True Story

by Kate Reed Petty

  “Does this mean you’re done being mad at me?” she asked.

  “We’ll talk,” I said.

  4. Odd Job

  The text message said: Urgent Job. Come Ovr.

  But it’s your old friend Richard, and “urgent” is relative in Richard terms. Richard lives on Mott Street, which, from your basement in Brooklyn Heights, is either a short subway ride or a long walk. After the rough night you had, you decide on the walk. You like to cross the Brooklyn Bridge by foot once in a while, get a new perspective on things.

  You get to Richard’s building, a historic-building-cum-luxury-co-op, all carved stone and heavy iron bars on the door. You push the button for Richard’s apartment and wait, rolling out the cricks in your neck—the stubborn bastards—and then you notice movement across the street.

  You look over and see a bearded man standing near the alley. He’s a big guy, and he strikes you as suspicious—hanging out in an alley at seven o’clock in the morning. You decide to ignore him. You remind yourself you’re not paranoid anymore.

  And anyway just then the speaker crackles, delivering Richard’s voice in a blur of fuzz and pops. It’s impossible to know what he said.

  “It’s the pope,” you respond, knowing Richard can’t hear you, either. That’s just how it’s always been between you two. The buzzer, at least, groans at your joke.

  Inside you find Richard’s apartment door cracked open. You knock as you push your way inside. “Richard?” you say.

  From the foyer you hear the sound of running water on dishes and NPR. The early morning sun is bright through the large windows, stretching and yawning into the hallway. There’s a faint floral smell, maybe hand lotion; you get the feeling there’s a woman in the apartment somewhere.

  “In here,” Richard says, and you come around the corner and see him standing barefoot in a pair of jeans and an undershirt in front of the sink, rubbing a frying pan under the running water. Even this early on a Sunday morning he looks powerful, with his teeth buffed near radioactive white and his dark hair slicked back, like Al Pacino playing the devil.

  You pick a coffee mug up from the table; there’s a half moon of red on the lip.

  “She break your heart?” you say, putting it together: the open door, the smell of hand lotion, and Richard in his bare feet, cleaning up a breakfast that nobody ate. You assume she’s gone already.

  “Nah,” Richard says. He turns and takes the coffee mug out of your hand and puts it in the sink, then pours two fresh cups. “You know my heart is made of pure steel,” he says. You both sit down at the table.

  “Sure,” you say. “Like my dick.”

  “And your anal beads,” Richard says, grinning.

  “But you didn’t call me over here at dawn for girl talk,” you say.

  “No, I did not,” he says. He leans back in his chair, holding his coffee mug on his stomach with both hands and staring down into it. He does not move or look at you as he says, “Do you remember that girl in high school?”

  You immediately think of Haley Moreland.

  “I’ve always meant to look her up,” he’s saying. “I’ve always felt bad.”

  “Wait. The private school girl?”

  Richard nods, sighs, and rubs his face.

  You haven’t thought about that in years. You can barely remember it now; you were frequently drunk in those days; but what you do remember is not pleasant. You remember a leather couch, a room hung with diplomas, lying on your back until you were sober enough to drive. You remember the scandal, the accusations against Richard. But that was so long ago.

  Richard stands up to pour himself more coffee. He puts the coffeepot back on the stove and then puts both of his hands against the counter, as if bracing himself. “Nick, I’m very freaked out,” he says. Then he turns and looks at you seriously. “It’s Haley Moreland.”

  And Haley, already hovering at the back of your mind, rushes in like a gutshot bullet, her long, thin runner’s legs forever just out of your reach. “What about her,” you say. You worry about what your face is doing, a teenage wave of embarrassment surging red over your cheeks. That stupid fear of a crush revealed.

  Luckily Richard isn’t paying attention. He’s looking at something several inches above your head. You hear a beautiful alto voice: “Good morning.” You turn and see a woman leaning against the frame of the door to the kitchen. Zaftig and blonde, wearing a shirt that is obviously Richard’s.

