The Accidental Bad Girl

by Maxine Kaplan

  “I’m feeling better than I was last night. And I want to see Kendall.”

  Mr. Moody stood aside and then shut the door behind me. Simone grabbed my hand and followed her father into the open-plan dining and living room. He went into the kitchen, and Simone sat me down at the table.

  “So you got out OK, yesterday?” she asked.

  I nodded. She looked calm but tired. When I looked carefully, I saw that her eyes were red around the edges.

  Simone spoke first. “I think I should have made sure you were OK last night. I’m sorry, Ken.”

  I laughed. “No, you shouldn’t have.”

  “No?”

  That one word was full of all the arch incredulity at another’s very existence that used to terrify me so much about Simone. But now I was overjoyed to hear it.

  “I have to tell you something,” I blurted out.

  “Yeah, I think you do.” The scorn was still in her voice, but there was also a bit of raw hurt tucked beneath it. She noticed the crack in her façade and busied herself taking a sip of coffee. I could tell she was itching for a cigarette.

  I closed my eyes and whispered the truth:

  “Pete and Burke took a video. Mason has it.”

  I opened my eyes. The coffee cup was still hovering at her lips, her other hand clutching the tablecloth—Simone hadn’t moved an inch.

  Butter sizzled in a pan. Simone swallowed what had to be an enormous mouthful of hot coffee and set down the mug.

  “Did you hear me? Simone?”

  “I heard you,” she said quietly. She got up and walked over to the kitchen counter, pouring herself a fresh cup of coffee, plus a second one for me.

  “You don’t have to do that—”

  “Shut up,” she cut me off, elegantly balancing both cups, plus a plate of bacon, on her arms and pivoting on her toes. She took the two or three steps back to the table quickly and set down the dishes without a single clink. She sat back down, her back perfectly straight, and reached for the creamer.

  Her father came in after her and quietly set down a plate of pancakes, kissed her on the head, and left, reminding me so much of my own father, I thought I might cry.

  “Do you have any . . . questions?” I asked. “Anything to say?” Simone finished mixing cream and Sugar In The Raw into her coffee before finally looking at me. “I don’t have any questions,” she said. I started to say something else, but she put up her hand, stopping me. “I honestly don’t, Ken. I understand perfectly what happened. And I don’t have anything to say. There’s nothing to say.”

  I took a breath. “Mason’s threatened to send it to the whole Howell LISTSERV.”

  “And that’s why you didn’t turn him in.” It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. Simone nodded back. She made a face that was almost a smile. “That was very sweet of you, Kendall. I don’t know that I would have done that, though.”

  I felt myself begin to shake and clutched the cup in front of me. “It felt like the first time I had the chance to do something good for someone else. Like, the first chance since high school started.”

  “Is that what life’s been like?”

  I thought a moment. “I don’t think I’m as nice a person as I thought I was. And now I’m screwing you over, too.”

  She waited patiently while I told her about this morning’s meeting with Rockford.

  “I don’t know if it’s going to work,” I finished glumly. “I don’t even know if I’ll be able to stay out of jail. But I do know for certain that everyone we know will see that video. Mason will make sure of it.”

  Simone thought for a moment. She picked up a pancake with her fingers and took a bite of it. Eventually, she started talking.

  “Of course I wish that night never happened. Or rather, I wish that they hadn’t done what they did. Because of course, it didn’t just happen. Burke and Pete made a choice to rape me. Grant made a choice to let them. Mason made a choice to exploit it. But the funny thing about that night is that it gave me a kind of emotional shortcut. When it first started to hit me that this was real—that it had really happened—the very first question I asked myself was ‘What did I do?’ What did I do to make Burke and Pete think that it was OK to drug me and then have sex with my body? I did drink. I had messed around with guys before, even though the rumors far outstripped the truth—I was a virgin at that point. Oh.” She raised her eyebrows. “That surprises you. Of course it does. I’m sure it surprised them, too. But had my innate interest in experimenting with my boundaries, in kissing boys, in dressing in clothes that made me feel confident, been the reason they thought it was OK? In other words, was it my fault?”

