“Liam couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with this,” Brook said firmly. “Tell him you didn’t do it, Liam.”
“I didn’t,” Liam said. It was almost a whisper. He licked his lips.
“Are you calling my daughter a liar?” Troy demanded.
“He told you he didn’t do it,” Brook said. “Please! Stop bullying him!”
Brook realized that Michael had come around and was now standing beside her. She felt his arm slide around her waist. Her throat ached. She’d been almost shouting, she realized. She couldn’t understand how Michael could be so composed. How he could sound so reasonable and accommodating when he said:
“Listen, we’re all pretty upset. But Troy has a right to be angry about what happened to Phoebe, every right to let off steam. I don’t know why Phoebe would say Liam was the one responsible for this”—he looked down at the photos in Brook’s hand—“this horrible thing. But she has, and we need to calm down and get to the bottom of it.”
“You go ahead and calm down!” Troy said. “I won’t be joining you, and I don’t need to get to the bottom of this—because I’ve already been there. I’ve already seen what happened firsthand. Phoebe came back from this house last night stinking drunk. She was wearing my wife’s sweater, and she puked all over it. The sweater was torn almost in half by your son here. When he—when he tried to rape her.”
Brook knew that she wasn’t going to be able to reason with this man. He was trembling with rage: legs spread, fists balled, spoiling for a fight. He was in his element, she realized. He was beyond wanting answers; he was after blood. Michael obviously understood that, and was refusing to take the bait. But Brook couldn’t stop herself. She couldn’t let his awful lies go unanswered, spreading into the night, pooling down into the town.
Of all of them, Liam had had it the hardest when they first moved up to Barnsbury. Brook knew he’d been lonely and desperate for friends. In seventh grade, he’d started asking Brook to drop him off on the highway before the turnoff to Deer Mountain Elementary. She’d finally got him to confess that one of the kids in his class had looked up the list price of their silver Infiniti SUV. Liam’s classmates had started calling it the Popemobile. She traded it in for a secondhand Volvo wagon two days later.
How ironic that she’d actually believed their move to Barnsbury would supply her family with a sense of community. That here, in the town where Michael was raised, where Bostocks had lived for four generations, she’d finally be able to find a home. Instead, she began to realize that Michael was being looked upon with distrust for marrying such a wealthy woman.
She’d made an effort to live with her disappointment and tamp down her anger. Except when she thought her children were being affected by her mistakes—singled out or harassed in some way. Like now. Like this foulmouthed Troy Lansing, who thought he could barge into her home and tell lies about her son. No! She’d put up with people talking behind her back for too long.
“No!” she said out loud. Too loud. She could feel Michael’s grip tighten around her waist, but she paid no attention. “I’m sorry, but you are totally out of line—”
“Hold on,” Michael began, but she pulled away from him.
“I don’t know who you think you are,” she went on, taking a step closer to Troy. She felt a rush of vertigo and knew she was losing it. But she couldn’t stop. “I don’t know why you think you can just come up here and say these terrible things about Liam. I’m sorry about what happened to Phoebe. I think she’s the sweetest girl in the world, but this”—she waved the photos under Troy’s nose—“is not our doing. It’s not our fault. And you’re not going to lay it on my son, do you hear me?”
“Stop it, Brook!” Michael said.
“No, let her rant,” Troy said, nodding his head. He was smiling. “Let her foam at the mouth all she wants. Let her threaten me. It won’t do any of you a damn bit of good. Because Liam here? Let me tell you: he fucked with the wrong person. And I don’t care how rich you are or how much influence you think you might have—nobody assaults my daughter, leaves her black-and-blue, calls her a liar, and thinks for one minute that he’s going to get away with it.”
7
Still wiped out from the night before, Liam had gone to bed after dinner and was out the moment his head hit the pillow. He seemed to have dropped into the bottom of some endless well, when he felt his body jerk awake again for some reason.
“Liam!”
