Testimony

by Anita Shreve

  I move closer. His skin is glistening with sweat. He swirls, and as he does his eyes skate over mine with no sign of recognition. He has on a green flannel shirt over a T-shirt, a pair of jeans that are wet in the hems. His Timberland boots are muddy. It seems the crowd has parted just to watch Silas, but they haven’t really. It is only my own spotlight that shines down upon him. He and the blonde in the high heels never touch, never even look at each other, as far as I can tell. But the girl is in her element, the expression on her face alternating between a sexy dance pout and a flashing white smile. The smile is for show, to impress her friends, who now are standing on the sidelines, cups in hand, taking small sips. Envious. Who wouldn’t be? She moves like a dancer in her own universe, her own orbit, only occasionally intersecting with Silas’s. Did he ask this girl to dance? Why is he here? Clearly, he is not sick. And if he did come here, why didn’t he ask me to join him?

  This seems to be a Silas I do not know, just as I didn’t know the Silas on the basketball court today. I am afraid of this Silas, this Silas moving like a dervish on the dance floor, no longer in tune with the beat now, a Silas who might become a laughingstock were it not for the ferocity of his movements, the gleam in his eye. Perhaps everyone is fascinated by this new Silas. Perhaps they are waiting for him to fling a ball.

  I watch until I can’t any longer. Some people have noticed me on the sidelines in my Avery sweatshirt, and I know that within minutes, rumors will begin to circulate. That Silas and I have had a fight. That Silas and I have broken up. That Silas has a new girlfriend, a lithe blonde in impossibly high heels.

  I turn and push my way through the crowd. As I do, I wonder: Did we? Does he?

  Colm

  I will agree that the press created a monster. Or the public did. Or, really, the school itself did. One can argue blame indefinitely on this one — though one fact I can’t argue with: the press did fan the flames.

  I filed my story on Thursday, January 26, so that it would make the Friday morning edition in Boston. My instincts were right about the piece. The editors put it just below the fold on the front page. It was only the second time I’d had a piece on the front page, but that’s beside the point. I think I got the description of the tape more or less right, though really, until you actually see the thing, you just can’t imagine it. Of course I had to water the hell out of it so that it could be digested over morning toast and coffee. While in Avery, I’d gotten ahold of a copy of the student directory and I’d called students randomly. Amazing how many kids at that point were willing to talk to the press. And the thing about students? They rarely lie. They always exaggerate, and you have to listen carefully for that. But they seldom lie. Not to a reporter, anyway.

  I hadn’t talked to any of the participating students at that point. I couldn’t get near the Quinney family. Rob Leicht wouldn’t talk, either. But James Robles later had a lot to say — against the advice of his lawyer, I might add. And I did have one extraordinary, though short, phone conversation with the girl who’d been assaulted. I’d obtained her cell phone number from a classmate, and I called her and got some unusual and rather contradictory quotes from her. I believe I was the only one ever to speak to her directly.

  The story dominated the Globe for five days running. After that, there were frequent pieces, right up until the first anniversary of the incident. And every time there’s a story of a similar nature anywhere, the Avery story is trotted out. There were a lot of editorials as well, particularly about risk and entitlement and alcohol abuse. Bordwin’s resignation was a big story. Also the Robleses’ civil suit.

  I would say that within an hour of my filing the piece, which went online before it hit the streets, every local news affiliate and every Vermont paper was on its way to Avery. By late morning, the big guns were there — CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, the New York Times, the Washington Post — you name it. Everyone wanted a piece of this.

  CNN got the first raw footage of the tape, and though they couldn’t show much — the faces and all the body parts had to be grayed out — they made a big deal about the ethics of airing the clip in that nauseating, self-congratulatory way that the cables and the networks do. “We’re going to show this, even though we’ve spent all day debating the ethics of doing so, because we feel it’s in the best interest of our viewing audience.” What a load of bull. Then, trying to take the high ground, they bring out all the ethics experts and a million other experts, who debate everything from alcohol on campus to the definition of sexual assault in Vermont to the way the school tried to cover up the crime. Every night, you’d tune in, and there would be the Anderson Coopers and the Brian Williamses camped out in front of the Avery gates. And if you pay attention to these things, you can see they’re all wearing North Face jackets to be like the students.