  She paused a moment and looked down at herself. Simone was still in pajamas, or what passed for pajamas with Simone: an ankle-length slip of gold silk, with a slit up to her thigh.

  When she looked up from herself, she was smiling for real. She licked syrup off her palm. “I am who I am, Ken. And I like sex. I like to feel good in my skin. And once it really sank in that that night was their fault, their problem, and not mine, I got a gift. I got to never, ever feel bad about being myself again. If anyone thinks I deserve to be shunned or denigrated for being the way I am, as long as I don’t hurt anybody, I now know, in my core, that they can go fuck themselves. So let Mason send out that video. Let him. Let people watch it. If anyone watches that video and thinks anything bad about me, they can go fuck themselves. That video is not an indictment of my sluttiness. It’s evidence of a rape. I’m not embarrassed by what happens in that video. I’m angry. And anyone who isn’t angry after seeing that video should be the ones who are embarrassed.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so, after staring at her blazing eyes, stunned, for what might have been five full minutes, I just said what I was thinking, which was: “I wish I could be like you.”

  She laughed, a real, genuine laugh, growly and barking. “I know.” Her cell phone, lying a few feet away on the other end of the table, went off. She reached for it and then recoiled. “Christ, it’s Mikey.” She looked closer. “Texting to ask if I’ve talked to you. Again.” She looked at me, exasperated. “What did you do to him?”

  “Um, I did fucking nothing to him, except maybe keep him out of jail!”

  Simone’s brow furrowed. “Wait, what? What did Mikey do?”

  “It’s really disorienting to hear you call him Mikey. And, not much: He only stole Mason’s stash and hacked into my Facebook profile to frame me for it.”

  Simone dropped her pancake. It fell to the floor, and a little dachshund I don’t remember having seen in my previous visit to the apartment scurried out from nowhere and started to eat it.

  “No way,” said Simone. “He couldn’t have.”

  “He did. Didn’t even try to deny it.”

  Her jaw fell open. “Why would he . . .? I mean . . . how did you even figure it out?”

  “Ellie, of all people.” Ellie. Sensible, secretive Ellie, protecting me even as she was hating me. “She saw us, um, smiling at each other—we had kind of hooked up, a little bit—”

  “You what? Gross. Never mind. We’ll deal with that later. Continue.”

  I told her the story, along with Gilly’s subsequent, pathetic justification. She sat back in her chair with a wrinkled nose.

  “I take it back,” she said, the arch contempt fully restored to her voice. “That sounds exactly like something Gilly would do. He feels emotion and, like an over-stimulated cat, he lashes out. He’s been doing it since he was a baby.”

  “What happened between the two of you, anyway? Can you tell me now?”

  “It’s stupid. I imagine Gilly hasn’t told you because it makes him look bad. But I haven’t told you because it’s just dumb.” She sighed. “He read my diary.”

  I laughed. “You’re kidding.” Her face remained serious and strained. “That’s it? He read your diary. And so you two didn’t speak for five years. Really?”

  She scowled. “He said I was acting snobby, like I thoug
ht I was a hot shit high schooler, and so he read my diary out of ‘concern.’ And then he told Joey Long that I had a crush on him!”

  “Joey Long? That eighth grader who moved back to England before high school?”

  “Yes! I had very limited time to get him to like me, and Gilly showed him my diary entries about him! Because Joey was ‘too old’ for me, and he was ‘worried.’ Punk. Like I needed his protection from myself. Grow up.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. We just wouldn’t let him be the knight in shining armor he so desperately wanted to be, would we?

  Simone was right. Punk needed to grow up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Over the weekend, I delivered Mason’s letters as planned, even taking Metro-North up to Cold Spring on Monday; my mom alibied me with Howell, claiming I had the flu. I wore a wire each time and a little camera that Rockford showed me how to fit into a buttonhole. Rockford was too well known in Mason’s milieu, but another cop, dressed in street clothes, named Mendoza, always tailed me there, so they could set up a monitoring plan.

