Twisted Fate (24 page)

I started pulling albums out and looking at them. And after about fifteen minutes I found it. A DVD slipped out with the vinyl. It was marked with a simple
X
. Had to be it.

I took it and slid it into his DVD drive and waited.

If there is one thing in the world I regret having done in my life, it is this. If there is one thing I could go back and erase or if I could have made myself blind in the moments before the images came on, I would have. I gladly would have.

The footage was taken from the passenger side of a car going very, very fast. The sun is shining and you can hear laughter. The top is down. It’s obviously the Austin. The clouds look like they are flying by overhead and the trees are racing by at the side of the road.

“You make sure you’re getting this?” Graham’s voice asks.

And then another boy says, “Aw, hell yeah.”

“This is going to be our best movie,” Graham’s voice says again. “This is going to make you a star.”

The camera pans over and Graham grins into the lens.
He’s wearing dark sunglasses and his cheeks are flushed. He has his seat belt on and he’s wearing a helmet.

“This is the life,” the other kid says. The road is narrow and hilly and there are no traffic signs; they’re out in the country somewhere. In the distance you can see a bridge.

As the bridge seems to speed toward the camera you can hear the other kid yelling, first a whoop of triumph, and the perspective of the camera changes as if he is actually standing up in the convertible. Then he sits back down quickly. Laughing. Then, “Whoa whoa, Graham, slow down! Jesus, slow down! Sl—”

The screen went black. My heart was racing. He’d kept footage of the crash where he’d lost his best friend. The last moments his friend had shot. I felt sick and did feel a wave of compassion for him. It was sad and strange and so quick. I was about to turn it off but then the screen lit again and it was additional footage, a slow pan of the whole wrecked car and the sound of whoever was holding the camera breathing heavily. Making impressed and incredulous terrified noises. Laughing. Crying. Then the camera rounds to the passenger side and you can see someone is lying on the hood of the car. His head is bleeding his face is bleeding the windshield has shattered and broken in half at his middle and cut into his stomach and there is glass and blood everywhere. I felt like I was going to throw up. I had never seen anything so terrible. A blood-spattered hand reaches down to touch the boy’s head. And then he speaks and I was relieved! He was alive.

“Can you move?” Graham’s voice asks.

The boy, Eric, smashed and mangled beyond recognition, looking barely human, moans.

Graham touches him again.

“Call nine-one-one,” Eric gasps.

But the camera still focuses on his face. On his mouth which is full of blood. “Call nine-one-one,” he says, and blood pours from his mouth and his ear.

The camera’s perspective changes and you can see the boy’s face full-on—his eyes open but unseeing, and then there is a moment where he suddenly sees Graham.

“Call nine-one-one,” he says, his voice starting to rise in panic, his breath ragged as he begins to cry a little and then spits more blood onto the hood of the car. The camera stays focused on his face and the blood runs down the car and his face turns a white-gray and tears and blood run down his face. His eyes look into the camera pleading, then become vacant. After a few minutes his breathing becomes loud and labored, then his eyes go blank. It was the most horrible thing I had ever seen. The most terrible thing I can imagine anyone having to look at. That moment where his eyes became flat and empty.

But still the camera was running. There was nothing but the sound of the wind and some birds chirping. The boy’s, Eric’s, hair was partly matted with blood but the wind blew and tousled the part that wasn’t. Then the camera changed perspective, panned back—Graham must have walked away
a little and sat down—and you could see the whole front of the car and the dead boy on top of it. His broken body sliced by metal and glass and blood running everywhere.

You hear the scrape and click of a lighter being lit and you can hear Graham inhale, then exhale, then a cloud of gray smoke floats over the body of the boy. Graham was smoking. He was sitting beside the wreck with the camera trained on the last moments of his friend’s life, casually smoking.

I don’t know how long I sat there in his room. When I finally was aware of myself again, the front of my shirt was wet and I realized I had been crying. My hands were shaking. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was outside my body, watching myself from the other side of the room.

Then finally I took the DVD out of the computer, put it into my pocket, and put the album cover back where I found it.

I had no idea when it was shot, but I was going to take it to the police right away.

S
yd came home so broken up and freaked-out I had no idea what could have happened to her. I thought at first she had been raped, it was that bad. She was shaking and crying. She told me she was going to report Graham to the police.

“What did he do to you?” I asked, angry and worried, grabbing her by the shoulders and looking into her face.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing, it’s what he did to you, and this movie he made of Eric.”

“What movie?” I asked.

She went into our bathroom and threw up. I came in and held her hair back, then poured her a glass of water and sat on the side of the tub.

“Sis, what happened?”

