Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  “Cadence, listen to me.” Her father spoke low and steady. “I love you more than you can possibly imagine. You are my child, you are the most precious thing to me, and I would do anything, anything, to protect you. But I have gotten myself into a situation with your mother that is dark and toxic. I’m not the man I thought I was. I need some time and space to think, so that I can look in the mirror and recognize myself again.”

  “Now’s not the time to split apart. Hard times are supposed to bring families together,” Cady said, her voice breaking.

  “We haven’t been together for a long time.”

  Cady affected calm sufficiently for her father to let her off the phone, but she ended the call feeling more disturbed than ever. She rose and put her hand on the suite room door, then paused, suddenly embarrassed her roommates might have overheard her when the conversation got heated. They probably hadn’t heard anything, she thought hopefully.

  Cady opened the door to their suite. The futon had been completely cleared of Andrea’s study materials, and her bedroom door was shut. So was the door to her and Ranjoo’s room, and the music was off. So, they had heard everything and fled the awkwardness, which Cady wouldn’t have minded if she hadn’t had to get her stuff from her room. She exhaled a massive sigh, but it did little to expel the building tension in her chest.

  28

  Cady had never been so alert and focused in that morning’s French Lit class before, only her attention wasn’t on Madame Dubois—it was on the young woman in a khaki naval uniform.

  Lee Jennings was sitting one row ahead and two seats to the left, and Cady had been staring at her through the whole lecture. Lee was short and compact; she couldn’t have been taller than five foot two. Cady could tell she bit her nails, possibly the only mark of vulnerability on her. The rest of her aspect was serious, her mouth seemingly naturally downturned, her direct gaze magnified behind rimless glasses. She looked Asian, or maybe half, her brown hair was wavy at the temples, even as it was pulled back in a bun with regulation severity. Cady wondered if Lee would recognize her as Eric’s sister the way Nikos had, and she brushed her own hair off her shoulders and onto her back, as if that could hide its color. But Lee was looking straight ahead at the blackboard, where Madame Dubois was writing about the themes of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir in loopy script.

  The class was conducted entirely in French, and it required concentration to follow the lecture. Madame Dubois turned to pose a question to the class, which Cady translated in her head: “There are some who say the protagonist, Julien, is a narcissist, or even a sociopath. Do you agree?”

  Mathieu, a French Canadian whom Cady resented for his native advantage, raised his hand first, as usual. “Yes, he uses people, especially women, as tools. He’s manipulative and without remorse. He has no empathy.”

  Cady took halfhearted notes as he spoke, but she perked up when Lee raised her hand to answer next. “I disagree,” Lee said, in French. “He’s not a sociopath, but he is not sentimental, like the other characters. He is small, and he is poor. His only mode of advancement is his wit. Julien’s not cruel, he’s cunning.”

  Cady huffed—you would think that, she thought—and Lee glanced in her direction. Cady quickly dropped her gaze to her notes.

  Cady spent the rest of class rehearsing what she would say to Lee if she confronted her—when she confronted her. She was frustrated with herself that the girl intimidated her. But according to Nikos, Lee was both brilliant and ruthless, and Cady could sense her edge in that single glance. Still, she had to know more about this girl. If Nikos was wrong, she was harmless. And if he was right, Cady reminded herself, Lee had already hurt her in the worst way possible—by hurting Eric. In that case, Lee should be afraid of her.

  As soon as class was dismissed, Lee flipped her empty notebook closed and was out the door. Cady grabbed her things in one motion and rushed after her. Boylston’s main hall was congested, and although initially Cady had a bead on Lee’s tight bun weaving through the crowd, she soon lost sight of her. She thought she saw the brown head near the glass doors at the entrance, so she ducked and shoved her way through. Cady emerged and hurried down the steps to Boylston’s cobblestoned courtyard and stopped. Her eyes scanned the Yard, which was bustling with students crossing the green on the long diagonal footpaths, weighed down by overstuffed backpacks and bags, like ants—but Lee had vanished. Cady cursed under her breath.

