Since my pride had already been smashed to pieces, I figured there was no use hiding my car in the garage across the street from the Palazzo anymore.
I drove straight home and parked in our building's lot.
Between the blast of my car's air conditioning and the shock of my confrontation with Rebecca, I felt cold and shivery. I pulled my emergency cardigan out of my trunk (I hadn't worn it in months; I shook sand off it and tried to remember when I'd last been to a beach) and tugged it on.
I'd forgotten how nice it was to not have to walk four blocks between my car and my apartment.
I found Hanna inside, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, hunched over a large pad of newsprint and wielding a stick of conte charcoal with violent passion. She sat upright when she heard me come in and drop my bag to the floor.
"Hey," she greeted. "How was work?"
I hummed noncommittally.
Then I asked, "What're you drawing?"
"Nike of Samothrace," Hanna said, pushing a chunk of loose hair out of her eyes and smudging her forehead with charcoal in the process. "We've been practicing using sculpture as reference."
I reached out and buffed the charcoal off her forehead with the sleeve of my cardigan.
"Sounds bougie."
"It's the opposite, actually," she said. "The fine arts budget got cut again. We can't afford any more live models this semester."
I wish I could say I was surprised Garland University was prioritizing their athletics department and STEM majors over the arts, but who in the United States wasn't?
Hanna's parents loved her art. They did. But they were also terrified that, after graduation, she'd face the same uphill battle they'd faced after moving to the US—that she'd constantly feel like she was climbing upstream on a recently-soaped slip n' slide to pay her rent, put food on her table, and earn respect.
Once, very late at night and after a little bit of beer, Hanna had asked me if I thought she should transfer into a more useful major.
I hadn't known what to say.
Because it wasn't that having a fine arts degree was a kiss of socioeconomic death. Last summer, Andre had done a graphic design internship at a high-profile marketing firm in Huntington Beach. It'd been unpaid, but his parents had covered the cost of an apartment and all his public transportation for two and a half months. I didn't want to ask how much that bill had been. I doubted Andre even knew. Maybe he didn't even think about it.
But Hanna and I did. We always did.
Art wasn't the problem.
It was money.
Always, always money.
"I got fired."
The words came spurting out and hung there, suspended, for a moment. Hanna blinked in shock.
"You what?"
"Rebecca fired me. I'm fired."
I felt like a broken vase a guilty child had hastily patched together with wet Elmer's glue. Like I could sneeze and fall apart. But I managed to get the whole story out, from our VIP golf group to helping Bodie find his ball to Rebecca's less-than-warm send off.
"She told me to go back to Mexico," I said with a strangled laugh. "I mean—how dumb is that. She hired me. She knows I'm a US citizen."
"She said it because she wanted to fuck with you," Hanna said. "It's just words. You can't let them get to you."
I know she intended it to be a comforting sentiment, but it wasn't.
I scratched my nose on the sleeve of my cardigan and sighed wearily.
I'd put this off for too long.
"I need to show you something, Hanna."
Together, we walked outside to the little lot tucked halfway under our building. I didn't want her to see it. Each step was like trudging through knee-deep mud.
But I knew I needed to show her.
Hanna's sharp inhale was followed by a strangled cry of disbelief.
For a long moment, we stared at my car in silence.
Hanna tugged the sleeve of her sweatshirt down over one hand, stepped forward, and rubbed tentatively on the tail of the L. I'd already tried this myself, but I didn't bother telling her it wouldn't buff out. I just appreciated the thought.
"W—when?" Hanna finally asked. "When did this happen?"
"That night you blacked out. While I was in Target. Somebody keyed it in the parking lot."
"Did you see who?"
I hadn't, but I figured I'd share my hunch, so I told her about the carload of football players in Kyle Fogarty's Tesla.
I expected her outrage. I expect tirades and monologues.
But when Hanna spoke again, she was calm.
"Get in," she told me, nodding towards the driver's side door.
"What?"
"Get in. We're driving to Ralph's, and I'm buying you whatever wine you want. I've got my fake in my wallet. Let's go."
"Hanna," I said, hugging my arms over my chest. "I'm not going out in public in my car. Everybody will see—"
"Everybody's gonna see that you were harassed," she cut me off. "Everybody will see, and everybody will know that you don't give a flying shit what they do to you."
I'd had coffee dumped on me. I'd had my car vandalized. I'd been fired.
I felt my bottom lip twitch.
"But I do give a shit," I admitted.
