Twisted Fate (25 page)

How could what he had done be legal in any way?
How
could he hide who he was so easily? Why couldn’t they just go into his house and grab the computer and arrest him and take him away? How could they tell me that I had been breaking and entering, committing a crime, when
he
was the one who was sick and dangerous?

I began having nightmares. Almost every night. We
were living right next door to this guy and still Ally slept soundly. She still didn’t believe me but she was nicer to me than ever. We spent more time together. We would come home right after school and just sit in our room and talk. She knew something had happened, there’s no way she didn’t, but she still thought I was making up most of it or the police would have done something.

At some point, I felt so defeated I started believing her version of everything. It was easier just to believe her honestly, to deny everything I’d seen, to take comfort in her view of him. I let her take care of me, bake things. I just hung around the house with her. She still went out with Graham but I stayed home. I didn’t feel like hanging out with my friends because I didn’t want to burden them.

But one night everything shifted. Ally would tell me what Graham and she talked about sometimes, and he slipped up. She thought Eric was still alive and he told her he wanted her to come to Virginia with him and visit his grave.

Of course, she chalked it up to him “grieving,” but I knew it was weirder than that. He told her he wanted her to come visit his grave and then the two of them would take a drive together on the roads that Eric and he used to drive in the Austin.

When she told me this, I got angry all over again. He wanted to do the same thing to Ally. He was looking for another Eric and he wasn’t even being clever about it. He
was so drug-addled and stupid and arrogant and he had no respect for my sister—he just told her like it was how he wanted to film her and kill her and she was still gullible enough to listen. He had said similar things to me. That’s why he always wanted me to take his drugs.

He was looking for someone to take all the pills that make you brave and relaxed and think you’re invincible and drive that person into a bridge or off a cliff or who knows what. And he didn’t care if it was Ally or me or anyone. What he wanted was to see that image, to sell that image, to believe in the stupid idea that he was a cutting-edge artist doing things that no one could understand.

Then she told me the worst part. Every night she went over there he made another film of her. She was becoming his most popular subject, she said. His girl-next-door series. He said he wanted to have a thousand films of her. To film her her entire life.

I listened to Ally talk about Graham, saw the way she just believed everything he said. And I formulated my plan.

W
hen I got home, Graham was standing on the roof of his garage looking out into the woods. He must have heard the skateboard because he turned around. Most of the town still thought he was a hero because of little Brian and even after the film emerged, his parents somehow made it look like he had kept this monstrosity of a movie because he loved his friend. I had never seen anything so sick. No one knew about that of course. Just me and him. And he didn’t seem to care that I knew anymore. It had made him even more relaxed.

“Hey,” he said. “I called you earlier but you didn’t pick up.”

I looked at my phone. There were no missed calls.

“Sure you didn’t call Ally?”

He laughed. “Yeah, that must have been it. How’s it going?”

I really couldn’t believe that he could just talk so normally to everyone—considering all the secrets he had. But he was always like this. Gracious and charming when he was on the drugs, shy and polite when he wasn’t. That’s why it was so hard for people to believe what he was doing. Even when the evidence was staring them right in the face.

“It’s good,” I lied. “Hey, I was thinking about that thing you thought would be fun to do. I want to give the meds a try.”

“Yeah?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. He hung off the side of the garage and then dropped to the driveway and walked over to me. “What part of it?”

“All of it,” I said. “The driving, all of it. If we can drive with the top down.”

I watched his breathing change and a smile spread across his face.

“It’ll be fun,” I said. “I want to feel how it feels. We can go after school on Thursday. We can drive up past the golf courses where there’s no one around. I’ll drive so you can film. Those drugs will make me a really good driver, right? The ones that make you focus?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking deeply into my eyes. “They will. They’ll make all of it so much better.”

“Okay,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest. He was so awful. And he had no trouble just going with me of course. He had no faithfulness or respect for my sister, would sell her out and cheat on her. He was the worst.

“Cool,” he said. “I’m so happy we’re going to do this. We’re going to become immortal.”

“Yeah, we’re going to be stars,” I said. “Hey, are you still selling those films?”

He nodded.

“The documentary ones of Ally?”

He nodded again and I thought, how could anyone be so stupid to admit that? He just knew he was bulletproof. He could admit to anything now, it didn’t matter. He always got away with everything. Even if I deleted them, he would simply make more and keep posting them. I vowed that that would be the next part of my plan.

“It’s an automatic system,” he said. “I never shut it down.”

“Can I be in some of them?” I asked.

He got that huge grin again. “Sure. Of course. We can make very different films than what me and Ally make.”

“I want part of the money, though,” I said.

He said, “You got it, partner. I’ll see you Thursday at the old pier.”

H
e was there standing out on the pier waiting for me. I flipped up my board and carried it while I walked along the wide wooden planks in the cold autumn air. My footsteps hollow, clunking along the dock. And then he turned and looked at me. He was beautiful. There was no denying it. I could see that his beauty was probably the thing that made his whole life possible. All the things he had done wrong all crimes all the “mistakes” forgiven when people looked into his pale-blue eyes and saw the smooth contours of his jaw. Or when they knew how much money his parents had. There was a light breeze and his T-shirt and thin jacket clung to him, showing the outline of his broad shoulders, his muscled form, his hair tousled and windblown.