  She turned around and nearly slammed right into the uniformed chest of Cadet Jennings.

  “Why were you at my room last night?” Lee said, arms akimbo.

  Cady hadn’t expected to be on the defensive. “What?”

  “My roommate said a redhead from my French class stopped by, ‘Julie.’ I know it was you. What were you snooping around for in my room? Did you take anything?”

  “No.” Cady heard her own voice sound like a scolded child.

  “I’ll find out if you did.” Lee had a way of tilting her chin up so that, despite being a few inches shorter than Cady, she seemed to be looking down at her. “Don’t mess with my stuff again.” She turned to go.

  Lee got two paces away before Cady’s anger and embarrassment curdled to courage. “Why are you taking pictures of Professor Prokop?” she called out, loud enough to make a few passing students’ heads turn.

  Lee stepped in close again, crowding her. “None of your business,” she said, her voice low.

  Cady squared her shoulders. “It is my business, because I think you’re spying on her because she’s advising your competition for the Bauer Award, currently Nikos, my friend, but first my brother, Eric. And I don’t actually care if you want to play dirty for an academic award. But I do care if you were following or in any way harassing my mentally ill brother right before he committed suicide, and I think the Ad Board might be interested in that, too.” That came out better than she’d rehearsed.

  “Look, I’m sorry your brother died, but I hardly knew him. And if Nikos Nikolaides is your friend, you should find a new friend.”

  “I think it was you who made that fake Facebook profile for Eric.”

  Lee gave a laugh. “You’re crazy. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  But Cady registered a flicker of fear in Lee’s eyes. “The one you used to catfish my dad.”

  When Lee glanced back at Cady this time, her eyes had softened. “We need to talk.”

  Lee took her to Café Gato Rojo, a campus spot near the language building. The small coffee shop was filled with students and TF’s speaking in all different tongues, the United Nations with chia lattes. They didn’t order anything, and Lee sat at a corner table with her back to the wall facing the entrance. For the first time, she seemed as nervous as Cady.

  “Let’s clear this up. I wasn’t cyberbullying Eric. Your dad paid me to hack Eric’s profile.”

  Cady’s jaw dropped. “He paid you?”

  “I work at the Computer Help Desk on campus, our website has a bulletin for small IT jobs, it’s supposed to be for students and alums, but I saw an Andrew Archer posted a message saying he was the father of a student and to email for more info. I admit, I recognized the last name, I was curious, so I answered it. What he really wanted me to do was to get him access to Eric’s social media accounts.”

  “Wait, back up.” Cady squeezed her eyes shut. “Why would my dad hire someone to hack his own son?”

  “All he said was that Eric was going through a hard time and shutting him and your mom out, and that the school wouldn’t communicate with him.” Lee shrugged. “He’s a dad. He sounded like he just wanted to know more about his son’s life. And like a dad, he thought Facebook was the best way to do it, but Eric had him crazy blocked, he couldn’t see a thing.”

  “So you hacked his—”

  “No, I didn’t. I don’t know how to hack anything. People like your dad watch movies, and they think every Asian kid c
an hack into the ‘mainframe’ in thirty seconds from the back of a van. And even if I could, he wasn’t paying me enough for that shit.” Lee must have caught Cady’s scowl. “And, I wouldn’t do that to Eric. So I figured, if I just make a second profile for Eric and friend your dad, then it’s win-win. Eric gets his privacy, and your dad is reassured everything is okay.”

  “But … everything wasn’t okay.” Cady suddenly saw the what-could-have-beens in new light. “Eric was worse than ever. He was posting dark stuff, he was in crisis. If my dad had seen the real thing, he might have intervened or done something—”

  “You didn’t.”

  That knocked the wind out of her.

  “Look,” Lee continued, oblivious to her sucker punch. “All social media is bullshit anyway. I tried to do as close to the right thing by your brother.”

  Cady shook her head. “You didn’t care what happened to him. You wanted to take him down.”

  “Not him,” Lee said, her lips tight. “Her.”

