The American Girl (31 page)

JULY 27, 2015

Draft Blog Entry

I
f you're reading this, it's because something happened to me and you've found my phone. Maybe it's the last part of me that will remain, unless I manage to turn things around. I'm in the caves, waiting for Raphael and Noé . . . typing these last words and not knowing who they are for or what will happen after now. The last few hours have been the edgiest of my life. I itch to escape, but not yet.

In the car, I kept checking that the lock on the door of Raphael's car was up. I needed to know I was still free to go. He was strumming the wheel of his Bic, offering me a light.

“Do you,” he began, “have everything packed for tomorrow?”

Third time he'd asked me that.

I took a deep drag, stared out the window. Because he
knew
. He'd been looking at my phone, had cracked my password some
how. He'd already read this blog, seen that I'd been spilling his secrets here and now he wanted to stop me showing anyone else.
All the more reason to keep on with it
, I thought,
in case I don't make it, so at least people know what really happened
. Now I know that his charm's just part of a game we're playing to pass the time. In less than an hour, there'll be a party in these caves, the last taste of France,
farewell to Quinn
.

“Noémie will be there,” he told me, “some others, too. There'll be dancing, a few drinks, and a bonfire. Sounds good, doesn't it? How your first trip far from home is supposed to be.”

When the party's over, I can take that ticket from him and use it to get home.
Home.
I close my eyes . . . try to imagine it. All I can see is a black video screen whirling.

Dushka and Ruth, Sita and Gemma
. . . and Quinn.
The girls come and they go away quietly every time. But where? Noémie doesn't know. She's just afraid the same thing will happen to me, that she'll lose me like all the others. She's afraid of being left alone again, with nothing but Maman and Raffi and her nightmares.

After two hours of driving through ditches and rural back roads, we lost our tail. So we thought at least. The road by the sea was empty except for us. On Raphael's side, wheat fields reeled past in a golden blur. On mine, the sea was a strip of blue. With each turn of the tires, my guts curled tighter around ground glass at the thought of tonight. Woods sprang up from the yellow dirt at the rim of a cornfield, sudden and sparse, not the acne-scarred plane trees that crowd the village roads but sad black beech trees
waving their skinny arms. Like a legion of emos at a Jimmy Eat World concert—a scene from my old life.

The road twisted around hidden little beaches full of washed-up trash, dark cave pockets hacked into the coastline. I watched Raphael's face watching the road, the features unreadable. I wanted to know what he knew, what he had planned, but I didn't want to open another box I couldn't close. I stared out the window, wishing I still had my cigarette, the sun tattooing disco lights into my eyes. That's when I saw the turn into the woods, the dirt track leading up to the caves, and I would soon find out what he wanted with me. He'd find a few things out, too.

In the darkness of this cave, with its constant drip of water, I squeeze my eyes shut, see an image of us standing in the ashes of burned wood and cigarette cartons, sucking beer from a keg, the beat from the sound system pounding the ground, moving us despite ourselves. White pills, blue pills. Me dancing in the white dress I put on this morning because it made me feel less . . . sullied, my sandals shucked off, my feet bare, almost a child again. At the center of the gathering: Raphael Pan-like, demonic, doomed. Or that's how I imagine my last night in this place could be. I don't want to dream up the alternative versions . . .

We parked between ancient trees and walked under their witch fingers. I felt a last twitch of uncertainty. It might have been better to do something, anything than come here, after all. Raphael turned to me, unsmiling. Without his sunglasses, his eyes looked cold.

“Where's Noémie?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

He pressed his finger to his lips,
Shhh
.

Then he was on the phone, snapping questions or instructions. Nodding. Frowning. He hung up, pulled a cigarette out of the pack, and tapped it, front-loading the nicotine hit.

“Time to play one last game, Quinn: hide and go seek.”

My hands were shaking. I shoved them into my pockets. “I guess it is.”
Two can play at that game
, I thought, eyeing the caves up ahead.

“Let's go a little further up, then.” He smiled that half smile I used to find cute, gesturing me forward as if I were a sheep.

We moved deeper into the woods, into darkness.

