We Know It Was You Page 8

  “I’ll be in the other room,” she announced in a clipped voice. Mrs. Flax was always formal and awkward with Rodrigo. It was like she saw him as a stranger who’d just shown up one day, and whom they were all too polite to ask to leave. Which Benny found ironic, because at this point Rodrigo felt more familiar to him than his actual dad, who had been remote before but was now beyond remote—he was on another planet.

  Sometimes Benny had dumb fantasies where Rodrigo and his mom fell in love against all odds and got married. His father’s role in this was always dim and ambiguous. In some versions he miraculously recovered but still lived with them, like an uncle or a much older brother. In other versions he just sort of disappeared. Benny always felt embarrassed emerging from these fantasies; they were childish and disloyal. Rodrigo was a nurse, not a substitute dad, and Mrs. Flax was too old for him anyway.

  Benny looked at his watch. It was six thirty. He turned on the news and resumed his stance on the yoga mat.

  It is my wish that the world should know everlasting peace.

  He repeated the mantra, trying to clear his mind. Aikido was meant to be practiced with tranquility of spirit, not with visions of unidentified waterlogged bodies floating before your eyes.

  Benny always did his aikido exercises in the living room during the news. He felt it was beneficial for his father to observe this ritual, in whatever foggy capacity he was able to. The translation of aikido meant “the way of unifying with life energy.” It was a Japanese martial art unlike karate or tegumi, where the winner of a fight was determined by which opponent could force the other into submission. In aikido, the goal was not to use force, but to evade and redirect your attacker’s strike in such a way that no one, including your attacker, was harmed. The idea was that everyone was deserving of empathy and compassion, even those who sought to destroy you. The aikido fighter blended himself seamlessly into the motions of his opponent, like a magnet, anticipating each movement and deftly redirecting it using the attacker’s own momentum. It didn’t require physical strength or brute aggression: only focus and awareness and the desire to understand, rather than hate, the person who wanted you dead.

  “Hey, Rodrigo, did Mom tell you I’m getting my black belt?” Benny asked, doing a wide side stretch.

  “Very cool,” Rodrigo said, sipping his bourbon. “Mr. Flax, can you point to something in the room that’s the color black?”

  Mr. Flax sort of twitched and stared mutely ahead.

  “Yeah, black sucks,” Rodrigo said. “It’s not even a real color. How about pointing to something red?”

  Mr. Flax pointed at the TV. On the news a bright red body bag was being heaved onto a stretcher.

  “Nice,” Rodrigo said. “Now point to something—”

  “Oh my God,” Benny interrupted. He stared at the TV. Police officers were standing aimlessly on the riverbank holding what looked like an enormous soggy piece of fur.

  Who is in that body bag?

  Tuesday

  The assembly hall, 8:30 a.m.

  Everyone was talking excitedly. There was an undercurrent of explosive giddiness in the room. People were actually shaking. Every so often someone would shout, “You can’t kill a Wildcat!” and the entire assembly hall would break into a cheer. The room sparkled with glittering plastic tiaras. Corny Davenport was passing them out, and everyone was wearing one, even the teachers.

  “Where do you get three hundred tiaras at a moment’s notice?” Virginia asked loudly. She was supposed to be sitting with her homeroom, but no one was paying attention in the disorder, so she’d grabbed a seat in the front next to Benny.

  Benny shrugged, turning his tiara over in his hands, as if inspecting it. “You should put it on,” Virginia told him. “You’ll look suspicious if you don’t.”

  Benny frowned, and then put the tiara on his head. Virginia snorted. If there was anyone who looked really ridiculous in a tiara, it was Benny Flax. He looked younger, like a deeply dissatisfied thirteen-year-old whose mother had forced him to have a princess-themed bar mitzvah. Suddenly his serious expression didn’t look so serious—it looked pouty and sulky and babyish.

  Virginia adjusted her own tiara, cocking it a bit to the side at what she hoped was a jaunty, careless-looking angle. You should never let your accessories dominate your look—it made you seem insecure. There was a way to look good in a tiara, but irony was key. Virginia didn’t want it centered on the crown of her head like an actual princess, or perched goofily like a cake topper the way some people were wearing them.