  “Who? Prokop?”

  Prokop’s name ignited something within Lee, her nostrils flared and her jaw clenched. “There’s one female professor in the whole Physics department, one, and I was the only female applicant for the Bauer. I’m joint concentrating in Physics and Comp Sci, and after college, I’m going to be an officer in the Navy—I get what it is to be a woman in a man’s world, okay? But I thought for once, I found someone who could take me on my merit and not make me double-time it to be considered. I looked up to Professor Prokop, I identified with her. I have the highest GPA in the Physics concentration, higher than Eric and Nikos had, and I submitted a great application.”

  “You were angry that she picked a guy?”

  “No, I’m angry that she picked her boyfriend.”

  Even as it confirmed Cady’s own suspicion, it was strange to hear it validated.

  “Her favoritism of him was so blatant that even after Eric missed the deadline to submit his Bauer project, Prokop still wouldn’t choose another advisee. I had a hunch they were hooking up on the side, so I was interested in building a sexual harassment case against Prokop. That’s when I started following them with my camera.”

  “So you were stalking Eric!”

  “No. Only when he was with her.”

  “Did you photograph them … together together?” Cady was disgusted at her gross invasion of his personal life.

  “No, no, I never got anything I could use,” Lee answered, missing the point.

  “And you had the gall to say you gave one shit about his privacy? You have no boundaries.”

  “Boundaries are a privilege. Rich people have boundaries, I have limits, obstacles I have to work around. Accusing a star professor of sexual harassment is serious, the faculty here doesn’t just roll over when they’re threatened, there are repercussions—especially for someone like me. You and your brother waltz into a school like this, your daddy can pay people just to keep an eye on you. My mom’s an immigrant, my father didn’t go to college, without my ROTC scholarship and financial aid, I wouldn’t be able to pay for any of this. If I was going to call out what I saw, I had to come prepared, I needed proof. Any extent to which that involved your brother was completely harmless.”

  “Harmless?” Cady felt the heat rising in her face. “He was a paranoid schizophrenic, you think impersonating him online and stalking him with a camera and trying to blackmail his professor was harmless?”

  “I was careful, Eric had no idea—”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I had to get evidence—”

  “It was none of your business!”

  “Take that up with your dad!”

  Cady had heard enough. She pulled her bag over her shoulder and pushed up from the table.

  “Wait.” Lee grabbed Cady by the elbow. “I am sorry, okay? I’m sorry about what happened, really, you have no idea. But it wasn’t right what Prokop was doing, not to me, not even to Eric. He was vulnerable. People like her are predators.”

  Anger steadied Cady’s voice. “And what are you?”

  Cady fought back tears as she hurried out of the Gato Rojo. She almost couldn’t believe her father’s involvement, but Lee had too many details for her story to be false. Did he decide to hack Eric’s computer behind her mother’s back, or was Cady the last to know? She replayed the arguments her mother and father used to have about how to handle Eric’s illness; they always seemed on opposite sides, with her mom being the hyperinvolved empath, swayed by Eric’s complaints, open to alternative treatment, and her father as the medical hardliner, advocating tough love to get Eric to stay on his medication. Maybe he had second-guessed that tough love after all.

  And the affair. Lee hadn’t found proof, but her suspicion confirmed Cady’s own. Still, she didn’t think it was so terrible. So what if Eric had been fooling around with his teacher? It didn’t mean that he wasn’t brilliant, it didn’t mean he didn’t deserve the accolades he got. Cady was glad Eric had had someone who loved him on this campus, or at least who cared, someone who stuck by him, at least for a while.

  Unless the drama of a secret affair had added to his mental pain. Had the breakup been what pushed him over the edge? If only her family had known, they could have supported him better. How had she known so little about what was going on with Eric? Well, nobody told her anything. If her own father hadn’t been open and honest with her, whom could she trust? No one had been looking out for him properly, least of all—

  “Cady!”

  She was relieved to see Ranjoo waving hello and walking toward her, until her eyes fell on the guy beside her.

