“Damien? Whatever is the matter? Why are you out here screeching like a lunatic? I thought you were in London today.”
“Is she here?”
“Ashlyn? She’s in her room, most likely. Why, what has she done?”
There is a momentary scuffle.
“Damien, really. There’s no need to manhandle me. It’s beneath you,” and my father’s ironclad voice, “Step aside, Sylvia.”
Footsteps now, running up the stairs, thunking hard against the gray wool runner. Father used to be thin, but years behind computers and rich meals in his clubs have robbed him of his runner’s physique.
I scramble back to my room, slam the door, and try to turn the lock, but his hand grips the knob and the door swings open, jettisoning me across the room.
Damien Carr is suitably named. He has eyes like burning coals. Possessed. Driven. Evil. He looks to have the devil inside him now.
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. I haven’t a clue what you’re speaking about.”
“You’ve cost me the deputy exchequer position. They’ve pulled my name from the short list. Someone sent a salacious email from an anonymous account. I know it was you.”
“It wasn’t me, Father. I don’t care enough about you to bother destroying you. It must have been one of your other enemies.”
This brave speech costs me a molar. The pain of his fist blinds me; I see stars. When my ears stop ringing, I spit the tooth into my hand and sneer at him.
“You can hit me all you want, but I didn’t do it.”
“You’re lying. You’re a lying, thieving little cunt, aren’t you? How did you do it, Ashlyn? How did you manage? I know it was you, don’t bother denying it. The IP address was from that dingy café you skulk about, off Broad Street. Oh, you thought I didn’t know where you spend your days? Who’d you open your legs for to get this done, eh, Ashlyn? I know you’re not smart enough to have managed on your own.”
“Damien!” My mother watches this scene with horror from my bedroom door. I can only imagine what it looks like. A play in which I am the writer, director, and producer.
Here’s what I want to see.
Ashlyn: grinning maniacally, teeth rimed in red, holding a tooth in her hand. Her cheek and jaw are already swelling, she can feel her skin stretching out so it’s shiny and tight. She knows what this looks like; she’s been on the receiving end of her father’s fist many times.
Damien: his face puce with fury, eyes bulging with hate, spittle in the corners of his mouth from his buffalo clumsy sprint up the stairs, desperately trying to restrain himself from attacking again and failing.
Now start the fight again, only this time, give the audience a second, a beat, to realize he’s going to punch her before he does it.
The two of us face off as we have so often lately: my body bruised and battered, his sides heaving like a prized Thoroughbred flogged to the end of the race.
A beat. Yes, that’s right. That’s better.
My father hates me. Always has. All my parents see when they look at me is the irresponsible twat who let their beloved heir drown. It doesn’t matter that I was barely more than a wee babe myself, I was supposed to be holding his hand. I looked away for a moment and when I looked back, he was facedown among the lily pads.
Ever since Johnny died... Well, there’s no reason to pretend we ever were a happy, loving family, but the rift was complete when Johnny was four and I was six. Johnny, sainted, beloved Johnny, forever cast as the four-year-old cherub. The innocent facing the monster’s maw. I sat with my hand on his tiny back and wondered if Monet would have liked to paint him there, his sturdy little legs disappearing into the muck, the green of the lily pads vibrant against the white of his shirt and the brown of his wet hair.
Then the screaming. So much screaming.
I prodded at him, yes. But I did not hold him under. I did not push him in. No matter what the witnesses said. They lied. They realized who my father was and wanted a piece of the action. As if Sir Damien Carr would reward them for their accusations.
I don’t think my father cared for me much before the accident, though his animus after was legendary. He expected decorum at all times; I was a wild, rough-and-tumble girl child who liked to set fire to the curtains and tear apart the ancient silk and wool rugs with my rollerblades, and, because of the Queen’s magnanimity, could inherit all of Damien’s vast fortune. Not that I wanted it, who cares about money?
