Whistleblower, page 26
I scoffed out a laugh and rubbed hard at the back of my neck.
Unbelievable. He’d chosen landing a TV interview over being a decent human being.
“How generous of him,” I drawled bitterly. “And good for you—”
“Do you remember what you said to me right after the article came out?” Bodie interrupted, lightning in his thundercloud eyes. “That day I sat next to you in class and asked you why you wrote it. Do you remember?”
“Not—not verbatim. Why? What—”
“You told me you had to do the right thing.”
Bodie was half blocking me and the drink cart shaded my face, but I could’ve sworn Truman Vaughn was staring straight across the putting green at me. My spine prickled with nerves.
“Can you just make your point?” I asked.
“My point,” Bodie said, “is that I believe you.”
A hot breeze whistled through the trees along the cart path and out over the fairway, lifting strands of my hair and rippling the thin fabric of Bodie’s shirt. I stared hard at him—at his open, honest face—and felt the simmering anger in the pit of my stomach come to a rolling boil.
“You don’t get to have me and Vaughn,” I snapped. “It’s one or the other. Staying out of things and not picking sides means you’re just standing out of the way and letting the big guy stomp all over the little guy. If people like you”—I jabbed a finger into his sternum—“don’t pick a side, then what you’re really doing is siding with the big guy.”
“I don’t want to be a pawn,” Bodie said.
I winced. “When I quoted you, it—you’re not an investment to me.”
He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was selfish of me. You’re a journalist. You weren’t trying to get information out of me so you could fuck me over. You were trying to figure out the facts because it was the right thing to do. I know that. And you were right.”
I stared up at him. At his angular, boyish face and thundercloud eyes and that big, charming freckle on his right cheek and his bruised, swollen nose.
“So you think he’s guilty?”
I had to ask. Brutal as the question was, I needed the answer.
I could tell, from the agony in Bodie’s eyes, that he did.
He knew Vaughn had created a fake consulting firm, and he knew Vaughn had said enough sexist bullshit in the locker room that fondling the ass of a student worker wasn’t entirely out of left field for his character.
“I choose you,” Bodie said. “I choose the Daily.”
When I spoke again, my voice was low and my eyes were wet.
“Don’t say that if you don’t mean it, Bodie. And don’t say that if you’re just going to back down again when shit gets ugly. Because it’s not just sexist jokes in the locker room, and it’s not just moving money around for tax breaks. It’s grabbing the ass of a nineteen-year-old girl who was serving him at a school event.” My breath caught in my chest. “It’s—fuck, Bodie. It’s luring drunk girls onto his boat to have sex with them while they can’t consent and telling everyone it was a charity trip. So—so don’t say you’re on my side if you don’t mean it.”
I’d meant to tell Bodie about Josefina somewhere private, where we could talk things out and he could process things at his own pace. But there was no privacy here—just wide, open expanses of green. There was nowhere for Bodie to hide. I saw everything written across his face as he registered what I’d said, connected the dots, and came to the conclusion.
“Wait,” he rasped.
Then he pressed his lips shut, turned his back on me abruptly, walked forward three steps, and bent over at the waist to heave up his breakfast onto the grass.
“Fuck,” I said, hopping out of the cart. “I didn’t mean to tell you like this. Do you need a towel? Some water? I won’t charge you, obviously—”
Bodie waved me off.
“I just—I need a minute,” he croaked.
“Bodie!” Vaughn called. He and Sterling were coming across the green toward us, startled and clearly dismayed to find the strongest link in their team doubled over and tinted green in the face.
“I’m fine,” Bodie said, standing to his full height and shuffling to one side in a way I belatedly realized was meant to conceal me.
But it was too late. Truman Vaughn had already seen me, and those hawkish eyes had narrowed.
“Laurel Cates.”