  I held on to the story at the Globe for as long as it lasted. I received a Pulitzer for my work on it. I could go on and on about the ethics of accepting a prize for a sordid tale about alcohol abuse, sexual assault, and privilege, but you take a look at any story that’s won a prize in the last ten years, and you’ll see that a lot of them are built on greed or lust or sex or murder. You tell yourself you’re trying to go for a fair and responsible take — unlike the tabloids — but the truth is, we’re all tabloids.

  In Avery, you could only watch with wonder. Eventually, they had to lock down the school, but during those first couple of days, when the networks were interviewing the students, some of the kids let everyone know what was going on (same thing, by the way, that’s going on in the public schools). Can you imagine being a parent and watching the news on national TV and seeing your “Julie” or your “Joshua” going on at length about beer pong or blow jobs?

  I had found a place to stay at the Mountain View Motel — same motel, as it happened, that Rob Leicht and his mother were at when Rob was arrested. I don’t think Avery had ever seen an onslaught like this before. There were hundreds — and I do mean hundreds — of reporters, newsreaders, cameramen, and tech support looking for rooms. The owner of the motel said later that he’d done the best business of his life that first week (I think I was the only one he didn’t jack up the price on). People started renting out rooms in their houses — hell, they rented out whole houses in some cases and went to stay with Aunt Sally or whomever while they raked in the money. More power to them. I know for a fact that one of the female newscasters got a room with a bathroom down the hall that first night and had a fit and had to have a trailer hauled up from New York with a dressing room and a bedroom.

  Avery couldn’t handle it. There were only two guys on the police force, and their entire job became directing traffic and policing the press. Eventually, when the townspeople realized how the school and the town were being portrayed, they clammed up. Silas Quinney was a local, and a lot of people had feelings for Anna and Owen Quinney. Gary Quinney was Silas’s uncle. Richard Sommers and his wife, Sally, who was Owen’s sister, ran the only diner in town, a Qwik Stop attached to the Mobil station, and they shut down. Everyone had to send over to the next town for takeout. Some takeout. Pizza, tacos, really bad Chinese. Good cheeses, though. Excellent cheeses.

  By the third day, the press was banned from setting foot on the Avery campus, and if you go back to the tapes and look, you’ll see that all the shots from then on are done in front of the courthouse across the street, and the Anderson Coopers and the Brian Williamses are dressed in suits and ties. Periodically, someone from the school — at first Geoff Coggeshall, who was asked to be acting headmaster and then finally got the job as headmaster — would come out and issue a statement and take no questions. They were trying for damage control — they had future enrollment, alumni, and the current student body to think about — but the damage had already been done. Eventually, they hired a PR firm from New York, and that firm handled all the queries from then on.

  I still have all my notes and a lot of footage. I’ve been approached by a number of publishers to write a book about the Avery case,
and frankly I’m surprised someone else hasn’t done it.

  Natalie

  The town exploded. There’s no other word for it. We were in the news ten days running, and even after that there were articles. It was like one of those stories you see about miners who’ve been trapped and all the town folk are waiting to find out what happened. Or like the story of a bus going over a bridge, taking children with it. We were a town under siege.

  Parents swarmed the place, not necessarily to get their kids but to be here, to protect them. You have to serve anyone who enters the dining hall, that’s school policy. It’s so the parents will feel welcome on parents’ weekend or when there are special events, or even if they’ve just come for a game or a tour. So, during the scandal, there were dozens of parents in the dining halls for meals, and you couldn’t charge them. We had no setup for that. We don’t even have a cashier. The cooks had to order more beef and pasta and vegetables and milk, and some of the parents, if you can believe it, began to complain about the salad bar, so we had to order more of that stuff. And then, you see, you couldn’t tell the parents from the reporters, they were sneaking in, too, before the gates got locked and you had to have a pass to get through. I’d say for three days anyway, we must have served an additional fifty meals at a time to the press.

