Just One Bite

by Jack Heath

  I take another bite of Biggs.

  “So I can tell you why I think I did it,” Hope says. “But I wouldn’t necessarily be right. Dr. Rosen said I was just ill. He talked a lot about ‘risk factors’ for suicide, like it’s something that happens to you.”

  “It doesn’t have to be one or the other,” I say. “It can be something you did and something that happened to you.”

  To some people this would sound like Confucian gibberish. But it’s not. I know what it’s like to do something terrible because something terrible has been done to you. Karma in reverse.

  Hope gets it. She relaxes a little, the tendons in her neck going soft, her palms spreading flat on the table.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” I ask. There are sixteen other victims to investigate—I’m keen to get to the point.

  She nods. “I...I guess that’s the other reason I’m here.”

  I wait. She opens her mouth, half purses her lips, as though she’s not sure how to pronounce the words. I can see her growing more and more distressed by her own silence.

  But I’ve already figured it out.

  “Why don’t you start from when you met Shannon Luxford,” I say.

  Then the whole story comes rushing out.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  You throw away the outside and keep the inside, then you eat the outside and throw away the inside.

  What am I?

  He gave her a business card in the library on her first day of college. Not much on it except his name: Shannon Luxford. This handsome guy with the Ben Affleck chin, twenty-one, the cute curl of black hair and shoulders like a footballer.

  “The first few weeks are hard,” he said. “Fun, but hard. Get in touch if you need help, okay? Or advice, or just someone to talk to. I mean it.”

  “I have a boyfriend,” she said. Which was true. Peter was small and pale, perpetually hunched like Gollum over some arcane thing. He often tried to explain what he was working on—yesterday a new kind of cryptocurrency, today a method for synthesizing guitar sounds—and she never understood his explanations. Peter was a skilled programmer, but a poor communicator. He didn’t realize this, however, and Hope could tell he thought she was stupid.

  “Lucky guy,” Shannon said with an easy smile. “Don’t worry, I have a girlfriend back home. Anyway, the offer still stands, okay?” He checked his gleaming wristwatch. Hardly anyone Hope knew wore a watch. “I gotta go to class. See you ’round, Hope.”

  “See you ’round, Shannon,” she said, copying his tone. She wondered if it seemed like she was mocking him in a flirty way, or if she just sounded like a parrot.

  He didn’t approach her again, not directly. The next few weeks of classes passed in a blur of confusing paperwork and bullshit introductory lectures full of things she already understood, hidden behind a cloaking device of buzzwords and nonsense. When her communications professor started talking about “structuration,” she nearly walked out.

  But Shannon was always there in the background. He’d be laughing with similarly handsome young men, or playing Ultimate Frisbee on the lawns, and then he’d notice her looking at him, and wave. She’d wave back, and then pretend to be on the phone so he didn’t notice that she was alone, and that she had no friends here.

  Her dad sometimes suggested having lunch together on campus. She always turned him down, saying she was too busy. She wanted him to think she was having the time of her life at college, just like he had.

  Then there was the party. It was Kira Schwabe who invited her. Kira was a first-year English-lit major with an empty birdcage tattooed on her wrist. She was in one of Hope’s media tutorials, which she spent scrolling through Twitter on her laptop. Without looking up, she had said, “You know the party at Natasha’s house?”

  It was the first time they had ever spoken. “No,” Hope replied.

  “Oh.” Kira looked taken aback. “Really? I was hoping you could give me a ride.”

  It was that stunned look that made Hope say yes. Kira was surprised that Hope hadn’t been invited. Hope wasn’t fitting in at Braithwaite, but Kira had thought she was. If she didn’t go, she would be exposed. Loner. Weirdo. Target.

  The party was held in a sprawling three-story McMansion just off campus—four levels if you counted the basement, where giant speakers made rhythmic thumping sounds that filtered up through the whole house, making the walls vibrate and the double-glazed windows rattle. Conversation was impossible. Every now and then the basement door would open and the volume would become deafening. Laser beams and smoke would pour out, and a drunken teen would emerge from the haze like a visitor from the future.

  A stranger handed drinks in red cups to Kira and Hope. “Wooo!” he said simply.

  Kira downed hers in a single gulp. Hope sipped with more caution. She couldn’t identify the ingredients. Maybe Mountain Dew spiked with vodka.

  “Two parts battery acid, one part hand sanitizer,” she said. But Kira had already vanished somewhere into the throng. Another young woman, walking past with a bottle of rum, topped up Hope’s drink. Hope sipped it, just because it was in her hand and it was something to do. Standing there doing nothing made her feel conspicuous. Vulnerable.

  She went upstairs, where she thought the volume would be more bearable. She saw two men rolling blunts in one bedroom. Through the next door she saw a woman on her back on the bed, either laughing or crying. A man’s head was up her skirt. In the same room, another woman was blowing one guy and getting fucked by another, trapped between them like corn mounted on cob holders. Hope averted her eyes and started to walk back down the stairs.

  She bumped into Shannon Luxford coming up.

