Philly Stakes by Gillian Roberts

stopped and shrugged, as if she’d said nothing much.
    “What did you need to burn away?” Mackenzie spoke softly.
    Laura looked surprised, as if she’d forgotten where she was. She swiveled to see the room, Mackenzie, her mother, me, and then she stood up suddenly, pale and shaking. “I’m going to be sick,” she said.
    Mackenzie pointed in the direction of the women’s room. Then he looked at me, but I had already gotten up to follow her.
    From behind us, I heard Alice Clausen’s moans and weeping interspersed with Mackenzie’s low, slow questions.
    Laura splashed water on her face and stood breathing deeply over the sink. She clutched its lip as if to keep from falling down. “Why won’t he believe me?” she said.
    “Maybe because you aren’t telling the truth. Because you didn’t do it. Because none of this makes sense.”
    “Why won’t he let Peter go?”
    I took a deep breath. She looked so tiny and innocent in the white glare of the bathroom. “Laura, why do you insist that you killed your father? You have no motive. Who are you protecting?” There it was, that word again.
    “No—” She shook her head. “I—” Her hands left the sink edge and clenched into fists. She stammered, flushed with frustration and conflict, then stopped trying to speak. Instead, she stood crying, hands at her sides, not even bothering to wipe her tears or running nose. As if that would be a waste of energy. As if everything was.
    I was her teacher. She was my pupil. Until now, we’d had a lopsided, limited communication through her essays and my speculations. But it was a defined relationship. I knew what to do with it.
    No longer. I stood back, afraid of crossing some line into the forbidden or inappropriate, wishing I knew the ground rules.
    Laura continued to cry.
    Icarus, unnoticed, still dies every day.
    I noticed. She had to know it. Forget the rules—there weren’t any except the fundamental one that I was an adult and she was a child in pain. I walked over and held her. She was as fragile and lost inside her baggy clothing as a loosely joined pipe-cleaner doll. “He has to believe me!” she said into my shoulder.
    “He needs the truth.”
    “It is true. I did it.”
    “He needs to know why, to make sense of it.” She shook her head and pulled away, but I held onto her.
    “I can’t,” she said. “Never. It’d kill her.”
    “Her?”
    “You’ve seen how she is! She’s worse than that. She can’t—she won’t—”
    “Did you ever try? Sometimes people are stronger than you think they are.”
    Laura shuddered and stopped crying. “I tried,” she said in an emotionless voice.
    I took a deep breath. I could finally read Laura’s paper, see through the mask of Icarus and Auden to Laura’s face and message. Laura had tried to tell me that she was in grave danger. She wrote it in code, didn’t spell it out, couldn’t use the words because, while an adolescent might be willing to complain about almost every perceived oppression, there are some secrets, some problems so central, so mixed with guilt and warped love, shame and confusion that they make one mute. But very few.
    She had tried to tell me. And with all good intentions, I had backed off as neatly as her mother had. I let Mackenzie tell me my instincts were off, or exaggerated. Let him because I didn’t want to force out a truth that frightened and revolted me because it reversed the natural order. The most basic law—that adults protect their young. I behaved like all the other adults she knew. And so finally, Laura had nobody to turn to except another child, Peter, her only defender, asked to help her through the night, not as a lover, but as protector.
    Parents and children aren’t equals or ready to do the same things, and Icarus shouldn’t have been pulled into his father’s fantasy which, in effect, murdered him.
    A part of me cried halt, warned me I was galloping to conclusions. But what else could it be?
    Her father’s