Twisted Fate

by Norah Olson

  How can someone who is not me know how I feel just by things I’ve told him? It doesn’t make any sense. I know how I feel on this stuff and I know the kind of state I need to maintain to produce good work and I am not going to let that stop. Also—if they stop prescribing it I can just get shit online. He took me off the Xanax because he said I seem to have the anxiety under control. That’s because I already got myself some Librium and have been taking it for weeks! The Librium combined with Effexor, and the Adderall from Dr. Adams, is pretty sweet. Add to that the occasional half bottle of NyQuil to give things that floating sparkling effect that makes things beautiful and you’re good to go. But overall I am focused, relaxed, and ready to achieve greatness.

  The kind of greatness Eric always talked about. After sailing with Tate, I started to feel like Rockland might have been one of the more beautiful places I had ever been and I started to think that maybe I could make enough films and sell them and not actually have to go to school at all. I would wander around looking for good subjects.

  It’s amazing how much money people pay just for a simple little interview with a child. Near the skate park, near the elementary school, there’s always interesting subjects. For example, Julia Blair, who I talked to. She was playing on the swings and then she jumped off and was sitting by herself near the sandbox, clearly waiting for someone to pick her up. She was wearing a pink shirt and a little dark-green cardigan sweater with pictures of tulips on it. I sat on the swings. I had my camera attached to my hat as usual. And I was pretty sure I was getting some beautiful footage. The woods behind her—the contrasting colors of her clothes, the way she played absently by herself, looked distracted and thoughtful. I knew this would look good edited together with footage of things I had taken off the news or footage of cars driving really fast.

  Finally I asked her, “Are you waiting for someone to pick you up?”

  She nodded. “I’m waiting for my babysitter. She should be here soon.”

  “You don’t walk home by yourself? You seem like a big girl.”

  “I do on Wednesday and Friday, but today my babysitter’s taking me to her house. I’m in third grade. My mom says I can stay at home by myself soon.”

  She told me she lives on Westmont. While she was talking I was thinking how cool it would be to get little kids to describe the whole geography of the city. How it would be really weird. And I could intercut the descriptions with footage of highways and maybe old pictures of Rockland. I was sure the same people who usually buy my films would pay even more if I had a film with lots of kids talking about their neighborhoods and how they walked around, how they saw it. Maybe I could even get a production company interested in it.

  “Do you have any friends who might want to be in a movie?” I asked her.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But can I be a princess in it?”

  I told her of course. It really didn’t matter what she was going to be. People would buy the movie no matter what.

  I lay down on the grass near her and pointed the camera up at the sky—the canopy of trees overhead and the blue and the clouds. And it felt like the world was full of possibility. I left before her babysitter came to pick her up and went out to drive the Austin Healey on the beautiful winding roads of Rockland.

  Apparently it was on some kind of automatic system. Once people had paid enough to his PayPal account or bought him everything from his Amazon wish list, the video would automatically download from his site. There were already dozens of films. I thought the worst were the ones of kids. Talking to them about what they liked and then asking them questions about where they lived and went to school and who picked them up and when. The films were basically doing all the groundwork for any pedophile who wanted to come along. I couldn’t believe them when I saw them. He was literally assisting the potential abduction—the potential harm—to a child.

  One little girl gave her address, phone number, school, and listed all the streets she walked home on and what time. Our jaws dropped when we saw it.

  According to his parents, that was some kind of point he was making with his art. Like the films were a comment on what he was actually doing. That they were about trust and how the world has changed and how we are all constantly being watched and have no privacy and are at risk for people harming us . . . and God knows what other excuses these people came up with for what he was doing. They were blind to what their kid was up to. This was not art. This was some kid with a camera seeing how far he could push it, how much he could get away with. How he could get any attention at all. This is a very sick, very spoiled kid and nothing more. In the end, when I look back on it it’s amazing only two people were killed. The potential harm was so great.

  And who knows if some new terror will come out of it.

  I probably did it to spite her, I can see that now. Syd told me to stay away from Graham and then she and Declan went over there. Watched movies with him. She literally did that the day after she told me not to hang out with him. I knew that he was just another boy she would treat badly. I’d seen her do it before. I wanted to be friends with him and I wanted to do something interesting in my life before I went off to college. Something daring. I wanted to be with someone who could appreciate me for who I was and also show me things I didn’t know about. Syd is so crazy the way she exaggerates. “Stay away from him or it’ll ruin everything we have,” she said. I mean, please. I was like, “What exactly do we have? We haven’t had one good conversation since we were ten years old.”

  Syd never introduced me to her friends. We used to play with Becky together when we were little but Declan—I don’t think he’s even said a word to me. The two of them are always off together. If I come in the room and they are there, she pretends I’m not there and says “Let’s go” to him and he makes kind of an awkward face and then does whatever she wants. I started thinking about all the things Sydney had excluded me from. How after elementary school she pretty much ignored me at all times. And when she started smoking dope, and doing God knows what else she and her stoner friends get up to, it’s like I don’t even exist.

