“We’ve both been published in the Times. There’s Pulitzer talk of that piece for investigative journalism.”
“Do you have a point, Miss Fitzsimmons?”
“A few. My first: hire better writers. This is pedestrian. There’s no emotion in any of this. I feel nothing after reading this. Nothing at all. My second: neither Trey nor I aspire to be models. My third? I think people have seen us as exposed as they ever will. It was not intentional. It was unwanted. It was criminal, what happened. You’re trying to capitalize on a sex crime, Ms. Stein–.”
“It’s Monroe. I represent Mr. Kelvin Stein.”
“I do not care,” Coley says sharply. “Would you make light of this if it were your sex tape? If someone broke into your house and stole not only images of your naked, vulnerable self, but private moments with the person you love, as well as your sense of security? I don’t think so. Put yourself in my shoes.
“If I ever see you again, it better be for one of two purposes: you better come with an apology or a job offer on your writing team. That’s it and that’s all. Understood?”
“Yes, Miss Fitzsimmons.”
“And to make it crystal clear, I would never work for a company who preys upon victims of sex crimes like this, so Mr. Stein should rethink his business strategy, if this was his idea. Trey has eight-hundred-thousand Twitter followers.”
“It’s over a million now, after this happened,” I speak up, not feeling any need to until now–and it’s only to drive her adequate point home more succinctly.
“Would Mr. Stein like to hear about how you approached us with this insulting offer today?”
“He had nothing to do with this offer. No.”
“Do you think a million of Trey’s followers–who, by the way, are probably your exact demographic–would like to hear about it?”
“I’d prefer that they didn’t.”
Coley nods her head with finality. “This conversation is over. If you have anything more to say to us, you can come back another day. Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon,” I echo her sentiment in the exact same tone, following Coley into an empty elevator that was just vacated by other tenants in my building.
“The nerve of that woman!”
“God, I wish I’d had a camera.”
“Why?”
“Because some day my nieces are going to want to be princesses or models and I’m going to want them to be independent superheroes like you just were to that lady. Holy shit, Coley.”
“You’re not embarrassed?”
“What could I possibly be embarrassed about? You didn’t even stutter. It was like you’ve been practicing that monologue for weeks. It was perfection. That woman will never forget who Coley Fitzsimmons is.”
“Was it too harsh?”
“No way! It’s everything I would have loved to have said, had eloquence and quick wit been remotely accessible to my notably feeble mind today.”
“You’re not feeble,” she says with a laugh, exiting the elevator.
“I sure as hell feel feeble after that. I did nothing but stare speechless, in awe. And with pride. You were amazing.”
“She just caught me at a bad time.”
“Say thank you, Coley. Take the compliment. You were amazing, plain and simple.”
“Thank you,” she says. “So, is there really talk of a Pulitzer?” I nod. “That’s about the craziest thing I’ve heard.”
“We aren’t altogether horrible writers,” I kid with her, letting her into my place.
“That’s not what I meant and you know it. We wrote that in a couple of days for a college paper.”
“We’re excellent at what we do. We conducted good interviews with excellent witnesses, laureate. It was a stand-out story and a high-profile one, at that.”
“I always thought I’d win a Pulitzer Prize with my poetry. Well, let me rephrase that. I always dreamed I would…”
“No one’s stopping you,” I encourage her, setting my books on the island and grabbing two sodas from the fridge. “How about a BLT?”
“I’d love one… but no B, please,” she says.
“Ummm… So, a lettuce and tomato sandwich?”
“Do we have any turkey?”
“Yeah,” I tell her.
“Then do turkey instead of bacon. And hold the lettuce and tomato. Add cheese and mustard.”
I slam the refrigerator shut, simply to get her attention. She looks up at me innocently from the couch, batting her eyelashes. “Are you sure you don’t want the PB&J variety of a BLT?” I ask her sarcastically.
“What kind of jam do you have?”
“Strawberry.”
“That actually sounds better,” she says, scrunching up her nose.
“Next time, just tell me you don’t want a BLT, and I’ll be okay with that.”
“I might want one next time.”
“Anything you want, laureate. Would you rather milk than soda?”
She nods her head.
“You had no trouble giving that woman downstairs a piece of your mind and telling her what you didn’t want. Speak up with me, Coley,” I direct her, half-joking, but half-serious. “It’s the only way I’ll learn what you like and don’t like.”
“For the record, I like bacon,” she says. “I just don’t like the smell of it permeating the apartment.” She tells me this just before I put a plate of it in the microwave to cook.
“Oh,” I say. “But…”
“It’s your apartment, greaser.”
“Greaser?”
“After you cook it, it’s just going to smell all piggy and greasy for hours.”
“Piggy?”
“Porky?” she asks. “What word would you use to describe it?”
“Delectable? Mouthwatering, maybe? Makes me want to eat little piggies all day long.”