He started cheating on my mother well before their marriage bed grew cold and distant. I walked in on him once, with another woman in my mother’s bed. They were giggling and laughing and happy. She was blond, ice blond, like my mother, even looked like her a bit. But she sounded so different. So light and loose.
These sounds were unfamiliar, they drew me, a moth to the flame. I wanted to see what had finally, finally, made my parents happy.
Silly me. Silly, dangerous me. He came to my room that evening. Explained my role in their complicity. Tell your mother and I’ll kill you, he said, giving me his lopsided, gap-toothed smile. A smile to others, a threat to me.
And I, weak little mouse, thought, Sure, Daddy. I’m happy to cover up for you.
No, I didn’t. I put his words in my growing databank of slights and hurts and nasty things, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice, a sharpened razor to the wrist. To the throat.
Don’t worry, Daddy. I know your secret now, and I’ll keep it in my heart where no one can find it until the time is perfect, and then I will use it against you and laugh while you burn.
Our relationship worsens the older I get. I push my father’s buttons, as my mother likes to say. She does it now, her lips pursed. Instead of kicking his sorry, cheating, lying, homicidal ass out of the house or offering to get me to a dentist or even have Cook bring up an ice pack, she takes his side.
“Ashlyn, don’t push your father’s buttons. Tell him what he wants to know.”
“I. Didn’t. Do. Anything. What do I have to gain seeing you humiliated further? It’s embarrassing enough the whole world knows you’re fucking that trollop. It reflects poorly on the family.”
Ah, the time-honored tradition of daughter throwing her parents’ words in their faces.
He roars and his hand swings again but I’m faster this time, braced and ready for the blow the moment the words leave my mouth. I duck, grab my bag with my right hand, and scoot out the door, leaving them both staring in shock.
I clatter down the stairs, one flight, two. I can hear him behind me, shouting. He’s gaining. My boots are at the back door. I detour through the kitchens, past the shocked face of Dorsey, our family’s cook for my whole tender life. She steps out to stop me but she’s too late, and my father crashes into her. They go ass over teakettle into a heap on the flagstones, giving me the break I need.
“Ashlyn,” my mother calls again, pleading this time, but I grab my boots and I’m out, doing a runner through the labyrinth and out the back garden. Thanks to Dorsey, I’ve escaped.
Again.
Half a mile down the lane, I scoot through the hedgerow into our fields. I smoke here by the stone fence. It abuts the graveyard, where I like to go after dark. I sit by Johnny’s grave. His presence comforts me. He, unlike the rest of the family, forgave me ages ago.
I find a spot out of the wind and assess the damage with my hand. My face hurts, but my jaw isn’t broken. I still have my tooth clutched in my left palm. I wonder if anyone can put it back in for me. No, too dangerous.
I have a water bottle in my bag, dregs from yesterday. I swish out my mouth, spill the last of it over the bloody stump of gory white, then press it firmly back into place. The pain makes me go wobbly in the knees, so I sit down hard on the ground. Shut my eyes and grit my teeth, praying the tooth will take root.
I need a cigarette. Or a bump.
&nb
sp; I have to get out of this hell.
There have been rebellious daughters since the beginning of time. Most are like me, I assume, stuck in a house with people whose priorities put them last, who don’t care a whit about them, except to see what price they can fetch, what ladder they can be used to help climb, which advantageous match can be made. Too rebellious, and they shipped you off to a nunnery (or school, nowadays) or pawned you off on the first idiot man who’d take you. And if you thought Daddy was bad, just wait until you understood what the rest of your life was going to look like, on your back or on your knees, being forced, getting pregnant, and good luck living through the birth of the first, not to mention the thirteenth.
Female rebellion is a time-honored tradition, yes, but it’s usually more genteel now, death by a thousand cuts. Mine is coming to a head, soon, and I won’t bother with a thousand cuts. Just one. Well placed. Well timed.
Finality, Damien, comes for you on the wings of chariots.