—
Whatever cooling effects Bodie’s bottle of water had provided were grossly overshadowed by the shot of ice that rolled down my spine when I found Rebecca waiting on the back steps of the clubhouse, her expression eerily blank. She came down to meet me as I pulled the cart up.
“Laurel, can we chat for a second?”
I left the cart keys in the ignition and followed her into the lobby, where we were alone except for the potted ferns rustling in the air conditioning. The midafternoon sun poured in through the glass doors, bouncing off the freshly waxed tile floor and blinding me.
“What’s up?” I croaked, dusting off my khaki shorts.
Rebecca watched bits of grass land on her impeccably clean floors for a moment before she cleared her throat.
“Actually, let’s do this outside.”
My stomach twisted with unease as we slipped through the glass doors together. The front steps of the clubhouse were shaded but the hot breeze was suffocating.
“We’ve had a client complain about you, Laurel.”
“Who complained?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
“That’s confidential information. But there was a com-plaint, and it was quite serious. I don’t want any troublemakers on my staff—”
Once, when I was fifteen and my dad was first teaching me how to drive, I’d lost control of the wheel just before a sharp turn. We’d been in an empty parking lot and I’d been going about five miles an hour, but in that split second of untrained panic, my body had clammed up and my foot had come down on the gas pedal instead of the brake.
I quit, I thought.
We’d hit the curb so hard my dad had shouted.
I quit, I quit, I quit.
Why wasn’t my mouth opening?
“—so I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
My overheated brain was lagging. It was the only explanation for how long it took me to open my mouth and respond.
“And come back next weekend?”
I wasn’t delusional. I’d just never been fired before. I wasn’t exactly a shining example of unwavering work ethic, but I’d never made any major mistakes. I’d always straddled the line between model employee and the co-worker you complained about in the break room every day. I’d always been comfortably in the middle. But that didn’t matter, because Rebecca was the kind of woman who didn’t like other women.
Not ones who wore makeup. Not ones who spoke languages other than English. Certainly not ones who dared to speak out against men. Somewhere along the way, someone had told Rebecca that only one kind of woman was a good woman, and she’d believed it.
“I’m sorry, Laurel,” she said.
But she wasn’t. I saw straight through her.
Rebecca had made the decision to get rid of me a long time ago. Maybe the day the article had broken, maybe the day she’d overheard me speaking Spanish with the groundskeepers.
Today had been the perfect storm she’d been waiting for—PJ, my biggest ally, was out sick, and Truman Vaughn, my worst adversary, was there to serve as witness.
The fatigue was gone. In its place came the flood of fury.
My hands shook as I tore across the parking lot. I was so desperate to get the hell out of there I almost forgot to give my car the extra two seconds she needed to switch her locks off.
When I tugged the driver’s-side door shut, I made sure to let it slam.
I imagined myself revving my engine, or rolling down the windows and turning the radio to a Spanish music station and just blasting it. I thought about flipping her off too. Maybe with both hands. Driver safety be damned, I could go out with my middle fingers in the air and my mouth shaping the words fuck you.
But when I drove around to the front of the clubhouse, Rebecca was gone.
In her place stood Bodie.
He was looking for me. I could tell because he had my half-empty water bottle in one hand, the other shielding his eyes from the sun as he peered across the parking lot. He turned when he heard my engine. I’d never wanted to be invisible in the literal sense as much as I did in that moment.
And I couldn’t stop. If I stopped, I’d break. So the last thing I saw before I floored it out of the Garland Country Club parking lot was Bodie St. James in my rearview mirror. Between the shadowy bruises under his eyes and the horror-stricken expression, he looked like a Halloween lawn decoration. His face haunted me the whole way home.
Chapter 25
Since my pride had already been smashed to pieces, I figured there was no use hiding my car in the garage across the street from the Palazzo anymore. I drove straight home and parked in our building’s lot. Between the blast of my car’s air conditioning and the shock of my confrontation with Rebecca, I felt cold and shivery. I dug my emergency cardigan out of my trunk, shaking sand off it and trying to remember when I’d last been to a beach.
