“Oh, no,” Ji Sun said, and turned to look at Margaret, who had tears on her face and coffee all over her pale pink sweater.
“Oh, I’m fine! It just surprised me,” she said. “I’m sorry about your sweater!”
“It’s not your fault, Jesus.” Alice sent another glare toward Lainey. “I was going to let you keep it anyway.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet, Al! I should run in and wash this off. I’ll meet up with you.” Margaret dashed off to the sounds of a drum circle before anyone could offer to join her.
“Were you going to throw burning hot coffee in her face, Lainey?” Alice shouted over the sounds of the drums.
“That is extremely messed up,” Ji Sun said, close enough so both could hear her, before the drumbeats swelled loud enough for Lainey not to have to answer them.
When Margaret came back from the library, she had Reezus and Jamie from the women’s center with her. They both wore all black with strips of hot pink duct tape X’d on their chests, sharpied to read NOT MY PRESIDENT and FUCK THIS WAR.
Reezus had given Margaret her leather jacket and Lainey had to swallow a gasp. Margaret looked so exactly like what Lainey herself wished to project: soft and rough, her chiffon skirt rippling out in the breeze beneath the oversized jacket, flecks of mascara stuck to her perfect pink cheeks. Reezus looked even more butch with Margaret on her arm, and Lainey felt again like a child in a costume, chicken skin on her bare midriff, idiotic in this weather. Lainey knew Reezus wore a dildo tucked into her men’s briefs some days, and she wanted to grab at it, fuck someone with it, fuck herself in front of everyone, get some attention even close to commensurate with her rage. The student speaker had finished guessing at how many people around the world they were joining that day in protest, and the crowd had begun to chant “No blood for oil! No blood for oil!”
The next day in the student paper, there they were on the front page, Margaret and Reezus and Jamie with their mouths open and fists raised. They looked like they could be from any era, two androgynous warriors and their heroine, flowers in her hair like a crown.
Lainey could see herself, fuzzed in the background, and while she could only remember shouting until her throat went ragged, her mouth is closed in the photograph. In black and white behind the others, she looks almost like one of the straight-hairs, standing in judgment, nursing an empty coffee cup.
Chapter 16
Ji Sun hadn’t set out to keep Ruby’s secret, and she’d done so less out of kindness and more from the wish that if she ignored what Ruby told her, it might go away. But the rumblings on campus about Walker had only grown louder. Lainey’s friend Adam had even written an editorial in the student paper; it didn’t name Walker, but anyone who could read would know. Ji Sun needed proof, but the proof she really wanted—that Walker hadn’t done it—was not possible to get. Ruby was still irritated with her, but Ji Sun had managed to extract from her that Cat was one of the other students who planned to join the formal complaint. Ji Sun was hurt that Cat hadn’t told her herself, but she allowed that she hadn’t spent much time with her, and none just the two of them, since the start of the year.
That there was another Korean-American student accusing Walker gave Ji Sun’s investigation a new urgency. Hearing her friend’s name, Ji Sun felt the first sting of something like certainty that he was guilty, and knew, at the very least, that she was done sticking up for him. If Walker had done this thing, it hurt her, too, and as much as she wished it weren’t true, she would have to join with these women and stand up to him and so many men who had dismissed her, ignored her, erased her. She could see on their faces the first day of class which category she fell into: fetishized or disappeared. They would wipe drool from their chins or they would still, at midterm, mix her up with other East Asian students. She thought back on the looks she felt that Walker had given her alone. They hadn’t felt lecherous, they hadn’t even felt strictly sexual—they were loving. It made her sick to think of it now, how a tossed-off wink or grin could make her feel not just admired, but enveloped.
On a Tuesday before dinner, Ji Sun met Cat in the maps room of the main library. She followed Cat to a cluster of empty carrels where Cat opened her laptop and plugged in the Ethernet cable, pulled up her email. Ji Sun tried to make out the letters of her password, wanted to be able to log in later and read every word that ever passed between Cat and Walker, read even the emails that Cat sent to everyone else, to see what it was about her friend that drew Walker to her.