He sat up on one elbow and looked at the clock radio on his bedside table: nine thirty. He’d been asleep for less than an hour.
“Liam!” his father shouted.
Something was wrong. He knew every note and shading of his father’s voice, and Michael Bostock didn’t do anger. In fact, when he was most upset, his voice tended to flatten out and slow down. Things hadn’t been right between them since the wedding, but Liam was still almost painfully alert to his dad’s moods. He was able to discern levels of disapproval in Michael’s slightest gesture. One sad shake of his dad’s head was the equivalent to another father’s reading the riot act. So the sudden urgency and lack of control he was hearing now set off alarm bells in Liam. Was the house on fire? He stumbled out of his bedroom and down the hall.
“Deny everything,” his dad told him under his breath when they met at the top of the stairs.
“What?”
“Just do what I tell you,” Michael said, stepping back to let Liam go in front of him. Phoebe’s dad was standing in the front hallway, hands on his hips. He had one of those tough-guy stances, shorter than his dad by a couple of inches, but with the kind of bulk that meant business. Phoebe didn’t talk about her home life much, though Liam knew her parents were divorced. He also knew that Troy Lansing and his own father didn’t much like each other.
“You ever hit anyone?” Liam had asked Michael a couple of years back when they were on one of their camping trips. It was just the two of them. They’d hiked all day and had set up camp beside Half Moon Pond in the state forest south of Barnsbury. It was early May, the countryside just beginning to green out, the tree frogs keening across the mist-shrouded water. The question had been weighing on Liam’s mind since February when he’d almost come to blows with Gavin Cooper, who was two years ahead of him at Deer Mountain. Liam had gotten used to kids giving him a hard time about being rich, but this thing with Gavin was meaner and more immediate than that. Liam had joined the ice hockey team that winter and had quickly shown his mettle as a defensive wing, managing to confuse Gavin and throw him off-balance a couple of times during pickup games, sending the older, stronger but far less agile center sprawling.
“You fucking with me?”
“No,” Liam had told him. “You just keep getting in my way.”
“You want to see me get in your way? Try pulling that again.”
The opportunity presented itself a week or two later, and this time Gavin, from his prone position, whacked him across his shin guards so hard that Liam slid on his back across the rink. The school’s assistant coach, who was reffing the game, threw Gavin off the ice.
“I got my eye on you, Cooper,” the coach said. “I see that kind of behavior again and you can kiss varsity good-bye for the rest of the season.”
The two boys kept their distance after that, but Liam knew it wasn’t over. He could feel the anticipation humming through his body, like a low simmer, just waiting for the right moment to boil over, arms flailing, the taste of blood in his mouth.
“Why?” Michael had asked him. “You got someone in mind you want to hit?” Liam had told him the details of his escalating problems with Gavin. His dad didn’t say anything for a while. He just poked at the fire, his expression difficult to read in the leaping shadows.
“Don’t do it,” he said finally, looking over at Liam. “Once you start fighting, it begins to feel like it’s the solution to everything. It’s okay to want to hit someone—like this asshole Gavin Cooper. Just never get yourself in a position where you need to. You
ever feel that way, you come to me first, okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” Liam had told him, delighted that his dad had used “asshole” with him like it was nothing. Like they were men. He’d listened to Michael’s advice, too, and steered clear of Gavin for the rest of that semester. And he’d been rewarded when, a couple of days before school got out, he’d overheard his former nemesis tell another varsity player in the locker room:
“That Bostock kid’s crazy, but he’s not afraid of anything.”
It had been a big win for Liam. A rare triumph in Liam’s otherwise fairly miserable career at Deer Mountain. The high point, actually. Looking back, Liam decided it was because he’d managed to channel his dad’s spirit for a little while. He’d somehow been able to assume Michael’s laid-back self-assurance as if it were his own. The feeling hadn’t lasted long, but for a month or two he was able to pretend that he’d finally vanquished the dark thing in the pit of his being.
