The Little Brother

by Victoria Patterson

  I nodded, somewhat ashamed that I’d tried to take advantage of the situation with Joe gone, but also aggrieved that she didn’t want me when I so clearly wanted and needed her.

  Before we drove back to my room at Mike’s, she threw her pink towel into our bonfire, and we watched as it shriveled and burned. A quick flare of flames and then, almost instantaneously, it darkened and blended into the ash.

  27.

  THE 48 HOURS episode aired about a month before the trial and within the final weeks of my junior and Gabe’s senior year.

  Sara, Mike, and I watched it on Sara’s crappy television at her apartment. She had to fool around with it so that we could get a decent picture, smacking its side a couple of times. We saw the credits rolling for CSI and then, after what felt like ten minutes of commercials, the theme song for 48 Hours started—the episode was titled “Kinky Teen Sex Gets Out of Hand”—and Lesley Stahl, wearing a light blue pantsuit, and with a smoky spotlight on her, walked to the center of a dark room, saying, “Gabe Hyde spends part of his time living a life of paradise in Newport Beach, California. His father, Dan Hyde, is a multimillionaire who owns a beautiful house near the beach in affluent Orange County.”

  Her purple-red lipstick had smeared a tad past her upper lip, and she tucked a lock of glossy blond hair behind her ear. “Gabe lives with his mother, Gina Hyde, in San Bernardino County during the rest of the week. His younger brother, Even Hyde, Gina explained, chose to live with their father in posh Newport Beach, but Gabe stayed with her.”

  I groaned, and Sara said, “Do you want me to turn it off?”

  I waved my hand for her to be quiet.

  Dad stared out at me from the screen and, gruff-voiced, said: “Gabe’s just an average teenage kid, very sensitive, very emotional. Just a good, sensitive kid.”

  A Lesley Stahl voice-over as the camera panned from Cucamonga to Newport: “It’s a long freeway ride from the glamour of Newport Beach. But Gina says that middle-class America is where her sons learned their good old-fashioned values.”

  “I’ll get you a beer,” I heard Sara say.

  “We’ve talked about sex,” said my mom from the screen. “We’ve talked about drinking. We’ve talked about respecting other people’s rights.”

  “But,” intruded Lesley, “as correspondent Bob Langley reports, Gabe’s sense of morality would be put on display on the Fourth of July, and the evidence would be recorded on tape, by a camera given to him by his father for his twelfth birthday.”

  Bob Langley, white-haired and serious, walked along the beach boardwalk with his hands in the pockets of his slacks, saying, “Before the infamous videotape was made, Gabe had made other typical teenage films with Kevin Stewart and Kent Nixon, his friends in Rancho Cucamonga. All three boys had parents who split up, and all three shared at least one teenage interest: an obsession with sex.”

  “You open a newspaper, or a magazine,” said Gabe, sitting across from a sympathetic-faced Bob Langley at the dining room table at Dad’s house, “a girl is standing there, half-naked, if not more than half-naked. You turn on the TV—it’s the same thing. Everything portrays a sexual message, because sex sells.”

  “What kind of message?” Bob asked.

  A pause as Gabe shifted in his chair. “That it’s all right to have sex,” he said. “Even kinky sex.”

  “Crystal and Melissa, Gabe’s high school friends,” Bob said, walking along the boardwalk again, “know him as the boy with one foot in the door of wealth and privilege. They say they’re not promiscuous at all. They admit that their life in the suburbs isn’t bad, but they’d much rather be in a place like Newport Beach. They’re too young for bars or fancy clubs, but the ‘in’ place is to be at a good house party—especially at the big, glamorous house Dan Hyde owns—where the parents don’t monitor every move the kids make.”

  “Bullshit,” Sara said, putting a Coors in front of me. “Those tramps could get into any bar or club, wearing their miniskirts and flirting with the bouncers.”

  The scene cut to Crystal and Melissa, sitting across from Bob at a picnic table in some park.

  “We go to parties,” Melissa said, “and girls are, like, getting drunk and, like, hooking up with whomever. And then in the morning, it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh.’”