  “I’m Nick,” you say. She frowns at you, then frowns at Richard; clearly she wasn’t expecting company.

  “Nick is a colleague. He’s my consigliere,” Richard says.

  “What’s that?” she says, suspicious.

  “You’ve never seen The Godfather?” Richard looks at you with his eyes wide in mock scandal. “Nick, she’s never seen The Godfather!” He turns away from you, back toward the woman. You look at her and realize how young she is, with a pang that is both jealousy and disgust. “Emma, you need to see The Godfather!”

  Richard crosses the room, walking toward Emma; as he passes the table, he pauses, reaches over, and grabs a stapled pile of papers. He shoves the pile into your hands like he’s throwing it in front of a bus. “Read that, Nick. I’ll be right back,” he says. Then he’s across the room with both of his hands on the woman’s hip bones, half-following, half-steering her out of the room. “I’m so sorry, Emma, but I have to work this morning . . .”

  His voice fades into a murmur in the hallway. You get a crackle of pangs for bright sunny mornings and women and not having to worry about money. You look down at the paper and see the name Haley Moreland listed on the top, on the letterhead of a company called Sister Wife Productions, and the anachronism of high school memories in your New York life is so weird you can barely read. Women’s Fiction says the title at the top of the page. A film by Haley Moreland.

  You stare at the first page. It’s a letter to someone named Cheryl, asking for money. You read the words family foundation and commitment to gender equality and project in development, wondering what this has to do with anything, until you read that a group of boys assaulted Moreland’s best friend, Francesca.*

  You follow the asterisk to the bottom of the page and learn that *The survivor’s name has been changed to protect her identity.

  You start again at the beginning, and gradually understand what this is:

  Francesca has never known what actually happened that night. Charges against the perpetrators were dropped, denying her not only justice, but truth. Now, fifteen years later, an uncovered trove of childhood movie projects brings Francesca and Haley back together. Collaborating, they begin to assemble the evidence—home movies, news reports, and found footage—and piece together a collage of what happened in high school.

  But just as Francesca is catching a glimpse of some kind of closure, through a strange “coincidence” she gains access to hours of audio recordings—interviews with one of the perpetrators himself. Now a grown man, haunted by guilt but unwilling to confess, the perpetrator’s testimony reignites Francesca’s anger and makes her question whether closure is possible. The sum of these parts, WOMEN’S FICTION will be a complex film that challenges our conceptions of high school rape culture, justice, and what it means to make amends.

  “Emma was an intern at the company.” Your head snaps up as Richard comes back into the room. He’s got a smile on his face like he’s just peed in the pool. “That’s not totally gross, is it? I mean, she’s not an intern anymore. I know it’s a little bit gross, but it’s only a little bit gross, right?”

  You hold up the sheet of paper with Haley’s name all over it. Richard’s face falls. “What the fuck is this?” you say.

  “A grant proposal,” Richard says, sitting down with his face in his hands. “Moreland is fundraising to make a movie about me.”

  “I didn’t know the private school girl was Haley�
��s best friend,” you say.

  Richard shrugs. “Haley always was an ambulance chaser. But anyway, I don’t even think it’s the actual girl.”

  Some old piece of heartache dislodges from somewhere deep in your body. It floats around your bloodstream. You feel sad and old. You made this choice years ago; you chose Richard over Haley. Why is he bringing her back to you now?

  “I need to stop this film, Nick,” Richard is saying.

  You flip through the rest of the stapled pages—more writing, spreadsheet budgets, printed pictures, nothing you understand. “How did you get this?”

  “My old buddy Ed is on the board at the foundation.”

  “This says she has ‘damning recorded interviews.’ ‘Hours’ of them. Who’d she interview?”

  Richard shakes his head. “Might have been Max.”

