Cam Girl

by Leah Raeder

  The house was cozy, if cliché New England—lots of bare timber and whitewashed planks and striped fabrics—with industrial touches: drafting table and stool, steel swing-arm lamps. On the mantel and in the halls were family photos: Max and Ryan and a blond woman, then later, just the boys.

  “What did you want to talk about?” I said.

  “Anything. I’ve missed your company.”

  Right. “You want something.”

  He drew up beside me, the smile still in his eyes. “I know you don’t believe it, but I worry about you. It’s the paternal instinct in me. You said it wouldn’t go away, and you were right.”

  I fought the urge to touch the mic, ensure it was hidden.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Max said.

  “Okay.”

  He poured cognac into snifters at the bar in the dining room. I reclined against the table, watching.

  “How’s Ellis?” he said.

  “Fine.”

  “Did you ask her about what I told you?”

  I sipped, savored the licorice burn in my throat. “Yes.”

  “No, you didn’t. Do you know how I know?”

  I stared into my glass, considered bailing. Elle could hear every word we said right now.

  “It’s in your eyes, Vada. That flicker of doubt.”

  “Leave her out of this.”

  “Can she hear us?”

  I made my face blank. “What?”

  “Is she listening in? I want you both to know I have no intention of pursuing legal action against you. Put your minds at rest, please.”

  Despite myself, tension uncoiled in my shoulders. “Not like you could do shit to her, but okay.”

  “We can stop here.” Max looked at me over his glass. “You let go, and I’ll let go.”

  “Let go of what?”

  He glanced at the neck of my blouse. Then he touched his chest, the same place my mic was hidden.

  It took a second for me to parse what he meant:

  He didn’t want Elle to hear.

  I shivered. Wanted to blurt, Why? But instinct guided me.

  “You’re creeping me out, Max,” I said aloud, pulling out my phone.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  I sent him a text:

  write it down, but keep talking out loud

  “You two missed a great clambake,” he said, tapping his phone as he rambled about the steamers.

  MAX: She hurt you before and she’s doing it again.

  MAX: It pains me to watch this happen to you.

  VADA: how is she hurting me?

  MAX: You see it, but you won’t accept it until it’s too late.

  MAX: Don’t make the same mistake I did.

  VADA: what the hell does that mean?

  But instead of replying, he put his phone away.

  “Did you crack the laptop password?” he said.

  Thin ice. Careful. “We found some stuff, if that’s what you’re asking. Photos.”

  Against Elle’s advice, I’d filed for a copy of the autopsy, too. Autopsies were public records in Maine. Ellis thought it gruesome—“We saw how bad it was, why do you want more?”—but the more details we uncovered about Ryan, the more I wanted to know. The more something seemed so obviously wrong, right in my face.

  And Max kept trying to make this about Elle. Deflecting.

  So I said, “I saw the pics. The ones where Ryan was beaten till he was nearly unrecognizable.”

  He drained the snifter in one gulp.

  “Who did that to him, Max?”

  He filled his glass again, guzzled. I set mine down and moved closer.

  “Was he gay? Is that what this is about?”

  He laughed, brief and humorless. “You’re loyal to the people you love. Even when they lie to you.”

  “Stop changing the subject.”

  “Walk away, Vada. We’ll all be happier.”

  “Did you hurt him?”

  His glass tumbled to the floor, cracking. His hand shot out and clamped onto my shoulder. I grabbed his wrist but he was stronger and held on, grinding my bones.

  “I never hurt him,” Max rasped. “Never.”

  His hand sprang away. I massaged my right arm, glaring.

  “Stop this. Please. Let me keep my memories, at least.”

  This was exactly where I wanted him: vulnerable, unstable. Prone to spitting out truth.

  Prone to hurting me.

  “You went after my friend, Max. You started this.”

  “I was worried. I care about you. But I can’t save you from it. It’s going to tear you up, like it did to me. I’m sorry.”

