The Fall of January Cooper

by Audrey Bell

  "Bullshit. It's always like that."

  "With me, it's never like that."

  "That's because you hate fun," he said. "Even when you get laid, you don’t have any fun. You're like a crusader against fun. St. Christian of the Antisocial. That's how you're going to be remembered." He turned his head and spotted a pretty brunette leaving a CVS. "Man, look at that talent." He rolled down his window again.

  "I'm never driving you anywhere ever again," I said calmly. "Ever."

  "Hey, beautiful, marry me!" he screamed out the window.

  January

  The second good idea I'd had aside from telling Tyler to fuck off had been calling Mr. Gregory to see if someone could help me move my stuff out of the apartment.

  "It would look really, really bad if they threw me and my stuff out on the street," I explained. "And I'd probably be so distressed, I'd forget not to comment."

  He sent me a lawyer from their Boston offices named Cyrus who apparently “owed him”.

  He wasn’t at all what I was expecting. He was definitely way too senior to be moving my crap into the dorm room inhabited by the boyfriend-stealing whore of Babylon.

  I had been expecting someone like the petrified associate who had made my mother's drink back when we had been waiting to draft the prenup.

  Cyrus was sneaky. He alternated between putting things into his car and asking me questions about documents I may have signed and financial accounts I may have put in my name.

  "I don't know." I shrugged. "I mean, I signed whatever my parents gave me."

  "Didn’t you keep copies of it?"

  I shook my head. "No. I mean, I didn't even know what I was signing."

  “You never thought you should read any of it?”

  Cyrus sort of looked like an alien. White, pale, cold, hair that looked more like an immoveable black mass than anything else. Plus, he was scary smart.

  “They’re my parents,” I said, feeling flustered and stupid. “I mean, what would you do?”

  “I wouldn’t sign anything without reading it, or having a lawyer read it,” he said definitively. When he smiled, he looked like he was in pain.

  It took five trips up the stairs to get all of my stuff into the dorm room, which was mercifully still clear of Katelyn.

  Cyrus looked around the pile of stuff near the stripped down twin bed distastefully. "We should probably have a talk at some point about how the media will react."

  "They haven't found out yet?" I said.

  "It's been trickling out. The Times called my office. I don't think it'll stay quiet for long." He looked at me. "The investigators have asked to be the ones to notify the victims first. And the media has largely complied with that. But it won't be long before the victims have been told. Or a newspaper leaks it. You'll need to be prepared for a major backlash."

  “From the victims?” I asked.

  “Alleged victims.”

  I stared at him blankly.

  "You think they'll come find me, though?" I asked. “The victims?”

  “The alleged victims,” he said.

  “Whatever. Are they going to come find me?”

  “I don’t think so. The press, however, they’ll find you. Just say ‘no comment’ when they do," he said. "Even if you feel overwhelmed and they're shouting at you. I’m sure Gregory went over this with you.”

  “Barely,” I scoffed.

  “Well, just remember ‘no comment’ is your best friend.”

  I bit my lip and breathed. "Is my dad guilty?" I asked.

  "He's pleading not guilty. He'll be out on bail this afternoon."

  I met his eyes. That was the second time I'd heard that response. He will be pleading not guilty. "But did he do it?"

  "I'm sure this is frustrating for you, January."

  I knew he wouldn't give me any information. "Do I need to worry about anything?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, legally. Aside from the financial mess. Do I need to worry about legally being implicated?"

  "I don't know. Do you?"

  I met his eyes. "Listen, I'm not stupid. Okay. But the stuff I signed? Could it get me in trouble?"

  He thought for a moment: "If you were a party to fraud, then you could be implicated. There are a lot of outstanding accounts. You should talk to your parents."

  "The lawyer in Dallas told them not to talk to me. He said the phones were tapped," I looked at him.

  “Well, I’m capable of communicating your concern, if you’d like.”

  "You'll communicate my concern? That's great. Communicate my rage, too, while you're at it. Okay?" I dropped my useless iPhone on the cheap blond wooden desk. "Tell them..." I took a breath and realized how utterly exhausted I’d become. "Tell them that I have no one to talk to. Okay? Tell them I'm completely freaked out and I have nobody."

