by Dana Bate
The officer behind Simon lifts him to his feet. “Could you please come with me, sir?”
He drags Simon into the house and several other agents follow, while Jeremy, Zach, and I continue to kneel on the front lawn.
“Can we go inside, too?” Zach asks, shivering in the early morning air.
“In a minute,” the officer behind me says.
“Can you at least tell us what all of this is about?”
A fourth officer approaches, his hands on his hips. “The possession and dissemination of child pornography.”
“WHAT?” all three of us say in unison.
“We have records of multiple downloads of pornographic images at this address,” the officer says.
“This is some sort of mix-up,” I say, my voice tense and pleading. “I’ve never done anything like that—ever, ever, ever.”
“And what about your half-naked friend over here?”
I glance at Zach. “He never even visited my apartment until last night.”
“And this fellow?” he says, nodding at Jeremy.
“He’d never do anything like that.”
“You’re sure?”
“I—of course I’m sure.”
“Well, we have documentation of multiple downloads as recently as last night on wireless network SwannStream, beginning at 7:46 p.m.”
“I wasn’t even home at 7:46,” I say. “I was at the Kennedy Center.”
“With me,” Zach adds.
“Oh, so you two were on a date?” Jeremy huffs. “Fucking perfect.”
“It wasn’t a date,” I say.
“Like hell it wasn’t,” Zach says.
The officer holds up his hand, his eyes shut. “There are other instances besides last night.”
“I’m telling you—the three of us have nothing to do with this.”
The officer pulls out a piece of paper. “The warrant is for this address. This house.”
“This isn’t a house—it’s two separate apartments.” The pieces start coming together. “Don’t you see? It’s all a big misunderstanding. I share a wireless network with my downstairs neighbor. This has nothing to do with us.”
“The house is deeded as a single-family home, and we have a warrant to search the entire premises.”
“But it isn’t a single-family home. It’s two separate apartments. My landlord, Al, never changed the deed.”
The officer stares at me coolly. “Well, there’s only one functional doorbell, and according to the legal record, it’s a single residence.”
Zach jumps in. “I still have the ticket stubs from last night’s concert upstairs. If you let me back inside, I can show them to you.”
“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Jeremy says.
The agent narrows his eyes. “We’ll let you inside when we want to let you inside. Until then, you’re not going anywhere.”
The agent walks back toward the house, but the other three officers continue to stand behind us, still pressing guns into our backs. Only now, with my view no longer obstructed, do I notice how many people have gathered around my front gate, staring at us.
“Like this wasn’t already the shittiest morning of all time,” Jeremy mumbles under his breath, eyeing the crowd.
I sigh. “Tell me about it.”
“Tell you about it? Tell you about it? I’m the one who found out his girlfriend has been keeping secrets from him for months.”
“I told you—I didn’t mean for any of this to turn out the way it did.”
“How did you think it would turn out?”
I pull at the handcuffs around my wrists. “I don’t know. I guess I hoped I’d finally have the career I’ve always wanted. And you’d be glad this story finally came out.”
“Glad? Why would I be glad?”
“Because the whole cover-up made you uncomfortable. You said so yourself. Now the public knows the truth. They had a right to know.”
“Of course they did. But so did I.”
“Okay, well, what about me? Why weren’t you upfront about your past?”
“I was.”
“Not until I dragged the truth out of you. Would you even have told me about the whole ‘cash for comment’ scandal if I hadn’t brought it up?”
“Whoa, ‘cash for comment’?” Zach’s eyes light up. “As in the scandal at the Chronicle? That was you?”
Jeremy grimaces. “Butt out, dude.”
Zach looks at me, apparently disgusted. “So you’ll date some slimeball, but you won’t give me a second chance. Nice.”
“He isn’t a slimeball,” I say.
“I beg to differ.”
“Like you’re one to talk! You slept with someone else and lied about it. What does that make you?”
“A guy who made a mistake.” He locks his eyes on mine. “Sounds like you might know what that’s like.”
My insides twist into knots, and I turn to Jeremy, who is staring at the ground. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. I should have told you about the story.”
He sniffs as he looks up and scans the crowd, which is slowly growing in number. “Why didn’t you, then?”
I open my mouth to answer, but nothing comes out. Why hadn’t I told him? Because I didn’t want him to be mad at me? Because I worried he’d talk me out of doing the story? God, how lame am I?
“Because I was afraid of losing you,” I say.
Jeremy goes silent for a long while as a gentle June breeze blows across my front lawn. A few more people gather in front of our house, whispering and shrugging shoulders as the FBI agents walk in and out of the building.
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe if you’d told me the truth, I could have helped you with the story?”
I screw up my face. “You made it pretty clear you had no interest in doing that.”
“But if you were so passionate about it . . . All I’m saying is, I might have changed my mind.”
I fumble over my words, but before I can put together a complete sentence, I let out a small gasp. Along the fringes of the growing crowd, I spot Melanie, my former Morning Show producer, her spectacled face peeking out from behind a tall man’s shoulder.