  “Shit,” you say. You’d long forgotten about Max. You drink your coffee and try to imagine him at thirty-three—eyes still weed-shot, the same sarcastic smile on his face. “I figured he’d be dead or in jail by now,” you say. You watch Richard’s face tighten and fall and you realize that you’re right.

  “When?”

  “Two years ago. Drunk driving.”

  “Shit,” you say again. “But why would Max talk to Haley?” You’re stalling—you don’t want to give Richard an opportunity to ask for your help on this. You know that’s why he invited you over. You don’t want to help Richard on this. “And—Richard, what would Max even say? You never actually touched that girl.”

  Richard looks away. “I don’t think she talked to Max. Like I said, I think she’s making this all up.”

  You look at the paper again. The film will protect Francesca’s anonymity, while giving her a platform to finally share her truth.

  You cringe. Platform is the kind of thing Richard says. And here Haley is asking for money from a buddy of Richard’s who runs some kind of foundation for women. You push the papers across the table. You don’t want anything to do with this.

  “So what are you going to do?” you ask.

  “I called you,” Richard says, pushing the papers back at you.

  * * *

  • • •

  YOU MET RICHARD when you were thirteen. Back then Richard was a real sad sack: the Jewish kid who kept kosher in an otherwise Episcopalian suburb, the last to claim he had lost his virginity, the winner of an award from the English department for his sensitive interpretation of A Farewell to Arms. You and he were both on the lacrosse team, but you all used to say that Richard was only on the lacrosse team, not of the lacrosse team. Now you realize that you were all just jealous. You could always tell Richard was on his way to somewhere better.

  It turned out to be Princeton. Then a year backpacking through South America. Then the tech start-up, which he sold five years later for an influx of cash so big you can’t bring yourself to remember the exact number.

  That’s not true. You remember the number: seventy-five million dollars. Richard’s company is worth seventy-five million dollars because it cleans embarrassing stories off the internet for a yearly subscription fee. Richard calls it “reputation management.” In public, he is a valiant champion of privacy rights in the digital age. In private, he shares his own deeply personal story, how he changed his name from “Roth” to “Fox” to escape the internet results of a false accusation that has dogged him since high school.

  Richard was the first person you called two years ago, when you were getting sober and doing the steps, making amends with everyone you’d ever hurt. You guessed that Richard would be the easiest, and you were right. He jumped at the chance to meet you for a beer (and a seltzer for you). You had to insist that he let you do the whole apology thing. “No need!” he kept saying. “No need!” Before that, the last time you and Richard had seen each other, you punched him in the face because of a spilled beer. In other words, you’d been what you used to call a real pussy dick. You felt lucky that Richard forgave you at all, let alone so easily. The two of you spent the rest of the night drinking beer (and seltzer) and catching up, and if it wasn’t exactly like old times, you still felt relieved talking to someone who so genuinely believed in water under the bridge.

  Later, when you moved to New York, your old friend smoothed your way. You moved into the basement of a house Richard owns in Brooklyn Heights, for which you pay just nine hundred dollars a month in rent. It’s not a legal rental—the basement has no windows, and it flooded once after a heavy snowmelt—but the upstairs apartments each go for four thousand dollars a month. You feel like you’ve got a deal. Plus you could never afford the security deposit or pass a background check anywhere else.

  He offered you a job at his company, too. But you turned it down after you went in for lunch one day and found the office filled with alert young men with great-looking haircuts. Compared with them, you felt like an elderly drunk coming in to ask for change. You got a job at a temp agency instead. Now you do a lot of paper shredding and data entry; now you work mostly in closets. The pay is not great, and the work is inconsistent, but it’s the only job you can get except bartending, and you can’t trust yourself to bartend. You’re resigned to your fate. Until you pay back Lindsey. Afterward you’ll go back to school and dream bigger.

  Once in a while, though, you do an odd job for Richard.

