Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  President Edward Holyoke’s tenure was described as one of “prosperity and progress.” It said oversaw a period of modernization of the library texts, scientific instruction, and moral and ethical philosophy. He believed in “aggressive liberalism” and the book’s author noted, “It is probably more than a coincidence that so many of the New Englanders who took a leading part in the American Revolution had their education under him.” Cady saw Holyoke described over and over again as a ‘gentleman.’ “A polite Gentleman, of a noble commanding presence.” “A gentleman of innate dignity and sense of justice.”

  And yet, Cady thought, he was a slaveholder. This book didn’t mention that. She noticed how easy it was to edit someone’s past so that all the pieces of a person fit neatly together. Simple narratives were easier to tell, to teach, to understand, to remember. The lie endures for generations, while the truth dies with its victims. But what were the consequences?

  Then Cady saw something that reminded her of Bilhah’s talk of “smelling fire again:” the “worst disaster in the history of the College,” a devastating fire in Old Harvard Hall, the original library, in which all five thousand volumes were consumed. Cady opened a notebook and jotted down the date of the fire, January 24, 1764. Perhaps that was Bilhah’s approximate present. It described how all the townspeople came out in a snowstorm and tried in vain to save the library and “its treasures.” Cady felt almost moved until she got to the inventory of said treasures: listed without comment, after items such as portraits of benefactors, various taxidermy, and a model ship, was a “piece of tanned negro’s hide, ‘Skull of A Famous Indian Warrior, and in fact the entire ‘Repositerry of Curiosities,’ were seen no more.”

  The word hide turned her stomach. These were human remains, not curiosities.

  “Boom!” Ranjoo jumped into their bedroom brandishing a Sharpie. “I did it!”

  “Holy shit, you scared me,” Cady said, recovering her breath. “Did what?”

  “Catch.” She tossed Cady a small plastic toy lizard. “For my drawing class, I had to draw that sucker one hundred times from different angles—in permanent marker, no less. Check it.” She buzzed her thumb through her sketchbook pages revealing a flip-book of impeccably drawn lizards.

  “Whoa, you did amazing. But that assignment is insane.”

  “I know, this school finds a way to make studio art type-A. So, my hand is too cramped to do anything but shovel food in my mouth. Want to break for dinner with me? Or is this nightmare due tomorrow?” Ranjoo peered over at the books spread out on Cady’s desk.

  “Oh, yeah, a paper.” Cady stood so she blocked her view. “But it’s not due for a couple weeks. Let’s go.”

  They were getting ready to leave when an absentminded peek at her phone gave Cady pause. It was a Facebook notification that she had been tagged in a photo posted by their old neighbor, Patti Regan, one of the many women her mom’s age and older who had friended her in recent years. The picture was of a pool party at the Regans’ back when their kids, Eric, and Cady were young, maybe fourteen and eleven. The kids had all swum up to the pool’s edge for the photo; the twins were in the center, looking indistinguishable with their wet hair, Liam Regan mugging mid-cannonball into the water, and Cady sitting tall atop Eric’s shoulders. They were the reigning neighborhood champs at playing chicken, Liam and his sisters could never beat them even if they rotated the twins. Patti’s caption read, “#tbt ~ Summer Daze ~ Missing When These Kiddos Were Little! <3.” They had moved away so long ago, she wondered if Patti knew Eric had died; Cady doubted she would have posted it if she did.

  But it wasn’t the photo or the wacky mom-caption that unnerved Cady, it was the tags. When she touched the image, “Eric Archer” popped up as an active tag. How was that possible? He hardly used social media when he was alive, he certainly wasn’t accepting new tags now. She clicked on his name and was redirected to his profile page—only she was blocked from viewing it. The top of the profile asked: “Do you know Eric? To see what he shares with friends, send him a friend request.”

  “Ready?” Ranjoo was waiting at the door, already bundled in her oversized leather jacket and scarf.

  “You know, I just remembered something, an email I have to get back to. I can do it faster on my laptop. Give me five minutes, and I’ll meet you there.”

  Ranjoo’s voice was muffled by the scarf. “A’right, see you at Annenberg.”

