Richard

“Greg,” I called out, my hands out to the sides in a gesture that I wasn’t going to hurt him—not right away, anyway.

“I—” he stammered, taking a step away from me, his hands going up above his head. “I didn’t!”

“You didn’t what?” I began, but before I knew it, he was taking off in the opposite direction heading right for Jessica. I started to head after him, my footfalls slapping against the concrete like drumbeats. I knew that I could catch him, in fact he’d hardly gone ten feet before I was halfway to him. But just as I was about to take him down I noticed he’d already started to topple over.

I stopped just in time to watch Greg fall into the low bushes that lined the sidewalk, my stepsister standing over him. She turned her gaze toward me, a smile half-cocked on her face as she gave me a shrug.

“What’d you do?” I asked as I took another few steps closer, closing the distance between the three of us while Greg recovered himself from the tangling grasp of the shrubs.

“Me?” she asked, eyebrows raised and her hands raised in a show of mock surrender. “I didn’t touch him. He just turned around and saw me running toward him and panicked. I didn’t have to lay a hand on him—he sort of just did it himself.”

“You startled me!” Greg said, trying to defend himself as he got to his feet.

I shook my head before grabbing Greg by the front of his witty T-shirt, pulling him up nice and close to my face. I could practically smell the fear on him, his face dripping with sweat as I stared right into his eyes, my jaw set. I even threw in a growl for good measure.

“Why did you take the pictures for Michael?” I asked, drawing myself up over him as much as I could, trying to seem more intimidating. I’d been the bully during my last few years of middle school the anger of my mother’s death finding its way out onto others before I found football. I knew how to make guys like Greg wet themselves.

“I’m sorry!” he said, throwing his arms over his face to save himself from whatever punishment he imagined that I would give him. “They said they’d pay me to get the pictures. I’m barely able to afford to go here as it is! I figured that it wouldn’t do much harm. Getting a picture of some guy and his girlfriend doing it? I figured Michael was just being a pervert.”

“He didn’t tell you why he needed them?” I asked, almost lifting him off the ground. I hoped to god no one came around the corner and saw this, or this whole thing would have been for nothing.

“No!” he exclaimed, turning his face away from me in fear.

He was just a stooge, I thought, shoving him away from me hard. Greg didn’t know what Michael wanted the pictures for or even that Jessica and I were step-siblings. That, probably among other things, meant that Greg had no clue how Michael was storing the pictures or where any copies were.

“And what about Becky?” Jessica asked, her voice quivering with anger. Before I could stop her, I heard the sound of her hand meeting Greg’s face. “Did it make sense when you threw her to those bastards? When you let her get raped in the bedroom at some frat-house?”

Once again Greg was on the defensive, his arms raised over his head as Jessica swung her bag at him. Her face was red with anger as she forced him right back into the bushes. I’d never seen her so mad in my life, all the fury of seeing what Michael and his friend had done to Becky, of what Greg had let them do to her, it all poured out of her at once in a violent torrent of rage.

“You let them violate my best friend! You son of a bitch!” she cried out, forcing Greg onto the ground with another swing of her bag. “You lead her right to them, and they chewed her up and spit her out like she was garbage!”

“I didn’t know what they were going to do!” he whimpered, curling up into a ball on the concrete. “I swear to God, I didn’t know they were going to touch Becky!”

Jessica stopped, her chest rising and falling rapidly, her face still red. It was taking everything that she had to keep from swinging that bag again. I knew I’d have to step in if my stepsister couldn’t control herself, but would I want to?

“They told me that they’d give me the money at the party,” he continued after the assault had abated, lowering his guard so that he could look up at Jessica. “When I handed Michael the pictures, I noticed that something was wrong. Becky wasn’t acting right; she looked drowsy and confused. And when I asked them for the money, they just laughed.

“Michael’s guys pulled Becky off the couch and told me that they were going to show her a good time,” Greg’s eyes started to well up with tears. “I tried so hard to get them to stop. I tried to bring her back. I ended up getting my ass kicked and thrown out of the house.”

“Why didn’t you call the cops?” I asked, my brow furrowed.

“I did!” he shouted, his own anger rising in his voice. “And by the time they got there, the party was over. And besides, half the cops on campus were in AEO. They’d never have done anything to their brothers.”

Jessica took a step back, her hands covering her mouth as she dropped her bag to the ground. She turned her eyes toward me and I watched them begin to fill with tears. I knew that look, that hopeless frustration. She and I knew exactly what the other was thinking—if the campus police were on Michael’s side, then we were going to need some damn hard evidence if we even wanted to think about getting justice for Becky.

“You’re going to help us get those pictures back, Greg,” I said, glaring down at him. “Jessica and I aren’t about to let Michael get away with this, or with what he did to Becky.”

“You don’t understand,” he whimpered, looking up at me in fear. “They’ll kill me. If they find out that I’m helping you, then I’m a dead man! No, I won’t do it!”

Before I could move to grab him, Greg was scrambling away between me and Jess, sprinting down the sidewalk at breakneck speeds. I started to run after him, but the feeling of Jessica’s hand on my chest kept me from giving chase.

“Let him go,” she whispered, her eyes still downcast. “We’ll just have to find another way.”

_ SEVENTEEN _

Jessica

“I don’t know what we’re going to do, Becky.”

The two of us sat in our dorm room, each occupying our respective beds. Both of us had at this point resigned ourselves to skipping class that day, especially after the disastrous encounter that Richard and I had had with Greg only a few days before. And while my stepbrother had football practice to keep him occupied all I had was time to myself to stew and think on how utterly screwed the two of us were.

“Can’t you talk to the cops?” she asked, sitting cross legged across from me. “Michael’s blackmailing you, and last time I checked, that was a crime.”

“All they’d have is our word,” I sighed, “and besides, Greg said that almost half the campus police force were brothers at AEO. Even if we did report it, word would just get back to Michael and they’d cover everything up. I wouldn’t even put it past him to set us up for something we didn’t even do just for revenge.”

“Isn’t that what the pictures are supposed to be for?” she asked.

“No, I think he wants to hold those over our heads, make us squirm until he needs something or just wants to royally fuck with us.”

Becky shook her head, almost as distressed about the situation as I was. It was bad enough what Michael had done to her already, now he was ruining the lives of others as well. It had been almost a week since Becky had gone to class, which, despite everything, had still allowed her to do her coursework from the comfort of her bed, safe from the stares and rumors of the other students—and there were definitely rumors flying when it came to the events of that night at the party, spread in no small part by the brothers of AEO.

“I still can’t believe that Greg would have just run like that,” Becky said, leaning back on her elbows. “I mean, he’s not the bravest guy on campus, but I’d think that maybe he’d try to fix his mistakes.”

“Sometimes we really don’t know people as well

as we thought that we did,” I said. “Even people you might think are nice and sweet can be cruel on the inside.”

“You’re starting to sound like me now,” she remarked, a sad frown on her lips. “I’m sorry about all of this, Jessica.”

I wish sorry could fix it, I lamented, running my fingers through my hair.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve all of this,” I said, my gaze drawn up toward the slowly revolving ceiling fan. “Like, did I insult a gypsy? What does a person have to do to make them deserve people like Michael inflicted on them?”

“I wish it were that simple,” she sighed. “Sometimes I almost wish that it had been a punishment for something I’d done—at least then it would seem like there was a reason. But that’s just it, there isn’t a reason that it happened to us. There was no grand design that put all of this into place. Sometimes bad things just happen, and whether we deserve it or not we have to deal with them.”