The Rivals (11 page)

With laser focus, I walk back to my dorm and I ask Maia point-blank if she knows anything about Anderin abuse on the team.

“I don’t know a thing about it. But I’d sure like to know who’s spreading those sorts of rumors.
Who
exactly is telling you this?”

“Just people,” I say, but my face turns a shade of pink because I feel a bit foolish protecting Delaney and protecting Beat—people I barely know—while questioning my roommate.

Maia gives a dismissive laugh. “Just people? Well, that’s typical, isn’t it?
Unnamed sources.
People—including
just people
—should just have the guts to come forward, especially when they’re casting aspersions on the whole team.”

“I know. But that’s what we’re supposed to do.”

“Protect people who can’t come out and point fingers directly? I’m sorry, Alex, but I think that’s kind of lame. Nothing against you. It just seems if people are going to make an accusation, they should have the guts to do it without the guise of some sort of anonymous protection.”

Or immunity.

She doesn’t say that, since she doesn’t know about my immunity promise, but now I am doubting whether I’m making the right decision, trusting the right people, protecting those I should be protecting.

“Are these
unnamed sources
pointing fingers at me?” she asks, the tiniest bit of worry in her question.

“No! God, no. No one has mentioned your name.”

“Good. And if I find out they’re trying to win illegally, I will smash them,” Maia says with a wink, slamming her hand down on the desk in a pretend show of her pugilistic punishment. “But seriously, Alex. Keep an eye on this one. It all sounds a bit dodgy. I don’t want to see some wanker who won’t use his or her name leading you astray on your first case.”

Is that what Beat and Delaney are doing to me? Leading me down some false path? Keeping me off the scent? Here I am feeling like I am
finally
getting the hang of this, finally moving beyond my own past, but then I’m back where I started, grasping for something to hold on to.

It’s like I’m looking into a steamed-up mirror and can see only parts of my face.

I need to talk to Amy. “I’ll catch you later, Maia.”

“I’m leaving too. I have to meet the team for practice,” Maia says, and we walk out together. “I’ll see if I can sniff out the perp for you.”

I say good-bye to her in the stairwell, then head down to the second floor of my dorm, where Amy lives.

I hear her voice as I near her room: “Oh no! We so schooled you on Aerosmith!”

Her door is open wide, but I knock anyway. Amy smiles brightly, then nods me in. She’s wearing a black plastic guitar slung across her shoulder and she’s surrounded by three other girls.

“Alex, meet my Rock Band teammate Jess. We totally slaughtered these bitches in the hard round,” she says, gesturing first to Jess, then to the two other girls. “That’s Lena and Vania.”

“Cool,” I say.

“Oh! I just had a brilliant idea! You should play with us. You’re a musician. You’d totally kill,” Amy says. She turns to the other girls. “Alex is this kick-ass piano player. She’s going to get into Juilliard and then be the next Leonard Bernstein.”

“Hate to break it to you, but Leonard Bernstein was a conductor,” I say.

“Then you can conduct us,” Jess says, and gives me a wink.

It’s weird seeing Amy in her element, with her friend, maybe even her girlfriend. I’ve only known Amy as the leader of the Mockingbirds, leader emeritus now, because she passed the torch on to me when her term ended last year. I’ve never known about the rest of her life. But to see her here in her room hanging with her girls is kind of like running into a teacher at the supermarket and seeing her buy Cocoa Puffs. Like,
Wow, didn’t know you liked Cocoa Puffs.
And yes, I knew Amy liked girls. But it’s just that Amy’s life has always been Amy’s life, and her predilection for Rock Band or the way she talks when her friends are around are things I never knew.

“All right, chickadees, get your asses out of here,” Amy says, and makes a quick
get out of here
gesture with her hands. She takes the guitar off and dumps it on her bed. Jess grabs a satchel-type bag, slings it on her shoulder, and then swoops in and gives Amy a kiss on the lips. I notice Amy close her eyes ever so briefly, and then I hear Jess whisper, “See you later, baby.”

Then they’re gone.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I should have called first,” I say as Amy shuts the door.