Les Yeux, we meet again. The eyes of the caves watch us as if they remember.

When we got close, we stood still for a moment, on the edge of something. Raphael drew deep on his cigarette, dropped it, ground it out with his heel. I had the weird feeling of looking at his expensive shoes, his black shirt. Looking at everything about him closer than before. I was struck by how beautiful his skin was, the most flawless skin I'd ever seen, I thought. And his hands were beautiful, too. Delicately veined. An artist's hands.

Now I can feel the caves' weird hatefulness. I remember that terrible crimes happened in here. Do they lurk somewhere, those nightmares? Have they soaked inside the rock and loam like ghosts? Are they trapped there, howling their pain forever?

It's dark. After a long silence, Raphael flicks on his phone, shines its dim flashlight into the darkness. “We've waited ages. Don't think Noé is coming . . .” he says. He sounds nervous all of a sudden.

“She said she'd show and she will.” The grit in my voice surprises me.

“Well, I guess this is my new hideout . . . those guys in the car will never find us here.”

“No, never,” I say, steeling myself for what will come next. The word is lost in the darkness, the endless cool, sardonic laugh of the caves. They swallow my thoughts in a mocking echo.
So so so so . . . so what?
they seem to say.

We go deeper, edging through one more narrow hole that leads into one of the bigger chambers. The light of his flashlight flicks and gleams off corners of rock, casting huge shadows into the next chamber like monsters with mouths full of teeth. On the threshold of the room, my body tenses. This was the chamber he took me to, where we lay naked together, trusted each other, but that was a long time ago.

AUGUST 12, 2015

I
climbed in through the same window as before and ran down the corridor, past the coldly gleaming trophy cabinet and the staged school photographs. When I came to the double doors at the end of the corridor, a flashing light caught my attention. It filtered through the squared glass window in a closed door, carved into fragments of shifting colored light on the floor in front of me. I walked to the door and peered in. Inside were banks of dusty PCs. Behind them, blurred pink shapes squirmed and swam, writ large on the white wall. I pushed the door open.

A projector hummed, beaming flickering images through its single eye. The film it flung onto the wall played soundlessly. It was a film of a girl's face with plastic film pulled tight over her nose and lips. The room around her was dark and it was hard to see the details of her pale face, but I recognized her, anyway. Nicole Leclair's mouth sucked the plastic wrap in and out, her breath making a vapor. Her eyes were wild, afraid. The covering
tightened over her face, until, after a few choppy frames, she fell still. It was the clip Quinn had been sent via Snapchat back when all of this began.

I followed the projector lead to one of the prehistoric-looking PCs. It was switched on. The same film played there. I clicked the little
x
in the corner, closing it, and saw that the desktop was covered with .mov files. Video clips. Littered with them, in no particular order, jumbled on top of each other, some of them piles deep. Snowdrifts of video. As soon as I'd closed the first, another opened automatically. New grainy footage was beamed onto the wall: a girl lying prone on a bed, smiling happily, another girl chatting away, naked to the waist. I closed them and there came another and another, spewing out of the computer like vomit. In every one there was a girl, some faces familiar from Raphael's wall of trophies in the La Rochelle squat.

As I looked at these girls, it seemed that they'd trusted the cameraman. Perhaps, like Quinn, they'd let themselves be filmed willingly, believing Raphael loved them, not knowing what he wanted the films for. The unpleasant words
revenge porn
came into my head. Another video opened up: a woman dancing naked, her back to the camera. She turned to face the lens and I recognized Stella Birch. As soon as I closed that, something different spun open, an Excel document logging more code names of girls, alongside email addresses. It was an organized operation—seducing girls, filming them, blackmailing them to pay up and stay quiet.

I clicked the spreadsheet shut, my sweaty hands slipping on the keys. Another film opened. In this, the room was different
again. It was light, pretty, familiar somehow. A skinny girl lay on her side, her dark hair falling in front of her face. Behind her, just visible on the bookshelf, was a family photo, a mom and dad smiling at the beach with their tanned kids. Then she turned her sad eyes to the camera: Noémie Blavette.

