What We Saw(60)

“Hells yeah,” says Greg. “Battin’ cleanup.”

Dooney rolls off Stacey, who isn’t moving at all now. Deacon pulls at the front of his boxers, angling away from the camera, and takes Dooney’s place.

Randy jerks the camera up to catch one of the senior cheerleaders—a friend of Phoebe’s named Janelle. She walks by with Tracy, pointing and giggling, “Oh my god!” Tracy whispers something to her, and Janelle bursts out laughing. One of them—I can’t tell who—shrieks, “Trashy!” before they wander out of frame.

Greg takes a turn, then Dooney again, holding his beer up to the camera before guzzling the last of it and getting into position.

“Buccs be rapin’ and pillaging!” he yells. “R-and-P, babeeey!”

I bat at the keyboard, striking the space bar, freezing the scene. The counter flashes up at two minutes, seven seconds. The video is four minutes long, but I’ve seen enough. I dive toward Lindsey’s desk in the nick of time, heaving into the wastebasket underneath. There are tears running down my face, as my mouth floods with more bile. I leap up and race toward the Chens’ bathroom as Lindsey slams the laptop closed.





UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE


HarperCollins Publishers

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thirty-three

SOME THINGS ARE worse than an unanswered question.

Some answers make a situation less clear, not more so. Instead of putting my questions to rest, this video has only posed more.

“How could they just . . . mill around like that?” I ask Lindsey. She is lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling when I get back from the bathroom. “How can they walk around in the hallways at school like nothing happened? Like they didn’t witness—” My voice dissolves into tears again.

“A crime?” Lindsey says without moving.

“Yeah.”

“They don’t think it was a crime,” she says quietly. Her eyes never leave the ceiling.

“How?” I ask. “How could they walk right by Stacey and call her names while that was happening?”

Lindsey sits up and looks at me, her eyes are bright, but clear—quickened by the rage that fills her voice. “You heard Rachel’s ‘rules.’ If you learn what we learn here—that Dooney and all those guys are entitled to tell you if you’re pretty or not, that it’s up to you to make sure you don’t give boys a reason to hurt you? Then you don’t think it was a crime. You think what happened to Stacey was fair game. It was boys being boys. Just a trashy girl learning the hard way what can happen when she drinks too much and wears a short skirt.”

For what feels like a long time, I sit there in silence, taking it all in. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“We have to go talk to Ms. Speck tomorrow, right? I mean, we have to at least do that. Go tell her what we’ve seen, that we know who else was there.”

Lindsey is silent, but she shakes her head.

“Lindsey,” I jump up, pacing again, “we have to say something. If we don’t, how will the prosecutor build a case? All four of those jerks pled ‘not guilty’? If we don’t say something, they’ll get off. They’ll get away with this, and then what’s to stop them from doing it again?”

Lindsey reaches out and takes my hand, stopping my march back and forth across the rug in her room. “Kate, look at me,” she whispers. “Look at me.”

The realization crushes me beneath an avalanche of cold, hard facts. Lindsey: one of three Korean kids in our high school. Lindsey: whose dad owns a janitorial service, whose mom works all night long vacuuming other people’s offices.

“My parents’ first client when we moved here was Dooney’s dad,” Lindsey says. “Where do you think all their other clients came from?”

“But Ms. Speck is the guidance counselor. She has to keep things confidential. She can help us.” I’m pleading, but Lindsey’s mind is made up.

“I’m as angry as you are,” she says. “But I can’t risk it. If Mom and Dad’s work dries up here . . .”

She doesn’t finish her thought. She doesn’t have to.

“I have to go talk to Ms. Speck at least.”

“I know,” she says. “I wish I could go with you.”

I give her a hug before I leave and tell her I will see her tomorrow. As I drive away from the Chens’ house, I wonder how I will face Rachel and Christy. How can tomorrow be a normal Wednesday? How will I be able to walk down the hall past the Tracies or LeRon or anyone else who was there that night, and pretend I don’t know they were there? And has Ben seen this video? Has he been pretending it doesn’t exist?

Every answer is another question.

Every question is another trap.

The only answer I’m certain of is this: There’s no going back. Once you know something for sure, the only path through it is forward.

Alfred Wegener had it easy.

He only had to show up at a conference and be surrounded by people who rejected his theory for a single day in 1912. On Wednesday morning, as I walk into geology, Ben and Reggie are laughing about something as Reggie takes his seat.

What are they talking about?