  “Hooking up,” Crystal added, “could be from, like, kissing to, like, having sex. Parents don’t, like, exactly know what’s going on when their kids leave the home.”

  The program cut to a commercial, and no one spoke but we exchanged glances. Sara went to the bathroom. Mike got a beer from her kitchen. We sat and waited for the commercials to end.

  “On July third,” Bob said, the show resuming as he strolled on the coast near the crashing waves, “Hyde invited some of his friends from Rancho Cucamonga, including Melissa and Crystal, to his dad’s house in Newport Beach. They hung out in the backyard pool and started drinking.”

  “We said, ‘Okay, we’re going to bed,’” explained my dad to Bob, sitting across from him at the dining room table. “‘Everybody’s gonna be outta here real quick, right?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re just wrapping it up.’”

  A montage of blurred figures—presumably teenagers—drank and smoked and danced and kissed as Bob intoned: “But after Dan and his longtime girlfriend, Nancy, turned in, the party out by the pool would continue late into the night, and Gabe and his friends would get involved in something they would soon come to regret. It had nothing to do with Melissa and Crystal, but a girl who had come along with them. She was someone who Kent had gone out with a couple of times.”

  “She was, like, one of our friends,” said Melissa, “where we were like, ‘Wow, she’s different than us.’ She kind of, like, crossed the line at certain points with certain people.”

  “Flirtatious,” Crystal added. “Very flirtatious.”

  Voice-over: “According to Gabe’s friends, it was a wild night.”

  “She ends up, like, getting completely naked,” said Melissa, “and then Kevin is, too, and so they are at the edge of the pool, like on the step part, on the stair or whatever to get into the pool, and they, like, start having sex.”

  “I had sex with her about five hours later,” said Gabe, across from Bob at the dining room table, “and about twenty minutes after that, Kent had sex with her, all within a five-hour time span.”

  Bob stopped his walk to face the camera, hands still in his pockets. “Dan Hyde had no idea,” he said, “what had gone on. Besides, his son could always be trusted. There were no warnings in the past, no indicators. Things that night got out of hand, but no one could predict what would happen the next night and how it would ruin so many lives, as it was all captured on tape. For Gabe, the next morning, the Fourth of July, hit like a hangover.”

  Gabe said, “I was pretty much just in that state of mind that ‘Yeah, I’m having intercourse with a girl.’ So, of course, I’m a guy. Of course it’s good.”

  “He claims,” explained Bob, “it wasn’t till later that morning, when he spoke with Kevin and Kent, that he realized how wild the night had been.”

  “I thought I was the only one,” said Gabe, hands folded on the dining room table. “But all three of us thought we were the only one.”

  “If Gabe and his pals were really angry,” Bob said, “or even embarrassed, they quickly got over it. By nightfall, they were ready to party again. And a phone call went out to the girl from the night before. The girl was intrigued enough by the invitation to pass it along to her friends, who decided not to go. So the girl told her parents she was spending the night at a friend’s house and headed to Gabe’s house. Did Gabe and his friends think that they would have sex with her again?”

  “I think that thought crossed my mind,” said Gabe. “We’re teenage guys; we’re seventeen. Of course, it’s typical of a male to think that.”

  “Gabe and his friends,” Bob added, “say they were completely drunk when the girl showed up. And while all this was happening, Dan and his girlfrie
nd were in the main house. Dan, a migraine sufferer, was incapacitated with a migraine.”

  “The bottom line with us,” Dad said, his voice lowering, “is that we think that the kids are here under our control, under our supervision, that there’s a better chance they’re going to be safe.”

  “But Dan once again left the kids on their own,” Bob said, beginning to walk the beach again, “and trouble started as soon as the girl walked into the Hydes’ garage.” He stopped, faced the camera. “Then, in a decision that would change everything, one of the boys reached for Gabe’s camera and began filming everything. Gabe says they started having sex with the girl, only this time they were all together.”

  A female figure hidden behind a curtain shadow-danced seductively on the screen, and then it cut to a commercial for Scott toilet paper.

  Sara shook her head at me, and I nodded in agreement. Mike took a sip of his beer.

  “I wish I hadn’t quit,” Sara said. “I could use a smoke right now.”

