The Fixes (8 page)

74.

Well, shit.

(
Yes!
Eric's mind is screaming.
Yes, of course I'm with you. Wherever you want me to go, I'm going
.)

But he's also thinking:
Gaahhhhh.

(Connelly Men don't trash office buildings.)

(Connelly Men don't do vigilante justice, or whatever it is that Jordan and Haley and Paige—excuse me, the
Suicide Pack
—think they're doing.)

(Connelly Men don't get wound up in insane schemes that will land them in jail. They just don't.)

Jordan watches Eric, supremely calm. “Tick-tock. A security guard's bound to show up eventually. And we need to run the Fix before he gets here.”

He shrugs. “But it's totally up to you. You can go back to your mindless data entry and your bullshit problem sets and your Student of the Year plaque if that's what you want.”

(
No. No, it's not what I want.
)

“Or you can trust me, trust
us
, and have the most amazing, most meaningful summer of your life. Which do you want more?”

Paige and Haley are gone now. The whole night seems to be holding its breath, waiting on Eric's next move.

“What if I say no?” Eric asks.

“If you say no?” Jordan shrugs. “We get in my car, and I
drop you off at your mom's Mercedes and you never have to speak to any of us again. The end.”

Eric says nothing. Can't calm his thoughts long enough to form a coherent answer.

“It's your choice, dude,” Jordan says. “But you'd better choose something quick, or I'm going inside and you can fend for yourself.” He winks at Eric. “I have a good lawyer. Do you?”

(
Gah.
)

Eric's thinking he wants to go with Jordan. He's thinking he'd follow Jordan off a freaking bridge, probably.

But it's not just Jordan. Shit, this town is messed up. It's
wrong
that the rich people get to ignore the laws. And it's not like Eric's going to be in any position to change anything for, like, another ten years.

This is worthwhile, even if it's crazy.

(
But
.)

“You can live a long life like a hypocrite, or die young with integrity,” Jordan replies. “Which is it going to be, E?”

Eric hesitates.

(A little longer, just to build the tension.)

Then he sighs.

“I can't do this with you guys,” he says. “I'm sorry.”

75.

The ride down the mountain is silent. Eric keeps glancing across the car at Jordan, keeps wanting to tell Jordan he's sorry, wanting to explain himself. But he knows Jordan doesn't want an explanation. And he sure as hell doesn't want an apology, either.

Jordan wants someone who's brave enough to take risks. Break rules. And Eric isn't really a rule breaker.

Jordan pulls into the parking lot outside Hockley, Hart & Brent. Stops the BMW beside Eric's mom's G-Wagen, the only car left in the lot. Eric sits there a moment, but there's nothing to say.

He reaches for the door handle.

“So I guess that's it, then,” he says, stepping out of the car. “I'm sorry I, like, let you down.”

Jordan's face is expressionless. “Hey, you gotta do you, right?” He leans across the car and pulls the passenger door closed. Finishes the conversation through the open window.

“I'm just saying, though, you seem to think pretty highly of your dad's concept of integrity,” he tells Eric. “But everybody has secrets, E. Nobody's
that
pure.”

He shifts the car into gear.

“Anyway, I gotta get back to the girls. The Pack sticks together; you understand.”

And before Eric can answer, Jordan's peeling out of the lot, the BMW's engine roaring as it disappears into the night.

KIK -- CAPILANO HIGH PRIVATE MESSAGE GROUP – 07/07/16 – 08:15 AM

USERNAME: SuIcIdEpAcK

MESSAGE: Magazines are soooo 20th century.

76.

CAPILANO POLICE STYMIED IN
BEAUTY QUEEN
BREAK-IN.

Two paragraphs on page A6 the next morning. Everything vague; no details. Police called to the outskirts of town to investigate a break-in at the
Beauty Queen
offices, arrived too late to identify the perpetrators.

A detective named Dawson is quoted. “It seems like a case of simple vandalism; the building was trashed, but according to the employees we talked to, nothing appears to have been stolen.”

Still, the detective says, the PD's actively investigating. He encourages Cap citizens to keep their eyes open.

77.

“Feeling better, Mr. Connelly?”

Ann doesn't bother to hide the sarcasm in her voice. She watches Eric walk through the office toward her desk, her features pinched and mean.

Eric ignores her. Keeps his head down all the way to the doorway to his little room. To the piles of paperwork waiting to be manually entered into the shitty old desktop inside.