  Ranjoo hugged her and said, “Do you know Teddy?”

  The blood rose high in her cheeks. She couldn’t look him in the eye, much less reply.

  Teddy didn’t have that problem. “Sure we do. Cady’s my drinking buddy.” And he hugged her, too.

  Like muscle memory, Cady’s body froze, her heart raced. As Teddy casually threw his arms around her rigid shoulders, her mind dissociated from the present and jumped right back to that night—See what you did?—her paralysis shaming her all over again. By the time Ranjoo’s voice brought her back to the safety of the sun-dappled Yard, Teddy had already let go.

  “Right, at the Phoenix! I saw you guys, I forgot. I was wasted that night.”

  “Me too.” Teddy laughed. “We all were.”

  “I wasn’t that drunk.” She dared a glance at Teddy to see if he’d heard her, but he was looking at his phone. “How do you guys know each other?”

  “Arcadia.” Ranjoo must have noticed Cady’s blank stare. “You know, the play I’m painting the sets for? You’ve been really spacey lately, but I definitely told you about it.”

  “No, yeah, Arcadia, I remember.” Cady didn’t remember.

  “Teddy’s my work wife. He’s one of the few actors who actually pitches in with the crew. When they’re not rehearsing his scenes, he helps me paint backgrounds.”

  “She tolerates my having no artistic talent.”

  “You did a great job with that solid gray, boo.”

  “What can I say? I know my way around a roller.”

  Their easy banter gutted Cady. She hadn’t told Ranjoo what had happened at the Phoenix yet, because she was humiliated, and the facts still felt tangled up with the voices. Now it seemed too late. Would Ranjoo believe her over Teddy? He was her “work wife,” and Cady was just her roommate who didn’t listen.

  Ranjoo frowned at her with concern. “Are you okay? You seem stressed.”

  She had to get out of there. “I’m fine, I have stuff, I have to go to the room—”

  “That will not destress you. Andrea is melting down over some test. And did you know she’s mad we missed her birthday or something? I couldn’t even follow it. She’s so exhausting.”

  Cady rubbed her face, because her nails were
n’t long enough to claw it off.

  “Come to lunch with us, we’re going to Darwin’s, Ted says it’s the best sandwich spot in the Square.”

  “No, I just can’t, sorry.” Cady waved them off and began walking swiftly away. She had her back to them before they could reply.

  “Uh, okay, ’bye!” Ranjoo laughed at her abruptness.

  “See you around,” Teddy called out.

  Cady rushed away from them both, from everything that brought her shame and anxiety and fear on this campus, and escaped through the great wrought-iron gate to Mass Ave. She took out her phone and texted Nikos to see if she could get lunch with him at Lowell. Maybe she would just go there, she so badly needed a friend right now. Beyond the Yard’s sheltering canopy of ancient oaks, the noon sun shone brightly in her face, making her squint. A large group of visiting high schoolers wearing matching red T-shirts flooded through the gate as she was exiting. Their tour bus was parked near the crosswalk, unloading rowdy students like a clown car, all of them talking and joking and ignoring whatever instructions their chaperones shouted over them. She struggled to pick her way through the sea of bodies and the enveloping cacophony—the shrieks of laughter, the yelling adults, the grinding idle bus engine—all made her grow more frustrated and claustrophobic by the minute. When some girls moved and a space opened up by the curb, Cady rushed through it.

  Beeeeeep! The car horn blared, and Cady turned to face a Yellow Cab bearing down on her.

  29

  Just as Cady flinched in anticipation of the impact, two hands gripped her firmly around the shoulders and pulled her backward with such strength that she was lifted up off her feet. The cab barreled past her, close enough for her to feel the hot exhaust as it screeched to a halt.

  People and noise rushed in around her where Cady had fallen back on the street, but all she could do was try to catch her breath. The smell of burned rubber filled her nostrils. She saw her messenger bag on the crosswalk in front of her, its leather strap flattened and embossed with tire tracks.