It took Ben a long while to process my theory until he finally said, “Shit.”
“I know this is unnerving, but the longer nothing happens, the better for us, so let’s not lose our nerves now. Again.”
He cast me a brief look, a faint glimmer of hope in his eyes that I hadn’t seen since this whole thing had started.
When we reached the school, heads started turning our way, and the little hope Ben had been clinging on to in the last few minutes all but disappeared.
“They know,” he murmured, sounding miserable.
“They don’t know anything,” I said. “Especially not why you’re coming to school with us two losers in tow.”
Ben’s regular entourage was standing some fifty feet away from us, looking confused.
“Hey,” a voice said, and we turned around.
“Hey, Jenna,” I said.
She looked at Ben, an eyebrow raised. “Are you okay?”
Ben nodded, coughed and said in a fake-croaky voice, “Got a cold.”
“No, I mean since when are you hanging out with these two losers?”
“See?” I said to Ben.
Casting a glance at Jordan and me, Jenna said, “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Guys,” Jordan suddenly said, nodding toward the street. A police car stopped right in front of the walkway to the school’s main entrance. Three cops got out, two officers and one highly decorated figure with salt-and-pepper hair and a stern look on his face.
“Fuck!” Ben hissed. “That’s the commissioner.”
“And you know this how?” Jenna asked.
“My dad’s a cop.”
“Yikes.”
As they passed us on their way to the main entrance, the commissioner’s eyes seemed to graze us briefly with no discernible expression on his face. Ben waited until they had entered the building, then he turned to me and said with a panic-stricken face, “They know. The commissioner wouldn’t get up from behind his desk if someone had painted dicks on teachers’ cars or something petty like that. They know!”
I wanted to throw my hands in the air and tell Ben to stop being so negative, but even I couldn’t deny that something was afoot. Something big, and chances were it involved us.
“Know what?” Jenna asked.
“Long story,” I said.
“I got plenty of time.”
Over the ringing of the first bell, I said, “No, you don’t. Let’s go.”
THIRTEEN
First period was home room, and the fact that Mrs. Spelczik briefly dropped by to tell us to be quiet and self-study before she scurried away again didn’t exactly instill any confidence in Ben and myself that this would be just another Monday morning. I was sitting on Ben’s desk, Jenna and Jordan had pulled up their chairs, and together we were shielding Ben from his friends as he was biting his nails.
“Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?” Jenna demanded.
Jordan, Ben and I exchanged furtive glances until I finally whispered, “I’m being blackmailed.”
Ben glared at me, ready to pounce on me for blowing our secret, but then he realized I had said I, not we.
Her eyes wide open in shock, Jenna said, “What?”
I nodded. “Someone’s got dirt on me, and they demanded I did something I didn’t want to do. I have to assume that since I didn’t comply, they went public.”
Jenna processed that information for a moment, then she said, “That has to be some pretty dirty dirt if the police commissioner—”
“It involved inappropriate behavior on school grounds.”
“Oh my God,” Jenna said, covering her mouth with her hand. “Is that what you’ve been doing behind the gym the other day?”
Ben cast me a perturbed look.
“What? No,” I said, shaking my head. “Look, if that’s why the commissioner is here, you’ll find out soon enough, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, clearly not satisfied with my answer, but she didn’t pry.
Jordan punched my shoulder. “Hey, don’t worry, okay? We got your back.” He looked at Ben. “Right, Ben?”
Ben looked at Jordan, then at me, then back at Jordan. “Of course.”
We sat in awkward silence for a while until the intercom gong made us jump. “Attention please, all junior and senior year students are requested to proceed to the auditorium. All junior and senior year students are requested to proceed to the auditorium immediately. Thank you.”
The whole class exchanged questioning looks.
“Well,” Jenna said, getting up from her chair, “I guess we’re about to find out.”
As we made our way out of the room, Tyler Hicks put his hand on Ben’s shoulder and said, “Hey, Ben, any idea what this is all about?”
Ben shook off Tyler’s hand and snapped, “Why would I know what this is about?”
Shocked and mildly intimidated, Tyler replied in a low voice, “I don’t know. Your dad is a cop, so I thought …”
“Stop thinking. It’s not your strong suit.”
“Dude, sorry.”
“Shut up, Tyler,” Ben snapped.
Tyler looked like a puppy left out in the rain, and I would have almost felt sorry for him if my mind hadn’t been so preoccupied with this highly unusual call for a junior and senior year assembly in the middle of the first period on a Monday morning and under the eyes of the police.
When we reached the auditorium, the two officers and the commissioner stood huddled with Principal Tinney, the vice principal, and the school counselor, talking, nodding, shrugging. Among the buzz of a couple of hundred students whispering and murmuring, trying to figure out what was going on, we found ourselves four seats at the very back of the auditorium. If the pending announcement was going to hit as close to home as we feared, we didn’t really need to be any closer to the action. In fact, depending on how things would go, we might even want to opt for an early exit, so staying close to the doors seemed like a smart strategy.