But Ji Sun was too nervous to catch which letters Cat hunted and pecked, felt her breath turn rancid on her own tongue, bile up from her belly at the conviction she had, sitting next to Cat and feeling aware now of how craven it was to wait for evidence of something she already knew, and to ask the victim to provide it.
Cat drew in a breath and turned the screen so that Ji Sun could see. Here it was, his email:
My cock misses your touch, Kit Kat. All the girls love it, but only you make it hard as a brick xxM
How sunk she was. Not that it was crass, but that it was so inelegant. So short and so ordinary. Ji Sun had thought him some kind of poet, a prophet! The language he used in class some days, the songs he’d sung them all. And this is how he flirts? Ji Sun corrected herself: harassed. Cat and the others were accusing him of sexual harassment, and here Ji Sun was, a beat of arousal at the word cock, and then fury that she couldn’t read this message without feeling the wrong sort of rage at all the girls. Not: How could he! But: Who were they?
“I’m so sorry, Cat,” she said.
“Oh, Ji Sun, it’s okay!”
Ji Sun hadn’t realized she was crying until Cat offered her a balled-up tissue.
“It’s clean,” Cat said. “It’s just been in my bag for a while.” She watched Ji Sun uncrumple the Kleenex and wipe her eyes. “I don’t know,” Cat said. “He’s the professor. And he’s, like, the professor, you know? I do like him! I mean I did. I did have a crush on him. Before he . . . before this.” She closed the lid of her laptop. Her eyes looked like those of the animals in PETA brochures Lainey had brought home during a short stint as a vegan: resigned, done even dreaming of rescue.
“Me too,” Ji Sun said.
“Oh my God, really?” Cat asked, and the wide hope in her eyes, the sudden change from what had just been so bleak, was all the reason Ji Sun would ever need to do what she did next, which was not to stop Cat in her misunderstanding.
“No wonder. I didn’t get why you were so intense about this. I should have guessed,” Cat said.
Of course Cat would think Ji Sun meant that she was also harassed by Walker! Why else would Ji Sun be weeping? She couldn’t correct Cat now, tell her that she only meant to say that she, too, had a crush.
“It’s okay. It’s not your fault,” Cat said. “I’m telling you, you can’t blame yourself.”
But Ji Sun did. For not seeing what so many insisted was there, for finding instead not only what she wanted to, but exactly what Walker was selling.
So Ji Sun crossed a line, and she joined Cat on the other side.
Chapter 17
Everything was on fire. The war was on and so was the case against Walker. Lainey could still feel the tingle of the coffee burn on the back of her hand a month later, when the president declared war by announcing war had already begun. A week earlier, the US had tested something they called the “mother of all bombs” at an Air Force base in Florida.
Lainey was embarrassed by how she’d reacted when Ji Sun told her what she knew about Walker. But it was too much! She’d wondered if it were possible that Ji Sun’s friends were lying, and then, when Ji Sun assured her that they weren’t, Lainey had asked if maybe they weren’t overreacting now, to whatever had transpired between them.
“Excuse me, transpired between them?” Ji Sun made a face that Lainey had never before seen, at least not pointed in her direction. “Is this coming from the same
person who practically tackled the counterprotestors at Take Back the Night? The same young feminist who taught me the word vagina comes from sheath for a sword?”
Lainey’s face burned red; she couldn’t speak.
“What will it take for you to see him for what he is?” Ji Sun said. She didn’t need to raise her voice for Lainey to feel like it was the only sound in the world.
Lainey and Ji Sun hadn’t spoken for three days after that, a standoff that Alice worried was going to send Margaret over the edge.
“You guys, you have to get over this. It’s not worth it! He’s not worth it!” Margaret said. “Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? You’re fighting over a guy, you know. You’re such hypocrites!”
Margaret had never called them names, and when she said this now, in their room on an evening when Lainey was about to head out the door and Ji Sun had just come in, both Lainey and Ji Sun were stunned by its truth.
