Honor Code

by Kiersi Burkhart

  We’ll get through these next three years, because we’re doing it together. If I have Gracie, I can hang on, I know it. And we’ll get accepted to our dream schools and live in a big college house together. Maids of honor.

  Best friends forever. Despite all this. Maybe even because of it. Unbidden, I think of a line from the honor code:

  Everything worthwhile takes time, work, and sacrifice. The sacrifices asked of us are often greater than we expect, but they are what make us true Edwardians.

  Fuck that. Gracie never wanted to be an Edwardian. She never wanted sacrifices. She just wanted to be . . . herself.

  The first day back after winter break comes too quickly. I haven’t studied nearly as much as I’d meant to. I don’t want to go back.

  When my parents drop me off on campus, the lawn is cloaked in a thin layer of snow. Everything else—the parking lots, the paths—are slushy and muddy. Everyone walks with hands stuffed in pockets, shoulders hunched over, just trying to stay warm until they get to their rooms.

  At the wagon wheel at the center of campus, the statue of Dr. Edwards has icicles hanging from his chin, making him look like an old billy goat. It’s like he’s looking right at me, saying, What are you doing back here again, girl?

  I’m the first one to our dorm room.

  Except that Gracie’s wall is bare. All her sketches, movie artwork, and reprints of Dalí paintings have vanished. The mattress is wrapped in a thin white fitted sheet. No pressed pillows, no shiny laptop.

  That’s when I notice the note on her desk.

  I give up.

  Everything here . . . It’s too much for me.

  I can’t help you. I’m sorry.

  See you sometime.

  —Gracie

  I read it four times before crumpling it in my hand.

  Gracie was right. It’s a game. A rigged game. And it’s not without casualties.

  I have to do something.

  I imagine sitting down at the table with Bex, Lilian, and Eliza. Telling them what Scully did to me. They believe me, just like Gracie did. They have stories of their own, even, about the creepy guys they’ve encountered here. We share tears and we all hug, together.

  What if someone had told me that Scully Chapman was a rapist, before I knew the truth?

  “There’s no way he would do something like that,” I’d have said. And I would have been absolutely sure of it.

  No way will I tell them. With Gracie gone, they’re all I’ve got left at this school.

  There must be someone—someone who’d believe me. Someone who doesn’t think Scully Chapman is God’s gift to Edwards Academy.

  Oh.

  -----------------------

  Waldo doesn’t eat in Hamilton Hall—too many peasants. So at lunch I find him in the Juice Bar on the other side of campus, half sitting on a bar stool and half standing up, because his legs are so long that one touches the floor. He’s sipping some slushy green stuff when I go up and order a drink.

  I walk to the bar and stand behind him. Waldo looks up, and he recognizes me right away. But he shrugs and looks back at his book without speaking. Not even a nod.

  I am detritus to him.

  “Waldo, right?” I say it like I sort of remember, but maybe wasn’t paying attention when it was said. That’s his brand of cool kid—aloof, pretending like you don’t exist. I can emulate.

  His eyes dart up from his book. He nods, then goes back to reading.

  My voice drops low so the guy working behind the counter won’t hear me. “Do you also make a habit of sexually assaulting women?”

  His gaze leaves his book.

  “Pardon me?” He puts both feet on the floor so he’s actually standing now. He’s a foot taller than I am, even while still slouching. I have to tip my head up to keep eye contact.

  “Or is it just Chapman?” I say, taking a step closer. I don’t know when I became this aggressive, but now it’s boiling up inside me, pushing against the limits of my skin. All that silence, all the unfairness, has swelled up into something mean.

  “Not this again.” Waldo looks me up and down, then lets out an exasperated sigh like it’s only reaffirmed his original judgment: I am not particularly noteworthy. “That guy, I swear. And really? With you?”

  It’s a smooth, sharp dart in the chest. I am the size of a child’s toy. I have been played with until my little wooden appendages broke off. I know that I’m bedraggled and frizzy-haired and I Need Improvement, but I do not deserve this.