After a few minutes, the stream of students entering the auditorium finally ebbed away. Principal Tinney, the vice principal, the school counselor and the two officers remained in the wings and looked on with somber looks on their faces as the commissioner made his way to the lectern. He tapped the microphone and waited for the noise in the auditorium to die down.
“Thank you,” he said, his hands on the sides of the lectern. “My name is Brock Pearson, and for those of you who don’t know me …” He paused and looked around. “Actually, I hope most of you don’t know me, and I hope I don’t know any of you because I’m the police commissioner of Brookhurst County.” There were a few scattered chuckles, but the commissioner didn’t smile. “The reason we’ve asked you to gather here today is due to an incident that occurred late last night in downtown Brookhurst that will be upsetting to many of you, and, um … we didn’t want you to find out through television or social media.”
Ben and I exchanged looks at the mention of social media. He looked ready to lose his shit, but I shook my head and whispered, “This doesn’t sound right.”
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Ben whispered back.
“At around eleven-thirty last night, a student of this school …” Pearson turned to the principal. “Was he a junior or senior?”
“Senior,” Principal Tinney said.
“… a senior student of this school whose name we choose not to disclose at this point,” Pearson continued, “was riding a sedan along Madison Street in the southbound direction in downtown Brookhurst. For reasons we have yet to determine, he ran through a red light at the intersection of Madison Street and Beach Boulevard and collided with a truck that was traveling eastbound on Beach Boulevard. Both vehicles were traveling at a speed of approximately thirty-five miles per hour. Upon impact, the sedan’s airbag deployed, initially saving the student’s life.”
A collective sigh of relief briefly raised the noise level in the auditorium, and there were even some whoops and scattered appl
ause. Jenna was one of the few who had fully grasped the commissioner’s words.
“Initially?” she said.
“However …” Pearson waited for the noise to die down again before he continued. “However, the sedan immediately caught fire. The fire spread quickly. Due to the impact with the truck, the sedan’s doors were jammed, trapping the student inside. I am very sorry to tell you that by the time the fire services and ambulance arrived at the scene, your friend and fellow student had perished in the flames.”
For a few long moments, the auditorium was dead silent. Everyone was stunned and speechless as the news began to sink in. Jordan, Ben, Jenna and I exchanged mortified looks.
“Shit,” Jenna said.
When scattered sobs began to emerge from the auditorium, the commissioner said, “Now, these kinds of tragic accidents, sadly, happen every day all over the place. They always have, and they always will. What’s different now is that we live in different times than we did ten or twenty years ago. Today, every major street in the country is lined with surveillance cameras. You all carry smartphones in your pockets, and all of you are on social media, presumably. This has profoundly changed the way news are consumed and circulated, which brings me to the reason why I’m standing here in front of you today. Overnight we have obtained the footage of three traffic surveillance cameras that are located at the intersection of Beach Boulevard and Madison. The footage of at least one of these cameras …” He paused and swallowed, looking down at his lectern for a moment to compose himself. “The footage is very graphic. It shows the sedan in the seconds after the impact, from the moment it came to stop in the middle of the intersection up until it was fully consumed by the fire. I’ve been serving with the police force for twenty-eight years, and I’ve never seen anything so horrifying. Now, if I had any say in this, this surveillance video would never see the light of day, but unfortunately things are not that simple. Several media outlets have already filed FOIA requests in regard to the surveillance footage.”
“What’s that?” Jenna whispered.
“Freedom of Information Act,” Ben said. “If it’s a taxpayer-funded camera, the media have a right to get their hands on the video.”
“What that means,” Pearson continued, “is that sooner rather than later, local TV stations will air the video and post it on their websites, and once it’s out there … well, I don’t have to tell you how this works. I have no way to prevent that from happening, and I have no way to stop you from watching it. All I can do is stand here and ask you to exercise extreme caution when it comes to sharing the video on social media. Trust me when I say it is not something that most of you will want to see. Now I’m not stupid. I know how these things work, and I know a number of you will go and seek out the video no matter what I say. If this is what you think you have to do, there is nothing I can do about it. However, I must strongly urge you not to share the video on your Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Those of you who want to see it will find it, and this is your right. But I’m asking you to be responsible and respect the rights of those who wish not to see it. Thank you.”
I looked around the auditorium. After the initial shock, people were now beginning to whisper and murmur and put their heads together, and there were some who had already pulled out their phones. Of course there were. As well intended as the commissioner’s advice might have been, there was no surer way to make some people look at something than to say, ‘don’t look.’ My eyes fell on Ben’s entourage. They were sitting five or six rows in front of us, and they seemed especially agitated as they put their heads together in animated debate. I kept watching them for a few seconds until it finally occurred to me that something was wrong. Without turning my eyes away, I put my hand on Ben’s arm to catch his attention and said, “Where’s Troy?”
Ben followed my gaze until he found his friends. Then he pulled his phone out of his pocket and speed-dialed Troy’s number. He listened, and after a few seconds he put the phone down again, looking at the screen. “Voicemail,” he said.
I looked at him, and he looked back at me. In his eyes I could see we were thinking the same thing.