  Graham was maybe the first person who hung out with us together a lot because he lived next door. And because of the way we met—all of us standing out there by the edge of the woods. We would sometimes hang out talking together. He seemed to really like both of us and be interested in both of us. He was weird and cool and had something rebellious in him like Syd and he cared about things the way I did. At first, I thought he was maybe one of those academic stars that she always liked to be around and then I realized he was gentler and shier. More like me.

  Anyway I had all this on my mind and also the whole thing about going off to college. I used to look at it as a great adventure, but the closer I got to leaving the more I thought of it as being gotten rid of, maybe permanently. I know our parents loved me and that it wasn’t true but I felt like Sydney had outgrown everything about me and wanted me gone. I wanted to get away from her too. I did. But I couldn’t help feeling like I was the one who was being cast out and might never be a part of her life again. Even her talking about us coming together and being unified about things also freaked me out. For some reason it made me feel more like she was getting rid of me—not less. It was so unlike her. I just felt in those days like I was about to disappear.

  So I did it. I did. I went over to his house because he invited me. And went up to his room. The house was amazing. Though it looked smaller than I thought it would be after seeing it from the outside. There were these tiny little paintings hanging all over. A whole wall taken up with miniatures that looked like they had been painted with a single eyelash they were so delicate. The house was really tastefully done. Not in the cozy New England style my mother preferred, but in a sophisticated way. Outside in the backyard there was a marble fountain with a single long smooth stone in the middle—it looked like one of those polished stone sculptures we studied in art history. I think the artist was Brancusi.

  And I went up to h
is room. It was incredibly neat. Completely organized. It was more like a suite in a fancy hotel. He had his own bathroom connected to the room and the furniture was all really nice. He had a big old oak four-poster bed. The room was bright and on a corner with windows that overlooked the woods and also our house. His room was right across from our room. It was cool and quiet and he had shelves of interesting artifacts—things he said his parents and grandparents had brought back from traveling, or things people bought him as payment for the movies he made. He had more stuff than anyone I’d ever met. A massive record collection—I mean an actual vinyl record collection—that took up one wall of the room, another set of shelves from ceiling to floor lined with books, and another wall of electronic equipment—film stuff I guess. And then he had a closet full of stuff—some of it still in packages. Different kinds of cameras and lights and cables and microphones.

  He also had an extremely thin flat-screen TV and that I guess is what we were going to watch his movies on—or that’s what he asked me over to do anyway: watch movies.

  He hooked up his camera and I sat in a big comfortable leather chair in the corner by the windows and then he set up a tripod. He stood behind it looking at me and looking down at the camera every once in a while.

  “Is this okay?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Sure. I guess.”

  “You’re really beautiful,” he said, and I covered my face, embarrassed.

  “Okay,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Allyson Tate.”

  He looked confused for just a second and then smiled.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Next door to you.”

  “You’re the girl next door.” He smiled and looked up at me as he said it.

  I could feel myself blushing. “I am,” I said.

  “Where do you go to school?” He adjusted some things on the camera. Messed with the focus or the light or something.

  “RHS,” I said.

  “What kinds of things do you like to do?”

  I shrugged. “I like baking.” It made me smile to think about. “I like riding my bike. I like going out in the boat with my dad . . . gardening.”

  He was looking very intently at me. Studying me, but also smiling. Boys have looked at me, of course they have, but I don’t think any boy had ever looked at me like that. Certainly not a boy as handsome as Graham Copeland.

  “Where do you work?” he asked.

  “Pine Grove Inn.”

  “What are your hours?”

  “You know . . . after school until nine on Wednesday and Thursday and then Saturday mornings. I also just come when they need me.”

  “You’re a fascinating creature, Allyson Tate,” he said, and I shook my head. Even I knew that wasn’t true. I was a capable Mainer. I loved my parents and my little town and I would probably end up buying a house like my parents had and fixing it up and going sailing with my own kids when I grew up. I knew I wasn’t fascinating, that I probably looked like some girl from an L.L.Bean catalog. But maybe being happy with all the traditional things is what made me interesting to him. Maybe being able to find blueberry patches, to make a good “lobstah dinnah,” to winterize an old house, or to love your parents—maybe those were some rare qualities I’d overlooked in myself.

  He came around from behind the camera and sat next to me. And we both looked awkwardly at the lens for a while.

  “I have one more question,” he said.

  I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Because I thought I knew what he was going to ask. “Okay,” I said.

  “Can I kiss you?”

  I took a sharp breath and then laughed. “But . . . with the . . .” I pointed at the camera.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “I mean, no if you don’t want to. Of course, if you don’t want to, but, uh . . . well . . . I just want to kiss you on camera so I can feel like I kissed a movie star. I don’t think I’ll believe it myself if I don’t have evidence. We can record over it. I just. I . . . ah. Never mind.”

  I shook my head at him and laughed, and for a minute I didn’t even remember he was filming us at all. I didn’t care.