  The jobs are definitely “odd.” You get why Richard wants an old friend for them. Like, sometimes you book a private room at a strip club and arrange with the manager for Richard and some other men to arrive and leave through the back door of a neighboring restaurant. One time you posed as a programmer and went to a job interview at a competing company to gather information. Once, dressed as a food delivery guy, you hid a recording device in a conference room.

  These jobs are why Richard introduces you as his consigliere. It always makes you squirm. You’re more like Richard’s hit man, except a lot less cool. But you never complain. Shame is a part of your penance. Plus, Richard fucking pays. While the rate varies, as a whole Richard’s odd jobs are responsible for most of the four thousand dollars you’ve given Lindsey so far.

  But this time you shake your head. “I can’t do it.”

  “I know you can do it,” Richard says. “Nick, this is what I’m always saying: you have to believe in yourself!”

  “Thanks,” you say. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “So what, you’re too busy?”

  You roll out your neck, annoyed. “Can’t you kill this? You founded a company that basically does this exact thing for people.”

  “That’s what makes this story so perfect. Any guy gets accused, whatever. But a guy who founded a reputation-management company? This would go viral. More than viral. This would go nuclear viral.”

  He’s overreacting, as usual. “You’re overreacting,” you say.

  “Name your price,” Richard says. “Literally anything. I’ll pay you anything.”

  “I’m not going to blackmail anyone.”

  “Stop saying it’s blackmail. It’s not blackmail.”

  “You’re asking me to dig up dirt on Haley and then give it to a journalist to write a damaging story about her so the movie won’t get made.”

  “That’s just what journalists do! Don’t be so melodramatic.” Richard gets up and pours more coffee.

  “You didn’t do anything,” you say. “I don’t understand how this can be such a big deal when you never even touched that girl.”

  Richard wails. “You don’t know how optics work.”

  * * *

  • • •

  YOU DON’T AGREE to do anything except think it over.

  You take the subway home, stopping for a dollar slice at the pizza shop on your corner. You eat standing up, looking out the window. You can see Richard’s logic—there is no way to prove that nothing happened. The only thing you can do is prove that the premise of H
aley’s film is questionable. Which it is, since nothing happened.

  It’s not like you think Haley is a bad person. She’s just angry. And Richard made one very good point: This isn’t Haley’s story to tell. It seems like Haley is just doing it to further her own career.

  And you’re worried about Haley’s feelings here? says Richard’s voice in your head. Are we friends, or what?

  You think about taking a walk to the promenade, but it’s a beautiful, sunny day and there are too many happy families pushing strollers and chasing toddlers down the sidewalk. You miss Katie.

  You go back to your basement and take off your left shoe. There’s a hole in your sock. You wiggle your big toe through it. You’re a goddamned bum.

  Then you take off your right shoe and catch a little flash of white on the bottom. You look closer. It’s Kicker, stuck to the heel. Most of the glitter has rubbed off, but you can still see the little red beret and the stupid smile on that dumb dog face.

  When you thought you’d lost the sticker outside of that bar last night, you’d taken it as a bad omen. The sight of it now, stuck on the bottom of your shoe, breaks your heart.

  You call Richard.

  Richard doesn’t even say hello. “Tell me your price.”

  You take the amount you still owe Lindsey and double it. You’ve seen Richard negotiate and you know he always cuts the opening bid in half.

  “Twelve thousand dollars,” you say. “If you give me twelve thousand dollars, I’ll do it.”

  “Done,” Richard says, and hangs up.

  5. Private Eye

  There’s a new chime over the door at the Happy Pancake Diner. It sounds like you just got the answer right on Jeopardy!, and you smile. You’ve decided you feel good about this job.

  That’s why you’re at the Happy Pancake, after all. It’s your favorite place in the city. You rarely eat meals out; mostly you’re on a regimen of peanut butter sandwiches, dollar slices, and Nip Chee. Sometimes Richard treats you to barbecue or oysters. But about once a week—when you’re either very happy or very sad—you go to the Happy Pancake Diner in the Village and have a milkshake.