  But that was the least of it. This town hasn’t been the same since. George and Jill Marsh moved away for good. They went to stay with Jill’s mother up to Ludlow while they rented out their twelve-room house, which happened to be ideally located between the Avery gates and Peet’s store. They rented it to CNN and asked a thousand a night, and, God love ’em, they got it, even though the house has seen better days and only had two bathrooms, neither of which I would care to spend any time in. George and Jill raised $20,000 that way, and then one of the CNN technicians took a shine to the house and offered them $150,000 in cash “as is,” which they realized was enough to buy themselves a condo in Florida. So they’re in Tampa now for good. I thought about renting out our doublewide, but Ebbett wouldn’t hear of moving in with my sister, Lily, so that was that. I could’ve got four hundred a night easy, even if it was a doublewide. The bathrooms are excellent. I make only four hundred a week, and that’s before taxes. But no, as I say, Ebbett wouldn’t hear of it, so I ask him once in a while, just to get his goat, Where’s my condo? Which neither of us is ever going to have. But Ebbett, I will say this for him, he had a loyalty to the school, and when they shut the gates, he started calling anyone who was helping the press — even if only renting out to them — a collaborator, like in World War II. And he wasn’t the only one. And it’s odd, but that kind of split the town in two. It was a division that stuck. It started out, either you were helping the press or you weren’t, and even today, Ebbett won’t set foot in Bobby Peet’s store or speak to Fred Greason, who made a bundle in rentals he couldn’t load off on a tourist in October.

  People were desperate for beds and meals. The population of Avery — not counting the school — was, last time I looked, just over a thousand souls. At the height of the scandal, Samuel over at the post office reckoned that number had doubled, what with the press and the gawkers and the parents who had come to see what was what. I got no head for math, but I wish someone would’ve calculated the gross domestic product of Avery for that month.

  Greason had it great. He made three sales I’m aware of that were a direct result of the influx of folks. Maybe more, for all I know. As I say, Ebbett and me, we don’t socialize with Fred anymore, though I don’t hold a grudge like Ebbett does. If I see Fred and his wife in church, I’ll say hello like any good Christian.

  But even that’s the least of it. People took sides. The boys were guilty. The boys were just being boys. The girl was the victim. The girl was asking for it. But nobody, nobody, didn’t feel sick about Silas. He was one of us, you see, not some rich kid from New York. His family was just making it, like we all were. We were all proud of him. A lot of us would go to the games just to watch him. It was Jill Marsh, by the way, who got hit with the ball.

  What Silas was doing there that night, I can’t say. And if it wasn’t for that cursed tape to prove it, I’d never believe it. Never. It just ripped this town apart. Anna, I haven’t seen Anna in town in, oh, more than a year at least. I see Owen, but it isn’t the same Owen as before. He’s a shell, he is, hollowed out. Big scoops out of his face. Reminds you every time. You’ll go days, weeks, forgetting all about the scandal, and then you’ll drive by the Quinney farm — well, it ain’t no more a farm now than my doublewide — or you’ll see Owen at the Mobil station, and you’ll remember, and it’ll catch you up, and you’ll realize how fast, how fast, a life can get all twisted around.

  Enrollment at the school is down. I got less work at mealtimes. They haven’t cut my salary yet, but every once in a while, there’s a rumor that it’s coming. The cutbacks. They cracked down on the drinking big-time. There’s ten chaperones at every dance now, and they’ve got security cameras mounted on trees — not to keep the kids safe, mind you, but to catch anyone not on the up-and-up. Michael Bordwin, he’s long gone, and Mr. Coggeshall, he runs a tight ship. They’re always having initiatives. Initiative This and Initiative That. I do think the kids are probably drinking less, though, because it’s so damned hard to get the booze anymore. Anyway, attendance at Sunday breakfast is way up, if that’s any indication.

