Lucy, Chapter Nine

As soon as Carlie got to school she knew something was wrong. Everyone was looking at her funny and then Lucas didn’t show up for homeroom.

“What’s going on?” She asked Michelle, one of the girls who sat near the back.

“You didn’t hear? I thought you’d know all about it.”

“About what?”

“Lucas got caught with a big plastic bag full of pot.”

“What?”

“Yeah. They found it in his locker. Mrs. Hoskins had the groundskeeper cut the lock off and she found it. She said she had ‘sources’ who were right about him.”

“No. You’re kidding.”

Michelle shook her head. “He said it wasn’t his, but I bet it was. Doesn’t he live at your house? Does he like, smoke pot all the time?”

“No, of course not. He never smokes anything.”

She gave a wry smile. “It just goes to show you, you never can tell if you really know someone.”

Carlie sat back in her seat and listened as the teacher called the names and the girls all responded. She couldn’t believe it. Surely she would have noticed if Lucas was some sort of druggie.

“Wait… he was there when they cut the lock off?”

“Yeah. He offered to open it but Mrs. Hoskins told him to stand back, then he said the pot wasn’t his when she pulled it out of his locker.”

She shook her head. Something felt wrong.

According to her mum drugs were readily available at every street corner and it was up to Carlie to ‘just say no,’ but the reality was she’d never been offered drugs and she’d lived in Brisbane all her life.

Where would Lucas get a big bag full of pot? Not at the swimming pool, it was incredibly healthy and wholesome at the pool. Maybe he could have gotten it from Ben, but she’d met Ben before and he was sporty and fit, not the sort of person who she could envisage owning marijuana.

Even if Lucas had pot, why would he keep it in his locker?

Michelle said Mrs. Hoskins had ‘sources,’ but if Carlie didn’t know about it how would anyone else? Sure, Lucas talked to everyone in the whole school, but he did it in a cheerful, open sort of way, she’d never seen him whispering to anyone about drugs.

There was definitely something wrong. If Lucas had said the drugs weren’t his then she believed him.

Even though the teacher hadn’t called her name yet she jumped up out of her seat and headed out the door and towards the principal’s office. She hurried through the administration building and past Margie the secretary.

“Do you have an appointment?” Margie called out after her. “Young lady, you need an appointment!”

An appointment was the least of her worries right now. She strode straight up to Mrs. Hoskins’ door and knocked loudly on the heavy wood. There was no response so she knocked again. She didn’t bother trying a third time. She opened the door to a very upset Lucas and an unexpectedly blithe Mrs. Hoskins.

Lucas was huddled in a low chair and Mrs. Hoskins’ large, pink-clad form towered above him on the opposite side of her huge desk. Her stiff permed grey curls were slightly disheveled, most likely from the unusual occurrence of exposing herself to the heat this morning, and her rectangular spectacles were perched low on her nose. The wrinkled skin around her mouth held her lips in a tight, small smile.

Her eyes bulged momentarily when they met with Carlie’s.

“Carlie, what are you doing here?”

“Mrs. Hoskins,” she said between gasps of air. “Lucas is innocent. Someone set him up.”

Mrs. Hoskins’ eyebrows rose. “A set up? Well, that seems a most unlikely scenario. Run along now, you’ll be needing to get to class.”

“You don’t understand. It makes no sense for Lucas to have drugs. Someone has set him up. I’m sure of it.”

Mrs. Hoskins narrowed her eyes at her. “You will stop this nonsense at once. This boy was caught red handed with marijuana at school. He is very lucky that I haven’t called the police. Now, you will go to class and forget these silly notions at once, or I will have no option but to suspend you.”

Her reaction was so strong and so negative that it immediately set off alarm bells in Carlie’s mind.

She took a deep breath, stood as tall as she could and said in her calmest voice, “If you have to suspend me then I guess that's just what you'll have to do. Someone set Lucas up and if you wont listen to me maybe our lawyer will.”

Mrs. Hoskins’ mouth scrunched up and her brow lowered as if she were a bull contemplating a charge but her eyes were all wrong. It wasn’t anger or resolve that she saw in her old hateful eyes. It was something else.

“Come on Lucas,” Carlie reached for his hand and he moved towards her.

“Don’t you dare even think about walking out that door Sonny Jim,” Mrs. Hopkins snarled.

Lucas looked up at her with red-rimmed, uncertain eyes. She grabbed his arm and pulled him towards the door.

“You are suspended! Do you hear me? The both of you are suspended! I might even expel you!”

Carlie couldn’t help but laugh. In the emotion of the moment Mrs. Hoskins had forgotten about her snobbish British accent and was talking like a regular Australian.

“You will be hearing from us,” she said as she pulled Lucas out the door.

Once they were out the front of the school she started to feel shaky. Her hands were unsteady as she reached for the arm of a bench to sit down on. She couldn’t believe she’d done that. She’d never stood up to an adult like that, especially not the school principal.

“What should we do?” Lucas asked.

“We’ll have to go and see my mum, at her office in the city.”

“Okay. Should we take the bus?”

“Yeah.” Her mind was racing, trying to put the pieces together and figure out what had happened.

“Well, let’s go then.”

“Okay… Wait. We should write Nell a note so she knows what happened. She’ll be all alone at morning tea and lunch.”

Lucas agreed and they wrote her a note and went back in to push it through the metal slats of her locker. As they were walking up the hill on the way back out of school Lucas had a funny smile on his face.

“Why are you smiling?”

“Oh, nothing… it’s just that it was really nice of you to think of Nell, that’s all.”