  I debriefed with Rockford after each delivery, handing over the wire and the camera, but, honestly, there was never very much to say.

  “So, how’s it going?” I asked, as I unscrewed the button cam after my third delivery, to the mysterious Chelsea address, which turned out to be an HVAC repair shop. The guy I had delivered the letter to had been a very pleasant, older gentleman who had offered me tea. He clearly didn’t know what he was hosting.

  “What do you mean?” asked Rockford. He was distracted, plugging the recording device into his laptop.

  “There’s nothing on that tape, Rockford.” He looked up at me. “That’s why I’m asking how it’s going—‘it’ being the investigation. Because, from where I’m sitting, we’re not getting anywhere.”

  He sat down across from me. “We’re not there yet. But we are getting somewhere. We subpoenaed the bank records of every person you’ve delivered to and isolated payments from an account on Saint Lucia in the Caribbean. If anyone in the United States transfers funds there, we can track it. Even if it’s through a dummy account, there will be a paper trail we can follow. We’re working with campus security at Columbia, and we’ve cataloged everything that kid you delivered the note to has set up in his study carrel. And we’re very close to flipping Trev. He just operates the bar for his cousin, who it seems is the one that originally made contact with Mason.”

  I absorbed that information and then realized that he was leaving something out. “What about the P.O. box in Cold Spring? Do we know who picked up the letter?”

  He coughed. “Leon Cohn picked that up. He seems like he’s staying in the area, but he’s stopped using plastic, so we’re not sure where.”

  “What about the address I gave you?”

  “It’s a bait and tackle shop. The manager there had never heard of Mason Frye.”

  “So . . .” I thought through everything. “You have everyone except Mason.”

  “Mason and his father. Who is more connected with a few suspicious import/exporters than we’d like, so we’d like to bring him down with his kid if we can. Which we think was the point of Mason bringing in Leon and his dad’s money by proxy. If shit hits the fan, Rodney has an incentive to protect Mason, because it’s also protecting himself.”

  It made sense to me. Mason liked insurance policies. “But you have nothing directly connecting Mason to any of this,” I clarified. “Except my word.”

  He nodded. “We need his name on an account or his voice on tape, or we need you to actually see him fabricate, sell, or otherwise traffic the drugs. Otherwise, his father has enough expensive lawyers to make it possible that he walks.”

  “And I’ve pretty much only seen him play video games, flirt, and menace high school girls,” I said glumly. And my reputation makes it so that I’m not a credible enough witness on my own, I silently added.

  “Right. He’s good at this. But this is how you build a case, and we’re going to get another shot at him.”

  “How do you know that? I haven’t heard from him.”

  “Because I have a friend in the TSA who tipped me off that Mason got on a plane to Newark this morning. He should be back in Manhattan by now.”

  Just then, my backpack started vibrating on the table. My real phone was in my pocket.

  The backpack vibrated again. I reached across and pulled out the Barbie phone. Rockford raised his eyebrows at the pink case, and I put my finger to my lips.

  I pressed accept.

  “Mason,” I said, throwing my head to the side and flipping out my hair without even thinking about it.

  “Kendall, dearest,” came back his honeyed tenor tone. “Miss me?”

  “No,” I answered. “Enjoyed the break. Did some homework. Spoke to people who weren’t sleaze-balls. You know.”

  “Well, don’t worry, they were sleaze-balls inside. Everyone is. What are you doing tonight? Are you busy?”

  My heart sped up. “I didn’t think we were back in operation.” Rockford leaned forward eagerly.

  “You don’t know a dinner invitation when you hear one? You really are such a kid.”

  A plan snuck into my head and shook off its clothes.

  “Kendall, you there? Are you sifting through your dance card?”

  “No, no, I was just distracted by something on the TV,” I said quickly. “I can go to dinner.”

