A Second Bite at the Apple (27 page)

“You forgot to add the Sydney who used her boyfriend as a pawn in her quest for fame and fortune,” Jeremy says.

More banging on the front door. “It isn't like that. I swear.”

“So you didn't steal my private e-mails without permission?”

I stare at him for a long while. My lip trembles. “I didn't really steal them. . . .”

“Oh, okay. You just borrowed them, right?”

“I . . . well . . .”

“I'm out of here. I don't have time for this.”

“Jeremy, please—don't go. Let me explain.”

“Explain what? That you've been lying to me for months? That's probably the only reason you kept dating me, isn't it? To get your big scoop.”

“That isn't true! I didn't want any of this.”

“Then what did you want?”

The doorbell rings a fourth time, this time with more banging. Seriously? This 1-800-FLOWERS guy must be the biggest dumbass on the planet. Just leave me a freaking note and try to deliver the flowers later. I do not have time for this.

“I wanted . . . I wanted . . .” A fifth round of ringing. Sweet lord. This flower guy is going down. “Let me get that. But please—stay here. I want to talk about this.”

“I'm not staying anywhere,” Jeremy says.

“Just ten seconds—please.”

Before he can argue, I run down the stairs in my robe and slippers, scurry through the entryway, and unlock the front door.

I yank it open. And then I panic.

Twenty men dressed in black are standing right in front of me, their guns pointed directly at my face. A man at the back shines a huge, round light at me.

“FBI!” they shout as they barge in. “Put your hands in the air!”

I stick up my hands as one of the officers busts into Simon's apartment. “Is anyone else upstairs?” one of the officers shouts.

“My . . . my boyfriend.” I pause. “And my ex-boyfriend.” The officer looks at me quizzically. “It's complicated,” I say.

An agent immediately runs up my stairway, and another whirls me around, presses my hands behind my back, and slaps a pair of handcuffs around my wrists.

And that's when I decide, without question, this is the worst day of my entire life.

The FBI agent grabs my arm and marches me down my front steps. He forces me onto my knees, facing the sidewalk, and my furry robe bunches up beneath me as he presses a gun into the small of my back. When I look over my shoulder, I see another agent pushing Simon out of the building, followed by Jeremy and Zach. Like me, they are all handcuffed. Zach is also still wearing nothing but an undershirt and boxers.

As Jeremy and Zach approach, Jeremy's eyes flit between me and the FBI agents. “What the hell is going on?”

“We have a warrant to search the premises,” one of the officers says.

Jeremy balks. “On what grounds?”

The officer doesn't flinch. “Down on the ground, sir. We'll explain once we've secured the building.”

The officers force Jeremy and Zach to their knees, one on either side of me, and press guns into their backs. Simon kneels next to Jeremy, with yet another officer watching over him.

“Do you have any idea what this is about?” I whisper across Jeremy to Simon. Simon stares straight ahead and doesn't respond. I try again. “Why are they searching our building?”

Simon shrugs without looking at me.

“All clear!” shouts an officer standing on the front stoop.

The officer behind Simon lifts him to his feet. “Could you please come with me, sir?”

He drags Simon into the house and several other agents follow, while Jeremy, Zach, and I continue to kneel on the front lawn.

“Can we go inside, too?” Zach asks, shivering in the early morning air.

“In a minute,” the officer behind me says.

“Can you at least tell us what all of this is about?”

A fourth officer approaches, his hands on his hips. “The possession and dissemination of child pornography.”

“WHAT?”
all three of us say in unison.

“We have records of multiple downloads of pornographic images at this address,” the officer says.

“This is some sort of mix-up,” I say, my voice tense and pleading. “I've never done anything like that—ever, ever, ever.”

“And what about your half-naked friend over here?”

I glance at Zach. “He never even visited my apartment until last night.”

“And this fellow?” he says, nodding at Jeremy.

“He'd never do anything like that.”

“You're sure?”

“I—of course I'm sure.”

“Well, we have documentation of multiple downloads as recently as last night on wireless network SwannStream, beginning at 7:46 p.m.”

“I wasn't even home at 7:46,” I say. “I was at the Kennedy Center.”

