Reputation(98)

I shut my eyes.

“And then I saw you at Manning’s funeral—and I was like, Holy shit. I remember her. You’ve barely aged—good for you. And you seemed uncomfortable being back here, almost like you were so afraid it was going to happen to you again. Am I right?”

My lips part, but it’s like my voice box has been slashed. I need out of here.

“Why didn’t you go to your father about it? Bigwig at the school, you’d think he would have been able to help.”

Rage fills me. “Why didn’t you say anything? You were there, too. If you thought it was so disgusting, you should have turned them in.”

“I wish I could have, but I didn’t see it happen. Besides, those guys would have lawyered up and made me look like a fool. I wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on.” He leans in. “Is that what your father said to you, too? That the frat has a lot of political pull within the school, and you shouldn’t cross them? Lotta big donors within those ranks. Lotta old-boy money.”

“No.” I wrench my head away. “It wasn’t like that.”

I’d thought about saying something to my father, afterward. I wanted to. In an ideal world, my mother would still be alive, and I could have gone to her first . . . but unfortunately, I didn’t have that luxury. It wasn’t that I was afraid of confronting my father . . . but no matter how eloquent my monologue, I couldn’t blurt it out. It gave my dad such pride when I brought home stellar grades, high SAT scores—and despite my cynicism about a lot of things, that still mattered to me. I didn’t want to cause him complications or strife; I dreaded to think how this might affect his brand-new position if we prosecuted. For all I knew, the guy who raped me had parents whose donations to the school had built the new science building last year. I wasn’t stupid. I knew political connections were everything at Aldrich. I also knew how much my father relished his job, how hard he’d fought to become president. It was his saving grace now that my mother was gone. To threaten his position seemed cruel.

But even more than that, I didn’t want to be the girl in the news. I’d read enough about girls who cry rape—the shame people put on them, how people seem to circle the wagons around the guys, saving them. My face and body, every choice I made, every guy I’d hooked up with in the past, every beer I’d drunk and dumb thing I’d done—people would dig up all of it. I’d be under a microscope, each damning fact compounding toward a verdict that this was my fault, not the guy’s. I’d led him on, I’d wanted it, I shouldn’t have gone to the party in the first place. I didn’t want to go to trial. I didn’t want this bullshit to follow me around. I didn’t want to be marked as the girl who was stupid enough to be raped in the first place.

And so I said nothing. I didn’t tell anyone. I drew further and further into myself, blaming myself, even hating myself. It was only last year, when I was reporting on a story of a young woman who’d been raped at another prestigious university, that I got involved in the online forum. I’d been astonished when women also having attended Aldrich parties came forward, too. Some of them were closer to my age, and some of them were younger, but it was always the same frat—Chi Omega. Some of them had tried to complain, but it had gone nowhere. That was what scared me the most. That even if I’d tried, I would have been silenced.

“I don’t blame you for wanting vengeance,” Ollie says, and he sounds almost empathetic, like he’s on my side. “You snapped, didn’t you? That’s why you did what you did.”

I wrench away and make a break for the door, but Ollie quickly runs for it, once again blocking the exit. His body is rank with Axe spray. “You’re not just back in town to fight for your sister’s innocence, are you? You want to witness the downfall of Aldrich firsthand. The school that ruined you—you want it to go down.”

I stare at him, not sure what he’s talking about. Ollie smiles. “Please. You initiated the hack, and you know it. Your boy? Blue Parker? We traced it to him. The whole shebang.”

I blink hard. The words don’t even make sense at first. “Wait. Wait.” My thoughts are whirling. Blue? My Blue? But that makes no sense. Except then it hits me. There’s a file about me on the desk. There’s evidence in those pages. A trail I didn’t even realize I’d created.

“He said someone encouraged him to look into Aldrich,” Ollie went on. “It’ll lessen his sentence if he tells us who kicked this all off. I did some digging about what the guy was all about, where he’s from. And guess what I found. California. Not far from you, as a matter of fact. Even more interesting? Your number is in his cell phone.”

“I-I don’t know anyone named Blue,” I stammer.

“Sure you do! I got records from your editor. Richard, is it? You wrote a piece on hacks last year, but he killed the article before it published. That’s the saying, isn’t it?”

My jaw falls open. Ollie spoke to Richard?

“You got to know some hackers. Got to know how evasive they could be, how they could infiltrate a system without a footprint. And you still had this old wound, an old crime gone unsolved—hell, you wanted to punish people, right? I would.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Well, you certainly punished a lot of people. Four whole universities’ worth! Guess you figured you might as well expose everyone’s sins, huh?”