  Cady watched her go, then returned to frowning at her phone. Of course she was friends with Eric on Facebook. She messaged technical support last summer to turn his profile into a “memorialized” account so that it couldn’t be hacked; she was its new admin. She quickly typed her brother’s name into the search field, and the top results showed two Eric Archers with identical profile images. The first one led her to the “Remembering Eric Archer” page she recognized and had full access to, Eric’s old page. The second one, the one Patti had accidentally tagged, had to be an imposter.

  She supposed it was possible Eric had made the duplicate account himself—in his paranoia, he often suspected hacking of various accounts and devices—but he had largely abandoned social media in the last year of his life. If he had begun to distrust Facebook, she didn’t think he would make a second account, certainly not with his real name and image. Cady took a closer look at the second account, at least to the areas she could see as a non-friend. The fact that the profile and banner images were identical pointed to deception, whoever made this was intentionally trying to impersonate Eric. She knew this thing was fairly common. Once in high school, a handful of Cady’s Facebook friends started messaging that they had received friend requests from a “new account” of hers and asking if it was legitimate. It wasn’t, and Cady was able to flag the fake account as abuse, and Facebook removed it. It was little more than a nuisance, and Cady hadn’t given it much thought. She didn’t even get the angle on why a person would bother to make these dupe accounts, she just knew it happened often, as she had seen other friends post “This is my only account! Don’t accept new requests from me!”

  But this fake Eric profile struck her as unusual for a stranger taking a random shot at scamming someone. It didn’t look hastily made; it looked like a real, cultivated Facebook profile made with Eric’s stolen information and photos, just not the way Eric would have made it. For example, this fake Eric had “liked” the Philadelphia Eagles, Fandango, The National, Kendrick Lamar, and Harvard University. It wasn’t that Eric didn’t like those things, he did—but he would never, under any circumstances, have “liked” a corporate or promotional page on Facebook.

  Similarly, the photos on the imposter page weren’t fake or doctored, they all belonged to Eric at some point, they but they were … curated, a selectively edited personal history. Not to mention they were set to “public”—very un-Eric. The account’s deceit lay not in what it displayed, but by what it omitted. It was Eric’s life, minus the darkness. For instance, real-Eric had grown so paranoid in his last year, he had stripped his social media of most photos and information. His final Facebook profile picture was one Cady hated. In it, he was sitting at his desk, unremarkable from the chin down, but starting at his nose, the image was distorted, twisting his entire face into a whirlpool of color: the pink of his lips smeared across his brow, the blue of his eyes spilled out like running water, the rest a blur of flesh tone and red hair. Posting it just months before his death, Eric had captioned it, self-portrait.

  But in the perfect world of the imposter page, the profile image was a beautiful landscape shot of Eric in his happy place—outdoors, on a hike, looking off atop a summit. She had seen it online in the past, it had been taken when Eric participated in one of Harvard’s Pre-Frosh activities the summer before his first year, for which he’d chosen a week-long backcountry excursion. Cady remembered he’d come back from that trip more grown up, so confident, in the perfect frame of mind to enter college. Cady’s summer had been so chaotic, w
ith her mother barely speaking to her, that she hadn’t had the wherewithal to sign up for any of the Pre-Frosh offerings. The next featured image on the fake account was one she recalled from his Freshman year of Eric asleep with his mouth open during what is clearly a lecture class and captioned, Photo credit: Matt Cho. Then a close-up of their family cat, Pickle, maniacally chewing the tassel on one of their window curtains, over which Eric had photo-shopped the words: strng feery taste sciency. But God, how long ago were LOLcats a thing? That was pre-Instagram, ancient history.

  Cady clicked to the final photo and the furrow in her brow eased. It showed Eric in a Santa hat, sitting in front of the fireplace and holding their old Westie, Bowie, who was half-wearing a green elf hat. The photo must have been at least four years old, because Bowie died before Eric left for college. In the picture, Bowie was squirming in his arms, tongue out like he was smiling, and Eric was laughing, rendering the photo slightly blurry from the dog’s movement or Eric’s or both. Or maybe it was Cady’s giggling that had shaken it. She’d been behind the camera.