  He looked at me blankly.

  "You know what? Forget it," I said. I exhaled. "Don’t tell them anything. Thanks for moving me.”

  "You’re most welcome. Have a good evening, January."

  I nodded. I sat down on my bed and took a shaky breath. I couldn't make my parents talk to me. I couldn't stop my father's arrest. There was no way I could keep people from finding out. All I could do was breathe.

  It'll be okay.

  Are you insane?

  It has to be okay.

  I took a breath. I imagined our house lying empty. I thought of Rocco. Jesus, what had happened to Rocco? I found a quarter—one of my last—in my wallet, and ran down the hallway to the payphone and dialed the number on Cyrus’s card.

  "This is Cyrus Webster."

  "What about the dog? Rocco?"

  "Your mom brought him to her sister's."

  "Oh." I exhaled. "Oh, good. That's good. Okay. Thank you."

  "January, try to maintain equilibrium."

  "Right. Thanks," I said. I hung up. Try to maintain equilibrium. Maybe that was better advice than stay calm.

  I trudged back to the room and lay down on the small, cheap, uncomfortable mattress. My life was totally over.

  The door swung open.

  "Oh my fucking God. ROBBER!" Katelyn shrieked when she saw me.

  "Hi, Katelyn," I said dryly. "Do you still have a stash of vodka under your bed or are you not a total alcoholic anymore?"

  She had her hands full of a polo shirt. Schuyler Cross’s polo shirt to be exact. It was the color of orange sherbet. Which was ridiculous.

  "January?" he said.

  "Hi, Schuyler," I said. I looked at Katelyn. "So, how about that vodka?"

  "What are you even doing here?" Katelyn asked.

  "I live here."

  "What happened to your apartment?"

  I tried to remember what Christian had told me about his apartment. Something about a flood? "There was a flood."

  "What?" she repeated.

  Schuyler looked at me skeptically. "There was a flood in your apartment?"

  "Basically. I don't know." Maybe Christian had been lying about that. "Water everywhere. You know how it is."

  "You mean your pipes burst?" Schuyler asked.

  "Bingo. Vodka?"

  "So, you're moving back in?" Katelyn asked.

  I nodded. I thought of my father in prison. That was a nightmare. Boyfriend-stealing roommates I could handle. I studied my nails and looked up at her. "Yes, and don't you think it's just amazing how forgiving I am?"

  Schuyler snorted.

  Katelyn pulled a bottle of vodka from underneath her bed. She pulled a cup down from her desk. "I'm sorry about your apartment."

  "Oh, please. You don't get to be nice to me. I'm the one being nice here," I said.

  Schuyler laughed out loud. I ignored Schuyler and addressed Katelyn. "You stole my boyfriend," I explained patiently.

  "Okay. I was just being polite," she said. “I’ll stop being nice.”

  "Great. Vodka. Hop to it, lady."

  She made me a vodka tonic and handed it to me with a strange look in her eyes. "I'm surpr
ised you just didn't check into a hotel. I thought you said you would rather spend a night in Guantanamo Bay than sleep in the same room as me again."

  "Let's not exaggerate."

  "I'm not. That's what you said."

  "Mm...you've always had a terrible memory, Katelyn. Like the time you completely forgot that I was dating the guy you were sleeping with."

  She ignored me with a sour little smile. "How's Tyler?" she asked.

  "Why? Looking for your next victim?" I asked.

  "I don't really consider myself a victim," Schuyler offered, calmly. Way too calmly, in my opinion.

  "Right. Well, it wouldn't be the first thing to go over your head, Sky. You thought Africa was a country."

  "Seriously?" Katelyn asked him.

  "No," Schuyler said. "I mean, I was stoned. You know how she is."

  "This is cute. The two of you making it work, the home wrecker and the history major. It's like a sitcom," I said. I took a sip of the drink she'd made.

  Katelyn looked at me. She exhaled. "January, I really, like, don't want to fight with you anymore."

  "Yeah, me neither," Schuyler added.