The last fight we had, Daddy swore to cut me off, and I told him to go ahead, I didn’t need his money, his filthy blood money. Lord knows there’s none on my mother’s side; she married up, way up.
Without my inheritance, I suppose I’ll have to get a job. I can get an ID card that states I’m eighteen, forge enough documents to establish a short-lived work history. Rent a flat. I’ve been saving money—it’s one thing to have access to Daddy’s accounts, those can be frozen at any moment by the solicitors. No, I’m smarter than that. I’ve been filtering money for the past few years. Granted, a lot of it went up my nose or down my gullet, but I have over forty thousand quid stashed away now.
I don’t want to work, but I’ll do what I have to if it means escaping. I just want to get away. Find some peace.
My God, do you blame me? My parents are the real monsters.
AUGUST
Marchburg, Virginia
15
THE MISTAKES
Bewildered. That is the only word for it. I move from class to class, borne along the flow of girls like a mountain stream down a hill, relentless.
I already feel behind and this is only the first day of classes. I’ve taken so many notes my fingers are raw and bruised, wrists sore from balancing on the sharp edge of my laptop.
My classmates are smart. Seriously smart.
And the teachers expect nothing less than intelligent discourse. Lectures are informal conclaves where topics are discussed, rhetorized, not taught. With the small classes, the teacher-to-student ratio less than ten per class, there is no opinion, no idea, left unturned. The teachers don’t lecture, they posit a theory and open the floor to discussion. I am expected to be informed and have opinions. I am expected to participate. I feel nauseated at the mere thought of three days of this level of inquisition, much less three years. It will get worse as term goes on.
I am in trouble. Over my head. Already.
It is 2:00 p.m. and time for my computer science class. It is the second to last unit for the day. The lab, deep in the bowels of the science building, is quiet, illuminated by canned lights, the walls cherry and glass, arranged so the screens won’t get a glare.
And the screens—four to a table, three rows—are all run off professional-grade Dells, black towers humming quietly to themselves, busy bees at work crunching data. Complete overkill for a high school class. But that’s Goode. Overkill is their middle name.
The Silicon Valley professor, Dr. Dominic Medea, is as good-looking up close as he is from far away. More so. Dashing is the first word that comes to mind. A tall, dark, handsome Heathcliff, I can easily picture him striding across the moors, bellowing Catherine’s name. I read his CV over lunch. He’s worked at all of the major FANG companies, has developed more software than they can conceptualize. I’m lucky to be studying under him.
When I take a seat at the first table, he looks at me with an interested gaze, and like an idiot, I blush under the attention. I’m relieved when his eyes trail over my shoulder to the door. His face breaks into a wide, welcoming smile, and I glance, too. My heart sinks as Becca Curtis strides in.
The bully, stealing all the air from the room.
Dr. Medea claps his hands. “Wonderful, wonderful, now we’re all present. Becca, you can take the terminal right here.” He points at the seat next to me.
Oh, sweet Jesus. Not only am I sharing a class with my nemesis, I have to sit next to her, too? Why hadn’t I just kept my fat gob shut? Then she wouldn’t give a crap about me, and I could write my code in peace.
I fiddle with the strap of my backpack, determined to stay out of eye contact. Becca takes her seat, whispers, “Stupid Brit,” under her breath.
So much for that. I clench my teeth and ignore her. The only chance I had with the girl is long gone. I’ve been in these schoolyard battles before. I thought, naively, obviously, I wouldn’t face the same in America. That somehow, the girls of Goode would be different.
But human nature is what it is, and someone will always be there to prey on the weak.
The girl behind me whispers loud enough for me to hear, “What is she doing here? Isn’t this an upper-class seminar?”
“All levels now, apparently,” her tablemate says. “She’ll never be able to keep up. I give her a week.”
I turn and look over my shoulder. The girl’s thick brunette ponytail skims the green stole around her shoulders and she smirks.