And then my throat was tight, and the corners of my lips tugged back as I tried to hold back the sob I'd been stamping down for the last month. I buried my face in my hands and pinched my shoulders up to my ears, burrowing into my cardigan like a turtle hiding in its shell.
Like maybe, if I squeezed every muscle in my body, I could hold it together.
I didn't see Hanna come towards me, but I felt her when she threw her arms around me and hugged me tight.
"I hate this," I cried. "I hate this. I can't do this."
"You can," Hanna whispered fiercely. "You are."
I hated that Hanna was seeing me cry. I never liked crying in front of the people I loved—her, Andre, my dad—because I didn't want them to be the sponges that mopped up my anxieties.
I hated Truman Vaughn for all he'd caused.
I hated Rebecca, for firing me to impress a man.
I hate Fogarty for what he'd done to the car my dad had worked so hard to buy me for my sixteenth birthday.
But most of all, I hated the little seed of regret growing in the pit of my stomach. I hated that, sometimes, I imagined what my junior year would've been if I hadn't written the article. If I hadn't known.
Ignorance was bliss.
I understood why Bodie had hated when that bliss had been taken from him. I got it. But ignorance was a slow, corrosive kind of ruination. Horrible truths could eat you from the inside out, and you wouldn't realize what'd gone wrong—couldn't take action to stop it—until it was too late.
No. I wouldn't regret doing the right thing.
I wouldn't let people like Fogarty and Rebecca make me regret it.
With all the courage I could muster, I drew back from Hanna and wiped my face with the sleeves of my cardigan.
"You good?" Hanna asked.
"I'm good," I said on a shaky exhale. "Can I get a rain check on the wine, though?"
❖ ❖ ❖
For the second time in a row, I skipped Human Sexuality. I didn't want to make a habit of it, but I also didn't want my unemployment to drag on any longer than was strictly necessary.
I went to the coffee shops and fast food joints around campus, first, to see if they needed waitresses or baristas or someone to mop floors at four o'clock in the morning, before opening. Panda Express had a sign in the front window proclaiming that they were hiring now, but the guy behind the counter wrote down my name and number and then smiled in a way that told me he didn't plan on telling his manager that the girl who'd written the Vaughn article wanted to scoop orange chicken to pay her rent.
My next stop was the student union.
There was a corkboard in the lobby where people tacked up posters and pamphlets for everything from job fairs to hip-hop ballet classes.
I sighed and tore a strip of paper off the bottom of a flyer declaring proofreaders were needed. The wording of it was sketchy—I was pretty sure some freshman was just looking for someone they could pay fifty bucks to author a Writing 101 paper for them—but my standards were basement level at the moment.
I'd started to dream up strange business ideas, as desperately broke college students are prone to do.
Worst case scenario, I always had a spare kidney to auction off.
And that was kind of a joke, but also not. Because what if I didn't find another job? What if I was doomed to let the car my dad had bought me for my sixteenth birthday sit and rot?
I didn't have the money to cover our insurance deductible—and I wasn't even sure I could claim insurance, since I hadn't reported it to the police.
I knew, of course, that filing a police report would be the smart thing to do. But fear and pride were a weird mix—like orange juice and toothpaste, or Fireball whiskey and decision making. They clashed and did nasty things to your mental and emotional health.
I didn't want to go to the police.
I just wanted my car back.
As I was shoving the tear-off phone number from the flyer into my backpack, my phone buzzed with a text from Andre.
Um??? Explain yourself???
A moment later, a second message came through: I had to sit through a lecture on childbirth without you.
I laughed. It felt good to laugh.
I started to type out a response, but then my screen went dark with an incoming call.
"Hi, Andre, sorry I—"
"Childbirth," he interrupted, shock palpable through the phone. "The second time in a row you leave me to tackle this shit on my own, and this motherfucker puts a whole-ass vulva on the screen and makes us watch a kid pop out of it."
I waited until I heard him exhale.
"Are you d—"
"No, I am not done."
"Do you want to come over?"
"Hell yes."
❖ ❖ ❖
Hanna was in our room working on a sketch of the David.
She popped one headphone out when we came in. Andre launched himself onto my bed, landing with a hard creak of the mattress and sending one of my pillows tumbling to the floor. I stooped to pick it up, then whacked him on the back of the legs with it.
"How was class?" Hanna asked me. "Did you talk to Bodie?"
"No," I sighed. "I skipped. I just went to the student union to see about writing tutor openings."
"Well, that's good," Hanna said, unplugging her headphones entirely.
"No," Andre said, lifting his head. "It's not good. Do you know what today's lecture was about? Tell her, Laurel. Go 'head. Tell her what the lecture was about."