“What’s going on?” Liam’s mother asked, coming out of the kitchen just as he and Michael reached the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t need to be told he was looking at trouble. His father’s “Liam!” still rang in his ears. The air was charged with tension, though Phoebe’s dad just stood there glaring at him. It was Michael himself who finally kicked the supports out from under Liam.
“Something happened here last night. Apparently there was some drinking. Apparently Phoebe had something to drink. And she was . . . assaulted.”
The idea of Phoebe being attacked was bad enough. But then to hear that she said he had done it—that was totally insane. It wasn’t the worst part, though. No, that came when he recalled what his dad had told him at the top of the stairs:
“Deny everything.”
That meant his own father assumed Liam was capable of doing something this awful. It meant that, despite everything he claimed, Michael actually thought even less of Liam than he did of himself.
• • •
“I want the truth,” Michael said after Troy had gone. Liam was sitting across from his parents at the kitchen table.
“I didn’t touch Phoebe,” Liam replied, looking at his mom. “I promise.” He was too hurt and shocked to look his dad in the face.
“Did you hear me?” his dad asked. “I want to know what happened in this house last night. From the beginning. Exactly what time did you get back here with those boys?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Liam said. Self-loathing twisted in his stomach—along with a new kind of fear. If his dad believed he was that fucked-up, then maybe he really was. Maybe this wasn’t a phase, like his counselor at Moorehouse had assured him. Something everybody went through. Maybe it was always going to be this way and he was going to be nothing but a loser for the rest of his life. “I don’t know. We were drinking.”
“You were already drinking on the drive up from school?” his mother asked.
“Yeah. In the car. And here. Brandon and me. And then Phoebe.”
“Oh, Liam!” his mom said. “Why?”
“Listen,” Michael interrupted. “Right now we need to talk about what happened last night. Liam, I want to make sure I understand: you’re telling me that you gave Phoebe something to drink?”
“Brandon did.”
“This is your home. What happens here is your responsibility.”
“Okay, then,” Liam replied. “I gave Phoebe Lansing something to drink. I gave her some Johnnie Walker Red. I handed the bottle to her and said, ‘Heeeeere’s Johnnie!’”
Liam still wasn’t meeting his father’s eye, but he could feel Michael staring at him from across the table. Though it felt more like his dad was actually miles away—and Liam a little speck on the horizon.
“And then what happened?”
“I don’t really remember all that much. We were sitting around drinking. Brandon and Phoebe were together on the couch. I think he was like maybe kissing her a little.”
“And you just sat there?” Brook asked.
“Where was Carey in all this?” Michael asked.
“He was around somewhere. We were all kind of out of it.”
“And that’s all you remember?” his dad asked. “Nothing else about Phoebe? This sweater that was torn in half? Her getting sick?”
“No,” Liam replied. But as soon as he said it, he suddenly recalled—distant as an argument in another room—the sound of Brandon shouting and Phoebe crying. But the memory faded away before he was even sure where it was coming from.
“That’s not good enough,” Michael said. “Right now all we really have to go on is Phoebe’s word against yours. You need to call Carey and Brandon and get to the bottom of this. Now.”
• • •
Liam didn’t have Brandon’s cell number or his e-mail address. In fact, until the drive up from Moorehouse the night before, Liam hadn’t said a single word to Brandon, who, as a senior and a Moorehouse luminary, moved in circles that seemed as far away as constellations. As soon as he got back up to his room, he texted Carey: Nd to talk to Brandon ASAP. When he didn’t hear back right away, he called Carey’s cell and left a message.
“Something bad went down here last night with Phoebe and Brandon. I really have to talk to him. Soon, man. Please have him get back to me, okay?” He left his cell number again, though he knew Carey already had it. Then he texted him again just in case his roommate missed his first text.
He was too upset to sit still, so he practiced chords on his Fender acoustic, his free knee bouncing off-rhythm, his eyes fixed on his iPhone. His fingers shook. His mind was a mess. It was like he was trying to put together some enormous jigsaw puzzle and half the pieces were missing.
