Honor Code

by Kiersi Burkhart

Anastasia stands up. “Objection—leading question.”

  “I’ll allow it,” the judge says.

  Waldo grins at Turnquist. “By an easier time with women, you mean raping them, right?”

  Turnquist is trying hard, but smart as he is, I can’t help feeling that Waldo’s a little bit smarter. He bounces back the lawyer’s questions with monosyllabic answers, and Turnquist complains to the judge.

  “He’s still answering,” the judge says.

  “Fine.” Turnquist crosses his arms. “The defense rests.”

  When Waldo gets off the stand and heads out of the courtroom, he stops halfway. He turns, yells, “Hey, asshole!” When Scully turns around, Waldo flips him off.

  A bailiff comes to escort him out. “Fine, it’s fine,” Waldo says. “I’ll stop.”

  He leaves the courtroom, the bailiff following him out.

  Maybe he’s not Sam’s friend, but he did what nobody else was willing to do—stand up to the Chapmans.

  So where was Sam?

  -----------------------

  SAM

  I’ve never taken a Greyhound before. The seats are starchy and hard. The guy sitting next to me smells like body odor, and his jacket reeks of cigarette smoke. He’s eating pepperoni sticks from a bag, occasionally trying to talk to me. I just stare out the window, ignoring him.

  I visited New York City once with my dad, when I was in middle school. But even that didn’t prepare me for the sheer chaos of arriving at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It’s like fighting an oncoming river current just trying to get off my Greyhound and find the bus number I wrote on my sheet of paper.

  The ride to Rosland, out on Long Island, is tedious. I have to switch buses again somewhere in the middle, and even then, it’s a mile from the final bus stop to Gracie’s address in the middle of a rich suburb. It’s late afternoon by the time I’m walking down block after block of sprawling green lawns, stone cherub fountains, and high, wrought iron gates.

  I stop outside a massive, three-story Tudor with a stone façade, the number “1093” mounted on a huge slab of flagstone in white calligraphy. The property extends into the woods, wrapped in a white picket fence with a pretty red barn in the far back. But there are no horses that I can see as I walk up the long path. I plant both feet on the front step of the porch, next to the big wooden swing, and ring the doorbell.

  It takes almost a minute for someone to answer the door. It’s a young, blonde woman in a black dress and apron.

  “Hello?” she says, like a question.

  “Hi.” I offer her my hand. Who is this? Gracie’s white, blonde sister? Some friend I don’t know about? “I’m a friend of Gracie’s.”

  Perplexed at first by me asking to shake her hand, the woman smiles politely and takes it.

  “Gracie doesn’t want visitors,” she says.

  “I know,” I say, as if I am perfectly aware of Gracie’s situation. “That’s why I’m here. I’m Sam Barker—we were best friends at Edwards. And I have something really important to tell her, but I can’t get through to her phone.”

  “She probably won’t want to talk to you,” she says. She looks like she feels sorry for me.

  “That would be okay.” Even though it would cut me to my core. “I’m not here to make trouble. This is just something she really needs to know about, and then I’ll leave.”

  The woman glances into the house like she’s about to call for someone, then thinks again.

  Oh. She must be the housekeeper.

  “I’m really not supposed to let anyone in to see her.” She keeps her voice low, like she’s worried someone will overhear. “But it’s not healthy for her to be alone all the time. Lately it seems like she’s getting better.”

  “I’m so glad to hear that.” And I am. I think about her all the time in her house, alone, not talking to anyone, and probably replaying everything on an endless loop the way I have been.

  “She did say something about you over Home Weekend,” the housekeeper says. She looks like she’s leaning toward breaking the rules for me. I just have to tip her over the edge. “Before she dropped out.”

  “I was her roommate there.” I put on a wistful smile. “We did pretty much everything together. I miss her a ton.”

  “Right.” She nods. “I remember.” After one more look over her shoulder, the housekeeper gestures for me to come in.

  One step closer.

  “Okay, follow me,” she says. “But don’t go anywhere except where I tell you.”

