She did a quick tour of Fritz’s room, gratified to see things reasonably tidy. The bed had been made, and while the covers were lumpy and off-kilter, she appreciated the attempt. She’d learned long ago that if you wanted a job done, you couldn’t then turn around and criticize the outcome if it wasn’t quite up to your standards. Fritz had picked up his dirty clothes and jammed them in the hamper. The trash hadn’t been emptied, but at least all the trash was in the can and that was an improvement over the usual chaos. The shades were drawn and the room smelled of adolescent male, a musky unpleasant scent of oil glands and sweat.
She set her half-finished wineglass on the bed table and straightened the spread. The desk was littered with books which she was tempted to reshelve, but she didn’t want to tip her hand. Fritz didn’t need to know she’d cruised through in his absence. In the VCR, she spotted a video cassette with a hand-lettered label that read “A Day in the Life of . . .” She smiled to herself because she had a fairly good idea what this was. For his birthday in March, she and Hollis had bought him what he called an “awesome” sound system, as well as a television set and a video cassette player, the latter apparently providing the inspiration for the four boys—Fritz, Bayard, Austin, and Troy—to make a documentary. Many meetings ensued and it amused her to listen to the tenor of their negotiations. They had adopted and discarded half a dozen ideas, but they’d finally settled on a topic they were very secretive about. She had been curious, but she’d curbed her natural tendency to probe. She assumed they’d need a script, but one of the other three must have been in charge of the writing. It certainly wasn’t Fritz, whose grades in English languished in the C to C+ range. Whatever the subject, they’d taken the project seriously, working into the wee hours the weekend before.
Fritz told her Bayard was editing the footage, using some kind of computer software that allowed him to monkey with the tape. He’d worked on it for two days and finally dropped it off the night before. Troy had come over for supper and afterward, he and Fritz had been closeted in his room with their heads together, laughing away like crazy. She’d tried to jolly them into giving her a preview, but Fritz said the film still needed work.
This, then, was their project in its current state. She checked the cassette window, noting that the tape hadn’t been rewound. She’d have given anything to have a peek, but did she dare? She hesitated, glancing at her watch. 5:22. Troy’s mother had dropped the boys at their tennis lesson and Lauren had agreed to pick them up at six. The country club was less than ten minutes away so she had a good thirty minutes before she had to leave. The remote control device was on the cart. She picked it up and turned on the set, then pushed the tape all the way into the slot. It took her a minute to figure out how to switch from cable reception to the VCR. She pushed Rewind and waited while the machine whirred and finally clicked to a stop. She knew she was being nosy, but she couldn’t help herself.
She pushed Play, keeping half an ear tuned in case Hollis came home early. He disapproved of her prying into Fritz’s business, but she didn’t like the distance puberty had created between them. She understood that a boychick had to separate from his mother in order to develop into a man. Fritz needed male role models and male bonding. Where she’d been close to her son right up until middle school, Hollis was the one whose company and counsel he now sought. Her instincts and impulses were 180 degrees out of phase and nothing she said seemed to carry any weight. Hollis was, at the same time, the tougher disciplinarian and the more laissez-faire in his concerns. He thought their job was to stand back and let Fritz make his own decisions. Hollis felt the only way Fritz was going to learn anything was to take risks, make mistakes, and suffer the consequences. She thought their job was to keep watch over the process and step in if he was headed down the wrong road. If Fritz veered into dangerous territory, it was their responsibility to correct him before the effect of his choices blew back on him. He was a minor. They were liable if his decisions turned out to be poor ones.
Lauren perched on the desk chair, already smiling again in anticipation, wondering what sort of half-baked drama the boys had cooked up. The first images that appeared she recognized as the rec room in the Rademakers’ basement. The camera did a slow pan from the stairs, across the pool table, to the wet bar where Troy and Fritz sat in conversation, dressed in bathing trunks. They were drinking beer, or what appeared to be beer, judging from the many bottles lined up to the left and right of them. They’d apparently been in the swimming pool because she could see Fritz’s hair was curling with dampness. Troy, a year older than Fritz, was muscular, his chest covered in a fine mat of red hair and freckles where Fritz’s chest was hairless and narrow. He and Troy started horsing around in the clumsy way of drunks. Their laughter was shrill and it was clear they were more tickled with themselves than they had any reason to be. The sound quality was poor and there didn’t seem to be any coherent dialogue. As she watched, Fritz rolled and lit a joint, taking a deep hit before he passed it over to his friend. Were they seriously smoking dope on film or was the whole scene staged for “documentary” purposes?
The camerawork was shaky. “Handheld” it was called, a technique used to make a film look like authentic found footage. Maybe the boys were making a horror flick. That seemed to be the level of sophistication they were operating from. She half expected a mummy or a zombie to appear, walking stiff-legged into the frame. There was commotion to the right and someone else appeared—a girl wrapped in a bath towel. This wasn’t anyone Lauren recognized. If she was a student at Climping Academy, she wasn’t a junior or senior because Lauren knew all the kids in both classes. The girl’s feet were bare and her wet hair was plastered against her head as though she’d just gotten out of the swimming pool as well. She reached for a beer bottle and chugged it, clutching the towel to her chest. She seemed to be as goofily drunk as the boys, which made Lauren uncomfortable even if the three were mugging for effect. Fritz poured her a tall glass of gin and she chugged half of it down. The two boys began urging her to strip. She did a halfhearted bump-and-grind and when Troy reached for the towel, she backed away from him, holding on for dear life. She was doubled over with laughter, shrieking, “Troy, get away!” As the scene continued, the girl stumbled and nearly fell, but the horseplay was good-natured and she didn’t seem upset.
The film stopped abruptly and then took up again. The girl was now on her back, naked and sprawled on the sofa. She lifted herself on her elbows, perhaps intending to speak, but she was apparently not sufficiently coherent. Her movements were clumsy and she seemed to be having trouble focusing her eyes. She was well-developed for someone who looked so young. Her breasts were generous and her pubic hair was a dark bush highlighted vividly against her pale skin. Laughing, she tried again, addressing someone across the room.
“Hey, handsome. Gimme a hand. I need help.”
“Who, me?” The voice was one Lauren had heard before but couldn’t quite identify.