“He has a movie of Eric dying,” she said, and her voice had no emotion in it at all. “And he has films of you naked
and talking about all kinds of things.”

I could see she was terribly upset, but I knew Graham did not have movies of me naked and I knew there was no way he would take a video of his best friend dying. As far as I knew, Eric was still alive and Graham and I would go visit him on a road trip probably this coming summer. What I did see though was my sister losing her mind and I wanted to help her.

“What did the films look like?”

“OH!” she said. “And he has films of me, wearing your clothes. And I never wore your clothes or went sailing with our parents.”

“He probably thought it was funny to make movies like that—just Photoshopped it.”

“They weren’t funny, they were creepy. They were all creepy.”

“Come here,” I said, and I put my arms around her. “Graham makes some weird movies and you might be upset about some of them, but I am sure they are either faked, like the ones of you, or just weird collage art. Think about it. You know Graham, you know how he is. Would he really do those things? I don’t think so. You need to relax.” She started crying. “Syd. Remember when you said we need to come together and be unified? We need to come together now. You need to relax. You need to take some of my optimism and see what has really happened instead of being stressed and hysterical about seeing some weird art.”

“I have the movie here,” she said, pulling it out of the pocket of her hoodie.

“Let me see it,” I said.

“No, Ally. It will ruin your life. I’m taking it to the cops right now.”

She looked determined and like that determination was the only thing that was keeping her going. But still. She might have something that could get Graham in trouble if it was taken out of context. “Give it to me, Syd!” I tried to grab it from her. “It’s not ours. You’ve stolen it from his room. You shouldn’t have been in his room.”

She burst into tears, and pulled the disk close to her body, kicked at me with her feet. I hadn’t ever seen her so upset—even when our parents would go away for whole days when we were little. I’d never seen her crying like that. “Get it through your head, Ally! He’s bad. He’s bad!” Her face was tear-streaked and swollen from crying. She looked desperate. There was nothing I could do. I had faith that she was wrong. I knew Graham wouldn’t do anything to hurt me or hurt his friends. She was hysterical and there was no way I could protect her anymore. If she went to the police I was sure they would come to the same conclusion and send her home. In the end I had to let her go.

“Okay,” I said. “Do what you have to do, sis. The police will decide if it’s a problem or not. I can see how upset you are. Do it and then come home and I’ll make you some hot cocoa. I’ll bake you some muffins.”

T
here was, of course, nothing we could do about the video he had. It was evidence from another crime, and he was apparently not using it for anything, just keeping it. The other videos she said he had we could never find, and sadly I think it was just something she made up so that there would be another reason to go after him.

We tried everything we could, called it a snuff film because that’s essentially what it was, and that was all we could do. But you would be amazed at how wealth can tie up a court or how psychiatric experts can be used to turn things you know are wrong into things that are considered therapeutic. That family circled the wagons like nothing I’d ever seen in my life. Privilege doesn’t begin to describe it. It was like we were nothing to them. They were some kind of royalty. The family’s lawyer reminded the DA here repeatedly about double jeopardy. I don’t know which was worse—them telling us that we’d victimized their son, or
knowing that the kid’s dad could just buy his freedom no matter what. And this came after everything that had happened to Brian.

We would sit around shaking our heads, wondering if this kid, Graham, was a sociopath, or if he was just the stupidest kid we’d ever come across. And then he would come in and be such a nice kid. I mean, polite, easygoing, incredibly relaxed, confident, focused. His parents clearly loved him and paid attention to him. He didn’t look like he was capable of any of these things. And it really did remind you of why there’s such a thing as juvenile detention—because kids don’t think the same way as adults—some kids may never develop adult morals or understanding, some kids get more selfish as they get older, but most don’t. Most people in Graham’s situation would look back on his life and shudder. Know that they had made a mistake and wonder how they could even have been that person. That’s the best you can hope for in a situation like that.

In the end the worst of it was how that girl got traumatized by seeing the video. I felt bad for her, I did. I can’t imagine watching it and sitting right there in his room and knowing he was your friend. And of course it’s bad having any kid learn the hard way that sometimes the justice system doesn’t work like you want it to. Let alone a kid like Phil Tate’s daughter. That girl did not listen to anyone and did not take no for an answer. She was a force. And after seeing that video, she was an unstoppable force.

I
felt like I was losing my mind. I went out and skated and skated and tried to get the images out of my head. I was so angry I thought I would burst. How could it be that I was the only one who saw how bad things were? I didn’t tell anyone but the police about Graham’s film. Of course I didn’t tell my parents who probably didn’t even notice I was upset at all. And when the police did nothing, I felt like my life was a puddle that was drying up. Everything seemed to get smaller and more terrifying.