Ecstasy (37 page)

“So fine, you’re the superhero; what’s your plan?”

“I told you, I’m stuck.”

“Bullshit. I bet you’ve got some scheme running around in that twisted little head of yours.”

“No, I…Well, okay. I have been thinking… maybe I ought to go back to the beginning.”

“Which is?”

“The thing that got me into this mess in the first place,” I said. “Melting Rock.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I went back to the scene of the crime—not the one I’d been accused of, but the one I’d actually committed. This time, though,
I went in via the front door of Groovy Guitar rather than through a back window. But it didn’t matter; even the owner’s dog
looked at me like I was a felon.

I went in and headed straight for the back, past rows of instruments hanging from the ceiling like sides of beef in an abattoir.
I had no guarantee anyone would even be in the Melting Rock office; it’s hardly the kind of place that’s staffed nine to five.
Luckily, though, there was Jo Mingle—still hugely pregnant, and with her other baby whacking wooden blocks together in a playpen.

Jo didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see me; she did, however, look completely miserable.

“Look, Jo,” I said, “I’m really sorry about what happened with Trike.”

“Not your fault,” she said, sounding utterly exhausted. “Not anybody’s fault but his.”

“You really didn’t know, did you?”

“Nah.”

“I guess that’s good.”

“Yeah, I guess. At least I’m not going to jail, right? At least my kids’ll have one of us to raise them.…” I had no idea what
to say, so I just stood there. “So,” she said after a while, “what are you doing here, anyway? You still writing about Melting
Rock?”

“Sort of.”

She bit her lip, fingered her thick blond braid. “Then… sorry, I can’t help you. After what’s happened and all…”

“Um, Jo…I’m not actually working for the paper right now. I just”—I tried to think of a way to explain it—“I was there, okay?
I met those guys who died, and I’m just trying to figure out …I need to know what went wrong.”

“The cops said some sicko sold them bad acid. And Trike …he swears he didn’t know a single thing about it. And I believe him,
okay? He’s a bad guy, but he’s not that bad.”

“Right, but…I guess what I’m trying to do is understand the place.”

“Understand Melting Rock?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. That’s cool, I guess.”

“So what can you tell me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just what I told you at the fest, only it goes double now. It isn’t the same place
it used to be. It’s too bad, too. Back in the day, Melting Rock was really something special.”

“Special how?”

“Why don’t you have a look for yourself?” She waved toward the lone bookshelf, which was stuffed with albums I’d glanced through
when Mad and I broke in, each oversize volume covered in multicolored cloth.

“What are those, exactly?”

“Scrapbooks. There’s a couple for every year. Not this year, though. Nobody’s got around to it yet. Probably never will, either.”

“But what—”

“Oh,
man,
I have to go.” She consulted the antique watch hanging from a chain around her neck, then stood up, tummy first. “I have
an appointment at the clinic at two….Hey, could you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“If you’re gonna stay here and look at the books anyway, could you watch Happy for me? I’ll only be gone for, like, twenty
minutes. I just have to get my weekly exam. Could you?”

“Listen, Jo, I—”

“She’s a really easy baby, no problem. She’ll just sit there and play with her—”

“It’s not that. I, um…” For some reason, I felt the need to come clean. “Look, believe it or not, I just got accused of dealing
some ridiculous amount of cocaine, okay? I got arrested and everything. So you probably wouldn’t want me to—”

She blinked at me. “Just dealing? Is that it?”

“Um…yeah.”

“All righty, then,” she said. “If Happy fusses a little, there’s a box of organic zwieback on the desk. Just give her one.
She’ll beg you for two, but you gotta—”

“Wait,” I said. “You mean it doesn’t bother you?”

“Nah,” she said. “Drugs ought to be legal anyhow.”

With those words and a friendly smile, Jo took off—leaving me with a pile of papers, several rows of scrapbooks, and one very
fat baby. The kid watched her mother walk out the door, then screwed up her face like she was fixing to bawl. But she didn’t;
she just opened her eyes wide and stared at me like I was the weirdest thing she’d ever seen. Then she went back to her blocks.