  When the 48 Hours theme music started again, it showed the curtained woman dancing, and then it cut to Gabe sitting at the table, and he said: “She started taking her clothes off and just pretty much saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’m fine with all three of you guys,’ and stuff like that.”

  “In the garage,” Bob asked him, “there was a pool table, and the girl sprawled on top of it?”

  Gabe nodded.

  “And the sex was far from ordinary?”

  “Kinky sexual acts,” Gabe said. “There was a pool cue.”

  “What made you all think of doing that?”

  “Curious guys, I guess. Curious, drunk kids. And she was okay with it.”

  “From your point of view,” Bob said, “everyone knew what he or she was getting into that night. Did the girl ever say no?”

  “Not one time,” said Gabe.

  Sara stood and shouted at the TV: “That’s because she was too fucking drunk to talk, asshole!” She sat down again, saying, “Sorry, I can’t take this.”

  “I know,” said Mike. “How’d they get them to film this?”

  “The PR woman Dad hired,” I said.

  We watched Bob Langley strolling along the beach again, saying, “Sometime before dawn, Kent drove the girl back to Rancho Cucamonga, which might have been the end of the story. But then Gabe got careless. The next night, he brought the video camera with the tape they had made to another friend’s house, and he believes he left it there, where it was stolen. No one knows exactly how the video camera got into the hands of retired lieutenant Tom Lawrence. The lieutenant pleaded for more information on the news. Video footage”—and there I was again, under Sara’s towel, my shaky-handed delivery of the box—“was replayed of a man covered in a towel depositing the camera at the police station. But the man never came forward.

  “Dan Hyde, a prominent supporter and figure in the sheriff’s department and many others believe that the someone—the mystery vigilante—actually had a more base reason for turning over the camera: a political vendetta against Hyde and Sheriff Krone.”

  “It makes me sick to my stomach that they’d use my son to get to me, and make him suffer,” Dad said. He shook out a match and threw it into his abalone ashtray, then he inhaled on his cigarette.

  “He could go to jail for this,” he said, “because of me. Because of who I am. I don’t condone what happened at all; I don’t. But it’s not a crime. It’s been made a big-fish-type case right from the start. These types of cases can mean career advancement for a lot of people. I’ll tell you: It sickens me.”

  “Turn it off,” I said, by this time staring at the bottle of Coors in my grip instead of the TV screen.

  Mike shifted forward from the couch and pressed the Off button with the sole of his shoe.

  28.

  AFTER THE 48 HOURS episode aired, it seemed that everyone knew about the Hyde Three case. R. Sam Michaels began to churn out one article after another in the OC Weekly. “Untouchable and unreachable,” I heard Gabe’s PR lady say of Michaels. Michaels wouldn’t acknowledge her or her press kits, and “no one really knows who he is,” she said. “There are almost no photographs of him. He keeps a very low profile. I’m not entirely certain that he’s not using a pseudonym.”

  One afternoon just days after the 48 Hours episode, Mike and I went to the girls’ varsity volleyball game against our rivals, Newport Harbor, in their school gym. Mike had become interested in a girl named Karen, a pretty brunette with dark, sad eyes who played setter on the offense.

  Since his car was in the shop because of a faulty transmission, Mike had talked me into driving him. It was the least that I could do, he said, trying to be funny but falling a little flat, considering that I lived at his house and borrowed his parents as my own.

  We watched as the girls grunted and sweated, their shoes squeaking on the floor, ponytails swinging, and when the game ended (I don’t remember who won), Karen and her friend Tina came over and thanked us for coming. A shy and pretty sophomore, Tina had a smile full of braces of alternating purple and blue bands. She reminded me of a nervous colt, not fully grown into her lanky body. I’d met her before at the volleyball party and liked her.

  We flirted awkwardly that afternoon (“You don’t remember me, do you?” I said, knowing that she did. “I do!” “No, you don’t”), and all the while she pressed the brush-like end of her long, dark braid between her fingers.

  Meanwhile, Karen and Mike held hands for a few minutes—looking goofily into each other’s eyes—until the girls’ coach blew his whistle, calling them for a team huddle, before they had to board the bus back to our high school.