  I could smell his hair, which was clean and smelled a little like cinnamon.

  “I . . . um . . . sure,” I said. “Sure. Yes.” And I could feel my heart racing and I laughed again, not even knowing that I was going to.

  And then he held my face in his hands and he kissed me. And then he kissed me again. And again. And again.

  I felt so validated by the move to Maine. Things were going as planned. Graham was thriving. Simply thriving. He would have an amazing portfolio to send off to wherever he decided. And he seemed to have boundless energy. He wasn’t the shy, broken boy we arrived with. It was so gratifying for me to see him turning into a real artist. Someone who put the art before everything else. And just as I suspected that made him blossom, open up, start talking and thinking about things we were afraid he’d simply buried.

  I think the best way to describe this brief period of his life is as a kind of creative atonement. It was astonishing how much he could do with the simple tools he had.

  That second month in Maine was one of the best in our lives. David had cut back on his work and was around more. Helping Graham with his car. We ate dinner together every evening and screened films up in the attic room. Graham and I looked at each other’s work and gave each other comments and critiques. The first month was bumpy, but the second seemed magical. I could see how David and I were going to be when we were old and traveling to different countries to see the amazing art of our amazing son. I imagined it many times. But now those thoughts are just a memory. The last memory of happiness we have.

  It was a big mistake to hit the pipe before I went down to breakfast. My mom was acting all weird and I couldn’t tell if it was because she was actually acting all weird or because I was high. She looked totally freaked-out, and at first I thought maybe she knew I was high or she found my stash or something. Or maybe it was the way I was dressed. I was all in black, but I had a fishing-line necklace I made out of sea glass and broken-up circuit boards that I thought was probably the coolest thing I’d ever made in my life, and generally my mom disapproved of me smashing up my electronics stuff and turning it into jewelry. She could be pretty conservative in her tastes, and I was waiting for a comment—then I realized there was something big going on. Something bad in the news.

  I said, “What’s wrong?” and she just handed me the paper—she looked like she had been crying a little. I took it and looked at the headline: AMBER ALERT FOR ROCKLAND BOY, and a picture of this cute little chub in a baseball cap. I looked again and realized it was Brian Phillips—our cleaning lady’s son. He’d been over to the house plenty of times and was really sweet. I loved Brian Phillips! I even showed him how to write some code one day after school. My hands started shaking. I wished I wasn’t high. I felt sick.

  “Oh my God!” I shouted. “This is terrible!”

  My mother nodded and then she came over and put her arms around me. Hugged me tight I guess partly to reassure herself. “Jenny Phillips must be out of her mind with worry,” she said, still holding me.

  “I can’t imagine,” I said, hugging her back. I put my head on her shoulder. The news was the biggest, most terrible buzzkill ever, and I barely felt high anymore, just really upset.

  The story in the paper said that the last time Brian was seen was by his friends just before he took the turn off to the street where he lived. That was after school yesterday at about 3:10. Around 3:40 his mother started calling his friends, and then at 4:30 she called the police. Someone must have taken him between his house and the corner.

  Unfortunately there were no witnesses.

  My mom started crying. “We should have paid her more,” she said suddenly. “She would have been able to get him a phone if she had more money, or be there to pick him up herself if she didn’t have to work so hard. Why didn’t we pay her more? We could afford it. O
h, poor Jenny.” Then I hugged her while she cried on my shoulder. “Poor little Brian,” she kept saying. “Poor little guy.”

  I said, “It’s not your fault, Mom. It’s going to be okay. They’ll find him.” She nodded and apologized for crying and then started crying again.

  I didn’t feel like eating. I just had a glass of orange juice and then headed off to school.

  “Be careful, Becky,” my mom said. “Please. Just call me when you get to school today, Okay? Just this once.”

  “I will, Mom,” I said. “Don’t worry, someone will find him.” I left her sitting, stunned, in front of the television. Listening for any updates about the AMBER Alert.

  I got outside and could see what the news had already done. I don’t think there was one kid or even a group of kids walking without someone’s mom or dad right there with them. It was like the whole town had become tense and paranoid overnight. Brian was a really nice little kid. He was the kind of kid who just talked to everyone, super friendly and chatty and kinda never stopped talking. Lots of people knew him because of that, which I thought was a good thing. It seemed likely someone would recognize him—and I thought he’d be more likely to find a way to get help, to talk to someone.

  I walked up Euclid Avenue and stopped at the corner to light a cigarette and to wait for Tate and Declan so we could walk the rest of the way to school. I figured they would have heard the news, but I could tell even watching them walk from a distance that they hadn’t. They were laughing and bumping shoulders as they walked.

  When they got close enough to see my face, Tate said, “Whoa, what’s up, Becks?”

  “Brian Phillips was kidnapped,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Little Brian! Jenny Phillips’s kid? Our cleaning lady’s kid. Don’t you know him? He’s a cute chubby little motormouth, talks about X-Men?”

  At that they looked at each other and their eyes went wide.