The Collective(52)

0417: It makes us monsters.

0001: YES.

0001 is typing . . .

0001: Think about monsters you’ve seen in movies. Frankenstein’s monster. King Kong. Godzilla.



I blink at the screen.


0417: I’m not sure I’m following.

0001: None of these monsters are evil. It’s the evil of others that makes them powerful. Beaten down by the world, shunned, robbed of what they love, they don’t curl up and die. They don’t apologize. They fight back. They get bigger, stronger, more terrifying. You are a monster. We all are. Be grateful for THAT.



“Yes.” I say it out loud, close as I’ve ever felt to breaking the surface. A gust of wind rattles my bedroom window, then another. I get up from my desk to make sure the window’s locked, and catch sight of the darkening sky, swirling snowflakes. Out of nowhere, as though to punctuate 0001’s point. I move back to my computer and type out the thought as it enters my mind.


0417: But what if I’m a different type of monster? What if I’m more like the monster in Alien?



Her response is so quick, my words barely have the chance to vanish.


0001: She was a mother. That space crew fucked with her kids. She gave them exactly what they deserved.




THE SNOWSTORM IS over in just under an hour, leaving strewn branches in its wake and a light, slippery coat on my walkway, like spray paint. One of those “juvenile delinquent storms,” as Matt used to call them. They show up, vandalize your house, and get out of town. I’m surprised I haven’t lost power—a blessing, considering I haven’t stoked the woodstove.

I put on my coat and gloves, wool scarf and hat. I head outside and salt my walkway. Then I survey the driveway for branches, pulling the bigger ones out of the path of my car and dragging them over to the woodshed out back to saw up later for the stove. Once I’m done, I walk out to the main road and head up the mountain, the cold air biting my face.

Trying to feel the way she did at the end, Joan would say. But this time I’m trying to feel the way he did, stumbling drunk or pumped full of GHB or whatever it was she slipped into his drink, the girl—one of us, a sister—like a ghost beside him, fading in and then out of his line of vision, then multiplying into other girls, other women. Did a group of them drag him? Was there a gun at his back?

I want to know who he thought of in those last moments of consciousness, before the knife I bought was slipped into his pocket, before he passed out in the snow, same as my daughter did. Did he think of Emily? I want to believe he did—that without his parents there to protect him from the truth, he finally understood what he had done to my daughter, to my family. To me. I want to believe he was sorry.

After my private chat with 0001, I switched back to my regular server and checked my email. There were two new ones in my inbox: one from Xenia Hedges, confirming our contract and telling me how much she enjoyed our meeting, and one from Brayburn College. I’m still not sure how I got on their mailing list, but the email is a newsletter, the main story Harris Blanchard’s untimely death and his funeral, tomorrow, on the Brayburn campus. They’re going to bury him next to Tom’s mother, his grandmother. Harris Blanchard was a Brayburn double legacy whose parents had met there during freshman orientation week, whose grandmother had been a Brayburn Angel—meaning she donated more than five hundred thousand dollars a year to the college, right up until her death. And the newsletter had read that way.

Our community is devastated by the loss of senior and Martha L. Koch Humanitarian Award–winner Harris Blanchard, it read. An extraordinary student, son, friend, and human being.

If your family gives enough money to a school, that school will defend you to the death, no matter what the facts are behind that death. They’re like cults you pay to be the leader of. And Brayburn, as I learned from Xenia, of all people, has been serving its devotees an especially potent strain of Kool-Aid. “Your daughter—what happened to her—was one of the reasons Glynne and I split,” she had told me. “It wasn’t the first time they’d tried to gloss over the bad actions of a privileged student, and to see her siding with the school, over and over, just because she was an alum and Dean Waverly liked her artwork. . . .”

I’m angry all over again—a monster, created by Brayburn. If anyone from the school had bothered reaching out to Matt and me rather than to the press, if they’d shut up about the dangers of fraternity culture and just once offered us a real apology, treated us like human beings rather than something bad that had happened to their reputation.

At least they invited me to Harris Blanchard’s funeral.

By the time I reach the trail that leads to Unicorn River, my eyes are watering from the cold. My teeth chatter and my fingers are frostbitten, even in my heavy wool gloves. I can’t feel the tip of my nose. But I keep moving until I catch sight of the big smooth rock, the stream frozen solid, just as it was five years ago, after Emily was taken from me.

As I reach the rock, I imagine Emily at six on a sunny spring day, smiling up from the red-checked blanket we used to use for our picnics, cookie crumbs all over her face. Unicorn River wasn’t frozen back then. It was a whooshing stream we pretended we discovered ourselves, and for all we knew, we could have. In all the times I’ve visited this spot, I’ve never encountered another person.