“With me,” Zach adds.

“Oh, so you two were on a date?” Jeremy huffs. “Fucking perfect.”

“It wasn't a date,” I say.

“Like hell it wasn't,” Zach says.

The officer holds up his hand, his eyes shut. “There are other instances besides last night.”

“I'm telling you—the three of us have nothing to do with this.”

The officer pulls out a piece of paper. “The warrant is for this address. This house.”

“This isn't a house—it's two separate apartments.” The pieces start coming together. “Don't you see? It's all a big misunderstanding. I share a wireless network with my downstairs neighbor. This has nothing to do with us.”

“The house is deeded as a single-family home, and we have a warrant to search the entire premises.”

“But it
isn't
a single-family home. It's two separate apartments. My landlord, Al, never changed the deed.”

The officer stares at me coolly. “Well, there's only one functional doorbell, and according to the legal record, it's a single residence.”

Zach jumps in. “I still have the ticket stubs from last night's concert upstairs. If you let me back inside, I can show them to you.”

“Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?” Jeremy says.

The agent narrows his eyes. “We'll let you inside when we want to let you inside. Until then, you're not going anywhere.”

The agent walks back toward the house, but the other three officers continue to stand behind us, still pressing guns into our backs. Only now, with my view no longer obstructed, do I notice how many people have gathered around my front gate, staring at us.

“Like this wasn't already the shittiest morning of all time,” Jeremy mumbles under his breath, eyeing the crowd.

I sigh. “Tell me about it.”

“Tell you about it? Tell
you
about it? I'm the one who found out his girlfriend has been keeping secrets from him for months.”

“I told you—I didn't mean for any of this to turn out the way it did.”

“How did you think it would turn out?”

I pull at the handcuffs around my wrists. “I don't know. I guess I hoped I'd finally have the career I've always wanted. And you'd be glad this story finally came out.”

“Glad? Why would I be glad?”

“Because the whole cover-up made you uncomfortable. You said so yourself. Now the public knows the truth. They had a right to know.”

“Of course they did. But so did I.”

“Okay, well, what about me? Why weren't you upfront about your past?”

“I was.”

“Not until I dragged the truth out of you. Would you even have told me about the whole ‘cash for comment' scandal if I hadn't brought it up?”

“Whoa, ‘cash for comment'?” Zach's eyes light up. “As in the scandal at the
Chronicle
? That was you?”

Jeremy grimaces. “Butt out, dude.”

Zach looks at me, apparently disgusted. “So you'll date some slimeball, but you won't give me a second chance. Nice.”

“He isn't a slimeball,” I say.

“I beg to differ.”

“Like you're one to talk! You slept with someone else and lied about it. What does that make you?”

“A guy who made a mistake.” He locks his eyes on mine. “Sounds like you might know what that's like.”

My insides twist into knots, and I turn to Jeremy, who is staring at the ground. “I'm sorry, Jeremy. I should have told you about the story.”

He sniffs as he looks up and scans the crowd, which is slowly growing in number. “Why didn't you, then?”

I open my mouth to answer, but nothing comes out. Why hadn't I told him? Because I didn't want him to be mad at me? Because I worried he'd talk me out of doing the story? God, how lame am I?

“Because I was afraid of losing you,” I say.

Jeremy goes silent for a long while as a gentle June breeze blows across my front lawn. A few more people gather in front of our house, whispering and shrugging shoulders as the FBI agents walk in and out of the building.

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe if you'd told me the truth, I could have helped you with the story?”

I screw up my face. “You made it pretty clear you had no interest in doing that.”

“But if you were so passionate about it . . . All I'm saying is, I might have changed my mind.”

I fumble over my words, but before I can put together a complete sentence, I let out a small gasp. Along the fringes of the growing crowd, I spot Melanie, my former
Morning Show
producer, her spectacled face peeking out from behind a tall man's shoulder.

Melanie catches my stare and pushes her way through the horde of nosey neighbors.

She hunches her shoulders conspiratorially, as if the fact that I am kneeling on my front lawn in my robe and slippers, looking like Chewbacca Doubtfire, is some sort of secret between the two of us. This, of course, only heightens the mob's interest in me and my boyfriends present and past.

