Echo Bridge (7 page)

Hugh had a joint on him and offered to share it with her. I knew this to be a part of Hugh’s and Ted’s Sunday video game routine, for Hugh, at least—Ted had never smoked pot in his life. Lexi had done all her homework the day before; her entire plan for the day was to wander around in the early fall sunshine and take pictures, an activity that she felt would be drastically improved by being stoned. So she took Hugh up on his offer and climbed the stone steps to join him.

“When we’d burned it halfway down,” she said, “he put his hand on my back. I told him it wasn’t going to happen. But he just looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, it is.’” She shuddered against the car door.

Unlike me, Lexi had not been trying to hold her shattered self together in silence.

“I went to Farnsworth,” she said. “He wouldn’t do anything. Marian and I had already gotten caught in the dark room. He just sat back in his big leather chair and said, ‘You see, Alexandra, reputation is everything. I hope you’ll take that into consideration when you get a fresh start in college.’” She punched the steering wheel, hitting the horn accidentally, and the driver of the car up ahead flipped us off. “What a jackmonkey. I should screw every undergrad at Harvard and graduate summa cum laude just to prove him wrong.”

“Harvard?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I have to get in first. But my grandfather is a classics professor there, which means it would be tuition-free.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah, well. Not likely, with my being on Farnsworth’s shit list now. Marian was so not worth it. But the worst part is, my supposed reputation has nothing to do with it. He just didn’t want to bring disciplinary action against Hugh because he’d wind up having to kick him off the hockey team, if not out of school. Turns out alumni donations have a direct relationship to the hockey team’s performance.” She dug her nails into the steering wheel. “Which means he’d back Hugh if I went to the cops, probably.”

The cops. Legal charges. These were scenes I had not yet staged in my head. Ted’s possible reaction blotted out everything beyond the question of whether or not to tell him. But I had seen
The Accused
, for which Jodie Foster won her first Best Actress Oscar. I could imagine what would happen if Lexi came forward on her own. But if there were two of us…

I heard Hugh’s voice: “You dragged me up here after he blew you off in front of everyone at the poker table.” And if Farnsworth, as proxy for Belknap Country Day’s powerful alumni, was willing to brush Lexi’s accusations aside in favor of keeping Hugh on the ice, who knew how he’d manipulate our files, our character references from schools, anything?

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe if I’d told Lexi right then that I’d back her, if we’d driven to the Belknap Police Department instead of to her grandfather’s house, it all would have been different. But I didn’t. And in spite of everything, I’m not sorry.

“Wait, did he actually say all that stuff about the hockey team to you?” I asked. We were turning into Lexi’s driveway. Maple trees shaded the drive and the house sat back on a wide lawn, one of the very few Victorians in town, with a wide porch, a lot of intricate white trim, and a small tower with stained glass windows jutting off one side.

“No, just the reputation thing. I found out about the rest…” she trailed off, and we both looked at Farah Zarin, sitting on the porch steps with her bike lying on the lawn. “I’ll explain in a minute, okay? But let me handle this. Farah’s cool, but she can be kind of cagey at first.”

We climbed out of her car and slammed the doors. Lexi brushed cigarette ash off her sweater. Farah stood up and looked from me to Lexi, then back to me.

“What’s up, Lex,” she said.

“Hey, Farah. You know Courtney.”

“Sure.” She gripped the strap of her messenger bag and eyed me. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said. I looked at Lexi. I had no idea what was going on.

“Come on, you guys.” Lexi led the way onto the porch and through the front door, which was a light-colored wood with intricate flowers etched on the windows. “Max—my grandfather—has office hours today, so he won’t be home for a while.” We followed her down a hall lined with old, sepia-shaded photographs and brightly colored snapshots, all in thick wooden frames.

“You call your grandfather ‘Max’?” I asked.

Lexi shrugged. “It’s what his students call him. I think he sees me more like one of them than as his granddaughter. It’s okay, though. He’s interesting.”

