Helpless

Chapter 58

Prospect Park was once a weed-infested lot of broken bottles, crumpled beer cans, and cigarette butts. It was just down the road from Lindsey’s house, but all the years she could have played there (before it became uncool to play), the park was essentially unusable. Apart from all the litter, the playground itself was in shambles. The swings were broken. The slide could cut your leg if you hugged too close to the right going down. There were relics of a zip line, which the town selectmen had ordered taken down after some kid broke his arm. The only apparatus that wasn’t broken, rusted, or falling apart was the tire bridge, and that was never much fun to play on.

Some years earlier, a group of concerned parents, Lindsey’s mother among them, had rallied the town for funds to clean up Prospect Park. Bake sales were followed by a town appropriations vote, and the park had been reborn.

The park’s renaissance, however, came too late for Lindsey to enjoy the benefits fully. Yet even though she was well beyond the monkey-bar years, she still liked coming here. Her quick jaunts to Prospect Park began around the time of her parents’ divorce.

She sat awhile on the wide hard-plastic swing just to think. Over time, what had been an occasional desire had turned into something of a habit. She’d come to the park whenever she needed an escape, which, sadly, was more and more often. That was why she came here mostly at night—when the little kids were all in bed, and her mother was passed out on the sofa with half a bottle of Chardonnay. At least her mother’s drinking problem made it easy for Lindsey to sneak unnoticed out of the house.

Normal parents would know if their kid had walked out the front door at midnight. But getting her mother’s attention would require Lindsey to scream in the poor woman’s ear. Come morning, Lindsey doubted her mother would even remember the conversation. When Lindsey slipped on her light blue cotton jacket and slipped out the front door minutes before the grandfather clock chimed twelve, she did so without leaving a note as to her whereabouts. She’d be home in an hour.

The moon was just a sliver in the sky, and it was late enough that even the crickets, normally deafening, seemed to have retired for the night. Lindsey rocked herself backward and forward, pumping her legs just enough to keep her momentum, but not so much that the swing hinges creaked out her presence. She wanted only Tanner Farnsworth to know that she was there, and judging by her cell phone’s clock, the boy who had betrayed her trust wouldn’t show for another ten minutes. That is, if he dared to come at all.

Lindsey let her thoughts drift back to the events that preceded this planned rendezvous. It had all begun with a frantic phone call from Jill.

“Slow down, Jill,” Lindsey had to shout into her phone. “I can’t understand you.”

But once Lindsey finally grasped what Jill had been saying, she couldn’t believe what she heard. Their plan had been simply to figure out whether Mitchell was involved in the computer attacks. But in a single sentence, the life that Lindsey believed couldn’t get worse had done just that.

“Mitchell had what on his computer?”

“Your pictures,” Jill said. “The ones you told me you sent to Tanner. And that’s not all. He had pictures of me, too, and a bunch of other girls as well.”

“Oh my God.”

They went back and forth for a few minutes, with Lindsey punctuating each new revelation with another “Oh. My. God.”

“You’ve got to promise, swear to me, Lindsey, that you’re not going to do anything about this. I didn’t even tell my dad.”

“Your dad came and rescued you. Don’t you think you can trust him?”

“Yeah, a lot more now,” Jill agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I want him to know that I passed out at a party, or that somebody took pictures of me with my clothes off. You can’t tell anyone I told you this. Mitchell swore to me that he’d put my pictures everywhere if you did. Yours, too. I mean, we’ll be totally destroyed.”

“We went after one thing and found another.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jill.

“The police found child porn on your dad’s computers. But this isn’t the same thing. Mitchell can’t be the one who framed him.”

“That doesn’t mean I want my dad to know about these pictures!” Jill cried.

Lindsey tried to calm her crying friend, but it wasn’t easy to do over the phone. Eventually, Jill managed to calm herself.

“We can’t just let this go,” Lindsey said. “How many other girls’ pictures did Mitchell have?”

“A bunch,” Jill said. “Like I said, I didn’t look long. I copied them, though. I still have the storage key. When Mitchell found me looking, I swear I thought I was going to die. I can’t tell you how freaked out I was.”

“Okay. Let me think about it. We’ll figure out what to do. I’ll call you back soon.”

Lindsey didn’t call back. She biked over to Jill’s house and text messaged her friend to meet her in the backyard and bring the flash drive. Jill snuck downstairs without her father noticing and met Lindsey outside.

“Why do you want this?” Jill had asked.

“I just need to check it out for myself,” Lindsey had said. “I’ll give it back to you tomorrow. And don’t worry. I won’t do anything stupid.”

“Text me after you look at them,” Jill said.

“I will.”

