Mary Lou was in her dorm room the following Monday evening and not very happy about it. Her wired-together jaw was irritating her to no end, and she faced weeks yet before the wires could be removed and she could eat normally again. But worse, the scene on television yesterday, of Nancy’s loving look at that fucking guy – literally fucking guy, it was perfectly clear what he and Nancy had been doing – just brought Mary Lou’s blood to a boil. How could her lover be so unfaithful? Theirs was a true love, but Nancy had tried to ruin it by cheating on her!

There wasn’t much Mary Lou could do about it, though. She was still stuck here at Meriwether with no way to get down and try to reason with Nancy. A dozen times or more she’d gone looking for Ray to try to borrow his car again, and by this time she was willing to let him do just about anything for the use of it. That included some things that she’d never let those football players back in Spearfish Lake do to her – she was that desperate to have Nancy back.

She was just thinking about going to look for Ray again when there was a knock at the door. Maybe it was Ray, she thought – she’d left notes for him.

But no, it wasn’t Ray. It was a deputy sheriff in his brown uniform. “Miss, are you Mary Lou Kempa?” he asked.

“Yes, I am,” she said, wondering what this was all about. “Is there some problem?”

“Miss Kempa, you have been served,” he said, handing her an envelope that clearly had some papers in it. “That is an order out of the court in Hawthorne County. You are to remain no less than five hundred feet from Miss Nancy Halifax. Failure to comply with this order could result in jail time. Good day, Miss Kempa.”

Mary Lou was left standing at the open door trying to pick her jaw up off the floor, even though it had been wired together. This was the ultimate insult! How could Nancy do this to her! Her true love – a court order to stay away from her?

Mary Lou knew what such orders were all about. After all, a guy she’d known in Spearfish Lake, a football player she’d been close to, had wound up doing thirty days as the result of violating a similar court order by getting too close to that goddamn Alan Jahnke. What was the justice in that? And where was there any justice in keeping her away from her true love?

She let the court order fall from her fingers. Court order or no, she had to see Nancy. Had to. Maybe somehow she could put a stop to this insanity. Where was Ray?

*   *   *

Brenda was just about as happy as she could be. Susan had really come through for her!

The pizza party in Susan’s apartment the day before had gone much better than she could have hoped. She’d been warned to not try to sell the idea to Cody and Jan directly, but to stay comfortable, laid back, and let them talk themselves into it. Susan proved to have them pretty well figured out.

Right from the beginning Brenda could see that Cody and Jan were a very, very close couple. They were friendly and likable, not the pair of icebergs she’d seen at the news conference that morning. She could see that there was a special connection between the two, and could see right off that this story would have little to do with the shooting, but instead just who these two kids were.

Laura Delacroix had proved to be a much easier sell. Susan had been right about that, too – she was an outgoing girl, very comfortable with who she was even though she was a little out of step with the normal order of things. Brenda had never before met a woman who admitted to wearing a chastity belt more or less permanently, whether she wanted to or not, but it was clear after just a short time that the Delacroix girl not only wanted to do it, she was comfortable doing it, and she didn’t care who knew she was wearing it right now. And yes, she had a story to tell about it – several stories in fact.

After a short talk with Alan Jahnke and Summer Trevetheck, Brenda had decided against doing a segment on their Wiccan activities. Though they were more open about it than Susan had led her to believe, they thought – and Brenda agreed – that with Elise Simpkins still in critical condition at the local hospital, it would be in very poor taste. Still, Brenda made a mental note that it might be something to consider in the future, maybe featuring the Simpkins girl. She had a story to tell, too.

Susan had been so much help in putting Brenda together with two very good stories that she felt a little payback was deserved. Really, while doing a story about Dr. Thompson and Southern Michigan University wasn’t the normal kind of thing that Brenda did for WNN Newsmagazine, it was hard to pass up the bait there, too. Besides, SMU was an interesting and different place, and after a quick meeting that Susan arranged with Dr. Thompson, Brenda could see he was an interesting man with a lot of vision and the drive to make his vision a reality.

The only problem was that Brenda couldn’t afford to take her time on this one. The story of the shooting was fading already. President Obama had said something to the press that was a little more substantive than “Good Morning”-- and it never took much more – and the Republicans and conservative media were crawling all over it. Brenda hadn’t watched them herself – she had more important things to do – but Fred Appleby said that the report on the condition of the Simpkins girl had been driven to the second segment on the big network news shows, and had been brief at that. It would soon be out of the lineup entirely; over the course of the day, most of the other media had disappeared from the Southern Michigan University campus.