I found Hanna sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, hunched over a large pad of newsprint and wielding a stick of conte charcoal with violent passion. She sat upright when she heard me come in and drop my bag to the floor.
“Hey,” she greeted me. “How was the tournament? I thought that was supposed to go all afternoon.”
I hummed noncommittally, because I didn’t trust myself to tell her I’d been fired without completely dissolving into tears.
Then I asked, “What’re you drawing?”
“Nike of Samothrace,” Hanna said, pushing a chunk of loose hair out of her eyes and smudging her forehead with charcoal in the process. “We’ve been practicing using sculpture as reference.”
I reached out and buffed the charcoal off her forehead with the sleeve of my cardigan.
“Sounds fancy.”
“It’s the opposite, actually,” she said. “The fine arts budget got cut again. We can’t afford any more live models this semester.”
I wish I could say I was surprised Garland University was prioritizing their athletics department and STEM majors over the arts, but which universities in the United States weren’t? Hanna’s parents loved her art. They did. But they were also terrified that, after graduation, she’d face the same uphill battle they’d faced after moving to the US—that she’d constantly feel like she was climbing upstream on a recently soaped Slip ’N Slide to pay her rent, put food on her table, and earn respect.
Once, very late at night and after a little bit of beer, Hanna had asked me if I thought she should transfer into a more useful major. I hadn’t known what to say. Because it wasn’t that having a fine arts degree was a kiss of socioeconomic death—last summer, Andre had done a graphic design internship at a high-profile marketing firm in Huntington Beach. It’d been unpaid, but his parents had covered the cost of an apartment and all his public transportation for two and a half months. I didn’t want to ask how much that bill had been. I doubted Andre even knew. Maybe he didn’t even think about it.
But Hanna and I did. We always did. Art wasn’t the problem—it was money. Always, always money.
“I got fired.”
The words spurted out and hung there, suspended, for a moment.
Hanna blinked in shock. “You what?”
“Rebecca fired me. I’m fired.”
I felt like a broken vase a guilty child had patched together with Elmer’s glue. Like I could sneeze and fall apart. But I managed to get the whole story out, from the reappearance of Bodie to Rebecca’s less-than-warm send-off, and then it felt so good to let someone in on my misery that I scratched my nose on the sleeve of my cardigan and sighed wearily.
“I need to show you something, Hanna.”
Together, we walked outside to the little lot tucked halfway under our building. I didn’t want her to see it. Each step was like trudging through knee-deep mud, but I knew I needed to show her—to let someone I loved shoulder this burden with me instead of trying to take it all on my own shoulders.
Because it wasn’t my fault. None of this was my fault. And I was tired of letting myself believe that I was somehow responsible for how horrible people had been to me.
Hanna’s sharp inhale was followed by a strangled cry of disbelief. For a long moment, we stared at my car in silence.
Hanna tugged the sleeve of her sweatshirt down over one hand, stepped forward, and rubbed tentatively on the tail of the L. I’d already tried this myself, but I didn’t bother telling her it wouldn’t buff out. I just appreciated the thought.
“When?” Hanna finally asked. “When did this happen?”
“The night you blacked out while I was at Target.
Somebody keyed it in the parking lot.”
“Did you see who?”
“No,” I said. “But I—I did see Kyle Fogarty before I went inside the store. And he saw me. So. It’s fine.”
“Please tell me you filed a police report.”
I nod. “They’ll get back to me eventually. I think. Maybe not. I’m sure they’ve got bigger fires to fight.”
Hanna turned to face me squarely. “You know this isn’t just bullying, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those girls dumping coffee on you. Your boss firing you.
This.” Hanna pressed a fingertip to the hood of my car for emphasis. “This is illegal. It’s harassment. It’s vandalism. It’s targeted crime—”
I laughed before I could stop myself.