  A loud cheer went up, louder and more raucous than any of the previous cheers. Virginia looked up at the stage and saw a pair of blondes, Corny and Angie, with their arms around a third blonde they were lovingly escorting to the podium: Brittany Montague. She looked weak, but happy. She waved at the crowd like a pageant contestant. Benny and Virginia clapped mechanically.

  Brittany gave Corny and Angie a hug, and then they stepped back, seeming reluctant to let Brittany out of arm’s reach. Brittany gazed out serenely as the house lights dimmed and everyone went quiet.

  “As most of you know at this point, I’m alive.” She giggled, and the crowd giggled back at her. “But what you don’t know is how much I love you.” A huge cacophonous cheer erupted. It lasted more than a minute.

  “And love is what got me through the last three days. Well, love and strawberry-kiwi Gatorade!” Everyone laughed again, though it wasn’t a joke. The Gatorade was the reason she was standing there and not in the hospital hooked up to an IV. The local news headline was THANK GOD FOR GATORADE, SAYS ABDUCTED CHEERLEADER. Corny Davenport had found her locked in the pom-pom closet yesterday, where she’d been trapped since Friday night. She’d been drugged before the game and ditched there. There were no signs of abuse (the paper had reported this), and though Brittany’s purse had been stolen, it had contained no cash, and no charges had been made to the many credit cards. The attacker appeared to have wanted only one thing: the mascot suit.

  Onstage, Brittany pulled out a bottle of pink Gatorade and took a long, dramatic sip. The audience cheered wildly. She wiped her mouth and giggled.

  “What do you bet this whole thing is a scam by Gatorade,” Virginia whispered.

  Benny didn’t reply or even register that he’d heard her. He just stared ahead with his arms crossed. Several newspaper articles were clenched in his fist, the ink blackening his clammy palms. Things were moving ahead of him now, and fast. Brittany was alive. For a precious few moments, that information had been his and his alone. Well, his and Angie’s and Corny’s and Virginia’s, anyway. But as the twins’ Lexus had zoomed away yesterday, his control over the case had zoomed away with it. And now he was reduced to reading the paper for information like a clueless yokel.

  According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the last thing Brittany remembered before her abduction was standing in the shower with her clothes on. But she seemed confused—in the online edition of the story she reported that the shower occurred after Corny had rescued her. According to the Marietta Daily Journal, there may have been no shower at all; the reporter suggested Brittany had invented the shower to cover up her embarrassment at having repeatedly urinated on herself while trapped in the pom-pom closet. Normally Benny would have pounced on such discrepancies, analyzing every possibility, but at the moment he was too distracted by an overwhelming sense of failure.

  “I’m going to go home and rest for a while,” Brittany was saying, reading from a piece of paper in front of her. “But I just wanted to say how much everyone’s love and support means to me. Thank you for all the flowers and brownies and cookies and cards. And I appreciate everyone cooperating with the police as we figure out what happened on Friday night. I hope none of you ever have to find out what it feels like to be locked in a closet for sixty hours with no food or bathroom. But I do hope you get to find out what it feels like to be as loved as I feel right now, because it feels amazing!”

  The reaction from the crowd was deafeni
ng. “WILDCAAAATS!” someone shouted, and then everyone was shouting it. That was the weirdest part of all this—the sudden Wildcat zeal that had seized everyone, as if Brittany not being dead were the result of school spirit.

  “And you all look beautiful in your tiaras!” Brittany shouted, smiling stupendously. Then she took Angie’s and Corny’s arms, and they walked her off the stage as the audience gave her a standing ovation.