Ignore them. Ignore them.
Dr. Medea stands in the front of the room, smiling cluelessly at the vicious discourse happening among his ranks. “Welcome, welcome. I’m Dr. Medea, and today, we’re going to do some kernel hacking. Sounds like fun, yes?”
And we’re off. He assigns a basic Python sniffer script, a baby script, and by the muttering and groaning and lack of typing around me, I realize I am finally going to excel at something and my heart lifts. I am well ahead of the rest of the students, these advanced young ladies who are supposed to be moving on to MIT and Caltech, so much so that when Dr. Medea comes to check my code, he whistles softly through his teeth.
“You should have told me this was remedial work for you, Miss Carlisle. I daresay you could have taught today’s class.”
I am aware of every eye on me, including Becca Curtis, whose right eyebrow has shot to her hairline.
“Meet me in my office after class, if you would.”
I nod meekly.
The bells toll at three and we’re dismissed. Becca saunters past. “Maybe you’re not so stupid, after all.”
I can’t read her tone so I ignore her and Dr. Medea waves me into his office. It is a simple room, brick walls, the desk clean of everything but a freestanding iMac, a small Moleskine notebook, and a black desk pad. His brown leather messenger bag, worn and frayed around the edges, sits at his feet like a loyal old dog.
“You have experience with computers,” he says, and I nod. “Just how experienced are you?”
For once, I don’t lie. “I can hold my own. It’s easy for me. The rest of this...” I wave a hand, then freeze. God, what a stupid mistake. Way to go, Ash, admitting to a teacher you’re finding Goode anything less than a breeze.
But Dr. Medea bestows a gloriously kind, benevolent smile that warms me to my toes. “Goode is a challenging curriculum, a challenging environment. You’re going to do fine. New school, new country, it’s bound to be a bit jarring. Cut yourself some slack. Now, tell me about that line of code you just wrote. What does it do?”
I know he understands exactly what the code will do. Why in the hell was I showing off? “It allows large packets of information to be transferred through small pipes. Specifically, encrypted pipes that would otherwise stay closed.”
“And where did you learn it?”
“The newspaper.”
“Come again?”
“An article in the Daily Mail—that’s a paper back home. They di
d a story on Stuxnet last summer. They talked about how the Israelis pushed the virus into the Iranian nuclear systems. It looked interesting so I thought I’d try writing a compression code to enable the backdoor to close quicker as you leave. A footprint eraser, so to speak. Like an impression in sand just before the water covers it and it disappears completely.”
Dr. Medea laughs. “So, you just thought you’d write some encrypted compression code in class to perfect your earlier version, did you? Best be careful, Miss Carlisle, or the NSA will come calling.”
“I didn’t do anything—”
“Not to arrest you. To hire you. It’s an elegant bit of code. You are far more advanced than most of the girls here. I’m going to talk with Dean Westhaven about placing you out of this class and developing a one-on-one program for you. You clearly have talent, I’d like to nurture it.”
“No, no, that’s fine. I’m happy to stay in this class.”
“You won’t learn anything of use if you’re already at this level, Ash. It’s a waste of time. And talent, I must add.”
“But—”
“Listen to me. I know what it’s like to be the smartest person in the room. It makes you a target.”
“I’m already a target,” I grumble, then kick myself again. Stop, for heaven’s sake. He’s too easy to talk to.
“Oh, that won’t last long. Trust me. I know this breed. You might be an oddity right now, but in a few weeks, you’re going to be the toast of the town. Especially when they figure out you’re smart. At Goode, the best currency you have is your brain. So, relax. And let me do a tutorial so we can enhance your skills. No sense holding you back.”
“I—Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”
“Yes, well, we’ll make sure you use your skills for good, not evil. I’ll leave a note in your box as to when our first session will be. Good day, Miss Carlisle. Go enjoy the rest of this beautiful late summer before we’re all stuck inside shivering.”
Good Girls Lie Page 7
