAN, JUST TRY ONE MORE STEP IN THIS BUILDING, THESE ARE MY KIDS. MY KIDS, MOTHERFUCKER.”
Dean Morton cringed a little at that; obviously he was not thrilled that Luke was cursing so freely in front of all us fragile teenagers, but there was no denying that it was an impressive performance. And all of us fragile teenagers were definitely stoked that our security guard was willing to slug it out with all of the representatives of the free press that New York could spare that morning. Truth be told I think Morton was impressed too. In any event, he didn’t say anything, and after they managed to get off another few hundred shots, the so-called protectors of all American freedoms finally took off.
Everybody got sent back to class and I got sent to the nurse’s office, because I had a scraped-up face and a split lip. By the time they patched me up, Amelia had already been sent home, which really pissed me off. I mean, they couldn’t wait and let us go together? But people don’t think of these things. Anyway, the next day we all got the beginnings of a clue as to how serious the shit was that Amelia had stepped in. The many pictures taken by all those protectors of a free press were really quite impressive. And they printed all of them. Pictures of Amelia screaming, Amelia hitting photographers, Amelia kicking photographers, Amelia kicking me. Amelia curled up in a little ball on the sidewalk; they printed that one, too. A couple of those geniuses actually had video of the whole thing, which they showed on three local news shows, Entertainment Tonight and CNN, which, due respect to