“You’re so mean!” She holds up her laptop to show me a picture of tiny, baby piglets. “They’re just itty bitty babies!” She puffs out her bottom lip as she talks, but she’s clearly just teasing me. I’ve seen her eat bacon before at Ruvelyn’s.
“You’re in class right now, missy. Don’t you have some calls to make?” I ask her, hitting the button on the microwave.
“Now you’re just going to make me crave bacon all afternoon,” she grumbles. I walk over to the patio door, which is still obscured by the blinds. I reach behind them and pull back the glass door, leaving the screen shut, so we can get some air circulating. I open the windows in my bedroom, too.
“You’re cute,” I tell her, placing my hands on her shoulders and kissing her on the top of her head as I walk back by her. “Like, you make my insides all warm and cozy kind-of-cute.”
“Aren’t you in class, too, boss?” she asks me as she puts in one of her earbuds and takes out her phone.
“The pertinent word in that sentence is boss,” I come back at her, nodding at the phone in her hands and trying to get her to go to work.
“Well, bring me my lunch, boss, and I’ll start doing my work.” She slides onto the floor and readies her notebook in front of her. “Get me all excited about food and then force me to make phone calls on an empty stomach. Ass…” she mumbles.
I toss an individual bag of potato chips across the apartment, hitting her in the back of the head. My pitching arm is still in perfect shape. Slowly, she turns around to look at me, her eyes narrowed in what I presume is supposed to be anger, but she’s unable to stave off the laughter that lies just beneath the surface. I finish making her sandwich and deliver it to her. The attempted-evil glare follows me the whole way. When she looks down at the sandwich, her posture changes completely.
“You cut it into a heart,” she gushes. I sit down on the couch behind her and rub her neck.
“My God, Coley, you’re so tense!”
“Ow ow ow!” she says as she flinches away from me.
“Too hard?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s so bad…” I put my thumbs at the base of h
er skull and gently press against the knots in her neck, much more careful this time.
“Is it any wonder?” she asks me.
“No,” I tell her, then sigh. “Fuck. I feel awful about all of this.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I just… is there something more I can do? What would help your situation? That’s all I keep thinking.”
“You get to work,” she directs me. “Write your story. Tell our side of it. I know it’s all about Asher, but revealing what he did puts the blame on him for our situation.”
“A lot of people won’t even realize the two are related, Coley. If people aren’t following his story, they’ll never read that,” I explain. “Know what I think will help?”
“What?”
“A very public outing. Just the two of us. Something special. Something that lets everyone know that we are, in fact, an item… and you’re not, in fact, sleeping around.”
“I’m not sure I’m ever leaving your apartment again,” she says with a smile.
“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” I tell her, getting up to fix my own sandwich. “We’re both going to email our professors and get our assignments for the week. We’re going to get in touch with the dean and let him know we need some personal time to deal with what happened… and then we’re going to get the hell out of here.”
“And go where?”
“Where have you always wanted to go?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “Somewhere warm.”
“Wanna swim?”
“Sure!”
“Dive?”
“Yeah!”
“Ummm… do you have a passport?”
“Yes…”
After I’ve got my lunch prepared, I sit on the floor next to her to present my idea. “I’ve always wanted to go to Palau. Dad says it’s amazing for diving.”
“Palau? Like, near the Philippines?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“We can do that?”
“We can do anything we want.”
“But how is this going to help show people we’re together? We’ll be out in the middle of nowhere.”
“We can control the news cycle, laureate. We leak a couple of pictures. Done.”
“Couldn’t we do that anywhere?” she asks.
“Wouldn’t it be amazing in Palau?”
The excitement on her face is contagious. It’s something I’d like to see often… something I’d like to be the source of daily, if I could. “I wouldn’t even know what to pack.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll buy stuff there. Just bring your homework. It’ll be a working vacation.”
“Spring break’s in two weeks… maybe we should wait.”
“Or… maybe we should get our assignments for the next two weeks… and take an extended trip. Coley, they let people do coursework remotely all the time in special situations. This has to qualify.”
“I’ll miss my visit with Nyall, then.”
“Can we go tomorrow?”
“Could we?”
“I’ll call my dad and ask about the jet.”
“I think Joel’s classes are in the evenings on Tuesdays. Maybe he can go with us.”
“That’d be great. You guys can teach me more ASL.”
“I need to show you some online resources. I keep forgetting…”
“It could be that you’ve had a lot on your mind,” I tell her. “I doubt I’d be absorbing much of it anyway.”
My phone rings softly next to me as I work on the final few paragraphs of the article. It’s two in the morning, and Coley had finished her work and gone to bed hours ago. Seeing that it’s Danny calling, I answer it.
“Hey,” I say to him, wondering what news he has for me. I’d left him a message earlier, just asking for anything he wanted to contribute to the article.
“Did I wake you?”
“No, I’m just finishing up. You always work this late?”
“When I’m waiting on important results, I do,” he says. “I managed to put a rush on the processing of Pryana’s rape kit. I didn’t want to tell you guys because they couldn’t guarantee me when they’d have it completed.”