“You are always welcome here,” Amy says, and now she’s shifted back to the Amy I know. She’s even dressed the same as last year—skinny jeans, T-shirt, black Converse high-tops. She sits down on her bed, and I take the chair at her desk, pulling it out to the center of the room. On the wall above her bed, she’s tacked up several drawings on white paper, all variations on the same theme—hearts, strangely misshapen hearts. One is red and blue with one of the halves drooping over, like a slumped-down, passed-out man. Another is elongated, stretched from the bottom tip all the way up the other side, a pair of hands on each end doing the pulling.

“So what’s the latest on your big case?” Amy asks.

I give her the details. When I finish I say, “It’s like there are all these little pieces—Delaney says Theo’s part of it; Beat says Theo’s not. Beat says half the Debate Club is using to win; Maia says no one is.”

“Yeah, I feel for you,” she says. “Most of the cases I dealt with were much more black-and-white.”

“Right! That’s my point,” I say, and even though she’s not telling me what to do, at least she’s agreeing with me.

I look at the two hands on the heart and feel for a second like mine is being pulled too. On the one hand are my friends. On the other are the people I am helping.

“I don’t know, Amy. Maybe it’s not a big deal. But I just think being the head of the Mockingbirds puts you in this weird position where you’re not just this normal person or friend anymore. T.S. and I had this silly fight yesterday over whether she could see a tip that came into the mailbox. And then I felt like I was questioning Maia back there. And then she was questioning me. She asked a few times why I was protecting all these unnamed sources. Did you ever feel this way?”

“Of course,” she says.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, take just now. With Jess. We were together last year too, but I didn’t say a word about you until you filed charges. I couldn’t. But she knew I was super involved in a case—meeting with you, meeting with the board, the vote we took to revise the code of conduct to include date rape. She’d ask what I was working on, but I couldn’t tell her. Because it was my job to protect
you
,” Amy says.

“You put
me
ahead of your girlfriend?” I ask, feeling like Amy just rubbed her hand over the blurry mirror and now I’m seeing things I wasn’t able to see before. Like how she took care of me. Like how taking care of me stretched her. “But people knew it was me. They knew I was pressing charges.”

“
Some
did. But it was never publicly posted anywhere. We didn’t hang a banner and say
Alex is talking to us.
So I couldn’t say anything to Jess. It’s the same here. No one has pressed charges yet. No one has asked you to serve notice. So you
can’t
reveal names.”

“And Jess understood?”

“She didn’t like it. But she knew it was the way it is.”

Then I blurt out, “Carter has a girlfriend.”

Amy raises her eyebrows. “Really?”

“Well, I don’t know if they’re boyfriend-girlfriend, but they were kissing on the quad.”

“I guess she hasn’t learned the truth yet.”

“Which makes me think—do we really do any good? I mean, the point was to take a stand and be the one to say
no means no
and
you can’t get away with it
and look what happened. Here he is hooking up with some freshman, probably.”

“Was that the point?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Was the point of your case to stop him from dating or for you to get yourself back?”

Did I press charges to punish him or to retrieve me? I’d like to think the latter. I’m not afraid anymore, like I was. But I
am
defined by it.

“But how do you even get yourself back? I feel that
me
is gone. Who I was is gone,” I say, and my throat catches as I finally—
finally
—say out loud that a ghost is haunting me and that ghost is me. Tears prick my eyes, so I cover my face with my hands. I hate crying in front of anyone. I blink, trying to hold the tears in. It works, so I take my hands away and continue. “I mean, how can you be so calm and normal and wise about everything? I’m not even remotely close to being over what happened. Are you?”

“Well, I don’t have to see the girl who did it every day, and that helps. But you’re right. I’m not the same as I was.”

“How? How are you different?”

“I’m better,” she says, and smiles, straightens up her back. “I’m stronger. Tougher.”

Like a broken bone that’s stronger when it heals. That’s what I can be.