  Mr. Choi, Virginia couldn’t help noticing, had been pointedly left out of Brittany’s speech. No one wanted to spoil the school-wide emotional high of Brittany being alive by dealing with the creepy, baffling fact that, in her place, Mr. Choi was dead. They’d finally caught the body, and it wasn’t a young blond cheerleader. It was a middle-aged Asian man with a tattoo of a saxophone on his left butt cheek. Which meant it hadn’t been Brittany filming the locker room footage; it had been Mr. Choi himself, inside the suit. The idea made Virginia so hyper she could barely sit still. All those girls with their boobs out, giggling and jiggling around, no idea that a middle-aged man with a saxophone butt tattoo was hiding in plain sight, watching them. Probably with an erection! It was gross and thrilling and weird all at the same time, and Virginia had never felt more thrilled in her life. Benny, on the other hand, looked wilted and defeated. Virginia rolled her eyes at him. He was just mad he hadn’t figured it all out himself.

  The principal took the podium, beaming with smug pride, like they all had him personally to thank for their favorite cheerleader being alive after all. “We’ll see you at the spirit show on Friday, Brittany,” he called after her. Then, to the crowd, “Sign-ups are on the bulletin board in the main hall. Let’s make this the best spirit show ever, whaddaya say, Wildcats?”

  The crowd roared wildly in assent. Then the bell rang, and people began filing out of the assembly hall. Everyone was grinning and talking and waving their tiaras in the air.

  “So what now?” Virginia asked Benny. He was slumped in his seat. Virginia copied his body language, slumping down too. “At least there’s one less pervert in the world,” she said.

  “One fewer,” Benny corrected. The pervading story seemed to be that Mr. Choi had drugged Brittany and locked her in the pom-pom closet so he could sneak into her mascot costume and watch all the cheerleaders undress. Some of the football players were now claiming they’d known all along that the mascot was Mr. Choi, and that they had in fact heroically chased him from the field that night to spare the girls from his pervy glances. Which made no sense, but no one seemed to care. Everyone’s feelings were so jumbled and disorganized—the joy that Brittany was alive, the relief that they didn’t have to be sad anymore, that they could return to their self-involvement, overshadowed the desire to understand what had actually happened.

  Only Benny and Virginia knew how far it went—that Mr. Choi had not only been hiding in the costume, but had actually been videotaping the whole thing. There were still a lot of questions. Why had he run to the bridge? And who was that mysterious figure in the video, the one forcing him to jump?

  “Someone must have caught him,” Virginia said, trying to reanimate Benny. “So he ran from the field, but then got cornered at the bridge.”

  “If that were true, it would mean that this entire time that person knew Brittany wasn’t really dead. They knew it was Mr. Choi.”

  “Can you think of anyone whose mourning seemed fake?” Virginia asked. It was getting quiet in the assembly hall as it emptied out.

  “Everyone’s mourning seemed fake,” Benny said. “Mourning is fake. It’s just a performance we carry out in society to signify grief and cope with our own mortality.”

  “Okaaay . . .” Virginia looked at him. “You can take off your tiara now. We’re the only ones left.”

  Benny lifted his hand, but then dropped it, as if suddenly lacking the energy. His gloom made Virginia impatient. There was still a ton they didn’t know. It wasn’t like the mystery was over.

  “The locker room,” Benny said. “That’s where it started—not the football field. I can’t believe I made such a stupid error. We should have gotten to her first. Who knows what we could have found.”

  “We can still look around,” Virginia said, but she knew it was a lame suggestion. The pom-pom closet was cordoned off now, and no one could get near it. And questioning Brittany seemed like an unlikely proposition, at least until the protective wall of cheerleaders and their boyfriends withdrew from around her and things got back to normal.

  “And anyway, it’s good to make mistakes, because then you can learn from them,” Virginia said, feeling stupid immediately. Had she ever said anything less interesting in her life?

  “Don’t try to pep-talk me,” Benny said back. “Just let me beat myself up. It’s part of my process.”

  “Okay . . . Do what you gotta do, I guess.” Virginia got up and left Benny to his brooding.

  The sophomore lounge, 10:00 a.m.

  “Every time I think about it, I get goose bumps all over my body.”

  There was the crack and hiss of Coke cans being opened as Mrs. Hope passed them out to all the girls. The whole school had been separated into girl-only and boy-only groups so they could relax and be safe and talk about their feelings. The atmosphere in the school had changed in the hour since the assembly. Brittany had gone home, and it was like everyone’s joy and excitement and relief had gone with her. Now they were glum and lost again, and the teachers were forcing them to talk about Mr. Choi, and how it felt to realize there had been a pervert in their midst.