“One more absence like that and I'll have to tell your father,” Ann calls after him. “We don't tolerate slackers here, and he knows it.”

Eric shuts the door. Surveys his little cell. Sighs and sits down and gets back to work.

Integrity is a real bitch sometimes.

78.

Truth is, Eric
isn't
feeling better. He lay awake half the night thinking about Jordan. About Haley and Paige.

About the events of the evening.

Yeah, it was scary when Haley broke into that building. It was freaking
terrifying.
Eric knows he was gambling with his entire future just by being there, and he's mostly not sorry he bailed.

But still, the fact remains that it was the most exciting thing he's done in, like, years.

It doesn't help when Eric watches the video. SuIcIdEpAcK has the Vine on Kik by lunchtime, a close-up on a stack of
Beauty Queen
covers, then the footage Jordan shot of the Pack's destructive efforts.

And the destruction is total: we're talking wrecked computers, shredded files, furniture ruined. Even those artfully airbrushed cover posters are torn off the walls and kicked through their frames. (One with a bit more gusto than the rest, truth be told.) The place looks like a tornado hit. And then there's the Suicide Pack logo and some crazy girl laughing.

(It sounds a little like Haley, but, like, if she was on helium.)

Reaction from the members of the Capilano High message group on Kik is overwhelmingly positive.

Eff that magazine. It's trash anyway.

Kind of liked the mag but this is hilarious TBH.

[A long string of LOLs and one hundred emojis.]

Got off lucky compared to Callum. LOL.

SMH. SMDH.

The message board is anonymous. Everybody's an avatar, a username, and that's it, and anyway, nobody from outside Cap High can access the group. It's easy to stay hidden.

Still, Jordan isn't taking any chances, Eric sees.
Loving it
, ThaINfamous writes.
So fkn dope.

Eric closes the app. Tries to pretend like he doesn't care. Like he doesn't miss Jordan and the others already.

79.

Jordan doesn't text Eric. Jordan doesn't Kik. Jordan leaves Eric alone to think about the
Beauty Queen
fiasco, about the Suicide Pack.

To hear Jordan's parting words resonate in his mind.

Everybody has secrets.

Think about it.

80.

Eric thinks about it. Then Eric does more than think. He locks himself in his bedroom one night after dinner, runs a Bing—

(just kidding)

—Google search on his laptop for Senator Donovan Connelly. Gets, like, twenty million hits in 0.19 seconds.

It's all bullshit. There are news releases from his dad's campaign office. There's a profile on Huffington Post, a bunch of glowing reports about Eric's dad's pet causes—

(the environment and, like, immigration reform).

Eric even pops up in one or two articles, evidence of his dad's devotion to family—

(yeah, right)

—but there's nothing big and secret and awful, no crazy revelations, and Eric wonders if Jordan actually knows anything, if he has dirt on Eric's dad or if he was just being a troll.

So Eric refines his search. Delves deeper into the weirder corners of the internet, the conspiracy theories and the crazy fanatics. He's still on his laptop when he should be doing statistics problem sets to get ready for freshman year, stays up past his bedtime.

And then, as Eric's eyelids are drooping and his iPhone's
reading five hours until he has to wake up for work, Eric finds what he's pretty sure Jordan was talking about. And it wakes Eric up like he's mainlining Red Bull.

81.

Somehow, Eric has landed on a right-wing political blog written by some far-out fanatic.

(Not the most reputable source of information, but still.)

Whoever the author is, he seems to have a big hate-on for Senator Connelly. There's plenty of dirt.

There are posts about how Eric's dad financed his reelection by taking secret donations from Big Oil, even when he campaigned on the environmental vote.

There are posts about how Eric's dad supposedly had an affair with his campaign office manager, a pretty woman in her twenties named Maggie Swenson.

And then there's the big one.

HATE CRIME COVER-UP!

This is the story that rocks Eric's world.

HATE CRIME COVER-UP!

What is it about rich liberals that makes them believe money—and connections—can wash away all of their sins? Maybe the fact that it's true?

First Ted Kennedy, now Donovan Connelly. The lefty state senator has campaigned hard for the environment and immigration reform, even as his political career is propped up by Big Oil. [See attached link.]

