Whistleblower, p.23
Whistleblower, page 23
Nick took a breath, shot me one last withering glare so the whole class knew he wouldn’t tolerate being interrupted, and resumed the lecture. I briefly considered turning on my heel and leaving. It wasn’t too late to drop a class. I could take the incomplete. Drop out of college entirely. Change my name.
Become Carla’s assistant and tour the drag circuit.
“Laurel,” I thought I heard someone whisper.
Like a pair of magnets, my gaze snapped together with Bodie’s. He was sitting in the third row from the back. My row. The seat on the aisle was occupied by his backpack. He’d saved it for me. I could’ve cried with relief, but I was a little too focused on not tripping over my own feet as I darted down the aisle. Bodie lifted his backpack half a second before I threw myself into the seat. I tugged on the swivel desk with a tad too much enthusiasm, and it snapped into place with a loud thunk that caused a few heads to turn again.
What specific brand of asshole called out his students in a one hundred–person lecture? Honestly. Four years of tuition at Garland was enough to buy a starter home in most states.
You’d think Nick could respect that my being late to class came at a far greater cost to me than to him.
It wasn’t until I leaned back in my seat and exhaled a shaky breath that I noticed the paper coffee cup that’d appeared on my desk. Across the side, scribbled in black marker, was buddy.
(I guessed, statistically speaking, there had to be at least one barista in Garland, California, who didn’t follow football.)
“Is this for me?” I whispered.
Bodie shrugged. “Figure you need it more than I do.”
“Guess I owe you my firstborn now, huh?”
Bodie cleared his throat. I realized, belatedly, that this saying held significantly more sexual connotation when uttered while the dual projector screens up at the front of the room read
Unit Seven: Fertility, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. I had a jarring flashback to Friday night, when our mouths had been on each other’s, and promptly choked on my first sip of hot coffee.
“That paint party the Art House does is coming up, right?” Bodie said, guiding us into a new topic of conversation like a pro.
Fuck. I’d forgotten about Pollock. I needed to find my white shorts—the ones I’d picked up at Goodwill freshman year exclusively for the one paint party I attended annually—and make sure they still fit. I’d been hitting the tacos a little too hard this semester.
“Yeah, it’s two weeks from Friday,” I said in answer to Bodie’s question. “I need to get my hands on a white T-shirt. I like your sweater, by the way.”
I wasn’t just trying to flatter him. Bodie looked nice in sweaters. But, predictably, the compliment made his cheeks go pink.
“Are you going to go?”
“Of course,” I said. “Are—are you going? Because Hanna and I are throwing a pregame at ours, so you—you and Andre, could, like, walk over together?”
Bodie’s smile made warmth bloom in my chest.
“I’d like that,” he said.
“Cool,” I said.
“Cool,” Bodie parroted.
And then I took another gulp of coffee, because I really needed something to keep another dumb word from coming out of my mouth. I wasn’t supposed to be inviting him to things. Not ethical.
Nick announced it was time for the first group presentation of the day. On the other side of the aisle, Andre and three significantly shorter girls stood from their seats and started down to the stage. The girls had index cards in hand. Andre carried a reusable Target tote he’d borrowed (stolen) from my collection.
“Do you know what Shepherd’s presenting on?” Bodie whispered.
“Yeah,” I replied absentmindedly. “They’re doing—”
Oh god.
The first slide of a PowerPoint entitled The History of Sex Toys appeared across the screen. Dildos. They’re presenting on dildos. I clutched Bodie’s coffee cup in my hands and sank low in my seat, wondering if it was too late to pack up my things and take a nice five-point deduction from my already-abysmal attendance grade.
“Today,” said one of Andre’s group members, “we’re going to be walking you through a brief history of sex toys.”
Beside me, Bodie started bouncing his knee.
—
Purgatory ended with the final PowerPoint slide—a tastefully done black-and-white illustration of the world’s first vibrator, originally used in a nineteenth century Paris hospital on hysterical women, whose wombs tended to wander about their bodies like lost Disneyland tourists searching for the entrance to Indiana Jones Adventure.