Melanie catches my stare and pushes her way through the horde of nosey neighbors.
“Boogerface??”
She hunches her shoulders conspiratorially, as if the fact that I am kneeling on my front lawn in my robe and slippers, looking like Chewbacca Doubtfire, is some sort of secret between the two of us. This, of course, only heightens the mob’s interest in me and my boyfriends present and past.
I smile nervously, hoping Melanie will understand I am in no position to talk right now. She doesn’t take the hint.
“Hey, Boogerface!” she half yells, half whispers. “What is all this?”
The FBI agent behind me clears his throat. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to step back.”
“I’m with the press,” Melanie says, one leg over the fence.
“I don’t care who you are,” he says, pushing his gun harder against me. “Step back.”
Melanie sticks her nose in the air. She sniffs loudly. “Is that police militarization I smell?”
“Ma’am, I will say this one more time: Step. Back.”
She sighs. “Fine, fine.” She looks at me and starts to leave, but then her eyes land on Jeremy, and she freezes. “Hey, why do I recognize you? What’s your name?”
Jeremy’s entire face turns red, out of embarrassment or anger or, more likely, a combination of both. Melanie’s eyes dart between the two of us, and she reaches into her bag, grabs her phone, and points it at Zach, Jeremy, and me.
“No—Melanie!”
She snaps a photo, then another, and stuffs the phone back in her bag. She scampers off as the FBI agent shouts after her, while Zach, Jeremy, and I kneel handcuffed on my front lawn, on display like zoo animals in front of the growing mob.
If there is a way this day could get any worse, I don’t want to know what it is.
But there is an endless number of ways in which this day can get worse, and the universe is determined to ram them up my ass in the most painful way possible. After a mortifying twenty minutes of kneeling in handcuffs on my front lawn, over which period I see no fewer than five other people I know, the FBI agents finally escort the three of us back into my apartment. On the way, we pass Simon, whose lanky arms are still handcuffed behind his back as an FBI agent guides him out the front door. The agent escorts Simon into the back of a marked police vehicle parked out front and slams the door before getting into the front seat. If they know Simon is the suspect, then why are they still treating the three of us like criminals? And why did this need to happen on a day when I look like a rabid squirrel?
When we reach the top of the stairway in my apartment, the floor is littered with old folders, books, and papers, some of which I’d forgotten I owned, all of which I will have to sort through and reorganize once the officers leave. When I look down, I see a stack of notes from the Green Grocers story splayed out like a pile of autumn leaves.
One officer scans the material on my laptop, and another makes a copy of my hard drive to take back for further analysis. Despite our repeated attempts to explain what happened—despite the display of our NSO ticket stubs and the fact that they’ve already carted away the perpetrator of these alleged downloads—the agents proceed with their interrogation undeterred. At no point is Zach offered the opportunity to put on pants, nor am I given the option of wearing something other than a hideous furry robe, and so the three of us sit on my couch looking like a bunch of crackheads while a team of FBI agents ransacks my apartment.
Finally, once they have inspected every last piece of furniture and electronic equipment, they leave almost as quickly as they came. As the last officer departs, Jeremy gets up from the couch and heads for the stairs.
“Jeremy—wait. Please don’t go.”
“Why, so I can get firebombed by SEAL Team Six? No thanks.”
“Please. Just . . . stay for a few minutes so we can talk.”
Zach cups my shoulder. “If he wants to go, let him.”
I shrug off his hand with a violent twitch and stand up, pointing my finger at him. “Shut up. This has nothing to do with you.”
“All I’m saying is . . . I think it’s over.”
“You know what’s over? You and me.”
“Syd . . .”
“Don’t ‘Syd’ me. We’re through. We’ve been through for years.”
Zach opens his mouth to say something, but Jeremy’s phone rings and interrupts him. Jeremy glances at it. “It’s work. I have to go.”
“Can you call them back?”
“Seriously? What part of this don’t you understand? Your story has upended my client’s entire company.”
“You can take the call in my bedroom. I just . . . I need to talk to you.”
He sighs. “Fine. Whatever. This is such bullshit.”
He traipses through the mess on the floor and slams my bedroom door shut behind him.
“You’d seriously rather date that shill than me?” Zach says.
“Jesus Christ, Zach, get over yourself. He isn’t a shill. Frankly, he’s probably a better guy than you are.”
“I have never, ever compromised my integrity the way that guy did, nor would I.”
“You cheated on me and broke my heart. Right now? To me? That’s worse.”
“But I’m still in love with you.”
I clench my fists and stomp my foot on the floor. “No! You’re in love with what we had in high school. And you know what? I am, too. But those people are gone. Gone. They grew up. And it’s time we both accepted that and moved on.”
“Why do we have to move on? Don’t you think we owe it to each other to see if we can make a fresh start?”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But nothing. And as for you—you owe me an apology.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Yeah, five years later!”
“Why does that matter?”