  They trotted away from us, Tina throwing me one last shy, sweet look over her shoulder, and we watched in appreciation their firm legs and backsides in their shorts, their shirts knotted at their sides.

  “She likes me,” Mike said, happy, as we exited the dank gym into the bright sunlight. I felt happy for him, and for my good luck with Tina, and this was the overall feeling between us as we approached my BMW in the parking lot.

  “Oh, shit,” said Mike, the first to see spray-painted on the passenger side of my car in scraggly, large red letters: RAPEIST SCUM.

  It felt like getting slapped in the face, but almost immediately I had another sensation of stoic calmness, as if somehow I deserved this public shaming. I made an attempt at disassociation with the comment: “At least learn how to spell ‘rapist.’”

  “What’s that?” Mike asked.

  Something had been placed beneath my windshield wiper, and I unhooked it: a clipping of an article by R. Sam Michaels, one that I’d already read, outlining the most ridiculous defense strategies for the Hyde Three, including a detailed account of a former porn star as a potential expert witness testifying that Jane Doe wanted to make a necrophilia-themed porn. (The defense team never did call on Sheila Morgenstern, a.k.a. Nikki Foxx, star of over one thousand porn films, including Jail Bait, Gang Bang Girl, Fur Burger, and Both Ends Burning, but she remained on Dad’s payroll just in case.)

  I handed the article to Mike.

  “What’s this?” he asked, scanning it with disgust.

  As I faced my car, my back prickled, as if everyone was staring. The person who had tagged my car, I somehow knew for certain, was watching me.

  “Let’s go,” Mike said, looking around the parking lot.

  We got into the car, and Mike wadded the article and threw it on the floor mat. “It’s not like it’s your fault,” he said.

  “Guilty by association,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Whatever,” he said, “but you’re not a rapist. Uncool.”

  I started the car and drove, bouncing over a speed bump in the parking lot, and trying to ignore the stares and pointed fingers from the people leaving the volleyball game and also a crowd from a huge track-and-field event that had just ended.

  I couldn’t get out of the parking lot quickly enough, since I was bottlenecked behind a line of SUVs trying to exit through the o
ne way possible.

  Then I heard a loud groan from Mike. His head went down to his hands, clearing my view so that I could see what he had just seen from the passenger side: the bus with our girls’ volleyball team on it, their faces at the widows—pointing, talking animatedly—and there, toward the back of the bus, the grim and sad faces of Karen and Tina.

  Looking back, I can pinpoint this as the moment I decided to get out of SoCal as soon as possible. The very next morning I scheduled an appointment with my guidance counselor, a large, kind woman with nerdy black glasses, so that we could more seriously discuss my college opportunities back east, or anywhere, really, but in state. (“Are you sure, Even?” she asked, tapping her pen on her desk. “You know, there are some fantastic universities right here in California.” I stared long and hard at her in answer, and she didn’t press me again.)

  When we finally made it out of the parking lot, I rolled down my windows, letting the breeze thrash us, a rushing noise like going down a river. At Mike’s suggestion, we drove to the elementary school where his mom worked.

  She’d been rearranging her room, getting ready for summer, taking down her grade schoolers’ pictures and their names, which had been stapled across a wall. When we walked inside, she smiled until she saw our bleak faces, and then she said in a panicked voice, rushing to us, “What is it? What happened?”

  “Mom,” said Mike, “it’s okay, calm down.”

  She looked to me, and I confirmed, “It’s okay, Mom. Everything’s okay.”

  She followed us to my car, which was parked at the curb. Hands at her hips, she stared for a silent moment at the spray-painted message, and then she said—and by the way, I loved her even more for this—“Whoever wrote this uncreative and crude and completely erroneous statement was not one of my students, since the idiot can’t spell worth shit.” I’d not heard her curse before.

  We went back to her classroom, and she unrolled a large piece of green construction paper from its spool—a zzzzip noise as she cut it with a blade of an opened pair of scissors—and then we went back to my car, where she instructed us to hold the paper over the offending graffiti while she duct-taped it into place.