“I’m so excited we’re going to do this together,” he said to me. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a little prescription bottle and rattled it. Smiled.

“What about our deal?” He nodded and reached in his jacket pocket, took out his keys—the key to the Austin, which had his house key attached—and handed them to me. As promised, he’d let me drive the Austin and in exchange he could film me doing it while on his special prescription.

“Thanks,” I said, putting them in my pocket. I looked again at his beautiful face—the face that wasn’t hiding anything evil—it was simply expressing nothing at all. He was like a big empty hole, someone built entirely of secondhand images of life and chemicals made to numb the experience of living it.

I smiled back at him and then took my skateboard in both hands, swung it fast like a bat and hit him in the face as hard as I could. There was a loud hollow sickening crack as he was knocked backward by the force of the blow and toppled into the water. The ocean was choppy and his body bobbed and drifted quickly north toward the yacht club. I looked down and saw the spray of blood across the pier and spattering my jacket. There was also blood on the board, but I would get rid of it in just a few minutes.

There. Done. Over. I turned to walk away, but gasped as Ally was literally right behind me—my face nearly touching her face. She was stunned and horror-stricken, in shock.

“What have you
done
?” she wailed, tears streaming down her face. “We have to get him out of the water, he’s going to drown. He needs to go to a hospital!” She lunged for the water, but I held her back.

“No, Ally, we have to get out of here now. He hurt you. He hurt you and a lot of other people and he won’t be able to do that anymore.”

I held her around the waist and pulled her backward into my arms, trying to drag her off the dock as she dug in her heels. Finally she broke free and ran, threw herself off the end of the dock into the water with him.

“Ally, stop.
Stop!
There’s nothing we can do now. This was his fate. This is how it ends for him after all the things he did.”

I saw her struggling in the water. Ally is a great swimmer. She had lifted his head above the water, his face torn and bruised and broken, his nose flattened his lips smashed. She was swimming with one arm around him making slow progress to the ladder beneath the dock.

“Let him go, Ally, we have to get out of here. Let him go,” I said. “I won’t let you bring him back up on this dock.”

It seemed that he was still breathing—bubbles of foamy blood came out of his mouth and nose. His weight was pulling Ally down. I watched my sister struggling, crying flailing in the water, trying desperately to carry the weight of someone who was more than half dead, who had filmed her naked and lied to her and sold her image to old men who wanted to do her harm, someone who did this all under the guise of loving her. I couldn’t bear to see her this way. And I knew I would almost rather see her dead than see her revive Graham Copeland.

Almost.

“Help me get him up the ladder,” she called to me, spitting water from her mouth and gasping.

“No,” I said.

“Sydney! Please, we can’t do this. Please! Help me!” She inhaled water and then spluttered and choked it up. Her head disappearing below the surface for a minute. I climbed down the ladder and kicked hard at his body to get it away from her, but she held tightly to him. I am certain he was already dead but still she clung to him, trying to raise his face, putting his body above hers.

I grabbed the ladder with one hand, then held tight to her wrist with the other and put my foot on Graham’s shoulder, trying to sink him back beneath the waves as I pulled her up.

She was crying hysterically and shouting for me to stop and then I watched it happen. A large wave came cresting in and threw her against the base of the peer knocking her unconscious. It pulled her down where I couldn’t see her anymore. And only Graham’s body was bobbing there streaming blood.

I felt light-headed. I screamed her name and dove into the cold waves. I swam in the choppy water trying to see her. I thrashed in the water in my soaking cumbersome clothes for what seemed like an eternity. Minutes ticked by, each second a precious moment of my sister’s life. Then I caught a glimpse of her floating facedown far away—the
wave that had crested had sucked her right out into the harbor. She wasn’t moving.

I knew that she was dead and that the water was already freezing my limbs making it impossible for me to swim. I climbed back up the ladder and raced to Graham’s car, looking for a cell phone or anything I could call someone from. There was nothing. I screamed for help but the whole idea of meeting at the abandoned pier is that there is no one to help. I looked for a rope I could throw to her—knowing as the minutes raced by that there was no way she could have survived this.

I heard myself scream as if I were drowning and then I ran. Fast. I had to save the only thing I could.

I put the key in the ignition, turned the car around and drove frantically to Graham’s house. His parents were not home—and if mine were they didn’t notice their dripping-wet daughter crying and whimpering as she fumbled for the neighbor’s house key and let herself in.

I raced up to his room and followed the instructions Becky had given me and got to the dummy site—logged in and then there it was. The swirling beach-ball timer showing how many girl-next-door videos were being downloaded.

I logged into Graham’s site administrator page and voided the sale of the videos. Then I called up the full list of other footage, selected them all, and hit delete. I knew I was destroying evidence. But the boy who had committed
that crime had already paid. And so had my sister. I would not let him be the one who controlled what people remembered of her. I would not have people know her for anything other than what she really was. Not a piece of meat, or some girl who should have known better, or all the other terrible things people say about girls when boys hurt them and use them. I had gotten rid of all the disgusting images he made of people because he thought that they weren’t real or were just for his own entertainment or his own way to make money.