That meant that while the story needed to be told well, it also needed to be told quickly, while people still had some memory of the incident. It wouldn’t be long before most people forgot about it as the pressure of other events drove it from their minds.

There was nothing wrong with having to work quickly – after all, it was what Brenda specialized in. Bruce was a good cameraman, and his sidekick Angelo, who didn’t appear to speak a lot of English, wasn’t half bad either. Since Brenda acted as her own producer, as usual, that helped to speed up the shoots.

Once Brenda had gained their confidence – which hadn’t come easily – Cody and Jan proved to be very helpful. Over the course of the day, working around Cody and Jan’s classes, they’d shot several setups, talking about the two and how they had come to be. Some of the pieces had been shot in the room where the shooting occurred, but Brenda kept those to a minimum. She’d thought about shooting some in their apartment, but it was cramped, the lighting was poor, and it didn’t really supply an atmosphere she wanted to present the couple in anyway.

After a little thought, Brenda decided to shoot a big part of the interview on the front steps of the apartment house. It was a big, wide set of steps leading up to a classic Midwestern front porch that went the width of the picturesque old Victorian building – a perfect backdrop that would present just how casual the couple really was.

Thus it was that they were busy shooting late in the afternoon on Tuesday. There were only a few people present – Brenda and Bruce and Angelo, of course, along with Cody and Jan. Susan was there, but was keeping well into the background. Laura and her friend Stacy were there, too; Brenda had been working with them earlier when Cody and Jan were in class.

Brenda was sitting on the steps between Cody and Jan, talking with them about how Cody’s family had taken Jan in after that tragedy, when a battered old car pulled up out front. At first Brenda didn’t pay any attention to it, but she heard Cody say, “Oh, shit!”

“Trouble?” Brenda asked, waving her hand to signal the cameramen to cut.

“Afraid so,” he said as he got to his feet. “I better handle this. It may take a few minutes.”

“All right,” Brenda said. “Laura, there’s no point in wasting this light. Let’s go up on the porch swing and we’ll get some footage of you and me.”

Cody didn’t know Mary Lou well, and hadn’t seen her in a few years, but he knew who she was from Spearfish Lake. What’s more, he knew about the personal protection order – after all, he’d helped Nancy file it. With Jan accompanying him, he walked up to Mary Lou, while the guy driving stayed in the car.

“Hi, Mary Lou,” Cody said in a businesslike manner. “You know you’re not supposed to be here, don’t you?”

“But I have to see Nancy,” she protested. “It’s a mistake. It’s all a mistake. I need to talk to her, to make her see reason.”

“Mary Lou, what if she doesn’t want to talk to you?”

“But I have to talk to her. I have to!” Mary Lou replied, her excitement increasing. “I need her to listen to me!”

“Mary Lou,” Cody said quietly, “You know I’m a cop down here, don’t you?” That wasn’t exactly true since he was on a paid leave of absence following the shooting, but it was still true enough. “I know that Nancy filed a personal protection order to keep you at least five hundred feet away. She did that after that scene you made here the weekend before last.”

“But it’s a mistake!” Mary Lou protested, nearly in tears now. “It’s all a mistake! She needs to listen to me.”

“Mary Lou,” Cody said, still quietly, but with an edge to his voice now – an edge of authority, of someone you really don’t want to mess with. “Right now, you’re not in violation of the order, since Nancy and Logan aren’t here at the moment. But they could show up at any time, and I’d have to have you run in to the county jail. Violation of a personal protection order is contempt of court, so you wouldn’t even have to go before a judge to do thirty days.”

“You … you’d do that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would,” the cop edge still in Cody’s voice. “Mary Lou, no matter how much you may want to see Nancy, she doesn’t want to see you. She and I have talked about it a lot, and I know what happened up in Spearfish Lake last spring. You embarrassed her at graduation, Mary Lou. In fact, you embarrassed her a lot, right in front of her friends and family. That’s when she made up her mind she didn’t want to have anything more to do with you. She tried to go easy on you, Mary Lou. She tried to not embarrass you back, to let you down gently, but you never figured that out, did you?”