I smile nervously, hoping Melanie will understand I am in no position to talk right now. She doesn't take the hint.

“Hey, Boogerface!” she half yells, half whispers. “What
is
all this?”

The FBI agent behind me clears his throat. “Ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to step back.”

“I'm with the press,” Melanie says, one leg over the fence.

“I don't care who you are,” he says, pushing his gun harder against me. “Step back.”

Melanie sticks her nose in the air. She sniffs loudly. “Is that police militarization I smell?”

“Ma'am, I will say this one more time: Step. Back.”

She sighs. “Fine, fine.” She looks at me and starts to leave, but then her eyes land on Jeremy, and she freezes. “Hey, why do I recognize you? What's your name?”

Jeremy's entire face turns red, out of embarrassment or anger or, more likely, a combination of both. Melanie's eyes dart between the two of us, and she reaches into her bag, grabs her phone, and points it at Zach, Jeremy, and me.

“No—Melanie!”

She snaps a photo, then another, and stuffs the phone back in her bag. She scampers off as the FBI agent shouts after her, while Zach, Jeremy, and I kneel handcuffed on my front lawn, on display like zoo animals in front of the growing mob.

If there is a way this day could get any worse, I don't want to know what it is.

But there is an endless number of ways in which this day can get worse, and the universe is determined to ram them up my ass in the most painful way possible. After a mortifying twenty minutes of kneeling in handcuffs on my front lawn, over which period I see no fewer than five other people I know, the FBI agents finally escort the three of us back into my apartment. On the way, we pass Simon, whose lanky arms are still handcuffed behind his back as an FBI agent guides him out the front door. The agent escorts Simon into the back of a marked police vehicle parked out front and slams the door before getting into the front seat. If they know Simon is the suspect, then why are they still treating the three of us like criminals? And why did this need to happen on a day when I look like a rabid squirrel?

When we reach the top of the stairway in my apartment, the floor is littered with old folders, books, and papers, some of which I'd forgotten I owned, all of which I will have to sort through and reorganize once the officers leave. When I look down, I see a stack of notes from the Green Grocers story splayed out like a pile of autumn leaves.

One officer scans the material on my laptop, and another makes a copy of my hard drive to take back for further analysis. Despite our repeated attempts to explain what happened—despite the display of our NSO ticket stubs and the fact that they've already carted away the perpetrator of these alleged downloads—the agents proceed with their interrogation undeterred. At no point is Zach offered the opportunity to put on pants, nor am I given the option of wearing something other than a hideous furry robe, and so the three of us sit on my couch looking like a bunch of crackheads while a team of FBI agents ransacks my apartment.

Finally, once they have inspected every last piece of furniture and electronic equipment, they leave almost as quickly as they came. As the last officer departs, Jeremy gets up from the couch and heads for the stairs.

“Jeremy—wait. Please don't go.”

“Why, so I can get firebombed by SEAL Team Six? No thanks.”

“Please. Just . . . stay for a few minutes so we can talk.”

Zach cups my shoulder. “If he wants to go, let him.”

I shrug off his hand with a violent twitch and stand up, pointing my finger at him. “Shut up. This has nothing to do with you.”

“All I'm saying is . . . I think it's over.”

“You know what's over? You and me.”

“Syd . . .”

“Don't ‘Syd' me. We're through. We've been through for years.”

Zach opens his mouth to say something, but Jeremy's phone rings and interrupts him. Jeremy glances at it. “It's work. I have to go.”

“Can you call them back?”

“Seriously? What part of this don't you understand? Your story has upended my client's entire company.”

“You can take the call in my bedroom. I just . . . I need to talk to you.”

He sighs. “Fine. Whatever. This is such bullshit.”

He traipses through the mess on the floor and slams my bedroom door shut behind him.

“You'd seriously rather date that shill than me?” Zach says.

“Jesus Christ, Zach, get over yourself. He isn't a shill. Frankly, he's probably a better guy than you are.”

“I have never, ever compromised my integrity the way that guy did, nor would I.”

“You cheated on me and broke my heart. Right now? To me? That's worse.”