“And?”
“We have DNA evidence now. It’s Asher in her case, too.”
“Is this an attorney-client-privilege thing that I shouldn’t know about and put in this article?” I ask him.
“She signed off that the results could be released to you for the purpose of this investigation. I’ve already left her a message to call me, but I also told her that I would be talking to you.”
“Well, she approves the story before it runs. I just wanted to make sure it wouldn’t be a shock if she read about it from my submission before you spoke with her.”
“She should be fine.”
“So what’s the max sentence we’re looking at so far?”
“We have to prove he’s guilty first in a court of law.”
“Obviously I have full confidence in you. How long can he be put away?”
“We’re looking at a fifteen-year minimum… and a life-sentence maximum. That’s if he gets the harshest penalties and if the jury believes we have enough evidence in the cases of Lucy and Kamiesha.”
“Fifteen years is bullshit. He’s still a young man in fifteen years.”
“I don’t disagree at all. Hopefully the judge and jury will agree with us,” Danny says. “Anyway. I hope this helps with your story.”
“It certainly does. It doesn’t help with my sleep, but it helps with the story immensely.”
“Sleep’s what you do in retirement,” he tells me. “You have plenty of time for that.”
“Well, thank you. Go… do more work or something.”
“On it,” he says, ending the call.
Never having thought I’d have these DNA results, I go back through the article and decide it needs to be reorganized and partially rewritten to accommodate the important addition. Sleep’s what I’ll do in retirement.
Or maybe in Palau.
chapter twenty-five
Sitting up straight across from us in the jet, Joel signs something quickly to Coley. I don’t catch any part of it, but her response is a simple nod. He reaches for his tie and unknots it, pulling it through his collar. I can tell he’s trying to be nonchalant about it. I’m guessing he dressed up when he heard my parents were coming with us to Nyall’s hospital and thought it appropriate, but felt uncomfortable when he saw that my mother was in jeans and even my father had forgone any sort of neckwear today.
“Your professors are okay with this?” Mom asks from the row in front of us, peeking back. I’d told them about Palau just before takeoff, and they were both surprised to hear of the sudden travel plans.
“Yes,” Coley and I both respond. Coley then signs to Joel what my mother just asked.
“Palau?” Joel asks aloud. I unbuckle my seatbelt while Coley converses with him, then move to the row my parents are in.
“I wrote up a brief description of what happened,” I explain to Mom and Dad. “The crime that was committed. What we went through on campus yesterday. I think everyone saw the madness of what our lives were like over the weekend. No one questioned the need for us both to escape for a little bit while we attempted to let it blow over. They said as long as we keep up with our work, it’s fine. They were very sympathetic–especially Coley’s professors. They clearly see her as more of a victim than me; most people do.” I nod my head. “I get it, but… I’m not proud of this.”
“You wrote the note for both of you?” I nod my head to answer my father’s question. “May I read it?”
I pull up the email on my phone and hand it to him, then watch his expressions as he peruses the text. He smiles at me when he’s finished and hands the phone to my mother for her to read it.
“They see her as the victim because that’s what you’ve described in this letter, Jackson,” he says. “You barely mention your own anguish.”
“It seems paltry whe
n compared to hers.”
“It shouldn’t be a competition, though.”
“I’m honestly having a hard time describing how this whole thing affects me, though. Am I embarrassed? I mean… no. Ashamed? No. It’s the first time I’ve been unable to communicate what I feel. And having a bunch of strangers telling me I should be proud of it–having girls hit on me because of it–it’s… it’s confusing.”
“Complicated,” he states.
“It was an invasion of privacy. Of trust. But after having security experts and a federal agent sweep my apartment, I feel pretty secure in there now. I sure as hell don’t feel comfortable, but I feel safe. I don’t think she does, so I’m doing things to try to make it feel as private as possible until the new place is ready. Keeping the blinds closed. Making sure she’s watching when I set the alarms or letting her do it herself. But I am naturally inclined to trust people, and I think she’s the opposite. She was brought up to question people.”
“Didn’t we teach you to do that?” Dad asks.
“You always did it for me,” I admit, feeling a bit lacking in self-sufficiency at the moment. I shake away the insecurity. “I think it would be different if I had been fully… exposed. Or if it had been full-on intercourse. Sorry, Mom,” I say, feeling my skin break out in blotchiness. “I almost feel fortunate for myself that we’d gone to the bedroom for the rest of it. That people didn’t see more of me. If I’d been fully… naked? I would be mortified right now. And in that, I feel empathy for what she’s going through. That’s where the note came from. But I don’t feel so bad for myself because it could have been so much worse.
“I feel horrible for her. I want to get her out of town. I want to show everyone that we’re dating for her benefit; not mine. I don’t care what people think about me… but I don’t want people calling her a slut or men objectifying her. I’d love for people to know the Coley that I know.”
“Then let her speak for herself,” Mom says. “She has a voice. Let her use it.”