  I bared my teeth and mouthed, Leave. Her. Alone.

  He stared at my mic.

  This cryptic shit was getting me nowhere. I moved closer again, undaunted, peering up into his face.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, or your memories, or anything. But I need answers. I can’t move on otherwise. Give me something. Why did the cops take the gun?”

  “They found it in the Jeep.”

  My eyes widened. “Was Ryan going after someone? Whoever beat him?”

  “He’d never hurt a soul. That was Skylar, not him.”

  His lips curled at the name.

  Bingo.

  “Tell me what she did.” I leaned nearer, pressed a hand to his arm. His heart boomed so hard it rang in my bones. “Tell me what was going through Ryan’s mind that night. We both want the same thing, Max. Closure. And we can give it to each other, if you just help me understand.”

  His eyes gleamed, the color intensified like wet paint. So blue.

  “There’s no closure,” he said hoarsely. “It’s a lie. You keep yourself distracted, pretend you’re making progress, but the wound never closes, Vada. It will never close.”

  He sounded like Ellis. The deeper I dug, the more reluctant they both grew. Max had pried into her past and she’d pried into Ryan’s. Now both of them wanted to drop it with no explanation, no resolution. Just vague warnings about each other.

  As if they were rivals.

  Max stepped away from me.

  Instinctively I lunged after him, caught his arm. Ran my hands down to his palm and turned it toward the light.

  The back of his hand was a rich gold tan, but the inside was pale. I expected roughness from boat work yet the skin looked smooth. He jerked free before I could memorize it, compare it to the photo I’d saved. The hand that held those wooden carvings.

  “Leave now. Please.”

  “Max—”

  “I want to be alone.”

  Goddammit.

  In a final act of defiance I drank the rest of my cognac, slowly. He stood with his back to me, shoulders hunched as if expecting a blow.

  He didn’t turn or move. Barely seemed to breathe. My eyes played over his body, and I wished with a gutting desperation that I could draw because drawing was how I remembered things, and I wanted to remember this. I wanted to hold those images side by side.

  At last I left him and stalked out into the night.

  * * *

  The constellation of Christmas lights in the rafters filled the attic with a soft radiance. Ellis sat in the dormer window with her laptop as I paced, nursing a beer.

  “Got another bite,” she said.

  I flopped onto the bed beside her.

  We’d made fake social media accounts using the names and pics of kids from Ryan’s graduating class. Then we messaged his old classmates. This is Meg. I forgot my password so I made a new profile. Can you friend me again, please?

  Amazingly, it worked. If you even remotely impersonated someone, people often filled in the blanks themselves. You’re always forgetting shit, Meg. I told Steph & Kat to re-friend you too. Each act of trust gave us more names, pics, info.

  “This is phishing,” Ellis said. “If we’re caught, we could go to jail.”

  “We’re not stealing their credit cards. We’re just socially engineering them to
tell us stuff so we can solve a hate crime.”

  She pushed her glasses up, frowning. “We don’t know that there was a hate crime.”

  “Trust me, Watson. I have a nose for these things.”

  “ ‘There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.’ ”

  “What’s that from?”

  “Really?” She sighed. “You’re more Katie Holmes than Sherlock.”

  I pinched her bare thigh, and she kicked me away.

  Once we breached the outer circles of Ryan’s senior class, we scanned through pics and comments for mentions of him. He’d been a popular jock before senior year, when the gay rumors started.

  Ryan is so fine.

  Too bad he likes D in his A.

  Just like you, ho.

  Suspicion confirmed: Ryan was closeted, acting straight. At his winter formal, three days before he died, something big happened.

  I CAN’T BELIEVE MY FUCKING EYES

  [image removed]

  Is this a prank? Is it for real?

  omfg #eyebleach #cannotunsee

  LOLOLOL EPIC TROLL

  OMG is that RYAN???

  But we still had no idea what.

  Something shocking. Disturbing. Epic.

