“That’s out of the question.”
“But, Staff, the criminal charges against us were thrown out of court. This is just some—”
“I can’t believe we’re actually arguing about this, Brook. I had an associate run a background check on the law firm involved. They’re tough and aggressive. They’re going to be looking for the biggest possible payout—and they’re not going to give a damn who they hurt in the process. I’ve been in touch with a firm in Boston that—”
“Michael and I are already in good hands. The lawyer who helped us before is—”
“No! You need some top-notch specialized legal advice and you need it immediately. Don’t you understand? This firm knows how to milk this thing. They’re already pushing the envelope, turning public opinion against you. They’re calling the shots. Who do you think’s behind all this press?”
“I told you, Staff, we’re dealing with it.”
“Just how are you dealing with it when your name’s getting dragged through the mud day after day?”
“Whose name are you and Peg really worried about?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Brook. I would have thought that growing up the way you did would have made you a bit more sensitive to how painful this kind of publicity can be. If you refuse to think about your own reputation, at least consider what this might do to Liam.”
“Thanks for your advice,” Brook replied, barely able to keep her voice steady. She’d escaped nothing. She was not free. Her father was right. None of this would be happening if she were a Smith or a Doe or a Hines. Because she was a Pendleton, she’d brought the whole damned thing down on their heads.
“Give it some thought,” Staff said. “I think you’ll soon see the wisdom in what I’m saying.”
16
“Hey, fucking good game, man!” Brandon said, clapping Liam on the back as the Warriors made their way off the ice and down the brightly lit corridor to the locker room. Liam was sweat-soaked and exhausted—and more than a little stunned that he’d been invited to play with the Warriors in the first place, even if it was just an intramural matchup. The assistant coach, who worked with the younger boys and new recruits, had told the second-and third-string players to stay out of the way of the varsity team.
“They rule, okay?” he’d explained the first day of practice. “They’re in the running for the prep finals for the ninth year in a row. That’s Moorehouse history in the making. They don’t wait for the showers. They have first dibs on the steam room and sauna. They tell you to lie down and roll over like a dog—you just say ‘woof, woof’ and do it.”
“When do we get to be them?” someone had asked.
“Probably never,” the coach had replied. “It’s basically a senior privilege—and even then you’ve got to be the best of the best.”
Liam knew he was a damned good player. Isolated as he’d been at Deer Mountain, he’d spent hours alone at his old high school’s rink, obsessively honing his skating and shooting skills. Hard work and natural ability had shaped him into one of those rare defensemen who, while creative, swift, and agile, were also combative and physical, tenaciously guarding the goal area.
But even if he was a star in the making, he was still a lowly sophomore and pretty much a nonentity at Moorehouse. He’d seen Andy Mason, the varsity coach, glance his way from time to time, but he had no illusions. Moorehouse took great pride in—and put a lot of capital into—its ice hockey team, recruiting the best young talent and carefully bringing its players up through the ranks. At the very least, Liam knew that he was on a two-year waiting list. Which was actually fine with him. Since the start of winter term, all he really wanted to do was keep his head down—and get by unnoticed.
He knew from talking to his folks that news about the lawsuit had been picked up by the national media. Because he was a minor, his first name was being kept out of the coverage, and most of the pieces concentrated on the Pendleton side of his genetic makeup. More than three weeks into the new semester, nobody seemed to connect the story with Liam Bostock. But then Moorehouse, like most prep schools, was a world unto itself, with its attention fixed primarily on its own affairs. During the winter months, the doings of the Warriors—one of the leading lights of the New England Prep School Ice Hockey Association—totally eclipsed any interest that might be generated by a Boston Globe article on underage drinking.
Carey knew, of course. Carey knew and couldn’t get over Liam’s decision to take the heat for Brandon. In fact, Carey and Liam kept arguing about what had happened the entire first week that they were back on campus. It didn’t help that Liam was so down about other things, as well. He felt bad about what he’d already put his parents through. Worse as he watched them try to deal with these new legal problems. They were at each other’s throats. It was like Liam had developed a way of making everyone he loved miserable.