Thus dismissed, I pulled the first scrapbook from the shelf and settled on the dusty hardwood floor next to the playpen. I
flipped through the pages, which brought me back thirteen years—when I was at boarding school, and Melting Rock was just getting
off the ground.

Sure enough, there were pictures of ragtag groups of music fans, maybe a hundred or so in all. The only person I recognized
was a teenage Jo Mingle, though I did notice that many of the shots included a scraggly-bearded guy handing out thick slices
of brown bread and passing around a ceramic butter crock. Fascinating.

I went through a few more like this before it occurred to me that it might be more profitable to work backward instead of
forward. So I squatted at the bottom of the shelf and took the most recent volume, which was covered in purple velvet with
appliquéd gold stars.

I flipped it open, and right away I saw some familiar faces; Melissa was even there, boogying it up in a crowd shot. Eventually,
I came across a photo of Lauren, looking flushed and happy—and, of all things, sitting on the lap of one Axel Robinette. He
was holding her around the waist and, in his predictably suave fashion, grabbing one of her breasts.

What the hell was that all about?

A couple of pages later, I hit the jackpot: two full spreads devoted entirely to the group I’d been calling the Jaspersburg
Eight. At first I was blown away by my good fortune, but then I figured it wasn’t really that unlikely. After all, the reason
I’d found the teens in the first place was because Jo had told me they were a Melting Rock institution.

And there they were, looking a lot like they had when I’d first met them—hanging out on the grass, clowning around, giving
the general impression that they didn’t have a care in the world. They were younger, of course; the difference between sixteen
and seventeen can be acute, especially for boys. I noticed that Tom’s hair was shorter, and Billy had just started cultivating
those ridiculous sideburns; Shaun looked basically the same, skinny and with serious acne issues, though Alan wasn’t nearly
as well muscled as when I’d met him.

As for the girls: Cindy hadn’t changed much from fifteen to sixteen, though the previous year her hair had been electric blue.
Lauren seemed as grown-up and confident as ever; Trish, on the other hand, was maybe twenty pounds heavier than she was now—making
her almost normal.

But when it came to the prize for Most Transformed, there was no contest: Dorrie was the winner, hands down.

In fact, if she hadn’t been with the rest of the gang, I probably wouldn’t have recognized her. She looked…well,
normal.

Her hair was still short, but it was nicely styled. She was wearing a sundress akin to the ones that Lauren paraded around
in, a flower-print spaghetti-strap affair that showed off her tanned shoulders and budding cleavage. Other than a pair of
loopy earrings, there was nary a piercing to be found. On her ankle was a rose tattoo just like Trish’s, and I realized I
hadn’t noticed it before. Every time I’d seen her in person, she’d been wearing pants and long sleeves.

I scrutinized the picture for a while, my first reaction being intense sympathy for Dorrie’s parents. Call me uptight, but
the idea of a daughter of mine running around looking like an East Village rent-a-boy made me nauseous.

My second thought, though, was even more dramatic.

What the hell happened to her?

What could possibly prompt a girl to make such a dramatic identity shift her junior year of high school? What had made her
go from what appeared to be a typical teenager to a morose kid bent on self-mutilation? Was it really just normal adolescent
angst? Or was there something else going on?

Those queries prompted me to ask another, one that I’d been pondering for weeks now. Then I put the two together, and suddenly
everything seemed to fall into place.

I’d wondered what the boys had done, what could be awful enough to make someone want them dead. I’d thought it was connected
to the payoff scam, but it appeared that I was wrong.

And now I was wondering what had happened to Dorrie.

With everything else out of the picture, didn’t it make sense to ask,
What had they done to Dorrie?

And what was the most obvious answer? What was the most likely thing that a group of boys could have done to leave a girl
traumatized, maybe even change her overnight? I thought about how I’d found Melissa, naked and brutalized, and what everyone
had assumed had happened to her until she told us different.

Oh, my God,
I thought.
They raped her.