  What could he have done in front of everyone? Kissed a boy?

  Rumors flew that kids who talked about the incident got suspended, their college plans threatened. Discussion was driven underground, into private messages and invite-only groups.

  Now we were trying to breach those inner circles and find Skylar.

  I rolled onto my back, musing at the ceiling. “What if she was Ryan’s beard, and got sick of playing his fake girlfriend? Maybe she outed him at the dance.”

  Ellis twirled a lock of hair, agitated.

  “What?” I said.

  “This feels cruel. They’re so easy to manipulate.”

  “Because they’re dumb.” I snorted at our new “friend’s” profile. “I could send her a pic of Beyoncé and she’d believe I’m her. If she goes through life this gullible, something way worse will happen someday. Better to learn this lesson early.”

  “She wouldn’t believe you’re a celebrity. She believes you’re her friend because she trusts her friend.”

  “Maybe she trusts her friends too much.”

  Our eyes locked, and something electric crackled between us. I was so close to asking about her name again.

  “How much trust is too much?” Elle said.

  “When they can hurt you with it.” I didn’t break eye contact. “Good thing we’re not hurting anyone, right?”

  “Right.”

  It’s going to tear you up, like it did to me.

  What the hell had Max meant? Maybe I already knew this story: gay son, homophobe dad. It would explain why Ellis was loath to dig deeper, scared of reliving her own past. And why Max wanted to believe she was at fault in the crash. Blame the deviant.

  Except he knew I wasn’t exactly straight, either. He’d assumed Elle was my girlfriend from the start, and never called our relationship unhealthy, like Mamá. But maybe I’d made my case for being more-straight-than-not too well. Constantly dissociating myself. Reflexively denying it.

  Like the coward I was.

  I got up and cracked open another beer.

  “Guess I’ll go,” Ellis said. “So you can talk to Blue.”

  No bitterness in her tone, only resignation. Blue was my nightly routine now. A thousand bucks, a soul-searching dialogue that made me laugh and think. Then we got off. Every night the tension built, our flirting intensifying, growing luminous, incandescent, imploding. I put the tie around my neck. He came all over his fist. Sometimes we kept talking after. In my head I ran my fingers through his hair, his legs twining with mine. The thought of his hard slender body, his deft hands, his self-deprecating humor and intoxicatingly gentle maleness got me wet again. Sometimes we’d go for round two.

  He was the perfect guy. Almost ridiculously so.

  Night after night I lay awake, staring up at these fake glass stars.

  What’s wrong with me? I thought. Why am I obsessing over him when Elle is right here, flesh and blood, real? What do I really know about him beyond what he wants me to believe? Her, at least, I know. Why couldn’t I love her the way she loved me?

  It was the same love. I knew that.

  Ellis packed up her laptop and headed for the door and then stopped, came back, and pulled something from her bag. “These are for you.”

  Gourmet gummy bears.

  Way to make this impossible, Elle.

  “Well,” I said, “now you have to stay the night.”

  “Why?”

  “To help me eat them.”

  I was rewarded with the deepest blush ever.

  Ellis wouldn’t touch beer, so we raided the kitchen and found horchata in the back of the fridge, which I mixed with rum. Half an hour later we were lying on my bed with a pile of gummy bears spread on the quilt between us. Elle half-assedly played World of Warcraft on her laptop.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” she said, shooting arrows at a lumbering ogre.

  “Her.” I sorted bears into a color wheel, red to blue. “You heard Max. ‘He’d never hurt a soul. That was Skylar.’ ”

  “We don’t know if Skylar did anything.”

  “Maybe she put the gun in Ryan’s car.”

  Ellis frowned. “You’re making a lot of assumptions about this person.”

  “You have to make some assumptions about people, Elle. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere.”

  “You won’t get anywhere by assuming too much.”

  Fucking Occam.

  “So you think Skylar has nothing to do with it?” I said. “They just beat Ryan up for being gay? Is that still a huge deal here, in Maine?”