  “To me,” I hiss at him. “He did this to me.”

  Waldo winces.

  “Scully—” he starts. “You’re not the only one, if that makes you feel better. Scully’s been at this game since junior high. I tried to talk him out of it, but . . .” He shrugs. “You know how that ended. Let’s just say that he doesn’t invite me over anymore.”

  “You knew?” I am overwhelmed by a hurricane of fury. “You knew, and you didn’t tell anyone?”

  “Like they would believe me?” He snorts. “The Chapmans take from everyone, however they can—even from us. Scully’s just like his dad. Does whatever he wants, at anyone’s expense. Fuck the maid. Screw the secretary. Mike’s trying to push my dad out of the business he helped start, and has everyone convinced he’s the good guy.”

  Just like Scully. Everyone thinks he’s a saint, but he’s a monster wearing a costume.

  Waldo lowers his voice so the other people standing around can’t hear us. “But it’s not you, and it’s not me. It’s Scully who’s the snake charmer. You don’t notice he’s singing a song ’til it’s too late.”

  Waldo takes a long, slow sip of his drink, tilting his head as he observes me. My face must make a hundred expressions simultaneously.

  “Aw, it’s sad,” he says. “I’m surprised he did it to you. I thought he liked you. You know, considering . . .” He looks me up and down. “It’s you.”

  I want to take out all my simmering rage on him. Hurl my fist right into his smug face. I could look like a frog and I wouldn’t have deserved this.

  But now I know there are others. Probably many, many others. Who have been pawns, toys, used and thrown away.

  The anger flares, a spark into a bonfire. My whole body is ignited.

  Waldo gets up and strides over to the garbage. Then he dumps his cup, half-full, into it and heads to the door. As the bells clang, he calls over his shoulder to me, “Toodles. I hope you have a better second semester than your first.”

  As I watch him go, I think, I’m going to fix this.

  Somehow I’m going to get all the wrong off me and make this right.

  Act Two

  Chapter Twelve

  Sam

  The coffee shop is so normal and adult-looking that I stop short of opening the door. Big windows overlook the busy downtown street, with the café’s clever name, Java Jitters, splashed across them in espresso-colored, curlicue lettering. I’m so out of place.

  Bells jangle overhead as I finally open the door.

  I got Mom to call in permission to the office for me to leave campus today to study downtown. I told her I needed a change of pace to get my head straight for finals.

  Java Jitters was the safest place I could think of. Nobody from school would be here. And there was no way I could make up an excuse to go to New York.

  One sweep of the coffee shop is all it takes to spot Harper Brooks: a willowy woman with deep brown skin, natural hair pulled back in a blue floral band, wearing a crisp gray pantsuit. She looks just like her picture on The New York Inspector’s website. She’s sitting at a lone table in the very back of the shop, just behind a low wall.

  Perfect. Just where I wanted us to sit.

  I clutch a rolled-up newspaper, funneling all my anxiety into the crumpled sheets, and approach the table.

  “Harper?” I ask.

  The woman looks up from her phone and smiles. It’s a good smile, comforting and disarming. She’s younger than I expected—mid-twenties, as far
as I can tell.

  “That’s me,” Harper says, rising and stretching out a hand to me. “You must be Sam. Thanks for being able to meet with me.”

  I’d rehearsed over and over last night what I was going to say, but now, in the moment, I flub around for a single word.

  After a few seconds of silence Harper says, “I’m glad you reached out, you know. I’m interested in your story.”

  Right. I’m here to tell a story.

  To roll the ball toward justice.

  I sit down across the table and flatten the newspaper. The headline says:

  Reported Sexual Assaults Soar on College Campuses

  “You found me through my article?” Harper asks, sliding the paper toward herself to get a better look at it.

  “Yeah.”

  She slides it back. “What school do you go to?”