  She closes the front door, cutting off the afternoon sunlight. Without it, the high-ceilinged entryway is all shadows. The dark wood used for all the embellishments makes the house feel like a medieval castle. Small bits of sun seep through windows in the neighboring rooms, painting long, orange rectangles on the wood floors.

  The housekeeper takes off at a brisk walk up the wide stairs just ahead. The whole house is silent, and every creak of the floor feels like it will wake up some sleeping monster. Ahead of me, she rounds the stairs at the second floor, checking down the hallway before we keep going. I get a sense deep in my gut that I’m not the only one who’s not supposed to be here.

  That no one is supposed to be here.

  She stops at the third floor and glances up and down this hallway, too, before ushering me to follow her. There are so many doors—dark wood, like the rest of the house, and closed. Even though the doorknobs are all bright, polished, and spotless, it feels like no one has actually used them in ages. Which one is Gracie’s? It’s like I’m in a funhouse.

  As we walk down the long hallway, it seems like it’s narrowing. I feel suffocated. The scratchy sound of a television turned way down trickles toward us. At the end of the hall, the housekeeper stops and gently raps her knuckles on the last door.

  “Sorry, Gracie,” she says. “But you have a visitor.”

  “A visitor?” a voice on the other side asks.

  I’m flying. It’s her—it’s really her. Her actual voice. I missed it so much.

  “I don’t want visitors,” Gracie says. “You know that, Rachel.”

  I can feel the pounding of my heart in my toes.

  “But, Gracie,” Rachel says with an encouraging voice, as if she has said it many times before.

  Footsteps echo on the other side of the door. It opens five inches, revealing one shoulder and half of a face. “I don’t want to talk to—”

  When she sees me, Gracie stops mid-sentence. I expect her to run back inside and slam the door.

  “What are you doing here?” she snarls.

  “I have something to tell you.”

  “She says it’s important,” Rachel says in a placating tone. “Why don’t you just talk for a few minutes? You haven’t seen any of your friends in months.”

  Gracie eyeballs me, sucking on her lower lip. The skin under the one eye I can see is dark and thin. She opens the door just wide enough for me to slide in sideways and then closes it again. “You have five minutes.”

  It’s dim inside Gracie’s bedroom, only a few scraps of light slipping through the slats in the blinds. Clothes litter the floor. A TV in the corner plays an old movie on low volume with the closed captioning on.

  She is still my favorite person in the whole world. I want to throw my arms around her, but I don’t.

  “How are you?” I blurt.

  She just crosses her arms, staring at me.

  This wasn’t at all how I had imagined this going. I stumble for something to say, something to fill the space.

  “I’ve really missed you,” I say. “It’s been horrible at Edwards. Everyone hates me.” Her expression darkens. “There’s so much you need to know. So many things happened. It’s really lonely there without you.”

  She stands there, closed up. I can feel the anger radiating off her like steam.

  “Please say something.”

  “Four minutes,” she says.

  “Why did you leave?” Maybe a question will elicit a response. “You didn’t
have to leave me.”

  Gracie’s face shifts from irritation, to disbelief, to . . . anger? She finally turns to look at me, and her voice is dead flat. “Why are you here, Sam?”

  Everything I’d come here to say withers in my throat.

  She hates me, too.

  I glue my eyes to the floor. This is worse than the hate mail, the apple—worse than everyone at Edwards shutting me out.

  “First you wouldn’t shut up,” Gracie says, and I can feel her gaze burning into me. “And now you won’t talk?”

  “Scully got expelled.” I finally look up. “I got him kicked out. For you.”

  “What?” Her face contorts. “You did what?”

  Why is she so mad? “He came after me, too!” I cry. “He pushed me down, too. He ripped my skirt open! But he knocked over that boiling tea—”

  Gracie’s eyes narrow into slits. “Don’t you dare compare what we went through.”

  “He had to be punished.” My face feels bloated with tears. “I did it for us.”