  “Good,” he said. “I wanted to thank you for taking care of those little errands for me this week. They are all done, right?”

  “Yes, master,” I snapped. “I told you that they would get done, and they did.”

  “Fine, fine. Untwist your panties. Can you get to Laundromat in an hour? I’m starving, and if we get there any later, it’ll be hours before we eat.”

  Laundromat was a trendy restaurant a couple of blocks from Howell. It was only twenty minutes away from the police station by subway. “Sure. See you in an hour.” Mason hung up.

  “What’s going on?” asked Rockford as soon as I put the phone back in my bag.

  “I’m meeting Mason for dinner.”

  “Is that . . . ? Were you guys going out to dinner a lot?”

  His voice was pert and judging. I was about to give him the finger, but then I remembered how I had twined my arm around Mason’s neck at James Greenberger’s party and decided to preemptively shut up.

  “If I can get him to the Fish Hook lab, or on tape talking about making the doses, can you be ready to nab him?”

  Rockford’s eyes narrowed. “What is it you’re planning to do?”

  “I’m going to tell him that I figured out the formula.”

  He drew in his breath. “No. You’re not going to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s dangerous, and your mother will kill me.”

  I lifted my head, sure that I was right. “You don’t understand my relationship with Mason. That I’m suspicious of people and a sneak is what he likes about me. If I play into that, I think I can draw him out.”

  Rockford took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “How does a girl like you get to be a girl like you?”

  I was really tired of everyone telling me what kind of girl I was. “Just lucky, I guess.”

  He put his glasses back on and set his jaw. “No. I will wire you up, and we will be waiting outside of the restaurant in case he says anything that gives us probable cause. You will, however, not go anywhere alone with him. It’s my ass if anything happens to you.”

  We had been friendly lately, but the image of him flipping a pocketknife in front of my face flashed before my eyes. I made a snap decision and lied. “Fine,” I said. He didn’t care about my ass, so why should I care about his?

  I let him wire me up and then left the station on my own steam. The uniforms would be waiting for me there. It wouldn’t do to let Mason see me in a police car.

  The air on the street was sharp, and I could see my breath, blue and mist
y, as I sprinted down the pavement. When I turned the corner, the police station out of sight, I ducked under scaffolding overhanging an anonymous corporate building.

  I did not intend to obey Rockford, not if it meant I could end this. They had everyone ready to go down, except for the one person that I wanted to go down. I had come too far to risk Mason getting away.

  Quickly turning my back to the street, I unzipped my backpack and plugged the code into the combination lock on the pouch, half-forgotten, buried at the bottom of my bag. I took a breath and pulled out Rockford’s knife. Then it was back into the cold, the hilt of Rockford’s knife beating against my chest from where it lay sheathed front and center in my bra.

  By the time I got to Laundromat, Mason already had a table. I slumped into the chair, sweaty and heaving. I had run all the way from the train.

  “You’re early,” Mason said with a smile. “I haven’t even had a chance to hit on the waitress yet.”

  I drank about four-fifths of my water in one gulp. “Don’t let me stop you,” I gasped, before drinking the rest of it.

  He shrugged. “Nah. It’s no fun now that you’re here.”

  Finally catching my breath, I shook off my coat. “Sorry. You’ll just have to hit on me instead.”

  “It’s been a very long game.”

  I gave him as cold a look as I could summon through the sheen of sweat on my face, and he laughed right in it.

  We ordered and I scanned the room, looking for Mendoza. I found him in a dark corner of the bar.

  “So how was your trip?” I asked.

  Mason’s face went a little slack and then blank. It was as if he had shaken an Etch A Sketch, so that nothing showed up in his features. “It was fine. Like I said, I was seeing my father.”

  “This is the father you don’t get along with.”

  “You remembered. That’s sweet.”

  We had nearly finished the appetizer—which I had bolted down, suddenly realizing that I was starving—by the time he spoke again.