  “It’s still a huge deal everywhere. My own parents didn’t see me as human. I was an aberration. Sinful. Defective.”

  I touched her arm, silently.

  If we’d known each other as kids, it would’ve been different. I never would’ve let them hurt her. Sometimes I fantasized about it: packing our bags and running away, teen urchins living in the city. Broke but free. Happy.

  “And it’s not just homophobia.” She unleashed a barrage of arrows, mowing the ogre down. “Some things go deeper. Like gender. Pink for girls, blue for boys. It’s the very first category we’re put into as babies, before we even know who we are. Messing with that is sacrilege. It goes against everything they assume to be true about people.”

  “Obviously I agree, but what’s your point?”

  “Some people get violent when you challenge their deepest beliefs. Like their religion, or their binary definitions of people. Maybe Ryan made them question those things. Things they assumed were universal truths.”

  The deceptively obvious.

  Could he have been bi, like me and Dane? Could that have been worse, the refusal to be pigeonholed into Us or Them? From personal experience I knew people dealt poorly with shades of gray. When I was with Elle they saw me as gay. When I was with Raoul I was straight. Neither was true.

  Sometimes I bought into the black-or-white mentality, too. It was easier, picking a side. Not fighting to be recognized as a fluid, nuanced individual, but simply accepting a premade label, a prefab identity.

  I’d only felt like my real self with a handful of people in this world. Ellis was one.

  Blue was another.

  He was unlike any guy I knew. Other men might call him weak, beta, soft, but to me his tenderness only made his masculinity stronger. He wasn’t afraid to feel. Men who express emotion have more balls than those who fake toughness. His softer masculinity fit my harder femininity. We fit each other.

  When I’d looked at Max’s hand, I could have been looking at the hand that made me come each night. The hand that carved the wooden animal figurines now sitting on my desk: cat, bird, snake. Blue sent them using a mail forwarding service. I didn’t know the origin and he didn’t know the de
stination—something came from nothing, arrived at nothing. Ex nihilo.

  If Ellis wasn’t here, I’d touch them. These things that Blue had touched. Made for me.

  If Max was Blue, how the hell would I deal with that?

  It frightened me. Exhilarated me. Made me a little sick.

  “I need to kill something,” I said. “Let me play.”

  She sighed and slid me the laptop.

  I went to the log-in screen to choose a character. “Oh my god, you nerd. All your characters are blood elves.”

  “Shut up.” She tried to grab it back but I fended her off.

  “Will you relax? Smoke a jay or something.” I scrolled through the list. “Holy shit, you have one of every class at max level.”

  “So I play a lot. That’s not a crime.”

  “No, it’s a sickness. I bet these names are all lore-appropriate, too.”

  “Don’t pretend you know what that means.”

  “Believe it or not, I actually listen when you geek out on me. But thanks for the vote of confidence.” I frowned. “All your characters are guys? No girls?”

  “Girls get harassed.”

  “But they don’t know if you’re actually a girl in real life.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” She sifted through the gummy bears, finishing my sorting. “People treat you the way you present. One of the ‘girls’ in my guild is a guy in real life. People send her gifts all the time. They kill monsters for her, give her the best loot drops. But they expect attention in return. If she neglects them, they get mad. She got kicked from her last guild for starting ‘drama’ between two guys who had crushes on her. All she ever did was talk to them. There was nothing unsavory going on.”

  “ ‘Unsavory.’ Cute. It’s like you haven’t been grossly corrupted by a cam girl the past couple months.”

  “You do the same thing, cam girl. You play a role.”

  I clicked on an elf in shining armor. “Everything is a role. Right now I’m role-playing a blood elf paladin. When are we ever our real selves?”

  “I’m real with you.”

  I looked at her across the bed. “Ditto, nerd.”

  Ellis picked up a blue bear and pinched it till its head swelled. “You’re real with him.”

  “Can’t it be both? You each see different sides of me.”