He couldn’t stop thinking about how badly he’d fucked up with Phoebe, too. He kept remembering how great it had been to hold her in his arms. How, so briefly and for the first time in months, he’d felt really good about himself again. But then, how everything had suddenly gone wrong. How she’d turned on him and said: The fact is I used to love you so bad it hurt. And now I don’t love you anymore, but it still hurts. The painful words turned in his gut. And then to have that stupid lie he told Brandon about her used against her at the hearing! He hadn’t even been able to look at her after that.
Just when Liam was pretty sure that he’d finally been able to blot out Phoebe’s face and voice and put what had happened behind him for a little while, Carey would say something like:
“I don’t get it. I don’t get any of it. Why Phoebe blamed you—and why you didn’t stand up for yourself.”
“Listen, I have my reasons. Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”
“There’s only one possible explanation I can come up with, but I just refuse to believe you did this to get in good with my big brother.”
“Can’t we drop the subject? I’m sick of the whole thing.”
“What’s going on with you? Why can’t we talk about this?”
“Why can’t we talk about this? You sound like a girl! I’m not interested in sharing my emotions with you—so will you please just shut the fuck up?”
Liam hated the hurt silence that followed and that had now solidified into a thick fog of unhappiness that filled their small dorm room. Stilted politeness replaced the oddball camaraderie that had defined their first term together. Liam began to spend all his free time at Moorehouse’s enormous new sports complex with its state-of-the art exercise machines, Olympic-sized pools, and two ice-skating rinks, the old one that was used for practice, and the other—a new slick, gleaming arena that any professional NHL team would have been proud to call home—set aside strictly for the championship Warriors’ varsity games.
Liam bulked up with weight training. Strengthened on the Nautilus machines. Built his stamina swimming laps. And, any time the practice rink was free, skated and practiced his shots and maneuvers. Occasionally, he’d come across Brandon and his fellow Warriors in the locker room or sauna, but he’d find a way of slipping past them without comment. Once Brandon caught his eye—and gave him a curt nod—but there’d been no further communication between the boys since the night on the phone when Liam told Brandon: “Don’t worry. I think I know what to do.”
Until that afternoon when the Warriors clomped onto the rink for a practice game, forcing everyone else off the ice. Intimidating behind their red and silver masks and outfitted with custom gloves and skates—their blades flashing, sticks raised high in pregame salute—they looked like an invading alien army. But there was an underlying uneasiness in the air. They were facing a tough game against Westminster Academy that coming Saturday and four of the first-string players had come down with the nasty winter flu that was spreading through the school.
Liam skated off the ice, sat down on one of the benches just outside the rink, and started to unlace his skates. He trie
d to find Brandon’s number 16 in the confusion of circling uniforms. But he didn’t see him. God, Liam thought, it would be a disaster for the Warriors if Brandon was out sick, too. He was their championship goalie—tough, demanding, loudmouthed, with a kind of defensive radar that made him one of the most revered and reviled players in the league.
Since his falling-out with Carey, Liam had been trying to figure out how he actually felt about Brandon. He was afraid of him; there was no point in denying that. It was a big part of the reason he’d decided to cover up for the older boy. But his reasons for protecting him were complicated by other, more confusing emotions. He envied Brandon his outsized confidence and sense of entitlement. He was awed by the charismatic force field he seemed to generate, one that helped him bend friends and foes alike to his will. In many ways, Brandon as a person was not all that different from the way he was as a player. He loved to compete, and he’d do just about anything to win.