  “Edwards Academy,” I say. That’s when I spot the black recorder in Harper’s hand. “Is that on?”

  “Not yet.” Harper sets the recorder on the table and takes out a notebook. “I won’t put anything on the record without your permission.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That’s my job.” She waits for me to say something, but I don’t know where to start. So she adds, “It was brave of you to send me that email. If you’re ready to start, may I start recording?”

  I nod. The recorder switch goes from OFF to ON, and a rock drifts to the bottom of my stomach.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” Harper asks, pen poised over her notebook. I guess she takes notes while she’s recording.

  I take a deep breath. Anything I say now is immortalized. Every last word, in exactly the order that I choose to say it.

  I try to remember what I rehearsed.

  “I first saw him early in the morning, on the second day of school,” I begin. “Doing tai chi in the Morgan Edwards Memorial Graveyard.”

  -----------------------

  HARPER

  “The Fourth Year girls do this thing every year to the new kids,” Sam says. “They make us strip down. Then they grade us on how we look.”

  It’s been more than an hour now, and Harper’s hand is cramping. Not even the email subject line, “I was raped at my private boarding school,” could have prepared her for this. The paper gets lots of emails—rarely does one come specifically to Harper’s address.

  Her first instinct had been to drag it to the trash. Rich white kids assaulting each other at their fancy private boarding school? You don’t want to get in the middle of that kind of thing. Slippery and murky as a city river—and way too easy to get stung.

  Harper hadn’t wanted to take this interview, but she had written that campus rape story last year. And Sam had read it.

  So now here she sits, dishing everything Harper had never wanted to know about a private school, like Edwards Saturday Session, House Mom, Cath. It sounds like Hogwarts.

  Sam’s now talking about some “body survey.” She shrinks into herself as she talks about being pinched, poked, prodded, like a science experiment. High school girls can be so cruel where a little belly fat is concerned.

  That alone is a story Mark would drool over. Private schools have been fighting to stop degrading hazing rituals for years—a few kids have even died. Harper could leave now with plenty to write about.

  “I knew going in I was never gonna fit in,” Sam says. “Being a scholarship student.”

  Harper’s pencil stops moving. So she’s an outsider. A rich boy victimizing a girl on scholarship—the class angle is easier for her to work with. There are fewer land mines to navigate.

  Sam goes back to talking about Scully. From her descriptions, he could very well be the perfect man. A romance novel hero. But Sam is timid, almost ashamed as she talks about him. As if she is saying, I should have known. I should have known. She mumbles, like she’s not completely sure that what she’s saying even deserves to be said—like when she fought with her roommate over Scully at the Mixer.

  “The provost didn’t mind that he caught you smoking?” Harper asks. What is going on at that school?

  “Scully can do whatever he wants,” Sam says. She sinks even lower in her chair as she talks about going on a date with him. This girl is so fragile, she’s going to crumble. Is there anyone sitting close enough who could hear if Sam started crying? Harper doesn’t want to guess at what that would look like.

  As Sam describes walking up to Scully’s room, the door closing, the tea kettle chirping, her voice trails off. She gets as far as her clothes ripping before she folds in on herself like a star that’s given all it’s got, just before collapsing into a black hole.

  “It’s okay,” Harper says. “You’re doing great.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Sam sits up and tries to go on, to describe exactly what Scully did to her, but she stalls out.

  Shoot. As painful and ugly as it must be for Sam to relive this, the story has to have these details. It’s what’ll get readers right in the chest.

  “What made you decide to come to me?” Harper asks, hoping to calm Sam down and come back to it later. “Why not your parents? Or the police?”

  Sam’s face falls. “Going to the cops would be breaking the Edwards honor code in a huge way.”

  “You mentioned the honor code earlier. What is it, exactly?”

  “It’s just like . . . It’s a prescription. For how you should act. For how to be a good Edwardian.”

  “Why would telling the police not make you a ‘good Edwardian’?”