They caught the bus into the city and Carlie led Lucas into the big glass building that her mum’s law firm had their offices in. Even though it was the school’s uniform policy to wear the ugly felt hat any time she was in uniform outside of school grounds, Carlie purposefully didn’t put it on as an act of defiance. It was a stupid hat anyway. Who in their right mind would wear a dark blue felt hat in the heat of Brisbane?

The receptionist on duty didn’t recognize her. “I’m Carlie Weaver and this is Lucas. We need to see my mum. It’s kind of an emergency.”

Moments later her mum was in the reception area, ushering them through to her office where they sat on the comfy chairs. Her mum’s office was nothing like Mrs. Hoskins’. It was on the side of the building so an entire wall was made of glass and looked over a grassy square and had a view of city hall and the other tall buildings around. Her mum had a small desk and a large filing cabinet on one side of the office and the other side was filled with four cushy chairs and a few side tables.

Carlie hadn’t been in here for a long time, probably a year or more. She looked around and saw that not much had changed. There was still the oil painting of a suburban footpath and house on one wall and a formal family portrait from when she was about eight hanging beside it.

Her mum sat down on one of the cushy chairs with them and they told her what had happened. Lucas elaborated on a few points. He said that Mrs. Hoskins claimed that a student came to her and told her that Lucas had offered to sell her pot.

After a while her mum took a yellow notepad and pen out of the drawer of one of the side tables and started taking notes.

When they were done explaining everything that had happened she leaned in to Lucas.

“Lucas,” she said seriously. “I need to know the whole truth. If I’m going to defend you I need to know exactly what you did and didn’t do.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Her mum’s steady gaze held on Lucas. “Everybody makes mistakes and bad decisions in life. Making one bad decision does not make you a bad person. If you had anything to do with the marijuana, I need to know about it so I know the best way to defend you.”

“You’d defend me even if I did it?”

“Yes,” she said seriously. “I will always defend you, even if you made a bad decision.”

Lucas blinked a few times and then he said, “I swear it isn’t mine. I have no idea how it got in my locker.”

“Have you ever had marijuana before?”

“What do you mean had?”

“Have you smoked it, or eaten it?”

“No.”

“Have you owned it?”

Lucas hesitated and his brow wrinkled. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know what it was. Joseph Thule sold it to me for $10 and then I didn’t know what to do with it.” He was talking rapidly. “Micah didn’t know what to do either so we asked Matthew.”

“Matthew?”

“Micah’s big brother.”

“Oh. Was this back in America?”

“Yeah. Matthew told us what it was but he said we couldn’t smoke it because we’d get kicked off the swimming team when we got drug tested. He wanted to tell their parents about it but I wouldn’t let him because I was afraid my dad would get upset at me.”

Lucas’ eyes went all watery and he gulped for air between his rambling sentences.

“Matthew promised that he’d say that he and Micah bought it and that I didn’t know anything about it, but I still wouldn’t let him, so we had to try and get rid of it.

“I thought we should flush it down the toilet but Micah said it would float so we buried it in their back yard instead. Everything was fine until… until Micah’s mum decided she was going to have a… a…”

Carlie and her mum leaned in, enthralled by Lucas’ unusual story.

“…a Labor Day party.”

Carlie and her mum looked at each other. She had no idea why having a Labor Day party was such a big deal.

“We had to help clean up the back yard for the party,” Lucas continued. “When we got to the place where we’d buried the pot there were all of these plants growing out of the ground. We didn’t know what to do because Micah’s mom puts all of the garden waste into a composter, so she’d see them if we just pulled them out.

“Matthew and Micah wanted to tell their dad but I said no. I wanted to burn the plants but Matthew said the whole neighborhood would be able to smell it, so we went to the hardware store and bought Roundup to spray them with.”

“Did it work?” Her mum had dropped her lawyer’s façade and a small smile appeared on her lips.

“Yeah, they died but then we didn’t know what to do with the dead plants. There were only a few days until the party so we just pulled them out and tossed them over the fence into Mrs. Stubbs’ yard. We figured that she was so old and blind that she’d never know the difference.”

“And?”

“Everything was fine until after the party when Grandma Judy walked Mrs. Stubbs back to her house and she went out into the back yard and saw the dead pot plants beside the fence. She’s from Berkeley so she knew what they were and she took them back and showed them to Micah’s mom and dad.”

Lucas’ bottom lip began to quiver and a big fat tear spilled over his cheek.

“They told my mom and dad and then they sat us all down and asked us what happened. Matthew said he and Micah bought it. He said that I had nothing to do with it and I just sat there and didn’t say anything.”

Lucas bowed his head and buried his face in his hands, sobbing. “When we went home my dad said he was proud of me for staying out of trouble. Matthew and Micah were grounded and weren’t allowed to go to the homecoming parade. They had to stay home and watch a documentary about drugs and schizophrenia, even though it was all my fault.”

Lucas’ shoulders lurched unevenly from his big sobs and her mum moved her chair closer to Lucas and patted him on the back.

“There, there, Lucas,” she murmured soothingly. “You’re a very lucky boy to have such good friends.”

He nodded his head but didn’t lift his face out of his hands.

“It’s not too late to own up to your parents you know.”

He looked up at her and sniffed. His cheeks were red and wet with tears. “You’re going to tell them?”

“No, but you could tell them. I think it would probably make you feel better to clear the air, don’t you?”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah, maybe.”

She patted his shoulder and then sat back into her chair. “I don’t think that episode has any bearing on the current situation. Now, tell me, are there any girls at school who don’t like you or would prefer it if you weren’t there?”

Carlie sat and listened as Lucas talked about the trick Bess and Gina had played on him at assembly and her mum made notes on her yellow paper. It made sense that Bess and her old group was behind it, but she couldn’t help but feel that they were missing something. The pieces just didn’t fit together properly.