What we've stumbled across now, though, blows any hint of Connelly's other hypocrisies right out of the water. The Daily American has learned that Donovan Connelly, while a junior at Stanford University, was arrested with two fraternity brothers for his role in the beating of a homosexual man in San Francisco's Mission District. The fraternity brothers went to jail; Connelly was bailed out by his rich liberal father, pled out by his rich liberal lawyer, and saw his sentence suspended and his record expunged. Any record of Connelly's arrest was later ordered sealed by the governor himself.

The Daily American was contacted by one of those frat brothers, who declined to give his name.

“Connelly's lawyer showed up to the courthouse with a couple big checks,” the source told TDA. “Made us sign confidentiality agreements if we wanted to keep the money. Said they'd sue for every nickel we had if word ever got out. So we kept our mouths shut, went to jail, did six months or so each. Had a big pile of hush money waiting when we got out.”

The victim of Connelly's hate crime, whom our source described as “flamboyant but harmless,” has long since
disappeared, though our source was certain he'd been paid off, to boot.

“I heard his street name was ‘Roger Dodger,'” our source tells us. “He got that big check and took off for the better life. I never saw or heard of him again.”

82.

JG:
Did you ask him about it?

Eric texts Jordan the next day. Ships him the link to the HATE CRIME article. Asks him if this was what he was talking about.

Asks him how he knew.

I didn't know,
Jordan writes back.
But I suspected. Every politician is shady. And your dad didn't exactly strike me as a choirboy.

So how do I get the truth?
Eric asks Jordan.
Everything's sealed and, like, locked away. And this is the only site with the story.

A convicted felon against a state senator,
Jordan writes back.
A RICH state senator, too. I can see why the mainstream news wouldn't touch it.

EC:
Either that or it's phony.

JG:
Did you ask him about it?

EC:
Not yet.

There's a long pause. Eric drums his hands on the desk in his little office. Watches the ellipsis as Jordan types.

JG:
You should ask him.

JG:
Tell me what he says.

83.

Eric doesn't get a chance to ask his dad, not right away. Not before the fund-raiser, anyway.

84.

Eric's dad is guest of honor at some big environmentalists' gala downtown. Tickets cost a thousand dollars a plate, all to hear Senator Donovan Connelly talk about hybrid cars and solar panels and, like, protecting the wetlands. Eric's mom has a suit laid out on Eric's bed when he comes home from his internship.

“Aw, no,” Eric groans. “Don't tell me we have to go too.”

“Your father wants us beside him,” Eric's mom replies. “It's important that we show our support.”

“You mean he wants props. He wants people to see his nice, well-adjusted family.”

Eric's mom clucks her tongue. “He's proud of you, Eric,” she says. “He thinks it'll be good for you to see what
you
can do, if you keep following your path.”

85.

So Eric goes to the gala. He gets dressed up in his suit and rides downtown in the backseat of the Chrysler 300 his dad hardly uses—

(he has a GMC Yukon, with a driver).

Eric sits in the crowd with his mother and eats overcooked pasta and listens to an army of environmentalists talk about how wonderful his dad is.

Midway through the dessert course, Eric feels his phone buzzing. He checks his pocket. It's Jordan.

You ask him yet?

Eric's mom taps his shoulder. Motions to the front of the stage. It's Eric's dad's turn to speak.

AN ABRIDGED TEXT OF SENATOR DONOVAN CONNELLY'S SPEECH TO THE SIERRA CLUB

By Eric Connelly

[Applause]

Donovan Connelly: Thanks very much. Thank you so much. Please—no, thank you. Thank you very much. I—you're too much, really.

[Insert unfunny warm-up joke here; the crowd roars with laughter.]

DC: You know, I've always felt a kinship with the environment. Blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah my father, who blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah stewardship. That's why blah blah, I am proud to blah blah blah . . .

[This continues for several minutes; Eric tunes out. He's thinking about that blog he found. About Big Oil. Maggie Swenson. About Roger Dodger.]

DC: . . . blah blah blah, blah blah. But I won't ramble on too much longer—

[Thank god.]

DC: But before I leave you to your dessert and this delicious wine, I want to recognize my beautiful wife, Marla Connelly, and my son, Eric, who is already setting the course to follow in my footsteps and who I know will serve his country, when the time comes, with integrity, discipline, and honor.

[All eyes in the room turn to Eric. It's a sea of adoring faces.]

[Eric blushes and looks down at his plate.]

DC: . . . blah blah blah, good night!

[Standing ovation for, like, twenty minutes.]