I bury my face in my hands and let out a loud groan. “Because! You never apologized when it mattered. When I was heartbroken and distraught, when I thought I’d never fall in love again. Well, I am falling in love again, and now it’s too late for you. For us.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t believe that? You don’t believe that?” I rush across the room and gather up his pants, shirt, and tie in a ball and grab his briefcase off the floor. “Well, maybe you’ll believe this.”
I hurl all of his belongings down my stairway, and they land in the entryway with a loud thud. Then I snatch the roses he gave me off the coffee table and chuck them down the stairway, too, followed by a melamine vase that, frankly, has nothing to do with Zach but makes a glorious crash as it strikes the ground.
“If it weren’t for you, maybe I would have covered that Professor Ferguson scandal in college. Maybe I would have taken that food-writing job in Fort Lauderdale. Maybe I wouldn’t have needed to write some juicy horsemeat story in the first place.”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault that jerkwad is mad at you?”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“At some point, you need to stop blaming me for your misery,” he says. “The fact that your life is screwed up isn’t all my fault.”
The blood rushes to my face, and I grab him by his ripped undershirt and drag him toward my stairway. “Fuck you, Zach.”
Zach opens his mouth as if to say something, but I slap him across the face before he can. He stares at me with glassy eyes.
“You know what? Forget it,” he says. “I’m sorry I bothered.”
He trudges down my steps, collects his things, and disappears through my front door.
As I turn around, Jeremy charges out of my bedroom. “Well, thanks to you, it looks like I’m about to get fired,” he says. “Which, given the events of the past twenty-four hours, is the icing on the fucking cake.”
“Fired? But... why?”
“Why? Why do you think? I’ll be lucky if Green Grocers doesn’t sue me—which, by the way, they totally could.”
“But how would they know you were the one who leaked the documents?”
“Because someone already posted a photo of the three of us on the Web. It doesn’t take a genius to put the pieces together.”
Melanie. Damn it.
“Maybe they’ll understand—you were trying to do the right thing.”
“No, you were trying to do the right thing, and you handled it in the worst way possible.”
“I know, but . . . you could use this as a chance to redeem yourself—to be the good guy.”
He lets out a bitter grunt. “Why? So you can feel better about dating me? So that you don’t have to explain to all your friends and family that I’m not really as bad as my Wikipedia entry says I am?”
I shrug helplessly and open my mouth to respond, but nothing comes out. Jeremy stares at me for a long time without saying anything, letting me stew in the awkward silence, and then he turns around and walks toward my stairway.
“I’m not proud of what I did, but I’m not ashamed of who I am. Obviously you are.”
“That’s not what I said. I didn’t—”
Jeremy holds up his hand. “Enough.”
He holds my stare with unblinking eyes, and when I don’t say anything, he grips my banister tightly, until I can see the whites of his knuckles. “I think it would be better for both of us if we didn’t see each other anymore,” he says.
Then he starts walking down the stairs and, without turning to look at me or say good-bye, marches out the front door.
CHAPTER 41
It’s official: Everyone hates me.
Jeremy blames me for losing his job, Zach blames me for choosing a disgraced journalist over him, and my landlord Al blames me for getting him into trouble with the DC government for using a single-family house as an apartment building. Apparentl
y, I am the worst person alive.
Even my compatriots at the farmers’ market no longer hold me in their good graces. When I show up at the West End farmers’ market Saturday, the day after the story appears in the Chronicle, I pass Drew as he sets up beneath the Broad Tree Orchards tent. I have avoided him ever since our date at Tryst two months ago, but now he seems to be the one avoiding me, his eyes glued to the crate of black cherries he is arranging on one of the tables.
“Hey, Drew. Long time no speak.”
He looks up and acts surprised, as if he didn’t know I’d been standing there. “Oh. Hey.”
“How’s it going?”
“Okay. Busy.”
“I hear that.” I fiddle with the strap on my tote bag. “Sorry I’ve been MIA. Things have been a little nuts on my end.”
“Yeah, I saw your story in the Chronicle.”
Him and half the planet. Once I realized Jeremy and his superiors had seen my name associated with the horsemeat story, I didn’t see the point in removing myself or concealing my involvement. The whole point of taking my name off the story was to protect Jeremy, and now that I’ve failed at that, the whole exercise in anonymity seems pointless.
Drew unloads a crate of gooseberries. “I’m surprised you’re willing to associate with us lowly market folk, now that you’re all famous.”
“I’m not famous.” Infamous is more like it.
“Whatever. You obviously have an agenda.”
“An agenda? What are you talking about?”
“You’re obviously just working here to dig up material for your writing career.”
“That isn’t true. I needed this job. And I like working here.”
“You have a funny way of showing it. You do realize Green Grocers is pulling the plug on the pilot program, right?”
My heart sinks. “The company told me all projects were going forward as planned.”
“That’s not what we’re hearing. Julie is being told there are ‘unspecified delays’ to the program, and her contact at the company has backtracked on all of his commitments.”
Just what Jeremy said would happen. Damn it.
I clear my throat. “But it would have been wrong for me to keep the horsemeat story a secret.”