Just kidding. They were women with perfectly normal sexual frustrations, anxieties, and premenstrual symptoms.
Men just didn’t know shit.
“We hope this is a very happy ending to the presentation,” one of Andre’s group members quipped boldly.
Giggles and chortles swept through the crowd.
I was pretty sure I hadn’t taken a breath during the last half an hour.
Beside me, Bodie was still as a rock.
Another of the three girls in Andre’s group grabbed the mic and held up a baseball hat full of shreds of paper.
“We wanted to thank everyone in this class who answered the survey we sent out,” she said. “As a token of our appreciation, we put the email addresses of everyone who responded in this hat, and we’re going to draw three lucky names to win some prizes!”
I was suddenly very relieved that I hadn’t bothered taking that survey, despite the initial guilt I’d felt when Andre kept asking me about it, because it meant that my name wasn’t even in the running.
The first prize was a tiny purple bullet vibrator.
They had to draw four different email addresses before a boy on the other side of the lecture hall—to the amusement of his friends—jogged down to claim his prize. He held it aloft like baby Simba over the animal kingdom.
His friends absolutely lost it.
The second prize was even worse—an enormous cheetah-print dildo, seemingly too large to be in any way practical.
Despite the wave of laughter that rolled through the lecture hall, I saw people sink down in their chairs and fidget nervously.
A girl in the fourth row whooped with celebration when her email was read out.
The third and final raffle prize came in a hot-pink box.
“This,” proclaimed one of Andre’s group members, “is the Casanova V4.”
She read the specs like she was auctioning off a luxury sports car. Ten speeds. Waterproof silicone casing. Smooth ride. I glanced at Bodie out of the corner of my eye. I wish I hadn’t.
I’d never seen him so red-faced.
“Aight, let’s do it,” Andre said, rubbing his hands together.
He pinched his eyes shut and reached into the hat. He pulled out a single slip of paper, unfolded it, and then looked up into the crowd. His eyes fell on me, and I knew, with striking clarity, that Andre was about to pull a bitch move.
“Lcates@garland.edu?” he called out.
He furrowed his eyebrows like he’d never heard this email address in his life, which I knew was bullshit, because he’d sent me several papers for a quick proofread over the years.
And now this. Betrayal.
Beside me, Bodie ducked his head. His shoulders shook with laughter. I slumped lower in my seat. I was not about to stand up and claim a vibrator in front of a lecture hall full of people. I’d had enough public humiliation for one day. Any more and I risked the complete dismantlement of my precarious self-confidence.
“Do we got an L. Cates here today?” Andre repeated.
He was holding back a smile. I was going to throttle him.
My mind was so busy imagining all the ways I could get back at him, I didn’t put up enough of a fight when Bodie reached out, suddenly, and caught my wrist.
“No, wait—”
Too late. He held my arm aloft, his grip unyielding even when I wriggled.
“She’s here!” Bodie called.
Andre started up the aisle, his grin a mile wide.
People turned in their seats, craning their necks to see the girl who’d won Cosmopolitan’s top vibrator of the year.
“No, no, no,” I chanted, still fighting to free my hand.
Andre arrived at our row and dropped to one knee, bestowing me with the boxed vibrator in a sweeping gesture.
“Enjoy,” he told me, and had the nerve to wink.
People laughed. He’s not that funny, I wanted to yell. But Andre was already jogging back down to the stage. I glared at the back of his fade and thought about chucking something at him.
I looked down at the box in my hands.
Across the side, in atrocious cursive, was The Casanova V4.
Ten speeds! it proclaimed.
Somebody please end my suffering, I thought.
Bodie suppressed a snort. He’d leaned over to inspect the box in my hands. I lurched forward to shove it into my backpack, out of sight, and turned to glower at Bodie for his role in my well-orchestrated humiliation.