Lindsey never did text Jill. She rode home and looked at those pictures. Jill had tried to call her every ten minutes since, it seemed. Sent a bunch of texts, too. But Lindsey couldn’t talk to her friend until after she did what had to be done.

Tanner gave Mitchell the pictures that she’d sent to him. That was all Lindsey could think about. Did Tanner do this to other girls? He’d certainly had enough girlfriends. Maybe he’d done it to some, if not all. But Jill had said there were lots of girls and lots of pictures.

Lindsey didn’t care about the other girls. There was only one possible route her pictures could have traveled to get to Mitchell Boyd’s computer.

Tanner Farnsworth.

Lindsey didn’t even know she had a temper until Tanner Farnsworth answered her call. She didn’t cry once during their twenty-minute conversation. Her voice never lacked confidence. She liked standing up for herself. Powerful when enraged. Combative when wronged. Perhaps one day she’d be a lawyer, as her father often predicted.

“You tell Mitchell Boyd that the only life that’s going to be ruined is his! You tell him to leave Jill alone!” she shouted into the phone.

“Lindsey, you sound hysterical,” Tanner said.

“I swear, I’m so done with people picking on me. I don’t care if you plaster my picture on every Web site in the world. Go ahead! But I’m bringing you down with me. Do you hear me, Tanner? I have the images. Jill copied them, and I have them.”

That outburst met only silence.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tanner said.

“Oh, that’s bullshit, and you know it. You can do better than that, Tanner,” Lindsey said.

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll call that FBI lady and get her to arrest you.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Tanner protested. “You’re acting all hysterical, and I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lin. I never sent your pictures to anybody. I swear.”

“Then figure out how Mitchell Boyd got my pictures, because if you don’t come back with something that makes sense, you know where this goes from here.” Lindsey hung up without giving Tanner a chance to respond. For months she had been studying for the SAT; the word virile came to mind when she reflected on how surprisingly strong she’d sounded. Jill didn’t have to worry about Mitchell Boyd’s threats anymore, she assured herself. Tanner would make certain of that.

Lindsey texted Jill that everything was cool, and Jill quickly replied with an all-cap THANK YOU. They agreed to talk in the morning.

Lindsey knew Jill had understood “cool” to mean that she wouldn’t say or do anything about Mitchell Boyd. She felt bad for being deceitful, but hadn’t Jill been through enough?

Tanner called Lindsey a few hours later.

“I know what happened,” he said. “Mitchell took the pictures off my phone without my knowing. Can we meet?”

“Why?”

“Because I love you and I want to fix things between us.”

Lindsey closed her eyes tight and tried to wish away what he’d just said, but couldn’t. I love you.

“Okay. Where?”

“The park by your house. Two hours. You’ve got to bring the pictures. I’ll bring my laptop. I’ll show you how Mitchell was able to steal them.”

“Mom, I’m going out,” Lindsey said on her way out the door, knowing her mother was passed out on the sofa. Her mother’s drunken snores completed Lindsey’s private joke.

Lindsey continued to swing. She checked the time on her cell phone. Tanner was late. Maybe he’d bailed. She wasn’t about to call, begging him to come. Forget that. She thought about Mitchell Boyd getting off to pictures of her and Jill, and it churned her stomach.

Whatever Tanner’s explanation was would have to wait. She wasn’t going to stick around to hear it. She felt angry at herself for even agreeing to meet him.

“I love you,” she said aloud, mocking the words’ now apparent stupidity.

Lindsey was about to leave when she heard rustling in the bushes behind her. Her heart leapt into her throat. She remembered a path to the park through the woods, which Tanner must have taken.

She looked toward the road and didn’t see any headlights. Tanner must have parked on the dead-end street and used the back path to get to her. Maybe he was trying to sneak up and scare her. He’s too stupid to even do that right, she thought.

She leapt off the swing and spun around in the direction of the noise.

“Very funny, Tanner. Don’t be a jerk.”

The bushes concealing the path parted, but nobody emerged from the dark.

“Tanner, don’t be an ass,” Lindsey said. “I know it’s just you trying to scare me. It’s not going to work.”

Lindsey took a tentative step onto the path. She didn’t cry out when someone stepped out from the bushes and onto the path. She’d been expecting it. A tingle of panic ran through her when she realized it wasn’t Tanner standing in front of her. Her panic quickly escalated as the shadowy figure lunged at her, and grew into terror when she felt hands wrap around her neck.

She didn’t know she was going to die. Not then, anyway. That came soon enough, when she realized that despite the humid night, her attacker wore leather gloves. He felt around her legs and pulled the flash drive from the front pocket of her jeans. She felt his hands squeeze tighter around her neck.

Lindsey closed her eyes. She wanted this to be a nightmare. She wanted to wake up. At that moment, what she wanted most of all was her mother.