  She lunges at me, her fists clenched. I fall back against the closed door. She jabs her finger in my chest. “For us?” I think the room might explode—if Gracie doesn’t incinerate me first. “For us?!” She repeats, so loud my eardrums vibrate. “Scully didn’t rape you, Sam. Maybe he tried, but you didn’t suffer at all like I did. He raped me.”

  My blood is roaring, filling my head. The tears break free.

  Her face hardens as I start to cry. “You read my blog,” she says, her voice sounding dangerous. “As if you could just . . . learn my lines and pretend to be me.” She’s shouting now. “You stole my story. You stole me.”

  My legs are shaking. Without the door holding me up, I would fall. “I was just trying to help,” I manage to get out. “What happened to you . . . it was my fault. I had to fix it—”

  “So what if it was your fault?” she says. “Maybe you should have warned me. But you didn’t. In the end, I went over the next night having no idea—and Scully raped me.” I want to evaporate, because she’s right. “But that’s not where you fucked up. Instead of letting me deal with it the way I needed to, you had to go all vigilante. I didn’t ask you to be my white knight, Sam.”

  I’m too stunned to say anything. Not that she gives me the chance.

  “Just because you felt like you had to do something doesn’t mean that I did. All those emails and calls, over and over, telling me—do this, do that, come forward—you know why I didn’t answer?”

  I stay silent. I don’t want to hear what’s next.

  “Because I didn’t want to! It would fuck up everything in my life. But that must not have been the answer you wanted, was it?”

  “I—”

  “How do you think it’s been for me?” she demands. “Your face all over the internet, with my words. And then, him, on every TV station, every newspaper. Every time I see his face I feel sick. What did you want? A cheerleading section for your big show?”

  “But, Gracie,” I say through the tears flowing down my lips, “I just wanted you to be happy again.” That charcoal drawing of my friend with her real smile, the one that’s been pinned to my wall day in and day out . . . “Scully’s gone. We can start over now.”

  “Wow.” Gracie shakes her head slowly. “Do you live in some kind of alternate dimension? Don’t pretend like you did this for me. You liked the attention. That’s why you made that hashtag.”

  I gape at her. No. That’s not true. I thought only of her, of what Scully deserved.

  “You wanna know something?” she says, coldly searching my face. “I left because I didn’t want to sit through your guilt. That’s your problem, not mine. What was my problem? My trauma. But you couldn’t let it be. You couldn’t let me deal with it the way I needed to.”

  “You could have told someone,” I whisper. “The police. Like I did. Or your parents—they could have helped you. You wouldn’t have had to drop out.”

  Gracie looks at me like I’m stupid. “Yeah, right, keep this community sacred and all that. Come on, Sam. We both know the problem isn’t who to tell. It’s the fallout for telling.”

  “But, Gracie—”

  “And I did tell my parents. They tried to help. I’ve seen therapists, got drugs. But the Chapmans are top shit around here. My parents knew making a big deal out of it would just draw out my pain. That would make it all worse.”

  The energy drains out of her, and Gracie sits down on her bed.

  Snot is running from my nose. “What about justice?” I demand.

  Gracie is emotionless. “You’re obsessed.”

  “I . . . I thought it was the right thing to do.”

  “I don’t care what you thought was the right thing,” she says. “What you did? Instead of supporting me, and what I wanted to do, you made it all about yourself.”

  I have no tears left. My eyes are full of sand and my cheeks feel too tight. I thought getting rid of Scully, getting justice, would fix everything.

  I was so wrong.

  Gracie sighs. “You need to go.”

  Her tone is final.

  I leave her in the dark room with the muffled, flickering TV.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  HARPER

  As soon as she exits the courthouse, Harper checks her phone.

  Sam missed everything today. What could possibly be her reason? She’s dutifully showed up to see every testimony until now, even though she’s not obligated to.

  No new texts. No email, no voicemail, no calls.

  Something is wrong. Harper can feel it in her gut.

  In the car on her drive home, her phone suddenly buzzes. She glances down at it, even though she knows she shouldn’t.