  I looked from Schuyler to Katelyn and back to Schuyler. "What do you mean? Anymore? I literally haven't spoken to either of you monsters for months."

  I finished half of the vodka tonic in one long slurp. Not nearly as good as Christian's. I should have gotten his number. I should've been nicer. I should've been someone different altogether.

  I couldn’t think of a single problem I had that couldn’t be solved simply by being a different person.

  I cocked my head at Katelyn and sighed. "So, what’s new, Katelyn?”

  "Nothing," Katelyn said. "How long are you back here for?"

  "Indefinitely. I told you. There was a flood."

  "And you can't stay with Tyler?"

  "Tyler lives in Dallas and we broke up. If you can't handle it, why don't you stay with Schuyler?"

  "I have a roommate," Schuyler said quickly. "So that's impossible."

  "Well, listen, Katelyn. I don't have any problems with you. I think you're really great. If you don't want to live together anymore, then that's your problem, because I'm happy with the current arrangement."

  She let out a short, bitter laugh. "You don't have any problems with me?"

  "Nope. None."

  "You just called me a monster."

  "Well, I think it's really important that we're honest with one another if we live together. I don't have any problems with you being a monster, though. I mean, that's just life. Some people are total monsters. I'm just being honest."

  Schuyler laughed. "Oh, you want to be honest?"

  "Schuyler, do you live here? No. Great. Let's keep this between the roommates then."

  "I think you're a huge bitch," Katelyn said flatly.

  "Fair enough," I replied. "As long as you share your vodka and you don't leave your toenails on the floor, you can think I'm a bitch and I can think you're a monster and I don't think we should have any other problems."

  Katelyn exhaled. "Fine."

  "Great. Good to be home. Can I get another one of these?"

  Katelyn poured me more vodka.

  Schuyler turned on the TV.

  "But, seriously, you won't be here very long, will you?" Katelyn asked, warily.

  I shrugged. "I might be here the rest of the semester."

  Katelyn looked pained. Schuyler flipped through the channels idly. What an idiot. "Hey, do you still smoke a lot of pot?" I asked suddenly.

  "What?" he said serenely.

  "Weed. Marijuana. Do you still smoke a lot of it?"

  "Oh. Yes. Usually, I do." He had settled on Planet Earth. He was high. I could tell. Nobody else would ever be so relaxed in a room with his current girlfriend and his ex-girlfriend.

  "Oh my God. Look at those tiny little polar bears," Katelyn said. I glared at her. I'd already watched this episode with Schuyler. It was his favorite. The bears died in the end. He made me watch it once a week when we were dating.

  "I feel a lot of emotional connections to baby bears," he told Katelyn. My blood boiled. He used to say that to me. And I used to think it was adorable.

  "Can I have some of your drugs?" I asked.

  "You don't do drugs, January."

  "I want to start. I'm feeling uptight lately. Anxious. You know?"

  He looked at me warily. "Lately?"

  Ugh. He was being impossible.

  "Baby bears are so cute," Katelyn said, settling next to Schuyler on her bed.

  "I know," Schuyler said, wrapping an arm around her as she dropped her head on his shoulder.

  My jaw dropped. We had had sex pretty much every time we watched the stupid baby bears. He fucking played me, I thought.

  "They die in the end," I told her flatly. "All of 'em. They freeze to death. It’s super-depressing.”

  "Oh my God," Katelyn said, jumping away from Schuyler. "Change the channel!"

  Schuyler scowled at me. "What's wrong with you?"

  "Can I have some drugs?" I asked him.

  "You don't smoke weed."

  "Look, I need to unwind, man."

  "I don't want to watch these bears die, Schuyler!"

  Schuyler groaned and flipped through the channels quickly, settling on CNN.

  I knew automatically when I saw my father's familiar form, head down, walking briskly to a chauffeured car, that the news had broken.

  "And multimillionaire Richard Cooper has been arrested on securities fraud charges. It is too early to assess the damage, but some reports suggest that he may have perpetuated a $25 billion fraud, or the second-largest Ponzi scheme in history."

  "Is that..." Schuyler said.

