What We Saw (17 page)

“IMAGINE BEING SO
dedicated to finding the truth about something that you're willing to go against the prevailing thought of everyone around you, and become an outcast.”

Mr. Johnston is talking about a geologist named Alfred Wegener, but I'm sleepy and having a hard time focusing until he says this.

Last night, while Mom and Dad ate leftover Combo Plus, Will quizzed Ben and me on the differences between igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks. I lay awake for a long time after I went to bed, phone in hand, typing “Coral Sands rape video” into the search field of the browser, then deleting it. I'm still not sure if I'm more afraid of knowing what happened
or not knowing. Last night, I couldn't bring myself to look.

“Sometimes inspiration requires looking at things from a different point of view.” Mr. Johnston's voice snaps me back into the present.

A map of the world flashes onto the screen. “Wegener was looking at the same maps everybody else had, but he noticed something nobody else had seen and formed a hypothesis.”

Mr. Johnston runs his pen along the eastern edge of the South American continent, pointing out its symmetry with the western edge of Africa. “Wegener hunted for clues on both sides of the Atlantic. He found the same dinosaur fossils in both places, the same plant species, too. For years everybody had explained this by saying that at one time, there must have been land bridges that crossed the Atlantic in a couple spots. But ol' Alfred wasn't satisfied with that answer, mainly because—well, look at it.” Mr. Johnston laughs. “How could you not see the big picture when it all fits together so well?”

Mr. J is fired up, his eyes glowing in the light of the projector. “The thing that sealed the deal for Wegener was when he found the same formations in the rock on both coasts. Sure, a plant or an animal could cross a land bridge—but rocks? How'd they get from one side to the other? The answer seemed simple to him.”

Mr. Johnston taps a button on his laptop and the map starts to move, the continents drifting slowly into one another. South America snuggling up to Africa. The world, assembling. This picture makes so much sense that when he returns to the
previous image, it's impossible not to see the way the continental shelf used to fit together.

“In 1912, Wegener presented this theory at a major conference. He stood up and told them all, ‘Hey, you guys. I think you're looking at this wrong. I think the continents moved and took the plants and rocks and dinosaurs along for the ride.' And guess what happened?”

Mr. Johnston waits. Lindsey raises her hand. “Miss Chen?”

“He was right?”

Mr. Johnston nods. “Yep. But that day? Nobody believed him. The whole scientific community was committed to seeing things one way: The continents were permanent; the land bridges had gotten washed away. Wegener spent years collecting evidence. He could demonstrate that continental drift was happening, but he couldn't explain how. He was pretty sure it had to do with the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation and the pull of other planets. His ‘capital T' theory explained everything he observed, but he wound up becoming a pariah in the geology community.”

“Like a fish that eats people?” Reggie asks from the back row.

“That's
piranha
, Reg. But nice try. A
pariah
is an outcast. Somebody who gets shunned and avoided.”

Rachel pipes up. “What a miserable way to spend your life.”

Mr. Johnston nods. “Maybe. But what he saw changed the way we look at the world. Alfred Wegener is a scientific superstar because he was right.”

“How do we know?” Reggie asks.

“Yeah.” Ben's voice comes from just behind me. “Did we ever figure out how this whole drift thing happens?”

“Sure did.” Mr. Johnston smiles. “There have been tons of new advances, but guess what the easiest way is to observe the continents floating around on the earth's mantle today?” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone.

“GPS,” he says with a grin. “There's an app for that.”

“Oh my god. Kate. Sit down. You're pacing like a caged animal.”

I flop down on Lindsey's bed as she continues to click around on her laptop. She is typing the email addresses of different varsity players into the search field on Reddit. She has been pairing these with different hashtags for about an hour now, looking for a video neither of us want to see, but have to find.

“Are you sure Sloane wasn't just trying to get a rise out of Hargrove?” Lindsey asks.

“No,” I say. “Okay, maybe, but if there was no video, why wouldn't he just say so?”

Lindsey nods, conceding the point. “Did you ask Ben about it?”

“Not really.”

“Not even when UltraFEM threatened to release it next week?”

“No. I already stalked his Twitter feed and his Facebook.
I felt so guilty when I talked to him about it afterward. I don't want to be that girl.”

She frowns. “How does asking about something this important make you ‘that girl'? Don't you want to know for sure what kind of guy your boyfriend is?”

I pull a pillow over my face and groan into it, then throw it back at the head of her bed. “I
do
know for sure. I've known him since we were five. If Ben knew about this video, I just don't believe he'd keep it from me—or the police.”

“He's way into you,” Lindsey agrees, her fingers tapping on the keys. “Couldn't keep his arm off you last night at dinner.”

“To be fair, he was also keeping me on the seat. There wasn't much room in that booth, and—”

“This might be it.” Lindsey slides her laptop toward me so it balances on both our legs. The words leave my lips first, and then my brain. The video in the browser is titled simply
#R&P.
The frozen image is the arm of a couch. It's the signature white leather of Margie Doone's brand-new basement media room. I'm overcome with the certainty that I have asked to see too much.

“Whose account is this?” I ask. “What email did you use to search for it?”

“No one's,” she says. “All you can see on Reddit are usernames. I finally found this buried in a sub-Reddit by searching a bunch of the hashtags people were using that night.” She points at
#R&P.
“Almost forgot about this one.”

We stare at the screen for what feels like a very long time.

Eons.

Finally, Lindsey crosses her arms. “I found it,” she whispers. “You have to push play.”

My finger is trembling as I hold it over the silver track pad. I swallow hard, and click.