“You’re right,” Lainey said. She put down her bag. “I’m so sorry, Ji Sun,” she said, and explained that this was the hardest apology she’d ever had to make because she was still so ashamed at how she’d acted when Ji Sun told her what she’d learned, and she still wanted to think that Walker was better than that.
“It’s hard for me,” Lainey said, “to accept that someone I admire so much, someone I like basically worship is just this . . .” There was no right word. “Asshole! Just this giant asshole.”
They laughed then, and hugged, and Margaret cried with relief and Alice went to her room to find the binder of notes she’d kept from Walker’s class. “Let’s burn it,” she said, and climbed up on the window seat to try to disable the smoke detector.
Lainey got her copy of Walker’s book, American Algorithm: How Silicon Valley Scions Are Reshaping the New Global Capitalisms, signed special for her with a funny little drawing inside. She’d planned to X-Acto out the title page and frame the drawing and inscription, it meant so much. Now she spat on the cartoon and dragged her finger across the ink, which didn’t smear. The page darkened beneath her finger, but the tiny cartoon Walker had drawn, his arm holding a protest placard that squared around his own name, stayed smiling. She spat again and rubbed at the page with her finger until the paper rolled away into grubby bits under her nail. “I’m burning this, too,” she said, and threw the book to the floor. “Burn this asshole to the ground.”
Even the best man, their favorite one, was garbage. Protests were little more than farmers markets without the produce, and America was turning Iraq to ash. Everything decent could be undone, and they couldn’t stop anything, save anyone. So when Ji Sun mentioned, crouched in the parking lot where they’d taken their pyre so as not to get in trouble, in the glow of their small fire, that she may have inadvertently suggested to Cat that she, too, had been harassed by Walker, Lainey felt the click and spark of possibility, the power of a plan.
By now she knew how rich Ji Sun was, though the source of her family’s money was still something of a mystery. The most enduring rumor was that her father had invented a kind of sealant used in nonstick pans around the world, but Ji Sun’s friends knew that it was her mother’s family that was truly, dangerously rich, the money from her father’s innovations and real estate investments a convenient decoy, flashy and newsworthy.
Lainey only knew how rich because she’d stumbled on a trust statement last semester, written the number in her planner, and later, at the airport on winter break, asked for the exchange, asked a second time because she couldn’t believe it, and then asked at another counter in the same airport because she’d been so sure it couldn’t be true.
“It’s just . . . not the kind of number you associate with money,” Lainey had told Alice in January, when they returned from break.
“We can’t, like, treat her differently,” Alice said.
“Why would we? We already knew she was superrich.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Alice shook her head. “Oof!”
“It was tucked in a book! Open on the window seat. It wasn’t like it was hiding away. You would have done the same thing,” Lainey said. “Wouldn’t you have?”
Alice was silent for a moment. “Should we tell Margaret?” she asked.
“No,” Lainey said. “I feel bad enough for nosing, and now for telling you. But I had to tell someone!” Lainey had been gratified to see how stunned Alice was to learn the number. Alice was wealthy, too, but that her pale eyebrows still hadn’t returned to their usual spot told Lainey that she’d been right that Ji Sun’s affluence was in another league. “I mean, I wanted to tell you. But I feel like if we tell Margaret it’s more like this big secret we’re all keeping from Ji Sun, and it gets weird.”
“Yeah,” Alice said. “I get that. Plus, Margaret does have a tendency to blurt out secrets she’s meant to keep.” Alice touched her knee, looked at the floor.
“She promised, Alice,” Lainey said.
To have friends that could read her mind, even if it was just decoding her expressions after enough time spent together, felt to Alice like actual magic—that Lainey could look at her and know what she feared, know just what to say.
“I know, I know. It’s just weird, you know? After so long keeping something a secret, to have people know. I . . . I trust all of you, but sometimes I remember that you know and I wonder what you must think of me.” Alice kept her head low, but looked up, cautiously met Lainey’s gaze.