I ignored him.
"I mean, they took down my info, but there's no telling if anyone will actually want to work with me—"
"Miracle of life, my ass," Andre muttered.
"Somebody will hire you," Hanna told me, shooting Andre a questioning glance. "Seriously. You have a good GPA, you have—"
"No references," I finished for her.
"At least you ain't got a child," Andre commented.
I was tempted to whack him with my pillow again.
"I gotta pee," Hanna announced, grabbing her phone before she rolled off her bed and stretched her arms out over her head, elbows and wrists cracking. "I've been working on this stupid drawing for hours. I'm so stupid, you guys. I thought picking a statue with big hands would help, like, disguise the fact that I always draw my hands big. But he looks like he's wearing fucking baseball mitts."
"It looks great, Han."
"Don't even," she grumbled as she tugged the bathroom door shut, her eyes on her phone as she typed one-handed.
I turned to Andre. He, too, was on his phone.
Figuring I might as well join in, I pulled mine out and opened up Candy Crush. I'd barely started on a level when Andre jerked upright.
"Holy shit," he said.
"What?" I asked absentmindedly, swiping a pair of striped candies. "Did Nick change the reading? I swear to God, if that dirty little fake-feminist hipster makes me read another two hundred pages before Thursday, I'm rioting—"
Andre shook his head.
"St. James went on ESPN," he said.
"What?" Hanna shouted from the bathroom.
"St. James did another interview for ESPN."
There was a drawn-out moment of silence.
Hanna flushed and came thundering back into the room. I launched myself across Andre's lap to grab his phone. Our heads pressed together, the three of us watched the screen as Andre clicked on the video that'd been posted four minutes prior.
There was a thirty-second ad for tampons, first.
Once the smiling, frolicking women were done lying to us about the joys of menstruation, Bodie St. James appeared on screen.
He had on the same suit he'd worn for the first interview he'd done for them—navy blue, no tie—and someone had smothered concealer under his eyes to try to mask the severity of his bruised nose. The Los Angeles skyline was superimposed on the green-screen behind him. I wondered if anybody had bothered to mention to the video editing team that Garland, California was over an hour's drive from the city.
"Several weeks ago," he began, in the steady voice of someone who spoke with one hundred percent conviction, "I made a statement on behalf of my team. I said that the accusations made against Vaughn were false and made with malevolent intent. I would like to apologize for that statement. It was made hastily, and without any evidence to back it up."
"How did you find this?" Hanna whisper-hissed.
"Quinton sent it to the team group chat," Andre told her.
I shushed them.
"We hope this investigation is carried out quickly and thoroughly," Bodie continued, "but not for the sake of our team. Our thoughts and prayers are with the women and their families."
Hanna inhaled sharply.
"Lastly," Bodie said, his voice wobbling so slightly that I might've been the only person on earth who caught it, "I want to thank the writers and editors at the Daily for their dedication and bravery in bringing these accusations forward. We ask that fans of the team, and of Vaughn, treat them with respect."
The video ended.
Bodie stared at us with grim determination from behind the replay button.
I asked Andre to watch it back one more time, because it didn't feel real. I was half worried the page would suddenly go white and the video would disappear like a technological cloud of mist.
I reached for my phone and punched out a text to Ellison.
Bodie's on ESPN
She responded immediately.
Watching it now
Then, a moment later, she sent: Did you hear about the emails?
And so Ellison broke the news to me that, Monday evening, an anonymous source had tipped off investigators about an email account that allegedly belonged to Truman Vaughn. There was no word yet about the content of the emails sent or received, just that they existed—on a throw-away Gmail account—and that police were combing through hundreds of them. It could be nothing. It could be a dead end. The account might not even belong to Vaughn.
But I had a gut feeling it did.
And I knew who'd told the police where to look.
My spy.
_________________
Author's Note: I stan a boy who realizes he's been complicit in a culture that terrorizes women for speaking up, recognizes his own power and privilege, and uses his platform to do better and demand better of others. I also stan a girl who has been so brave in championing the voices of other women and yet completely crumbles at the idea of letting those she loves shoulder any of her pain. My children are learning. They stumble, but they keep going.
I've started outlining what I think might be my next book. Very exciting. What's decidedly not exciting is the amount of Grown Up Shit that I've got on my to-do list this week. If anyone wants to Venmo me a million dollars so I can move to a small cottage in the Scottish Highlands and write in total solitude with absolutely no other obligations, hit me up!!!
Your friendly author,
Kate