  "Oh my fucking God," said Katelyn. “Oh my fucking God.”

  All the blood started to rush to my head. For half a second I thought I was about to panic. I got very, very hot and then I felt a wave of cold wash over me. I’d heard about shock. Maybe this was shock.

  Maybe this was hitting the ground.

  I didn’t really care, though. My life was totally over.

  I smiled sunnily at Schuyler. "So, drugs?"

  Christian

  I looked up from the textbook I'd slipped behind the bar. The usual weekday crowd was there— watching the Yankees game. These guys were die-hard Red Sox fans, the ones who came in when the Sox weren't playing just to root against the Yankees. They weren’t Harvard kids, but a mixture of local cops and construction workers. They spent less than the weekend crowd, but I liked them better.

  Most of the younger cops who came in knew my father. They always wanted to know if he was much of a hardass at home as he was at work. And they liked to give me a hard time. It wasn't like they could say "What the fuck, Cutlass?" to the guy who was actually getting under their skin at work.

  They drank beer, and they drank slowly. I kept my eye on the TV tuned to CNN. Every hour or so they revisited the allegations against Richard Cooper. They always showed footage of January. They said she was a former debutante, a socialite with a glittering life. I had no idea where they got all of the photographs, but they had them in spades—January on a private jet, January on a million dollar horse, January shoving dozens of shopping bags into the back of her Range Rover.

  My heart stuttered every time they showed her walking on campus. January Cooper. Richard Cooper's beautiful daughter. Harvard student.

  Head down, dark jeans, dark sunglasses, but you couldn't hide how beautiful she was. I didn’t know what I felt—a flash of recognition and a flash of regret, I guess.

  Sometimes, I wanted them to leave her alone. Or to defend her when an anchor wondered, ‘How much did she know? Will she face charges, too?’

  Nobody ever defended her.

  Sometimes, I wondered if she had known. And, if so, what the fuck was the matter with her.

  She had found a way to make a lot of enemies, though, there were “unnamed sources close to January Cooper” who had spilled every last detail about
her life. All of them—all of these people claiming to be “close” to her—were happy to say it was perfectly possible that she was aware of the fraud her father had perpetuated.

  “She has a reputation,” said one anchor, “for being ruthless.”

  I looked away from the screen and back down at my textbook. I scratched out notes on my problem set.

  January Cooper, January Cooper, January Cooper.

  I looked up at the TV again. She'd been on TV all week, silent and unsmiling. Some days she looked like an ice queen. Other days, she looked like a China doll. Either way, she looked fragile. Like all you would have to do is reach out and touch her and she would crumble.

  God, you're getting sappy. She's the daughter of a sociopathic billionaire and everyone says she's a raging bitch. Leave it the fuck alone.

  "Hey, Cutlass."

  I looked up to see a former teammate, Bobby Hoyle, tapping the bar. "What the hell?" I grinned and shook his hand, pulling him into a one-armed hug. Bobby played for the Detroit Red Wings. He'd been the captain of the team when I was a freshman.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" I asked.

  "My sister, Caroline, has a big volleyball game." He smiled. “Plus, it’s alumni weekend.”

  “I forgot about that.”

  “You coming to the game?”

  Every year, the alumni came back to scrimmage the team. About a quarter of our alums played hockey professionally—the scrimmage always ended up being pretty high-octane. I’d gone to watch the game junior year, for the hell of it, and ended up feeling like absolute shit. I wasn’t putting myself through that again. “Nah, I’m working.”

  “Really?” he asked, furrowing his brow. “Well, a bunch of the guys are back. I know everyone wants to see how you’re doing.”

  Hoyle had taken Sam under his wing. He had spoken at Sam’s funeral. He’d broken down sobbing. It hurt to remember that.

  “Well, tell ‘em I said hey. Can I get you a drink?”

  He looked at me regretfully. “You’re really not going to come?”

  “Yeah,” I said decisively. “Anything to drink?”

  He leaned back. “Ah…Johnny Walker on the rocks.”

  I nodded. He leaned over the bar. “What’re you reading back there?”

  ”Econ. I have a midterm coming up.”