  “I mean, the locker room was our sanctuary,” Corny was saying. “Like, our special private pep fortress.”

  I’ve seen your boobs, Virginia thought. It was hard to look at Corny without seeing the locker room footage playing before her eyes.

  “I’m supposed to wear the wildcat costume this Friday,” Kirsten Fagerland piped up. “But I refuse. I’m not going to do it. That mascot violated us.”

  I’ve seen your boobs too.

  “That’s fair,” said Mrs. Hope, taking a long sip of her Coke. “No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

  Virginia felt lucky she’d ended up in Mrs. Hope’s group. Mrs. Hope was one of the few cool teachers at Winship. She wasn’t going to be awkward or creepy or tell the cheerleaders it was their own fault for being beautiful. Apparently Mrs. MacDonald was telling her group that if they didn’t want perverts obsessing over them, they should ask the school to buy more conservative cheerleading uniforms.

  “I think about all those times Mr. Choi asked me to stay late because my cello was out of tune,” said Mandy Li. “It always sounded tuned to me. Now I’m thinking he was just trying to get me alone.”

  There was a collective shudder in the room.

  “It’s important to feel safe in your own school,” Mrs. Hope said. “It’s important to feel safe in your own body. But it’s going to take time.”

  “If Mr. Choi weren’t already dead, I think my boyfriend would probably kill him,” Corny said proudly. “I always feel safe when I’m with Winn.”

  Next to her, Angie Montague sighed. “Brittany is so brave,” she said. “But I’m not. I just want to wear a burlap sack and hide in my room forever.” She folded her arms as if to protect her breasts from the leering world. Not that it made any difference. Virginia had already seen Angie’s boobs and could see them now in her mind—naked and fresh and full, sparkling with glitter and jiggling as she laughed.

  “What about you, Virginia?” Mrs. Hope said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Um, I don’t know,” Virginia said carefully. She couldn’t just blurt stuff out the way she used to—she had to protect Mystery Club and their information. “I’m not a cheerleader and I’m not in band,” she said, “so I probably wasn’t on Mr. Choi’s radar. I don’t think he even knew me.”

  Mrs. Hope nodded, giving her an appraising look. “But even if you didn’t know Mr. Choi personally, you’re still a part of the community he affected. . . . Do yo
u feel safe?”

  Virginia looked around. She didn’t know what she felt. Creeped out, definitely, but something else too . . . excitement. Excitement that people weren’t necessarily what they seemed. Because if everyone was what they seemed, Virginia was certain she was going to die of boredom and disappointment. She’d had enough disappointment in her life; it was like people just lined up to let her down, and then acted like it was her own fault for expecting anything else. If there was one thing she’d learned in Florida, it was how much people will resent you for expecting them to be anything but predictable and petty and passionless.

  “I think it’s a mistake to be obsessed with safety,” she said to the group. “Safety is boring and it makes people weak. If people are always safe, they never have to learn how to stick up for themselves.”

  Everyone looked at her.

  “Is that how you feel?” Mrs. Hope asked. “That people should learn to stick up for themselves?”

  Virginia shrugged. “I dunno. In the Boarders we do it all the time. Sometimes they don’t open the cafeteria, and we have to take the bus to the grocery store just to get food. But you never hear us complaining.”

  “It sounds like you’re complaining right now,” Kirsten said.

  “Well I’m not,” Virginia snapped back, unsure how the conversation had veered off in this direction. “I’m just saying that there are worse things than being looked at.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . . like . . .” Like not being noticed at all.

  Room 202, 10:15 a.m.

  “Respect,” Coach Miles declared, leaning confidently against the teacher’s desk. It was weird seeing him in a classroom instead of on one of the sports fields. But everyone was mixed up today. Benny had ended up in a group with mostly jocks. He suspected he was there to provide diversity, both ethnically and intellectually, a responsibility that made him self-conscious and annoyed.