O
KAY
, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe, as my mom would say, I was assuming facts not in evidence. But…I couldn’t shake the feeling
that I was finally on the right track.

I was about to run out in search of more information when I remembered that I was responsible for the well-being of a tiny
human. By the time Jo got back fifteen minutes later, I was practically hysterical with curiosity.

I went straight from the Melting Rock office to the Walden County Public Library, where I headed for the reference section.
I grabbed the previous year’s Jaspersburg High School annual and flipped to the photo of the junior class. It took some searching
to find Dorrie in the crowd, but there she was—hair shorn, nose pierced, not having totally adopted her present look, but
well on her way.

From my previous incarnation as the
Monitor
’s schools reporter, I knew that student portraits were taken at the end of September, so the kids could give them to their
parents for Christmas. That meant that when the scrapbook photos were shot the previous August, Dorrie looked normal; a month
later, she’d been transformed. If my theory was right, whatever had happened to her had gone down sometime in the course of
those few weeks—maybe even at Melting Rock itself.

Son of a bitch.

So how could I find out more? Asking Dorrie herself didn’t seem like a great idea, considering how she’d freaked out and slugged
me the last time I’d spoken to her. Trish and Cindy had their own stability issues—which left Lauren, the long-haired nymphet
who may or may not be schtupping my best friend.

I called her on her cell just as school was getting out, and she agreed to meet me on the grounds that it was “way more fun
than studying calc.” So I went over to Café Whatever and read the
Times
while I waited for her, taking some pleasure in the discovery that, even in the wake of his Mohawk Associates scoop, Gordon’s
latest assignment involved the bitter politics surrounding the closure of an Elmira tampon factory.

Lauren walked in half an hour later, looking rather schoolmarmish in a skirt and lightweight sweater, hair again up in a bun.
She ordered an espresso and a thin lemon biscotti, which she dipped into the tiny cup with the precision of a chemist at the
bench.

“So,” she said through a smile, “how’s Jake doing?”

“Um…okay, I guess. I haven’t seen him that much.”

“ ’Cause you got suspended from the paper?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“It was in one of the stories about you getting busted.”

“Oh. Listen, Lauren, I didn’t do it, okay? Somebody set me up. They planted those drugs in my—”

“Well,
duh.
”

“You believe me?” Between Lauren and Jo, I was starting to feel like something less than a pariah.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re
totally
not the type.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“So how come you wanted to talk to me?”

“Well…I came across these old photos from Melting Rock last year, and I was kind of wondering about them.”

“What photos?”

“Just of you guys, and…First of all, there was one of you and Axel Robinette, where you two looked kind of… intimate.”

Another eye roll. “Yeah, we kind of hooked up that year. Nothing big. Just your typical M.R.F.”

“Your what?”

“M.R.F. Didn’t you hear that before?” I shook my head. “It stands for Melting Rock”—she leaned in, her smile turning naughty—“…if
you’re in front of a grown-up, you’d say ‘Fling,’ but we’ve got another word for it.”

“I bet you do.”

“So, you know, that was that. No big deal. Is that really what you wanted to talk about?”

“That, and… Dorrie.”

“Dorrie? What about her?”

“Like I said, I was going through some pictures from last year, and she just looks totally different. I checked the yearbook,
and it seems like she went for the goth thing practically overnight.”

“Yeah, I guess she did,” Lauren said with a shrug. “So what?”

“Don’t you think it’s a little weird?”

“What’s wrong with trying something new?”

“Nothing, but…In those pictures she seemed so happy, and now she seems so miserable. Are you telling me you didn’t notice
the difference?”

“Dorrie’s always been kinda moody. It’s just her style.”

“Yeah, but this seems like an extreme.”

“So what’s your point?”

“Lauren…do you think it’s possible that something happened to Dorrie?” No answer. “Look, I totally understand if she swore
you to secrecy, but this isn’t the kind of thing a person should just sit on, okay?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I think something happened to her, maybe at Melting Rock last year. I think …maybe she was sexually assaulted.”

“Are you serious?”

“So you’re telling me you don’t know anything about it?”