  A new email. And it’s from Gracie.

  She’d wanted this reply so much, but now that it’s here, she feels bile boiling up. She has to drive another few miles until she can get off the road. Parked at a rest stop, her hands shaking, she pulls up the email.

  TO: Harper Brooks (hbrooks@nyinspector.com)

  FROM: Gracie Grace (graciegrace12@shmail.com)

  SUBJECT: collect your girl

  I’ve tried to ignore this, to keep it out of my life, but you and Sam just won’t let it drop. You won’t let me be.

  So fine. Here it is—that reply you’ve wanted so bad.

  Sam wasn’t the one who was raped by Scully Chapman.

  It was me.

  I wrote that blog. I know you’ve seen it, the one Sam’s claiming is hers. But it’s not.

  The story she told you is my story. She wanted to take down Scully, so she lied to you. She lied to everyone.

  Now please—please—stop emailing me.

  Gracie

  “Oh my fucking god,” Harper says aloud. She tosses her phone into the passenger seat like it’s diseased. She presses her face to the steering wheel, wishing she could unread it.

  Sam used her. This entire time, Sam had been using her.

  Everything Harper wrote was a lie.

  She should have known better. She did know better—her instincts had been telling her at every step not to get involved, that this story was full of landmines, and she ignored it.

  The whole drive home, Harper wishes she could take it back. But it’s out there now, with her byline all over it.

  -----------------------

  SAM

  After a bus ride and another Greyhound home from Long Island, the taxi to Edwards costs me every last dollar I have. I don’t get to school until one in the morning, and the door to Isabel House is locked. I end up sleeping on a couch in the student union until people are up and moving about, and I scuttle back to my dorm room before a teacher notices.

  When Mom and Dad pick me up, we’re all exhausted. Thinking about yesterday keeps me silent, squashed into the back seat of the station wagon, all the way to the courthouse.

  A few minutes before testimony is supposed to start, Harper slides into the courtroom. She has circles under her eyes, and heads to the other end o
f the gallery to sit down. She pulls out her notebook and folds her hands on her lap. As I stare at the side of her face, she starts to turn around. Her dark brown eyes lock on mine.

  She knows.

  She knows.

  She knows.

  I jerk my head back to face front, not able to look her in the eyes anymore.

  This is bad. Gracie must have told her last night. What will Harper do with it? Somewhere online I read that journalists issue retractions when they get something wrong. Will she take it all back? Surely that would look bad for her, too. And it would ruin any chance I have to put Scully in jail. It would wreck everything I’ve done.

  It’s hard for me to pay attention as Turnquist trots out a whole host of witnesses to vouch for Scully’s character. His friend Cal goes on and on about how generous his pal Scully is with other students. One of Scully’s teammates from the polo team gets on the stand and laments how the team’s suffered without him. Even his dad testifies about how the Berkeley administration read the Inspector article and immediately revoked Scully’s admission.

  I want to feel victory, but I can only think about how everything is unraveling.

  Then Turnquist says, “Gracie Caleza to the stand, please.”

  Gracie?

  I sit up and spin around as the doors open. And sure enough—in walks Gracie.

  She’s dressed up in a black pencil skirt and gray button-down—exactly her style. She looks wonderful.

  “That’s your friend from school, right?” Mom asks.

  I nod.

  “Why is she here?”

  “I don’t know,” I lie. But I do.

  Gracie is here to tell the truth. It will all come crumbling down, right here, right now.

  She strides up to the stand, swears her oath, and lands in the chair still warm from Mike Chapman. She stares straight ahead.

  I am a house made of glued-together popsicle sticks, about to fall to pieces. Everyone will see me for what I am.

  But if she’s the one bringing it to the ground, I almost don’t mind. I probably deserve it.

  Turnquist approaches her, his shiny head reflecting the fluorescent lights. “Can you tell us how you know Samantha Barker?”

  “We were roommates at Edwards,” Gracie says. “But I transferred out.”