  She felt the tidal pull of nostalgia. And she understood how whitewashed histories got committed to print and how a fiction could get committed to memory. They were so much more comforting, they fit together more neatly, they made more sense than the truth ever could. Cady wanted so badly to believe that Eric had made this second profile. It was like visiting a parallel universe where Eric never got sick, and she would give anything to stay there. It was Eric, as he was supposed to be. Eric, healthy. Eric, confident. Eric, plugged-in. Eric, happy. Eric, alive. It felt more real than the alternative.

  But it wasn’t.

  She looked one more time at the Christmas photo. Nothing in that picture existed anymore. Not the dog, not the boy, not the laughter. Nostalgia had an undertow, and it threatened to drown her.

  But for one detail that bobbed to the surface. Eric had never posted that picture on Facebook. Cady had.

  So whoever had created this profile had been on her page, too.

  23

  The sound of Cady’s cellphone ring burst into the quiet room. She reached for the phone on top of her dresser, half-dreading, half-hoping that it was her mother calling.

  “Cadence.” Nikos’s familiar accent filled her ear. “I’m passing by Weld and I thought of you. Have you had dinner?”

  “No, but I’m meeting my …” Cady checked her watch, surprised to see it was already seven. Ranjoo had left more than a half hour ago, she was probably finished by now. “Never mind. No, I haven’t eaten.”

  “Good, me either. Come down, let me squire you to Lowell House. The dining halls close in a quarter hour, but our head kitchen lady fancies me, so she’ll still feed us if we’re a bit late.”

  The low moon was a gold button on a navy sport coat sky. On the walk to Lowell, Nikos talked enough for both of them, telling Cady about taking the math and physics GREs last Saturday and his top choice graduate programs. She was only half-listening, preoccupied with thoughts of Eric’s imposter profile. It wasn’t until they turned up a wide driveway off Mount Auburn Street that Cady’s attention was pulled into the present. “Whoa.”

  The beautiful and imposing bell tower of Lowell House dominated the building’s Georgian façade. The spotlit tower shone bright white, and the interior bells glowed in warm amber, like a jack-o’-lantern. Cady followed Nikos through the main archway and into a courtyard where stone walls dripped with lush ivy and a flagstone footpath cut across the manicured lawn to the dining hall. A small tree in the courtyard was wound with twinkly white Christmas lights.

  “Is this your first time at Lowell? It’s the prettiest house, at least on the outside. Inside there’s an occasional roach situation, but I shouldn’t tell you that before dinner.”

  But the dining hall itself was even lovelier on the inside. Cream-white arched ceilings and butter-yellow walls made the space airy and inviting, and one long wall was filled with floor-to-ceiling windows. Nikos jogged across the checkerboard-tiled floor to the kitchen on the left, leaving Cady to admire the two large crystal chandeliers that bathed the room in warm light.

  Nikos returned. “So, they’ve already taken away the hot entrees, but Marcia is working the grill, and I know I can get a couple more plates out of her. She’s only just been divorced.” He flashed a grin.

  “You’re terrible.”

  “I’m a man who can put food on the table. So what’ll it be? Want a cheeseburger? That’s what I’m getting.”

  “Sure, but make it a veggie for me.”

  Nikos rolled his eyes. “As you wish,” he said, and hurried off toward the kitchen.

  Cady dropped her coat and bag at an empty table and followed him. She scanned the buffet counters of mostly empty wells where the hot food had been and snagged a few tomatoes and sorry-looking lettuce leaves from what was left of the salad bar. She couldn’t find a hamburger bun, but the dining halls kept a bread and bagel bar out all night for people working late, so Cady popped two slices of bread into the toaster. While she waited, her mind was swimming with thoughts of the imposter profile and its implications—had Eric seen it while he was alive? She heard a woman laugh and looked across the kitchen to see Nikos making the middle-aged grill cook giggle.

  A few minutes later, Nikos met her at the table juggling three plates of food. “Here’s your Resistance Burger,” he said, deftly setting down her plate without disturbing the other he held in the same hand.