Bile rose in my throat. I smashed my hand on the keyboard, desperate to block the images out. But all that happened was more videos opened, many of them at once, smiling, laughing, innocent of the humiliation to come. I covered my ears, seeing, in among them, a darker film, even grainer than the rest. I recognized Quinn, her soft lips pressed against another girl's. Noémie. Inside the chamber of a cave, they kissed and touched, sighed and gasped. The camera moved around them, panning in and out, egging on their performance.

Another video opened up beside it, filmed in the same dark chamber. This one showed Raphael, lit by a single spotlight. He stood on a picnic blanket, a bottle of wine and some stained glasses tumbled beside him, the same things with which he'd been found. Raphael's face was contorted in an angry frown. He began to undress, beginning with his shirt, then his shoes. The striptease looked forced, unwilling. As he stripped, the other videos playing on the screen slowly ended and closed on their own.

In the spotlight, Raphael turned his face first to one person, then another, hidden behind the camera, protesting alternately in English, in French. When he was completely naked, he stood with his hand over his privates, looking every bit as vulnerable as the girls in the videos he'd made. Another figure entered the
frame. It was Émilie Blavette, her face red and furious. First she ran to her son, hugging him protectively, then she lunged at the camera, her hand hitting the lens. The file closed and the screen of the PC fragmented, its colors shivering. Then it turned blue.

There was a cough behind me. I turned around to see Quinn, her face dyed blue by the final projector image. Beside her stood Noémie and their hands were joined, Noémie's delicate fingers squeezing Quinn's strong, tanned hand.

“Oh my God, are you guys okay?” I asked, taking a step towards them until something in the way Quinn looked at me made me stop. Something in the way they were both looking at me, as it happened.

JULY 27, 2015

Draft Blog Entry

After we watched the videos in the school computer room, Noé and I sat in the woods while the sky grew dark. She didn't want to go back to the house again and I didn't want to leave her alone. Not that I had anywhere to go myself.

Sitting with our backs pressed against the white bark of a tree, our bodies vanished into the night and our voices became all of us. When I asked her the question
How did things get this way?
it seemed to me that the door that had been closed over the story of her life for so long had been opened. The secrets tumbling forth were unstoppable. I smoked and listened as she told me the story of what happened that day two years ago when her father supervised a school trip to the caves.

Nicole was Noémie's best friend in the school, but neither of them was popular. The cool kids like Freddie, Sophie, and Ra
phael pushed them around probably the average amount that uncool nerd kids get pushed around. A little while before the trip to the caves, though, Raphael and Freddie kicked the bullying up a notch. What had been ordinary geek-oppression like getting splashed in the face during swimming lessons became the dunking game. And then there were the running games of truth or dare that everyone felt pressured to be part of. It was just that the dares kept getting worse and, for her part, Émilie turned a blind eye to it. She thought her son could do no wrong. The other teachers were too poorly paid to care.

During one game, the dare was holding a square of plastic wrap from one of Raphael's sandwiches over your mouth until he said you could stop. Most of the kids got off with a few seconds. When it came to Nicole's turn, Raphael kept timing her until she passed out and made a film of her humiliation. Hence the video Noé first sent me. When they were alone together, she pleaded with her brother to stop, but he just made fun of her. He seemed to take pleasure in what he was doing, and after her protest, the things he did to Nicole just got worse. Sometimes Noé wondered if it was the vicious fights her parents had that had made her brother turn cruel. She told her father what was going on and he promised he'd have a talk with Émilie, but of course that just turned into a fight, too.

The day of the school trip, Émilie had a migraine, so Marc took the kids to Les Yeux alone. Raphael was in his element. He'd been to the caves so many times with his father that his knowledge of their tunnels and chambers was second only to Marc's. At some point—Noé wasn't quite sure how—she and Nicole ended
up with Freddie and Raphael, separated from the rest of the party. Raphael wanted to play a game. He knew about the hidden chamber from his father. It was a family legend, a special secret, and he knew just how to use it. He led the girls into it and told them its gruesome history—the reason it was created, the gas in the rock, the people who had died in there centuries before. Noémie had heard it before, but Nicole started to freak out. She didn't like it. She had to get out. That was when Raphael shut the two of them inside.