“But I love her!”

“She doesn’t love you, Mary Lou,” Cody replied, a little more gently now. “You managed to kill her love for you by the scene you made at graduation. She’s had to live with it, and she’s moved on. I think you’d better plan on doing the same thing, because as far as she’s concerned, it’s over with. Now, if you really want to talk to her when she and Logan get back, you can talk to her for as long as it takes for a patrol car to show up and haul you off to the county jail.”

“I … I can’t believe she’d do this to me! All I wanted was for us to be together!”

“Mary Lou,” Jan broke in. “You’re just going to have to understand that it’s not going to happen. It takes two to have a relationship, to have love for each other. It’s a process of give and take. I love Cody, Mary Lou. I love him a lot, and I’m always willing to do anything and everything he asks of me. But at the same time, he’s willing to do things for me, like protect me and be the guiding light of my life, not make demands that hurt me or embarrass me. It takes both of us, not just one of us. You and Nancy don’t have that kind of a relationship anymore, and from what I’ve heard, you never really had it. Nancy is her own person, Mary Lou. She deserves the right to make her own decisions, and that includes the decision of who to love. No matter how much you may not like it, she made her decision to not love you a long time ago.”

“But I love her! I can’t live without her!”

“I love Cody, Mary Sure. I couldn’t live without him either. But he loves me back. I hate to say it and you’re just going to have to believe it, but Nancy won’t love you back. I’ve talked to her too, and I know it. She tried, Mary Lou. She tried hard. But you wanted more than she was willing to give, and you still want it. But now, because of your actions, she doesn’t want to give it to you.”

“Do … do you really mean that?”

Jan could see she was starting to get through to Mary Lou now. “For your sake, I hate to say it, but it’s true. Mary Lou, all you’re accomplishing by continuing to pester her is to drive her further away, not get her closer. I know you don’t want to hear that things are broken beyond repair, but I think they are.”

“I … I … But I love her!”

“She doesn’t love you, Mary Lou. It was hard for her to realize that, but she made that decision, and moved on with her life. Now, it’s time for you to move on, too.”

“But … I can’t do without her! I don’t know how I’ve made it this far.”

“Mary Lou, I know you don’t know me very well, but you know who I am, right? You know what happened to me, right?”

“Yes, everyone in Spearfish Lake knows about it.”

“Mary Lou, when I was lying on the floor of our house while Bobby was raping me and Dad was waiting for another turn, I thought my life was over. I couldn’t handle it any more, just like you think you can’t handle it any more now, right?”

“What … what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I lived, Mary Lou. I somehow managed to live, to survive, and then Cody came through that door and my life changed forever. What I’m trying to tell you, Mary Lou, is that this is not the end for you. It may seem like it, but it isn’t, not by a long ways. I can’t promise you that your life is going to change for the better the instant you realize that what you had with Nancy is over with, but if you turn and walk away, it could be the first step to something better. It’s something you have to do, Mary Lou. It has to be your decision, and no one can make it for you. Not me, not Cody, not even Nancy, but instead, you. The past is the past, Mary Lou. Forget about what might have been, and move on to what can be.”

“I … if I do, I’m going to miss her.”

“Don’t you miss her now? That won’t change. Yes, you’ll still miss Nancy, but if you walk away now, maybe someday you can be friendly again, but there’s no chance you can be lovers again. You’re just going to have to accept it and move on. Mary Lou, if you walk away now, Cody won’t have to be the hard ass he can be and send you to jail. But if you stay here and he has to send you to jail, you still aren’t going to get Nancy back. Not now, not ever. There’s someone else out there for you, Mary Lou. Maybe even someone better. But you’ll never know if you don’t go find them.”

“I don’t want to do it,” Mary Lou replied, the tears rolling now. “I hate to give her up, but … I’ve lost her anyway, haven’t I?”

“Yes, you have,” Jan smiled, knowing that she’d finally gotten through, at least a little bit. “Don’t make things worse than they are by trying to fix something that can’t be repaired. Turn your back, walk away, and look for something better.”

“All right,” the distraught girl replied. “I hate to do it, but if it’s all I have left, I’ll do it.”