  “Keep this community sacred. The most important line of the honor code. If you have a problem with another student, you’re supposed to confront them directly. Work it out, because what’s ours is ours. Like ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,’ you know?”

  “Right,” Harper says. “But that line’s for adults engaging in consensual, legal debauchery. Not for minors at a boarding school.”

  Sam shrugs. “If anyone found out I’d gone to the cops . . . it would be social suicide.” Sam squeezes her eyes shut, as if the thought of it makes her want to hide.

  “If it’s supposed to be all within the school, then what about reporting him to the school? There are federal laws in place that require them to take reports like that seriously.”

  “You mean, report him to the exact same provost who caught him smoking and just let him go?”

  She has a point there.

  “But that’s why you came to me, isn’t it?” Harper asks. “If you report it and the school tries to silence you—that would be a big story.”

  “A big story that I’m at the center of,” Sam says. “This isn’t about me. I just want people to know about Scully. That’s the only way I can protect other girls from him. And if I reported him to the school, it would be all about me.”

  “Don’t you want justice for what he did to you?” Harper asks.

  “That would be enough justice for me,” Sam says. “If everyone knew.”

  “Without revealing yourself.”

  Sam sets her jaw, and her wet eyes turn icy. “You agreed to that in our email,” she says.

  Oof. That’s how she’d read it? All Harper had said was she’d give Sam a pseudonym—anonymity is standard where crimes against minors are concerned.

  But Sam’s face is stony. She has set out her terms and seems intent on sticking to them.

  “What about your parents?” Harper asks. “Have you told them?”

  “No. I don’t need to drag them through that.”

  “But what about real justice?” Harper persists. “Somebody like Scully should be in jail. Where he can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

  “I just want people to know the truth.”

  Harper squeezes the handle of her bag . . . then sighs, and releases it. She won’t win this fight right now, not with Sam dead set.

  “I’m so sorry this happened to you, Sam,” Harper says. “Thank you for sharing this with me. I’ll do my best to get your story to the light of day, but I can’t guarantee anything
.”

  “Sure,” Sam says, but it doesn’t look like she’s happy about it.

  “It’ll take me a while to interview witnesses and corroborate your story,” Harper says. “So—”

  “What? You’re going to interview people?” Sam’s voice grows panicked. “As soon as you talk to anyone, they’re going to know it was me.”

  “Try not to worry,” Harper says. “I’ll make up a cover story. I’m good at this, you know. It’s my job.”

  Sam is breathing hard.

  “And Waldo already knows, right? Do you think he’ll talk to me?”

  Sam thinks a moment. “I’m sure he will. He loves attention.”

  Harper offers her a reassuring smile. “Perfect. Then I’ll be in touch to check your quotes with you when I’m done. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Sam says. They get up, and Harper holds out her hand. Sam takes it and shakes. Her skin is hot. “Whatever it takes.”

  -----------------------

  Harper was able to keep her cool in the coffee shop. But as soon as she leaves, Sam’s story hits her square in the face.

  Public college campuses, where her last rape story took her, are one thing. But this place—Edwards Academy—is different. That cultish honor code has created a self-regulating community. A lot of wealthy, white people could get very pissed off if it were exposed. There’s a big sign on this private school reading TREAD WITH CAUTION.

  Once inside her apartment, Harper collapses into one of the two small chairs.

  What is she getting into?

  Ever since she got that internship at The Inspector’s news desk, fetching everyone coffee, she’s fantasized about getting a job at a real paper. It kept her waking up at five a.m. after bartending all night, to sit in the junior reporter’s chair and monitor the police scanner.

  Then she saw a nugget in a university newspaper about an alleged rape on campus, one of many. That was the first time the idea of moving up had rushed hot in her chest and said, Honey, you’re onto something.

  The university had ignored the government’s Title IX regulations on how schools should handle sexual assault—and simply buried it instead. Harper saw corruption.