It had to have been Brandon who attacked Phoebe. Of course it had been Brandon. He remembered them sitting together on the couch. Liam closed his eyes and saw Brandon’s left hand between Phoebe’s thighs, his right moving beneath her sweater.
But she’s a fucking tease, man, Brandon had told him that morning. I was like this close. Close to what? Raping her? What else could he have been bragging about? Then Liam found himself recalling the conversation he’d had with Brandon on the way up in the car. He was already flying high on the OxyContin-whiskey cocktail, pumped with a sudden, dizzying sense of invincibility. A part of it was the way Brandon had treated him. Like he really enjoyed hanging out with him. Like he knew he could share dope with Liam and count on him to be cool about it. Like he assumed Liam had done it for real, not just alone in his bed.
So she really puts out, huh? Brandon had asked.
Oh, yeah, Liam had told him.
A dumb lie! A stupid lie! Liam berated himself as he thought back on how he’d blown up his relationship with Phoebe to Brandon. The way he’d sacrificed her with hardly a second thought to get in good with Carey’s older brother. And then, as though the puzzle pieces were falling from the sky on top of his head—but as heavy and hurtful as bricks—he remembered Brandon cursing at Phoebe and telling her:
What’s the big deal anyway? Liam told me you’ve been putting out for him since seventh grade.
And then the look on Phoebe’s face as she ran, hunched over and crying, holding her sweater bunched up around her waist, into the night.
The opening chords to “American Idiot” had Liam diving for his phone.
“Hey, man,” Brandon said. “I hear you want to talk. What’s up?”
“Phoebe’s dad was here, claiming she was, like, assaulted last night.” Some instinct kept Liam from saying whom Troy had accused of attacking her.
“That’s kind of harsh,” Brandon said. “I hope you pointed out that she was all over me.”
“No,” Liam said. “I did not. You don’t know her dad. He’s a total maniac. I didn’t feel like having my head bashed in.”
“Right,” Brandon said, laughing a little. “Understood. But, come on! I didn’t even get to close the deal. And she just about neutered me! I’ve been wearing my balls in a sling all day. So what am I supposed to do? Send her a bouquet from 1-800
-Flowers?”
“This isn’t a joke,” Liam said. “This guy is really pissed off—and I don’t know what’s going to happen.” But something was taking shape in Liam’s mind. It was still too vague to call it a plan. “He said he wasn’t going to let you get away with this. He wanted your number.”
“Fuck, no!”
“Don’t worry—I didn’t give it to him.”
“Listen, you have got to keep me out of this.”
“You should have thought about that last night. Phoebe’s dad said her sweater was ripped in half. He has photos of her with bruises all over her body. I’m not sure what he’s going to do, but I don’t think he’s about to let things ride. Phoebe’s uncle is the chief of police up here.”
“Oh, no,” Brandon said. “Fuck, no! I can’t get messed up in anything like this right now. I just got into Brown. I worked my fucking ass off to get accepted—and my folks are totally thrilled. And, honestly, Bostock? I wouldn’t have put the moves on her if you didn’t green-light things for me.”
“Yeah,” Liam said. He felt queasy now that Brandon was reacting pretty much the way he had hoped. Calling him “Bostock” was a sure sign that Brandon understood just how much he needed Liam’s help. How much Brandon would be in Liam’s debt. For a second or two, Liam felt disgusted with himself all over again. The older boy was right—in some ways this was just as much Liam’s fault as Brandon’s. Just as much Liam’s doing. So why shouldn’t he just go ahead and take the blame? He’d only make matters worse for himself by telling the truth. He didn’t want to even think about how Brandon would turn on him back at Moorehouse if Liam told anyone what really happened. He’d be merciless, Liam knew. But it wasn’t the prospect of Brandon’s wrath that made Liam decide what he did.
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