Liam had no illusions about Carey’s older brother. He would have raped Phoebe if she hadn’t managed to fight him off. He was a brute and a bully, and Liam knew that he should hate him for it. But the truth was, Liam felt himself drawn to Brandon—enthralled by his ego and swagger. Carey was right: he did want to “get in good” with Brandon. He wanted to impress him. Wow him. Prove to him—and himself—that he was just as tough and smart as Brandon. No—that he was tougher and smarter. He wanted to both be Brandon—and beat him at his own game. Liam didn’t like this about himself. It was one of many things he didn’t like. But he felt powerless to do anything about it. And how fucked-up was that? Sometimes Liam could almost hear a drip, drip, drip of self-loathing pooling down into the darkness inside him.
“You! Bostock!” Coach Mason called from the center of the rink where he was surrounded by a sea of Warriors. “Lace up!”
“What?” Liam asked, rising off the bench in his stocking feet. He glanced behind him to make sure the coach wasn’t talking to someone else.
“Lace the hell up and get out here. We need some warm bodies.”
It was just an intramural practice game. And Liam had been invited to participate only because the coach was obviously desperate for at least twelve players to fill out the two sides. But that didn’t take away from the fact that Liam had played well. He’d been in the zone. His lonely, relentless conditioning had paid off in ways that surprised even him. Stamina, timing, pacing, aim—he seemed to have had everything down to a science. No, an art. He skated like the wind. He handled the puck like a pro. He feinted easily around the Warriors’ top left wing. Forced the center to commit three penalties. He badgered, provoked, and in general made himself indispensable to his side of the Warriors. And the whole time, he felt Brandon crouched behind him. Watching him. Weighing his performance. And finally, toward the end, when Liam managed to get the right wing to trip over himself as he charged down the ice, lifting up his goalie mask and yelling:
“You sic ’em, boy!”
He was breathing so hard by the time the game ended, he had to gulp in air before he was able to respond to Brandon’s congratulations.
“Thanks,” he said. “It was like the best thing that’s happened to me all year.”
“Yeah?” Brandon asked, looking over at him. “Well, don’t repeat that kind of crap to the other guys, okay? They’ll think you’re a total pussy.”
• • •
Following the game, and to his great surprise, Liam was picked by the coach to join the varsity Warriors. Though relegated to the back bench and rarely given the chance to play, he was allowed to dress for every match—donning the red and silver uniform that he’d come to love—and to travel with the team on the bus to away games. Initially he was reserved and almost mute around the other players, but he gradually began to relax and feel more a part of things. Especially after Brandon began to single him out: bad-mouthing him, giving him a hard time about some screwup on the ice, in general making it clear he was worthy of notice.
At Coach Mason’s request, Liam had his hair cut even shorter than his mom had made him trim it for the hearing. It now looked a little like the business end of a utility broom. One day, before an important home game, Brandon grazed his knuckles across the top of Liam’s head on his way out to the ice. When Brandon made a number of spectacular saves that afternoon, he attributed his luck to Liam.
“You know, I think it’s a little like rubbing a rabbit’s foot. Only for me, it’s Bostock’s fucking brush cut.” After that, everyone on the Warriors would file past Liam and run their gloves over his head before hitting the ice. As the Warriors’ undefeated streak continued, Liam became the team’s unofficial mascot. They started to call him “Bossy.” And not just Brandon, but everyone now began to routinely make Liam the butt of crude but good-natured jokes. It bothered Liam from time to time, but not nearly enough to overshadow his pleasure at being a part of something at last. And not just anything—he was one of the Warriors! He found himself living for the team, for the games, and the bright, flattering glare of Brandon Cowley’s attention.
It was far better than trying to find a way of living in any degree of comfort with Carey. The more Liam was consumed by the Warriors, the colder and more withdrawn Carey became. Like Liam, Carey began to spend less and less time in the dorm room the boys shared, instead haunting the music house with its solitary, soundproof practice rooms. Carey had turned into a real prick in Liam’s estimation. Judgmental and full of himself. It seemed impossible now that they had actually been pretty good friends just a few short weeks ago.
