The closer you look, the more you see.
Every now and then, a group wanders by the corner of the couch that Randy is filming. They shout or point or laugh.
Dooney. Then Deacon. Then Greg. Then Dooney again. Reggie laughing.
Randy shouting.
Will gasps.
I glance at him as he watches the guys paw at Stacey, climbing on and off her. Her head flops toward the camera, her eyes roll back in their sockets. Every now and then she grunts or groans. As Will watches, his face, set like stone only moments ago, is crumbling—first the contraction of disbelief, then the crinkle of discomfort, the wide smooth planes of shock, and now the heaviness of disgust.
“No more,” he whispers. He reaches up to pause the playback only a few moments past the place where Lindsey and I called it quits.
For the second time in a week, I grab his arm, stopping his wrist over the keyboard. I push his chin back toward the screen.
“No. We have to watch, Will.” My voice chokes with tears, and I see his eyes, shining and full in the glow of the laptop.
“We have to look,” I say. “We have to see what happened, so we can tell the truth about it. Stacey can barely remember. We have to help her. Not being able to say no isn’t the same as saying yes.” I look back at the screen as the video continues. “She didn’t deserve this.”
Will nods. He swipes at his eyes. “Nobody does,” he whispers. “Nobody deserves this.”
I ask him who he recognizes. I can’t make out for sure who everybody is. We point at different people, trying to identify everyone we can see as the video ends. A split second before the playback freezes, a guy steps in front of the camera. He’s facing away from the lens, watching Greg and Dooney, who are still taking turns on top of Stacey. The guy stands under one of the recessed lights so close to Randy that you can’t see anything but the back of his head. The iPhone tries to refocus, going completely blurry, then zeroing in on the closest point beneath the light.
The thing nearest to the camera happens to be this guy’s left ear, glowing under the halogen bulb directly over his head. He’s so tall, I can see he’s ducking a little to avoid scraping the low basement ceiling, and as the focus snaps sharp I see something else, too: an inch-long scar that I’d recognize anywhere.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
forty
THIS VIDEO DOESN’T show you everything.
For instance, you never see the face of the young man who has the scar behind his ear. You never hear his voice. You don’t know how long he’s been standing there, watching what is happening on the couch, or what he says after the camera is turned off. You don’t know if he’s walking downstairs to say good-bye and stumbling upon the scene at that moment, or if he’s been there the entire time, looking on behind Randy, a silent witness.
This video can’t show you the face of the young woman who knows that scar because she inflicted it. You can’t hear the strangled cry that escapes my lips. There’s no shot of me crumbling to the floor of Will’s bedroom or of Will racing to get my mom. He does his best to explain to her about the video, but he doesn’t notice the scar on the screen. Neither does Mom. Neither of them look closely enough to see more, and I cannot find the words to tell them.
No footage exists of me crying myself to sleep that night or of the tears that begin to flow again when I wake in the gray light of Saturday. I know I can’t return to Des Moines for the championship game, and Mom is so concerned about me she decides we will all stay home. Will watches the Buccaneers lose by six points on television and comes to my room to tell me the news. He finds me holding a piece of coral from my nightstand, desperate to go back to that day in September when Ben was only a childhood memory in my mind and a wish in my heart.
This video can’t explain to you how I cursed myself for falling in love. It could never show how much easier it would’ve been to simply keep nodding at Ben as we passed in the halls. It would’ve been easier to never have known the warmth of his love—the taste of his lips on mine, his body tangled up in my own—than to know all of those things, and then see him in the final frame on this screen.
The video doesn’t show you the texts I get that afternoon from Ben as he rides home on the bus from Des Moines. It can’t reveal all of the promises that are swept away today, or the hope that is buried once more beneath layers of lies, lost in the sediment of deceit.
In that sense, this video doesn’t really show you anything at all.
It does show you that my boyfriend was present in the room while his friends assaulted a girl he could’ve helped, but chose not to.
And in that sense, this video shows you everything you need to know.
forty-one