“What happened to your parents, if you don’t mind me asking?” I said, pausing by a photograph of a laughing blond child who could only be Lexi, and two adults decorating a Christmas tree.

“Swissair flight 111,” she said. When I gave her a blank look, she explained: “Famous plane crash in 1998. New York to Geneva. It went down off the coast of Nova Scotia, supposedly because of faulty wiring in the entertainment system. The investigation is credited with initiating major redesigns in that kind of thing on planes. But the flight was called the UN Shuttle because it was carrying a bunch of important dignitaries, so there are many conspiracy theories.”

She opened a pair of pocket doors into what was obviously a library, although I’d never thought of Belknap as the kind of place where people had libraries in their homes. The creamy walls were lined with bookshelves, the books on them large and heavy and stamped with gold lettering. A huge painting hung on the wall, of a pale, naked woman fondling a swan suggestively, with four fat babies rolling in broken eggshells at her feet. There was a vast Oriental rug on the floor, and a globe at least four feet in diameter in an ornate wooden stand in one corner. In another, a glass case with a gilded edge displayed a series of revolvers, all with similar characteristics but slightly different, like an evolutionary spectrum of firearms. Four tall leather wingback chairs faced each other, with several mismatched side tables in between them. Lexi sat down in one and curled her legs under her.

“Max is an orphan, too, so he didn’t think twice about taking me in. He bought this house for me, basically; otherwise he’d still live in a faculty apartment in Cambridge.”

Farah and I each sat down as well, though with decidedly less relaxed postures than Lexi. She looked from one of us to the other and back gain.

“Farah,” Lexi said. “I want to tell Courtney about the Belknet.”

Farah sucked her breath through her teeth. “Lexi, it is really uncool to just spring this on me. Isn’t she friends with him?”

Lexi glanced at me. “You can trust Farah,” she said. Then she looked at Farah and added, “You can trust her, too.”

Farah and I squinted at each other. I didn’t see the point of a standoff. I’d gone this far already.

“Hugh Marsden raped me,” I said. I blinked and looked away from Farah at the room around me, but I wasn’t looking at anything anymore. I couldn’t believe I had said it out loud. It was like a valve had released just a little of the pressure inside my body, just enough to make living bearable.

“Well,” said Farah, her face relaxing into sympathy, “that’s horrible. I’m sorry, Courtney. He’s a psychopath.” She slipped a MacBook out of her bag and opened it, tapped some keys, and turned it around so I could see the screen. “Unfortunately for all of us, he’s a psychopath with a get-out-of-jail-free card. He almost broke my jaw once.”

I took the laptop from her and looked. There were a lot of open applications and lines of text that I didn’t understand, but in the center of a screen was a transcript of an instant message chat:

“Is this for real?” I asked, looking at the two other girls.

“I have access to everything that happens on the Belknet,” said Farah. “Emails, search histories, IMs, everything.”

“Oh, my God.” I stared at Farah with horror and fascination. The secrets she must know—I immediately began trying to remember every single email or chat I’d ever sent on the school intranet, wondering what things Farah must know about me.

She could read my expression. “I mean, there’s way too much happening on there for me to actually see all of it,” Farah explained. “I kind of monitor information, so I know what’s going on, but there’s really no way for me to actually use any of it without coming forward about how much access I have. I break several federal privacy laws every day.” Sighing, she said, “And the crap I see is enough to ruin my faith in humanity. Or at least in men. You would not believe some of the shit the guys at Country Day say-slash-type to each other.” Seeing my face, she quickly added, “I’ve never had a reason to delve into Ted Parker’s email account, and I’ve never read anything bad he’s written about you. He’s on the receiving end of some pretty detailed emails from his buddies, though.” She made a face. “It’s enough to make the World of Warcraft dorks look good, if I didn’t know about their Internet porn habits.”