“Nothing about this is funny,” Hanna cried, incredulous.
“I know! I know. It’s just—you made a pun.” At her blank stare, I added sheepishly: “Targeted crime. Get it? Because it happened in the Target parking lot.”
Hanna’s lips pressed into a flat, trembling line. I think she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or throttle me. But when she spoke again, she was calm.
“Get in,” she told me, nodding at the driver’s-side door.
“What?”
“Get in. We’re driving to Ralph’s and I’m buying you whatever wine you want. I’ve got my fake in my wallet. Let’s go.”
“Hanna. I’m not going out in public in my car again.
Everybody will see—”
“Everybody’s going to see that you were harassed,” she cut me off. “Everybody will see, and everybody will know that you don’t give a flying shit what they do to you.”
I’d had coffee dumped on me. I’d had my car vandalized.
I’d been fired.
“But I do give a shit,” I admitted.
And then my throat was tight, and the corners of my lips tugged back as I tried to hold back a sob I’d been stamping down for the last month. I buried my face in my hands and pinched my shoulders up to my ears, burrowing into my cardigan like a turtle hiding in its shell. Like maybe, if I squeezed every muscle in my body, I could hold it together.
I didn’t see Hanna come toward me but I felt her when she threw her arms around me and hugged me tight.
“I hate this,” I sobbed. “I hate this. I can’t do it.”
“You can,” Hanna whispered fiercely. “You are.”
I hated that Hanna was seeing me cry. I never liked crying in front of the people I loved—her, Andre, my parents—because I didn’t want them to be the sponges that mopped up my anxieties. I hated Truman Vaughn for all he’d caused. I hated Rebecca for firing me to impress a man. I hated Fogarty for what he’d done to the car my parents had worked so hard to buy me for my sixteenth birthday. But most of all, I hated the seed of regret growing in the pit of my stomach. I hated that I wanted to imagine what my junior year would’ve been if I’d never heard about Josefina Rodriguez. If I hadn’t known.
I just wanted things to be normal again. I understood why Bodie had hated when that had been taken from him now.
Horrible truths could eat you from the inside out, and you wouldn’t realize what’d gone wrong—couldn’t take action to stop it—until it was too late. But at least it wouldn’t hurt.
With all the courage I could muster, I drew back from Hanna and wiped my face with the sleeves of my cardigan.
“You good?” Hanna asked.
“No,” I said on a shaky exhale. “But can I maybe get a rain check on the free wine?”
—
For the second time in a row, I skipped Human Sexuality. I didn’t want to make a habit of it, but I also didn’t want my unemployment to hang over my head. I went to the coffee shops and fast food joints around campus first, to see if they needed waitresses or baristas or someone to mop floors at four o’clock in the morning, before opening. Panda Express had a sign in the front window proclaiming that they were hiring now, but the guy behind the counter wrote down my name and number and then smiled in a way that told me he didn’t plan on telling his manager that the girl who’d written the Vaughn article wanted to scoop orange chicken to pay her rent.
My next stop was the student union. There was a corkboard in the lobby where people tacked up posters and pamphlets for everything from job fairs to hip-hop ballet classes. I sighed and tore a strip of paper off the bottom of a flyer declaring proofreaders were needed. The wording of it was sketchy—I was pretty sure some freshman was just looking for someone they could pay fifty bucks to author a Writing 101 paper for them—but my standards were basement level at the moment.
I’d started to dream up strange business ideas, as desperately broke college students are prone to do. Worst-case scenario, I always had a spare kidney to auction off.
And that was kind of a joke, but also not, because what if I didn’t find another job? What if I was doomed to let the car my parents had bought me for my sixteenth birthday sit and rust?
I didn’t have the money to cover our insurance deductible—and I wasn’t even sure I could claim insurance, since I hadn’t heard anything back from the police about the report I’d filed and I was too chicken to call them. I didn’t want to cause any more trouble or draw any more attention to myself.