He smiled and held out his hand like he wanted me to shake it.
“Congratulations,” he said. “I’m so happy for y—”
I bit back a smile, without much success.
“Eat shit, St. James,” I grumbled.
Bodie laughed again.
His hand was still reached out toward me. I smacked it away with the back of mine, but he caught my fingers in his and held them, just for a moment, before he let my hand drop.
—
After class, I noticed I had a voice mail from Ellison Michaels. I’d missed her call by four minutes. The message she’d left was cursory and ominous, in true Ellison fashion: “Cates. Text me when you get this. There’s someone in my office right now I think you want to meet.”
Her name was Sarah.
She was twenty-six and a Garland University alumna. An economics major. Uselessly good at Ping-Pong, frustratingly bad at all forms of creative expression. Two dogs. A nine-month-old son and a wife at home watching him. Sarah lived in Michigan now, and she did not watch football. Not anymore.
Seven years ago she’d been an athletics department intern getting paid minimum wage to work at a charity event when Truman Vaughn had grabbed her ass. A few days later she’d submitted a tip to the Daily. She hadn’t known what else to do. But nobody had answered her. And now she was sitting in Ellison Michaels’s office, hands braced around a ceramic mug of chamomile tea, dark eyes tracing over the student events posters tacked up on the walls with a bittersweet blend of pride and nostalgia.
“You’re Laurel,” she said when I arrived, breathing heavy because I’d jogged from class.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s me.”
I apologized for the delay. Sarah assured me she didn’t mind.
“I was a little shaken when you emailed me,” she told Mehri, steeling herself with a sip of tea. “I’m sorry I didn’t come out here sooner. I was going to lie to my wife and say it was some kind of alumni thing, but—” She shrugged helplessly. “I had to tell her. I tell her everything.”
Except for this. She’d held on to this for seven years. Kept it tucked away, so it wouldn’t bother anyone she loved. So it wouldn’t hurt them the way it hurt her.
“Thank you,” Mehri told her. “Thank you so much.”
Sarah nodded.
“I want to help,” she said. “Whatever you need . . .”
“Is whatever you’re comfortable giving,” Mehri finished.
Sarah’s face scrunched up. I plucked the tissue box off Ellison’s file cabinet and passed it to her without a word.
“My memory isn’t great,” said Sarah, fingers shaking as she fumbled for a tissue with one hand so she could keep hold of her mug. “I don’t know if I can get all the details right.
I know—” She inhaled, and it caught in her chest, but she pushed on. “I know the event was on a Saturday, and I think it was March, but I—I can’t remember who they were honoring—a water polo coach? I don’t—”
Sarah’s voice broke off with another tight inhale.
Mehri leaned forward so she was eye to eye with her.
“Sarah,” she said, “nobody expects you to remember everything.”
“But isn’t that how this goes?” Sarah asked, breathing faster now. “They put you up on the stand and they ask where you were and when and why and what shade of lipstick you had on and what color shirt the guy was wearing and—and if you say I don’t know then they—they—and it’s not even a big deal. He just—he grabbed my ass! And maybe his fingers were— I don’t know—wedged in—and maybe he ground himself against me, and I felt—” Sarah’s face shuttered, so quickly I could’ve blinked and missed it. When she continued, I had the strangest sense that she was telling us exactly what she’d told herself for seven years: “But I feel like that’s nothing. There are women out there who get assaulted, you know?”
“What he did is assault,” Ellison said. “And if it’s a big deal to you, it’s a big deal. Period.”
Sarah set her mug down on the desk so she could blow her nose properly.
“I thought nobody read the tips,” she admitted after wiping the first nostril. “I thought I was just, I don’t know”—she paused to tackle the other—“shouting into the void.”
Ellison waited until Sarah had finished wiping her nose to say, “If you don’t want to come forward publicly, you don’t have to. But know you aren’t alone. Not in any part of this.”
Sarah looked from Ellison to Mehri to me and back again.