  “Hope!” he said. “Hey, how are you?” His smile faded as he saw the look on her face. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine. What are you doing here?” It came out more bluntly than she intended.

  “I know, right? I’m way too old for this party.” He smiled, as though he knew he was exaggerating. “A student I’ve been helping, he asked me to come. But now I don’t think he even showed up. Anyway, no big deal. You have friends here?”

  “No.”

  His voice became more gentle. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I often see you on your own. Are you sure everything’s okay?”

  “I’m fine, I just...” She hesitated, torn between “don’t know anyone here,” “don’t like the noise” and “don’t belong here.” The alcohol made everything fuzzy. She was on the verge of tears.

  “It’s okay,” Shannon said. He wrapped an arm around her, like a concerned big brother. “Let’s get you out of here, okay?”

  She nodded, and he held her hand and helped her down the stairs. Only later did she think he’d held it a little too tight. Possessive, not protective.

  She remembered walking back to his car, huddled into him for protection from the wind. She remembered his hand on her leg on the drive home, and her not wanting to offend him by pushing it off.

  “I’ll come up with you,” he said when they’d parked near her dorm building. He made it sound like it was for her safety.

  “You don’t need to do that,” she told him.

  “It’s okay.”

  As soon as the door room door was closed, he was kissing her. His breath tasted like cheap beer, and this made her feel like he wasn’t taking advantage of her—they were both drunk, not just her.

  She was drunker, though. Too drunk to fight him off, if she tried.

  “We shouldn’t,” she said when he broke off the kiss. Later, she hated herself for saying that instead of “you can’t” or simply “don’t.”

  He was already unbuttoning her jeans.

  “Please,” she said. But he just tore at her clothes with renewed energy, as though he’d misunderstood.

  In the end, she let him do it. She even made encouraging noises, just wa
nting it to be over. She didn’t even allow herself to think the word rape until days later, alone at an STD clinic, her vagina still sore, a bruise fading on her upper arm where he’d grabbed it.

  Hope didn’t tell anyone right away, and the longer she waited, the more impossible it was. It would have been so much simpler if he had been a stranger in a dark alley, or if he’d slipped something into her drink. But she knew him. People would say she had been attracted to him, and they would be right. She had deliberately left the party with him, had let him into her room. She hadn’t screamed for help.

  Soon it was too late. If it really wasn’t consensual, she imagined people saying, then how come you didn’t go straight to the police?

  She couldn’t even tell her boyfriend, Peter. She was afraid he would think she had cheated on him. It kind of felt like she had, the moment she had taken Shannon’s business card.

  Eventually Peter sent a text to tell her the relationship wasn’t working out. He said it felt like they had drifted apart.

  Hope decided to do nothing. And that was what she did. She stayed in her dorm with the door locked, skipping classes, rarely eating. She looked at the words in her textbooks without really reading them. When her teachers eventually called her, she told them she was sick, and she sounded so zombified that most of them actually believed her. Over and over again, she asked herself what sort of pathetic person just lets this happen and does nothing. Over and over again, the answer was: Me. I did that.

  And then he sent her a video.

  It came from an unknown phone number. She wouldn’t have opened it at all except for the thumbnail, which clearly showed her face in profile, eyes squeezed shut.

  Feeling sick, she opened it. There she was, facedown on the mattress, her jeans tangled around her ankles. She was making encouraging noises. Shannon had been filming with a phone. The most disturbing part wasn’t even watching Shannon violate her. It was seeing things literally from his perspective. She looked so willing.

  She wrote back, Who the fuck is this? Desperately hoping that it was Shannon. The idea that he might have shown this to someone else was horrifying.

  He didn’t answer the question. Instead he wrote, Be nice. We had such a good time.

  Her fingers trembled as she typed. What do you want?

  His response: I want you to talk to your dad.

  * * *

  Hope doesn’t cry as she tells me this story. She’s probably cried enough. Every experience is less potent each time you relive it. Like Adderall—less kick each time you use it.

  Her story doesn’t move me much, for the same reason. I’ve watched people die, sometimes by my own hand. I’ve chewed their insides. Nothing much shocks me now.

  So Hope and I sit opposite each other, both dry-eyed, as she tells me the rest of the story. She started talking Shannon up to her father, who promoted him to a teaching assistant role and got him his own office. After that, Shannon let her delete the video off his phone, but she has no way of knowing if he made copies.

  “He probably didn’t,” I tell her. “The video is evidence of his crime. He would want it gone.”

  “Unless he wants me to do something else for him.”

  “No. If he wants you to do something else, he can just pretend he had copies.”

  “And if I asked to see them?”

  “He thinks you’re not the kind of person who would ask that.”

  “He’s wrong,” Hope says. “I’m not scared of him anymore.”

  I nod. Luxford targeted her because she seemed vulnerable. But now that she’s survived a bullet through the head, she’s probably not so easy to intimidate.

  “So you dropped out of college,” I prompt.

  “Right,” she says. “It was too hard to concentrate on the work, and there just didn’t seem to be any point. A stupid, spineless person like me, getting a degree.” She holds up her hands, assuming I would object to this. “I’m just telling you what I thought at the time.”