“Besides,” Amy says, “I think life is about how you respond to the crap that happens. I was just your average girl before. I did my own thing, had my friends, and beat anyone who took me on in Rock Band. Then Ellery did this,” Amy says, tapping her back with her hand, narrowing her eyes, the latent anger that will always be there stirring. “And I
was
different. I couldn’t go back. There was no going back. So I learned who I could be. I learned I could be someone who could stand up to bullies. And then I could be someone who’d stand up to anyone, for anyone. I’m not afraid of anything now, Alex. What can anyone do to me now? I’ve already had someone slice my back open with a knife. What more can they do to me?” she says, holding her arms open wide as if to say
bring it on.
“The same goes for you, Alex. You’re not the same. You’re not
supposed
to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget. Twenty years from now, you’ll still remember what it felt like to be exposed. And you’ll remember too what it felt like to take a stand. You’ll probably remember that more.”

I know she’s right. I know it not just because the tears are now rolling down my face, but because she’s the only other person here who can remotely understand how I feel.

I wipe my tears and glance up at Amy’s wall, scanning her heart drawings, seeing one I didn’t notice before. A rudimentary sketch of a girl wearing a triangle-shaped dress, her legs nearly buckling under the weight of this gigantic heart she’s carrying that’s ten times her size. She’s about to toss the heart to another girl, and the caption reads
Take it.

I look back at Amy, who’s carried the burdens for others, who’s carried their hearts when they needed her to, who carried
me
when I needed her last year. Back then I was the girl no one knew. I still
want
to be the girl no one knows.

But there is no going back. I am not the same, and I never will be. I have to let go of what other people think of me. I have to stop worrying about whether they see me as the girl who was raped. I
am
the girl who was raped.

And I can take my past and declare it mine. I can make it my own.

It no longer has to be my shame. It no longer has to be the thing I have to live down.

So what if the whole school knows my history? I can make a choice to be stronger for it, tougher for it, better for it. I can choose to be on the other side, to be someone who takes a stand not just for herself but for others.

“As they say, there’s no turning back.”

“No, there’s not,” Amy says, and her smile is as wide as the sea. And now I’m smiling too, and I’m still kind of crying, and I still kind of hate it because I definitely still hate crying. But I’m not crying because I’m sad; I’m crying because I’m letting go of who I was. I’m stepping into my new self.

I stand up and reach for Amy’s black plastic guitar. “One song. We play for bragging rights.”

“No fair! You’re a musician.”

“All’s fair in love and music,” I say, and turn on her Rock Band, where I proceed to demolish her in Nirvana, Radiohead, the Who, and more because she can’t stop asking for just one more song, just one more song.

Maybe it’s from all my piano training, or maybe it’s just because I’m feeling pretty kick-ass right now.

After I make Amy beg for mercy, she gives me a suggestion for the case.

“You need the runners to step up their game. Here’s what I would do: I would ask a couple of the runners to help out with the investigation. The three of you on the board won’t be enough.” Amy gives me a wink. “I know who you want to ask.”

“Anjali,” I say with a smile, because Anjali is one of thirteen runners this year. Council members who aren’t selected for the board can choose to stay on as runners. They have to repeat some of the more menial runner tasks like attendance mistakes, but these “tier-two runners”—like Anjali—have more seniority; they manage many of the on-the-ground assignments, and they often assist the board with investigations.

I stop by Anjali’s room on the first floor. I ask her to help. She says yes immediately.

“I loved being on the council last year, and I so wanted to help out more,” she says.

“I’m really psyched too, because I wanted to work with you in the first place and now we can,” I say.

“Totally up for anything,” she says, and gives me a crisp salute, then tucks her wispy blond hair behind her ears. She’s taller than me by a few inches, maybe five nine, five ten. She stands barefoot and is wearing a short purple skirt with a red tank top and a blue tank top layered over each other. Today’s scarf: thin and emerald green with silver streaks. I love how she wears scarves every day, even when it’s hot out. I love how they’re random and don’t match her outfits either.

We discuss the Mockingbirds assignment for a few minutes, then we shift to English class and Mr. Baumann’s boarding-school assignments, then to chess.

“I’m having a chess party tonight. Do you want to come?” Her voice rises a bit when she asks me, that cocktail of nerves and hope like when you ask someone on a date.