Then she took a shaky breath and tossed her clump of used tissues in Ellison’s trash can.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Ellison nodded.
“Sarah, if you’re ready, Mehri can formally interview you right now. Cates, come with me. I need more caffeine if we’re going to get this article done in the next five days.”
—
Ellison Michaels had the keys, codes, and all required credentials to get us into the media center after hours. We’d decided, as a team of three, that putting our article in print meant the Daily’s faculty advisor would have a chance to catch it and warn Vaughn and everyone at his foundation.
At midnight on a Monday we went to the media center to post our article—detailing our anonymous whistleblower’s evidence of embezzlement within the Vaughn Foundation, the Real Housewives’ firsthand accounts of Vaughn’s weeklong partying binge, and the testimony of Sarah. A face popped into my head—thundercloud eyes, a boyish smile, hair stubbornly rumpled. I hoped that when Bodie St. James woke up in the morning he would see just how important his words had been. How many people he’d helped.
“Ladies,” Mehri said. “We’re live.”
I sent Hanna the link first. She texted back immediately.
I’m opening the Fireball come get drunk with me after u post it u journalistic powerhouse we r popping bottles tonight!!!
Then I sent the link to Josefina Rodriguez.
Remember, I captioned it, you’re not alone.
Chapter 23
I’d always been warned that Garland was a dry place, and that just one ember was enough to spark a wildfire capable of destroying everything in its path. You had to stomp them out quick if you wanted to stop the whole state from going up in flames.
“Laurel. Laurel. Answer your phone.”
Hazily, I became aware of Hanna’s pillow-muffled voice and the rumble of a phone vibrating on my bedside table. I slapped blindly at my nightstand until my fingers found the battered plastic of my phone case.
“Hello?” I croaked.
“Laurel,” Mehri said, her voice small and pinched. “They killed the website.”
I sat up and tried to scrub the sleep from my eyes. “What website?”
“The Daily’s. It’s gone.”
“Wait,” I said, my brain still working at half speed. “Our article got taken down?”
“Laurel,” she said lowly, “the whole site got taken down.”
—
I was halfway across the quad in front of the student union when a middle-aged white guy in charcoal slacks and a neatly pressed button-down shirt stood from where he’d been perched on the ledge around the fountain and called my name.
“Excuse me, Miss Cates?”
I ducked my head and tried to pretend I hadn’t heard him, but he was quick. Just before I made it to the doors of the student union, he launched himself in front of me, blocking my path with one outstretched arm. In his other hand was a cell phone. It took me a moment to realize why the angle he was holding it at looked so awkward. He was recording me.
“Sorry,” I rasped, my voice betraying my panic at the intrusion. “I’ve really got to get to—”
“Adam Whittaker for Badger Sports,” the man interrupted me. “I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about the Vaughn profile.”
Ellison had prepped me for this kind of thing. She’d given me some long statement packed with legal jargon and told me to recite it—verbatim—if anyone tried to ambush me with an interview.
What came out was, “Lawyer. I get a lawyer. It’s the rule.”
“This won’t take long,” Whittaker continued, unfazed by the fact that I sounded like a child playing a board game.
“Did you or anyone at the Daily receive money from another university to sabotage Garland’s team?”
“We didn’t—” I began, then remembered I wasn’t supposed to engage and huffed in annoyance. “If you’ll excuse me, I really need to—”
I tried to sidestep Whittaker. He mirrored my movements, blocking the doors.
“Who made the executive call to weaponize the Me Too movement?” he asked. “Was it you, or your editor in chief?”
One of the glass double doors behind Whittaker flew open. Ellison Michaels appeared as if the fact he’d spoken her title was enough to summon her from thin air. Her platinum-blond hair was slicked back into a tight French braid, and her glare was cold as ice.
“This is private property,” Ellison said, so quietly and calmly that a prickle of unease rolled down my spine. “If I see you harassing my writers again, I’m calling the police.”