Meanwhile, Principal Tinney had relieved the commissioner at the lectern and started addressing the auditorium. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a sad day for Brookhurst High School and all its students and staff. After consulting with the Brookhurst County School Board, we have decided that no regular classes will take place today. Those of you who feel the need to be alone and go home, you are free to do so. Those who cannot bear the thought of being alone in their grief, you’re welcome to stay here and make use of the school facilities as needed. In addition to your teachers and the school counselor, we have arranged for external counseling to take care of your needs. If you need any help, please report to the school nurse. Before I let you go, I’d like to echo Police Commissioner Pearson’s appeal to exercise caution in your use of social media in the next few days. Please act responsibly and give those who need to grieve the space to do so.”
The principal kept talking, but I could no longer hear his words. My vision became blurred, and I started feeling dizzy as a whirlwind of strange thoughts and competing emotions was raging in my mind. Trying to process everything that had happened in the last couple of weeks and culminated in the events of the last three days, it felt as if my brain was hammering against the inside of my skull, trying to escape. As my body heated up and my kidneys pumped adrenaline into my bloodstream, I felt as if I was on the verge of passing out, and I wondered if this was what having a stroke felt like. I tried to sit still because every little movement seemed to encourage the onsetting feeling of nausea. I was feeling trapped. The world around me seemed to close in on me, and I felt the urge to get up and run. Gripping the armrests of my seat so firmly that my knuckles turned white, I tried to hold on to something as everything around me started turning faster and faster. I closed my eyes, hoping to shut out the world, to make it stop turning, to stop the assault on my mind, to make it all stop, but suddenly my body jolted forward, and I put my head between my knees as I spewed the contents of my stomach onto the freshly waxed linoleum floor.
FOURTEEN
Three weeks passed. They were three weeks of somber eulogies and candle-lit night vigils, of mourning, grief, and fundamental questions of life and death asked by supposedly shallow and frivolous millennials who were suddenly putting the why in Generation Y.
We all watched the video of Troy’s final seconds. I didn’t know of anyone who was able to withstand the temptation. I also didn’t know of anyone who watched it more than once. The video was graphic enough to permanently burn itself deep into the inside of one’s mind. Troy’s struggle to free himself of his seatbelt and the slowly deflating airbag as he tried to open the driver’s side door and, when that didn’t work, his desperate attempts to smash the windows as the flames ate their way into the passenger compartment. The look in his eyes, the expression on his face that turned from mortal fear to excruciating pain as his hair and clothes caught fire. His silent cries that became spasmodic coughs as thick black smoke filled the inside of the car. His convulsive death throes as the flames consumed his body.
Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have watched the video. I knew how I tended to react to tragedy that struck less close to home. The reason I ended up watching it anyway was that I was hoping to disprove a suspicion that had been creeping up on me whenever I allowed myself to stop and think and connect all the dots. I didn’t watch the video out of morbid curiosity or some misguided sense of sensationalism. I watched it to see if it had a timestamp.
It did.
The collision at the intersection of South Beach Boulevard and Madison occurred at 11:31:07 p.m. that Sunday night. It was just a few seconds after I had sent my message to our anonymous blackmailer in which I told him to go fuck himself.
What if he was sitting behind the wheel of his dad’s sedan when he read my message?
What if it riled him up so much that he misse
d that red light?
What if my action more or less directly led to the accident that cost Troy’s life?
They were nagging questions that, once I had watched the video, preoccupied my mind all of my day and most of my night as a prevalent feeling of guilt started to compete with a growing sense of self-preservation. Troy’s death had shaken our community to the core, and the police were committed to get to the bottom of it. If they determined that Troy was operating his phone when he ran the red light, chances were they would investigate whom he was trying to call or text at the time of the accident. This would lead them to his Instagram account which would lead them to Ben and me. The moment I realized that, I reacted the only way I knew how: overwhelmed by the possible implications, I panicked.
Two days after the accident, I deleted all images and videos on the BenHynes01 account, then all the private conversations, and finally the whole account. I assumed that Troy’s phone got destroyed in the fire and that all data on it was deleted beyond recovery. However, if the police were determined to solve this case, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that they would access his phone provider’s data to find out what Troy was doing with his phone or whom he was communicating with at the time of the crash. All I could hope was that all the data I had deleted was really gone forever and that it didn’t still rest on some Instagram server somewhere where they could be retrieved upon the request of law enforcement.
I didn’t tell Ben. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. When he came to me the next day and told me the account was gone, I acted all surprised. If I had told him I had deleted it, he would have lost his shit and gotten mad at me because in Ben’s version of reality, the blackmailer was still alive and he could still expose us, and it would be all my fault. He didn’t believe that someone who was as close to him as Troy could be the blackmailer. He didn’t want to believe. And now that the account had been deleted after Troy’s death, he had every reason not to believe it. Ben had enough issues to deal with. The betrayal by a close friend would only have added to his problems and made it less likely that he would ever trust the world enough to ask it to accept him the way he was. He was better off believing that our blackmailer was still out there, that the threat of getting exposed was still real. Maybe it would one day encourage Ben to come out on his own terms and of his own accord.
Instafamous Page 9