“None of the teachers know you have access to all this stuff? Farnsworth?” I asked.

Farah shrugged and took the laptop back. “Maybe Mr. Lester”—he’s the computer teacher—“but he’s really big on the ethics of the information age, so I think he kind of chooses to trust that I am, too.” She shrugged. “I don’t see why I ought to be ethical when everyone else is practically inhuman.”

“How did he almost break your jaw?” I asked.

Freshman year, Farah started getting messages from an unfamiliar email account. Messages like “jihad anyone lately?,” and “we r watching u towelhead,” and lots worse. Farah’s favorite was “your a guantamera abortion.” She assumed the sender had meant “you’re” and “Guantanamo,” although even that didn’t make much sense.

“My mother’s Iranian, but my father’s American, and they raised me to be an atheist. Unfortunately, the assholes of the world jump to bizarre conclusions based on—” She pointed to her face. Her coloring and features were unquestionably exotic, which is to say, foreign. When the messages turned threatening—“i’m gonna slit your throat and screw your dead face sand nigger”—Farah signed up for Mr. Lester’s after-school computer classes. She knew she wouldn’t learn how to hack an email account or trace an IP address, but she figured she should start with the basics. A few months, a few private message boards, and a subscription to
2600: The Hacker Quarterly
later, and she knew the emails were coming from Hugh Marsden. Farah had always been careful to keep both her distance from him and one eye on him. Their sole in-person interaction had been at a party sophomore year, when they’d encountered each other near the keg in someone’s garage.

“He gave me this
look
,” said Farah, and I knew the look she was talking about, an amused and evaluative leer. “So I asked him if he’d taken down any jihadists lately. He threw me into the wall.” The idea that this had happened at a party—I was probably there, inside the house with Melissa somewhere—where there must have been a bunch of people around who hadn’t done anything made my stomach churn. Farah did say that Horse Riley had seen it, helped Farah up, and yelled, “Hey, man, what the hell?” at Hugh, but Farah had shaken her head and said it was no big deal. Horse got her a dishtowel full of ice for where she’d hit her face. She heard Hugh mutter something about towelheads and suicide bombers followed by a round of raucous laughter at the keg. She left soon after; she had a feeling the muttering would get louder the more they all drank. Farah stopped going to parties after that.

Lexi sighed. “As long as Hugh keeps scoring goals, Farnsworth will do whatever he can to protect him.”

“Farnsworth’s not omnipotent,” Farah said. She opened her laptop with one hand while with her other hand she began tugging at the short locks of hair that stood up at the crown of her head, twisting them into spikes. It was obviously something she did without thinking.

“Nice use of SAT vocab, Farah,” Lexi said dryly. “But what’s your point?”

“That there are other authority figures we can bring down on Hugh,” Farah dropped both hands to the keyboard and began typing.

The cops again, I thought. I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I already felt like things were moving too fast. The events of the day—yelling at Hugh in front of everybody; my fight with Ted; my first real conversation with Elaine; admitting what happened to not one, but two people, both of whom I’d barely spoken to before that afternoon—caught up with me all at once. I pressed myself back into the high, deep chair, wishing I could take it all back. If only I’d stood another foot out of Hugh’s reach in Thistleton Hall—he never could have touched me casually, never would have set me off. I’d still be alone with what he’d done to me, but I’d be able to control the situation, too.

I didn’t want to go to the cops. Lexi was right: Farnsworth would back Hugh; that was how Country Day worked. I could see the bewildered look on my mother’s face when it all came out, the pity on my older sister’s—Anna would never let something like this happen to her. I could hear the endless tide of whispers that would sweep the school. And there was Ted, of course, who’d discover that neither his best friend nor his girlfriend were the people he thought they were.

“But it’s our word against Hugh’s and Farnsworth’s,” I said. “Those IMs don’t even prove Hugh did anything.” I was practically whimpering, and Farah shot me a disbelieving look.