“Very often we have to do things we hate to do,” Jan said. “Just between you and me, Cody hated having to shoot that guy last Saturday, just like he hated to have to shoot my father and my brother. But he had to do it, because if he hadn’t done it things would have come out a lot worse. That’s where you are right now. Do you pull the trigger and make things better, or do you put the gun down and make things worse? You know what you have to do, Mary Lou. Now all you have to do is to do it.”

“I guess,” she shook her head. “But it’s not easy.”

“It wasn’t easy for Cody, Mary Lou, and it wasn’t easy for me. But we both realize it had to be done, and we’re both glad he did it. You can turn away and make things better, or you can stay here and make things worse. That’s the decision you have to make.”

“I … I … thank you Jan. Thank you, Cody. I guess I’d better go.”

“I think it’s the right decision,” Jan smiled. “Good luck, Mary Lou. It could be that better things are just around the corner for you, just like better things were just around the corner while I was dying on my living room floor. Maybe they are for you.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Please, try to keep an eye on Nancy for me, would you? I’m still going to worry about her.”

“We’ll do that,” Cody smiled, the first time he’d spoken in several minutes; he’d realized that Jan was getting through to Mary Lou much better than he could have done. “We think she’s pretty special, too.”

In a minute Mary Lou was back in the car, heading up the street. “I sure hope that’s the end of that,” Cody said to Jan as they turned back toward the porch.

“I hope so,” Jan agreed. “Maybe it will be.”

Brenda came up and joined them. “That was really impressive, you two,” she said. “I wish I’d had a camera on that, but I didn’t.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Jan replied. “That was pretty personal. The girl has some real problems. Maybe she can sort them out. Maybe not. But having them made public wouldn’t have helped her in the slightest.”

“I realized that right from the beginning,” Brenda nodded. “There are some things that need to be said on TV, and there are some things that shouldn’t be. One of the things I’ve had to learn the hard way is how to tell the difference, and I can tell you that there are a lot of people in this business who have never learned it.”

“I see that just about every time I turn on the news,” Cody agreed.

“Still, it was pretty impressive to watch. Cody, you would have sent her to jail, wouldn’t you?”

“I didn’t have to, but if Nancy had shown up and Mary Lou had made a scene, I wouldn’t have hesitated to do it. But, Brenda, it wasn’t the best solution and I knew it as soon as she got out of that car. Jan knew it, too. Most people think of cops as carrying guns and writing tickets, but mostly that’s not what being a cop is about at all. The important part about being a cop is helping people who are scared, or hurt, or afraid, or even panicked. Guns have very little to do with that. Occasionally they are a help, but mostly they aren’t. Gentle words often go a lot further. Believe me, I would have much rather spent all day Saturday trying to talk some sense into Reed than having to shoot him. But he never gave me the chance, so I had to do what I did.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand that,” she said. “It isn’t easy, is it?”

“No, it’s not. Just between us, lots of cops don’t understand it and never get to the point where they do understand it. But the good ones do. It usually wears them out pretty quickly, though, and it’s all too easy for them to become, well, cops.”

“Jan, I noticed you had to say pretty much the same thing over and over to get through to her?”

“Yes, I had to keep sending the message and hope she’d finally get it,” Jan grinned. “You should know about that. It’s just like television. You have to send the same message over and over and hope that sooner or later people will understand.”

*   *   *

Mary Lou settled into the passenger seat of Ray’s old clunker, the tears still running down her face. “Let’s head back,” she told him. “There isn’t anything more I can do here.”

“It’s obvious you didn’t get to see your friend,” he said as he turned the key to start the car. She’d given him chapter and verse of the whole situation on the trip down from Meriwether. He knew Mary Lou was a lesbian, after all – in fact, had known it from the beginning. But the desperate love she had shown had reached him a little. The bottom line was that she was a human being, not just a lesbian.

“No,” Mary Lou sighed. “I guess it’s over. I don’t want it to be, but they said I have to accept it and move on.”

“I heard a lot of what that girl was saying to you,” he said. “It sounded to me like she was talking pretty good sense.”

“I see that though I don’t like it,” she sighed, wiping her tears with her sleeve. Now that the decision had been made, things were a little easier. Nancy was in her past, whether she wanted it that way or not. She glanced over at Ray. He was still hardly the handsomest guy on earth, and there were several things about him she didn’t like. But under it all, he seemed to be a nice guy – well, for a guy, that is. Maybe? Or maybe not? “She was right. I’ll just have to move on.”

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