As the image springs to life, the person holding the camera jumps over the white leather sofa arm onto the couch. Stacey is lying on the chaise that sticks out from the opposite corner of the sectional. Her halter top is missing, but her bra is still on. Her eyes are closed.

Dooney is lying next to her, rubbing his hand up and down her stomach, cupping her breasts, laughing. Deacon pulls up her skirt as Kyle leans in and out of the frame over the back of the couch with a red plastic cup and shouts, “Buccaneers! R-and-P,
babeeey
.”

Dooney buries his face in Stacey's breasts, shaking his head side to side and making a motorboat noise with his lips. He slides a hand down into her underwear.

“Dude! She drunk or dead?” I recognize the squeak of Randy's voice, his words slurring from behind the camera. He must be filming this with his phone.

Greg is there, hooting and pushing Randy, the camera jerking and shaking. I gasp as it pans around the room.

There are so many people there.

I catch a glimpse of the Tracies, one of them making out with LeRon, the other sitting in an overstuffed chair with a
glassy gaze. She looks stoned out of her mind.

Some areas are more well lit than others, but the footage is remarkably clear. As Randy swings the camera back to the couch, he gets closer. Dooney is pulling down Stacey's underwear with one hand, the fingers of his other hand already inside her. Randy shouts and giggles hysterically. “Oh my god, dude!”

Greg leans over the couch again, smacking lightly at Stacey's face. “Yo! Anybody home in there?”

She moans and twists away from his touch, a drowsy hand comes to her mouth like she's batting a fly away from her lips. She's barely conscious.

“I got something that'll wake her up!” roars Dooney.

Deacon and Greg collapse in laughter. Dooney is sloppy, flailing around, undoing his belt and his jeans. He pulls off his shirt, whooping. “Let's get our bucc on!”

“Dooney! Where's the tunes, man?” The camera spins again, as Reggie leans into Randy, then notices what's going on. “Oh, shit!”

We get a close-up of Reggie as he sees what is about to happen on the other end of the couch. “No way, dude!” He laughs like a seventh grader who has just heard a fart joke.

When Randy spins the camera back around, Dooney is already on top of Stacey, the belt of his jeans flopping against the side of the couch as he pushes his hips into her. She grunts and moans, eyes still closed.

She has no idea what is happening.

Acid rises in my throat. I want to run, but I'm paralyzed,
staring at the screen. My heart is beating out a command to flee, but I know I have to stay. I have to see this.

The voices and faces overlap. The sound and focus blurs and snaps.

Randy shouts,
“
Get a
roooooooom,”
from behind the camera.

Reggie laughs and yells, “Timber!”

Greg high-fives Deacon over Dooney's back. “Your turn to wake her up next, man.”

Reggie circles the couch and appears next to Greg, standing over Dooney for a closer look. “You taking a crack at that?”

“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.

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 pleaded ‘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? And has Ben seen this video? Has he been pretending it doesn't exist?

Every answer is another question, and 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?

How can Reggie joke around after what he witnessed a week ago?

Ben sees me and smiles, tapping the back of the empty desk in front of him.
C'mon. Join me.

I walk through the classroom toward the desk he always saves for me right next to Lindsey. She holds my gaze without smiling, then drops her eyes, like if we look at each other, everyone will know what we've seen.

I pass Janelle mid-monologue, railing on her cheerleader friend about the girl's nasty boyfriend, her hand waving back and forth like a diva at a microphone. I hear her say the word
trashy
and it rumbles through me like an earthquake.

A tiny seismic shift.

Everything looks different now, and it always will.

After class, Ben tells me he'll meet me at the cafeteria after fourth period. “Miss you already,” he says, then kisses me on the lips. As he walks away, Kyle rounds the corner to join him with a smile and a fist bump.

I expect to feel disgust or rage when I see him, but instead my eyes fill up and my stomach lurches. I quickly turn and
walk the other way.

I miss me already, too
.

The thought is a whisper in my head that spurs me on to the French room. I make an appointment to talk to Ms. Speck at the end of the day.

You see your boyfriend—the guy you've known since you were five. He's leaning against your locker in the hallway, swiping through his phone, the muscles of his neck drop into a navy-blue V-neck. He stands head and shoulders above the stream of students around him, an island in the flow.

Waiting.

For you.

As you walk down the senior staircase toward him, more bodies flood through the hall. Phoebe, her eyes darting back and forth, her confidence shaken, scurries toward her locker, quickly twisting the combination, dropping her books, grabbing her purse and keys, ready to flee campus as soon as she can.
What is she running from? What does she know? Why did she break up with Dooney? Where was she when the video was made? Did she see it? When?

The Tracies watch Phoebe leave, the metallic sound of their laughter as sharp as their fingernails against their lockers, their eyes rolling, their tongues slashing.
Were they ever her friends? Why did they stay that night, watching and laughing? Did they show Phoebe the video, only to turn on her when she broke up with Dooney?

Kyle, Reggie, and LeRon surround your boyfriend. Layers of sediment. You think about trying to brush them away, but you freeze on the stairs, your knees trembling. This is not a tiny seismic shift. This is something deeper—a dark rift. A canyon has opened up inside you, and you feel yourself falling.

Christy and Rachel are laughing with the Tracies as Lindsey shoulders her purse and slips down the hall toward the parking lot. Ben starts to move with the guys, drifting away from your locker toward the gym for practice. With one last glance around, he is swept away, leaving you petrified on the stairs above, his voice ringing in your ears:

There you are.

Alone.