Noé remembers banging on the door, begging her brother to open it, remembers Nicole crumpling in a heap against her, so terrified all she could do was cry. Afraid of the rocks around her, she started gasping for air, having some sort of panic attack. It was Freddie who weakened and undid the bolt in the end. By then, Nicole was unconscious. Even when Marc carried her out into the sunshine, she never woke up. The doctors said later that she had a heart defect, that it ran in her family. No one could have known that the fear she felt inside that chamber would kill her.

It didn't stop the board of governors from shutting the school, though. Émilie, who had thrown every atom of her energy into her headmistress role, was furious. But she didn't take her anger out on Raphael. She'd painstakingly protected him through the initial inquiry and afterwards it was Marc who took the brunt of her wrath. He was the grown-up in charge. He was also weak, a disappointment, and she knew he was having an affair. Marc had already been struggling. His nightclub business was failing. He'd used up what money was left to bribe contacts
in the local police force to drop their investigation into Nicole's death and the Blavettes could no longer afford Mas d'Or. Émilie's wrath seemed to push him beyond the breaking point. One day after they'd closed the school and closed the caves and St. Roch was trying to salvage its tarnished image for the tourists, Marc walked out and never came back.

Noé cries when she tells me about the black hole that opened up after her father disappeared, how she didn't know if he had got lost in the caves or just run away. Sometimes she didn't care and sometimes she thought about little else. Life moved on in St. Roch. Nicole's parents left. A new school opened up and the students took lessons from their new teachers there. Since the incident had been kept quiet, tourists still came to the town and Émilie was able to sign Noémie up to exchange programs, hosting students in return for a pittance, but it was never enough.

Émilie was out of control. She would swing between manic weeks when she would shop and socialize as if nothing had happened and weeks of sitting in an armchair all day, not moving, stricken with guilt that Nicole died on her watch. She ran up debts that Stella had to help her with. She went out partying and came home late or not at all. Worst of all, she seemed to blame Noémie for everything now that Marc wasn't there anymore to shout at.

Yes, that was the hardest part, to hear how her mother hated her, the main reason being that she was too like her father: her looks, her mannerisms, her weakness. Everything about Noé reminded her mother of that bastard. She would see that look in
her mother's eyes after she'd been drinking, as if she was thinking of revenging herself, as if she had confused the two of them. That look terrified her. That was why Noé started starving and cutting herself. If she vanished, her mother wouldn't have to look at her anymore.

All the while, Raphael shone ever more golden, the town hero. He won sports medals, scored straight A's, a scholarship to the Sorbonne. Noé never noticed him suffer a day of guilt for what he had done to Nicole. In fact, it seemed to inspire him to play more cruel games, as if they had become some kind of addiction. When he came home from Paris with a video camera
,
Maman was so pleased. Her son was going to be a famous film director, a star! One day Noémie looked at what was on the camera and found out the kind of films he'd been making and in a video of one of their exchanges the girl looked scared. She took it and showed it to Maman.

That night, Émilie locked Noémie in her room and didn't let her out for three days. She said it was for “her own good.” After that, Noé sometimes heard her mother wheedling with Raphael to stay away from the girls, to “be a nice boy.” Maybe one reason she'd been so hard on Noé . . . she feared she'd be next. But Maman was trapped: Raphael had been giving her money he made from blackmailing girls and his new job working for Séverin and she depended on the income he provided. More than that, the money made her his accomplice.

After a long time, Noémie's words stop. She falls so quiet, it's eerie, hearing the bats and the owls call, the crickets' endless
chanting. I reach out for her, to reassure myself that she's still with me, that she hasn't vanished as she said she wanted to.

“I'm so sorry all of this happened to you,” I say.

“Tomorrow,” she says darkly, “Raphael will say he wants to play one last game with you. Don't go with him, please.”

My hand finds her cheek. A tear runs over my fingers, its salt stinging some hangnail or paper cut I hadn't even noticed. “No,” I hear myself saying. “I am going. We both are. We'll all play his little game together.”