  “Was your father pissed off?”

  “Very. He kept encouraging me to spend some time with Shannon. Because I’d spoken so favorably about him, and he thought Shannon would encourage me to get back into my studies. I couldn’t tell Dad the truth, but I hated myself for lying. He was angry at me, and Mom was confused. I started to think they’d be better off without me around. And I felt guilty—what if Shannon had done the same thing to other girls? If so, it was my fault. I could have done something at the time, but now it was too late.”

  I think of all the photos in Luxford’s desk.

  “Every time I had to drive anywhere,” Hope continues, “I’d imagine a car crash. The kind no one walks away from. And the thought became comforting. It was weirdly fast—I went from worrying about dying to hoping I’d die. Then one day Dad left his gun safe open.”

  “When? You know the date?”

  “May 23 last year.”

  Not one of the dates marked in blood on the wall planner. “Do you know why he had the gun out?”

  “Mom screamed the same thing at him. Apparently it was an insurance thing. Anyway, he was out, and I saw the gun. I ignored it at first, and went back to my room. Then I kept thinking about it. Eventually I went back. I put it in my mouth, just to see what that would feel like.”

  I ask the obvious question. “How did you feel?”

  She’s been avoiding my gaze for most of this conversation. But now she looks right at me. “Awake,” she says. “For the first time in months.”

  I know what she means. I’ve had a gun to my head more than once. You’re never more aware of the sensations in your body. The whole world goes sharp, like that ultra-HD TV in Hope’s living room.

  “So I put a little bit more pressure on the trigger,” Hope continues. “Then a little more. Playing chicken with myself.”

  She takes a sip of coffee.

  “Then what?” I ask.

  “Then I woke up in the hospital.”

  An FBI agent laughs quietly in the corner. Nothing to do with us—he’s in his own conversation.

  “Let me give you some advice, Mr. Blake,” Hope says. “If you ever want to kill yourself, put the gun to the side of your head, not the front or the back. Apparently the brain can take a lot of damage to the left or the right brain, but not both. The doctor was thrilled. Apparently I’m a medical miracle. People like me advance neuroscience by decades. Mom and Dad, uh...” She looks down at the table. “They were pretty disappointed in me. They didn’t understand. They couldn’t, because I still didn’t tell them about Shannon. It was way, way too late. Since then, they don’t leave me alone. It’s like I’m a prisoner. If Dad hadn’t gone missing, I wouldn’t even be here.”

  “Who found you?”

  “With a hole in my head? A neighbor heard the gunshot. The front door was unlocked.”

  I feel a jab of sympathy for Biggs. He was tricked by his TA, lied to by his daughter, blamed by his wife for his daughter’s suicide attempt and eventually abducted. Even his pacemaker let him down, in the end. And the guy who found his body didn’t report it—he took a bite out of him instead.

  I don’t blame Hope, or Gabriela. The only bad guys here are Luxford and me.

  “Listen.” Hope leans forward. “Do you think Shannon killed my dad?”

  She’s dreading the answer. She thinks she could have prevented her father’s murder.

  “If he did,” I say, “then I can’t work out why. You’re sure your father didn’t know about the rape?”

  “Positive. Like I said, he was always talking about how great Shannon was.”

  “Are you willing to go on the record about all this?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Like this wasn’t a personal conversation already?”

  “I’ve be
en looking through your dad’s web search history,” I say. “There’s some weird stuff in there.”

  “What kind of... Never mind, I don’t want to know. Not if...” She doesn’t say the rest, but I hear it, anyway. Not if he’s dead. I don’t want to tarnish his memory.

  “Did anyone strange come to the apartment?” I ask. “Any large women?”

  She looks confused. “Large like fat?”

  “Large like tall.”

  “No. Not while I was home, which has been pretty much always since I got out of hospital.”

  I think back to the honey-trap idea. “What about men? Big enough to overpower him. Anyone suspicious at all?”

  “We’ve had no visitors except the mailman. My dad was a good guy. A little oblivious, maybe, but good. He wouldn’t be mixed up with anything bad.” She takes a shaky breath. “Do you think we’ll ever find him?” she asks.

  I look down at my sandwich.

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” I say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A man calls his dog from the other side of a lake. There are no bridges, and the dog doesn’t walk around the lake. When it arrives, it is dry. How?

  “I want to know everything,” Thistle says when she picks me up.

  “Shannon Luxford raped her,” I say. “He filmed it. Then he used the video to blackmail her into talking him up to her father, who hired Luxford as a TA and gave him his own office—”

  “Where Luxford could rape more students and take more videos,” Thistle says. “Holy shit.”

  “Right. I didn’t tell her about that part.”

  “Uncharacteristically tactful of you. Is that why she tried to kill herself?”

  “It couldn’t have helped,” I say, “though it sounds like she was already depressed. Her parents basically haven’t let her out of sight since the suicide attempt.”

  “Did her father know about Luxford? Does her mom?”

  “She says no. But we don’t know about Biggs’s final days. Maybe he found out.”