  J. Dot

  Yeah, sometimes I think about Rob and Silas. I wonder why they were there that night. I know I was thinking, What’s Silas doing this for? Because he had Noelle. But I was thinking that with only half my brain, obviously, because I should have been asking myself the same question. Why am I doing this? And the answer is . . . the answer is . . . it was pure sex. No one will say that, but that girl, she was on fire. It was a kick. A kick and a thrill. And we were hammered. It was mad fun. It was wild. What can I say?

  Why was Silas there? He was in a terrible mood, a dangerous mood all day, I know that. Something had happened at home or with a teacher, I never learned what it was. But he was ripped. I remember him, right in the middle of the game, slinging the ball as hard as he could at the stands. It hit a woman in the face and shocked everybody. The ref threw him out of the game. You probably heard about that. They reported it in the press, like one thing was the cause of the other. Silas left the court, wouldn’t talk. Then later that day, when we found him in his car, he was already on his way to oblivion, you could tell. So something happened. And it wasn’t about Noelle, because she was just as shocked as the rest of us.

  Yeah, we should have talked to him. We should have done a lot of things. But when you’re seventeen, eighteen, you don’t think. You’re just letting go for a few hours.

  Yeah, I was nineteen. Big deal.

  She came right for us. She had a plan all along.

  What do I think of students and drinking? This is a serious question?

  You turn eighteen, you’re a grown man. I’m sorry, but you are. If you can get drafted and go to war and kill people, then you ought to be able to drink a goddamn beer. Six beers, if you want to.

  Well, I realize the girl shouldn’t have been drinking. I don’t know where she got it.

  Do I think the kids are drinking at Avery, even after all this? Are you shitting me? I mean, you realize we were all already in AA.

  That’s a joke.

  Avery Academy?

  Matthew

  That Shakespeare shit. Just thinking about it made Matthew furious. “Entitlement.” “Pride of Avery.” “The flower of youth.” “The fortunate son, about to inherit the mantle.” Where did they come up with that crap?

  It wasn’t entitlement, for Christ’s sake. It was pride. A sense of invulnerability. Who didn’t want that for his son? Obviously, James came from a privileged, educated background. Matthew and Michelle, both working at a college, had shaped the household. They’d never had the television on, for example. James had read voraciously as a boy. His mother might say differently, that she’d
had to goad him to read, but once you put a book in his hands, you couldn’t tear it away. Homework seemed to be an issue, and Michelle had been a saint about that. James had organizational problems, and Matthew was sorry now that they hadn’t had him diagnosed. It was possible that all along James had suffered from a constellation of mild learning disorders.

  James owed a great deal to his mother, but Matthew could see that he was aching to escape her, too.

  They said James was the ringleader. The press presented him in that light simply because he was the oldest. But that wasn’t the way Matthew understood it had happened. Matthew hadn’t viewed the tape. He didn’t want to. That was private and should have remained private.

  Those boys, they felt alive, that’s all. You combine that with rampant hormones and a vixen and alcohol, and, Matthew guessed, you had a potent soup that he’d dare any seventeen-year-old boy to resist. Nineteen-year-old boy.

  Sienna

  I’m wondering if you, like, pay for interviews? It’s OK if you don’t, except that I felt I had to ask since maybe you do, and I have, like, expenses. Not huge expenses, but my parents wouldn’t let me get a job over the summer, they sent me to a camp for the performing arts, which was pretty funny and a whole long story all by itself, but I don’t have any, what’s the word, petty cash, to buy, you know, stuff I need. So, but that’s OK. I understand. You’re a student, too, right, even though you’re, like, what, a graduate student? I’m kind of curious how you knew my name and where to write to, since my name was never given to the press, but I guess anyone with half a brain could have figured it out just by looking at the class directory the year after and seeing who wasn’t there anymore. But you’ll just use Sienna, right, because even though this is academic and all, the rule about protecting the victim must still apply, no?