“I think you’re amazing, Alice. I think you’re smart and kind and good. You can be all those things even if you did . . . a bad thing. You are all those things.” Lainey could reassure with such magnanimity because she had not yet made a mistake for which it was impossible to truly forgive herself.
Lainey wanted to explain to her that she credited Alice with helping Lainey understand that people were not bad or good, and that they could do a terrible thing and still be a good person. This is what you were meant to learn at a liberal arts college, Lainey was pretty sure, but she had learned it better from Alice, from what Alice had done. But she couldn’t figure out a way to explain this to Alice without acknowledging that there was a time when, upon learning what Alice did, she would have moved her friend into the “bad person” column, and that if someone else did what Alice had done, someone Lainey didn’t know so well, maybe she would not be able to move them out of that column. But now they were teaching one another that these columns were not so neat, that few people lived their lives on just one side of that line. In the girls’ bathroom in Loeb Hall, where Walker taught, someone had scrawled Walker is a PREDATOR inside the stall that Lainey used most often. In Walker’s seminar, they had learned how they were both victims and perpetrators of capitalism, and when Lainey saw the word PREDATOR like this, tall as a fresh pencil, she’d had to fight the urge to get out her own Sharpie and try to start a conversation. But even if she agreed that everyone was both predator and prey in some way, what could possibly prey on Walker? Wasn’t he at the top? He had everything he wanted and still it wasn’t enough. He wanted something—someone—that didn’t want him. He’d told them that they weren’t any better than America’s CEOs just because they didn’t see the faces, or recognize the humanity, of the people they harmed indirectly via their late-capitalist splendor: closets stuffed with cheap clothes made by children, chocolate bars in their backpacks made from beans picked by slaves. But Walker did see the faces of the people he hurt. And he liked it, did it again. This was an uglier kind of power; Lainey didn’t care what Walker said. She wasn’t taking his word for it, for anything, anymore.
“You should join the complaint,” Lainey said now, as they huddled close together, black tendrils of burned paper floating up from the pavement. Lainey rubbed her hands together and blew on her knuckles. “If Cat already thinks, you know, that it happened to you, you should join for real. Add your name.” Her eyes met Ji Sun’s and she could feel the shift of a needle into a groove, sense the satisfaction
of having put something in action.
Ji Sun was still a little miffed with Lainey, and now by how quickly she’d gone from Walker holdout to pushing Ji Sun to take him down. But more than irritation, she felt profound relief that their silence had ended, that the four of them were together again. She had thought of what Lainey was proposing, of course, and when Cat asked if she would add her name to the formal complaint, she’d said she needed to think about it.
She’d thought of little else. If Walker saw her across a table, if it came to that—and wouldn’t it? Didn’t this kind of thing always play out across conference tables, institutions such as this doing everything in their power not to be named in a lawsuit, not to have their dark secrets see the light of any rooms outside their own? But if Walker saw her across this table, sitting beside three young women that he did kiss, or fondle, or fuck, he would look at her and gasp. He would know, know that she was lying, but not have anything to say about it because in so saying he would be admitting guilt, that he had chosen these three students to prey upon and exploit, but not this one. Just imagining this made her hate Walker even more, for how it made her feel at this imaginary conference table to burn with shame not at having falsely accused him, but at how he hadn’t chosen her to try to harm, how this, too, did hurt her in some perverse way.
Her parents, another such institution, would also do whatever it took to avoid making the news. They outsourced their scandals to her father’s siblings, and now their children, too, enabling Ji Sun’s cousins with a combination of vast resources, little work, and no incentive to clean up their acts. This kept Ji Sun’s mother’s family clear of much scrutiny. But if Ji Sun were named in a sexual harassment suit against a famous tech founder at her American college, it would bring some trifecta of public shame: that she was a sexual person, that she dared to speak up against a man in an authority position, and that she was damaged goods. Besides which, Walker hadn’t sent her any untoward emails; he hadn’t pressured her to touch his penis; he hadn’t shut the door to his office behind her and then picked up her hand, put it on his own knee, waited.
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