  Cady gave a laugh. “It’s not a political statement, it’s just a kinder, healthier choice.”

  “Don’t talk to me about health with whatever you’ve got there. What do you call that, a poor man’s pain au chocolat?”

  “What? It’s just toast—” Cady stopped, suddenly at a loss for words. She was looking down at her plate bewildered to find a piece of toast with peanut butter and a squiggle of chocolate syrup. She was seeing it for the first time.

  “It looks disgusting,” Nikos said. “But if it’s delicious, I want a bite.”

  She hadn’t made this, had she? Had she taken someone else’s plate by mistake? But there’d been almost no one in the kitchen with her.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Cady met his gaze. His bushy black eyebrows were tilted like a roof over his soft brown eyes, his lips were pursed with concern. She felt a wellspring of emotion in her chest; he was the only person on this campus who would look at her like that. But she couldn’t tell him that, so instead she told him all about Eric’s second Facebook profile in a gush of words.

  “That’s very weird, I’m sorry you had to find that all alone.” Nikos gently covered her clenched fist with his palm to comfort her. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter now.”

  “Of course it matters! Someone was stealing his information and using it to impersonate him. That’s huge! Can you imagine how that would have affected him?”

  “Did Eric know about the fake profile?”

  “He could have. I scrolled way down and checked, the first posts were started in the fall of last year, before he died. Toward the end, Eric was so paranoid. He was always thinking he was getting hacked. His doctor told us those sorts of groundless fears were typical. But what if it wasn’t just paranoia? What if he was right? Someone was messing with him. Messing with me, even, I told you they took one of my pictures too. This goes deep! “

  “Okay, but before we get carried away with conspiracy theories, let’s slow down. Those Facebook dupe accounts are a common scam. It’s happened to me before. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to infer that one Cadence Archer on Eric’s friend list might be a relation. You said that Christmas photo was your banner photo, right? And the banner photo is always set to public, so it doesn’t even mean you were hacked.”

  “No way a random scammer made this profile. It was made with care.”

  Nikos picked up her phone to see the profile again. “It’s very thor
ough.”

  “But who would do this? Who would want to torment him? Like the poor kid didn’t have enough on his plate. He never bothered anybody. Even in the end, he only hurt himself. Why target Eric?”

  Nikos looked down at his hands. “This is hard to say, but in the last year of his life, Eric wasn’t exactly the most popular person. His illness changed him, made him difficult to be around. I’m not sure he had many friends.”

  “Did he have enemies?”

  “None that I can think of.” Nikos shrugged. “I’m not ready to discount the possibility that the timing was coincidental, and it was simply a random Internet attack. I’m sure Eric didn’t even know, and if he did, he wouldn’t care.”

  Cady shook her head. “If Eric knew, it would’ve triggered a lot of bad memories for him. He was sensitive about that stuff. He got bullied as a kid, bad, especially in middle school. By high school, it was clear he wasn’t just smart but brilliant, and he gained the confidence to own his nerdiness, so people let up. He worked so hard to get happy with himself. Which is why, you know—” Cady felt a familiar tightness in her chest and throat “—why what happened was so unfair.”

  Nikos reached out and put his hand over hers for the second time. But Cady pulled her hand away and blinked away the wetness in her eyes. She hadn’t wanted to lose control at that moment, she wanted Nikos to take her seriously. And she didn’t want him to touch her out of sympathy.

  “You know, I was bullied.” Nikos sat back in his chair. “Don’t give me that look! I was a short, hairy know-it-all with a funny name. Of course I was bullied.”

  “Nikos Nikolaides.” Cady pronounced it slowly, letting her tongue click against her hard palate. “It’s a lot.”

  “The repetition aside, Nikos is a name more befitting a Greek god, and then I show up, barely eleven stone, a hundred seventy-three centimeters, and I’ll tell you that’s about five foot ten, but that’s rubbish, and this is after my growth spurt. For most of my young life, my name was a joke at my own expense, like when someone names their Chihuahua ‘Killer.’ ” That made Cady laugh, and Nikos feigned being wounded, although one dimple betrayed an impish smile. “It’s a terrible fate, really, you should pity me.”