Liam began to sit at the group of tables the Warriors commandeered in the dining hall. He trailed along with the team after practice when they tramped en masse down to Ralph’s café in town. He even began to accompany them to the dances that Moorehouse sponsored with girls-only prep schools in the area, sitting with the team in the middle rows of the bus where Brandon held court. One night, driving back through the winter darkness, his fellow Warriors were grossly sizing up the girls they’d just met. One of them asked Liam, “Think you’d give it up for that Nisha chick, Bossy?”
“Sure.”
“What? Bossy’s giving up his cherry for a Chink?”
“Jesus, you asshole, she’s like Indian or Pakistani, right, Brand?”
They all deferred to Brandon when it came to questions about girls. He seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of sexual positions and practices, both foreign and domestic, as well as a kind of sixth sense about which of the girls they met “clearly wanted it real bad.”
“I hate to disappoint you guys, but Bossy can’t give it up for anyone—’cause it’s already gone.”
“Fuck no!”
“Bossy? How do you know? Were you there?”
“Let’s just leave it at that,” Brandon replied, as Liam felt his heart begin to pound. He was glad the bus was shrouded in darkness, because he could feel his face burning. What was Brandon up to? Was this his way of thanking Liam for what he’d done? Making the team think Liam was already in Brandon’s sexual league. Or was it Brandon’s subtle way of reminding him to keep his word—and his mouth shut? Liam felt buoyed and threatened by Brandon at the same time.
Later that night, lying awake in bed, Liam wondered if his recent streak of tremendous good luck—making the Warriors, being taken up by the team, becoming known around campus as a player—wasn’t in fact the result of Liam’s natural abilities. Perhaps it was all due to Brandon’s influence—over Coach Mason, his fellow Warriors, nearly everybody on campus. Maybe this was just his way of paying Liam back—or paying him off. Liam hardened his heart against the possibility. No! He was earning his own way on the team. He was liked for who he was as a person, what he could do as an athlete. It took him over an hour to calm his fears and finally get some sleep.
17
Phoebe and Lacey were both in the drama club at Deer Mountain, though neither one had worked up the courage to try out for an actual show. They were happy enough to serve on the production crew and watch fr
om the wings while the likes of Malina Simmons and Justin Finkleday—two of the most awesome seniors—faced the stage lights and basked in the applause. The two girls had almost taken the plunge together that past fall when the school mounted Our Town, reasoning that they could at least handle the pressure of standing motionless among the dead of Grover’s Corners, but at the last minute Lacey had chickened out.
“What’s the point?” Lacey told Phoebe. “I get stage fright so bad, I feel sick to my stomach just thinking about being up there.”
“Yeah,” Phoebe agreed. “I get butterflies, too.” But, for her, it was a good kind of nervousness—one mixed with an undercurrent of excitement. Though Phoebe didn’t think of herself as particularly outgoing, she was nevertheless strangely drawn to the idea of climbing onto the stage and taking on the persona of someone else. A made-up character. What fun it would be to step out of herself for a while and into the skin of someone entirely new, someone larger than life! She had the memory for it, too. She didn’t tell Lacey, but by the time the auditions had rolled around, she knew almost the entire play by heart. So she was really disappointed when Lacey changed her mind about the tryouts, but she knew she couldn’t say anything. They had an unspoken pact as best friends. They prided themselves on doing everything—or not—together.
But something had shifted in their relationship since the news about the lawsuit hit. Where in the past Phoebe and Lacey had gone about their days lost in the crowd of the nearly three hundred high schoolers who jammed the halls of Deer Mountain, now Phoebe was starting to be noticed.
“The principal would like to see you, Phoebe,” her homeroom teacher, Mrs. Rubino, had told her about a week after the town hall meeting. Just that morning, her dad had called to tell her mom to check out the Boston Globe, which had run an in-depth story on the lawsuit he’d filed against Liam’s parents. She could feel the eyes of the whole class follow her as she stood up and walked out of the room. Phoebe had been in the school’s offices on many occasions—her mom was an administrative assistant in accounting there—but this was the first time she’d ever had a face-to-face with Principal Gunther.
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