Want to Go Private? (22 page)

My own eyes are dry.

They won’t even let me have my underpants back when it’s over. The nurse picks them up with tweezers and puts them in a plastic bag for “evidence.” They give me these stupid paper panties to put on. Mom says they’re the same kind they give you in the hospital after you have a baby. Oh, yeah, speaking of which, I have to take a pregnancy test, too. And get tested for sexually transmitted diseases. When I’m dressed (with my paper panties, which are really uncomfortable) the nurse talks to Mom and me about how in a few weeks time I should get tested for HIV. Just in case.

I pretend to sleep on the five-hour car ride home so I don’t have to talk to anyone. But I keep thinking about what Dad said. That Luke’s name isn’t really Luke.

“Are you Edmund J. Schmidt, of 282 Tudor Street, South Boston, Massachusetts
?”

Why didn’t Luke tell them the truth? Why didn’t he say no?

The foundations of my life are crumbling and I’m about to be buried under the wreckage. My head spins, just like when I was in the motel room that first night, drunk on vodka and cranberry juice, until I finally fall asleep for real in the backseat, exhausted.

CHAPTER 29
ABBY
DECEMBER 11 10:30 A.M.

The FBI lady, Agent Saunders, is sitting across from me in our living room. There’s also another lady from the FBI, Maura, a “victim support specialist,” who says she’s there to help me. Because, apparently, I’m a victim. Mom is next to me, holding my hand. Dad’s hovering by the door, like he half wants to be here but half doesn’t, in case he hears something about his little Abby that will upset him.

It’s too late, Daddy. I’m not your little Abby anymore
.

I reach down inside for the ice-cold numbness that I feel whenever I think of Luke and pull it over me like a security blanket. Numbness is what I want more than anything right now. I just wish everyone would leave me alone so I could stare at a blank wall and not think or talk about anything.

“Abby, I need you to tell me everything you can about Edmund J. Schmidt,” Agent Saunders says.

“I would if I knew who the hell you were talking about.”

“You know damn well who it is!” Dad exclaims from the doorway. He looks at me like I’m some kind of alien from the planet Filth. Which is kind of how I feel when I’m around him.

“Edmund J. Schmidt is the actual identity of the man known to you as Luke Redmond,” Agent Saunders says.

“But —”

“He’s thirty-two years old, from South Boston, Massachusetts. Lives with his parents: Joseph, an auto mechanic, and his mother, Anna, a retired secretary.”

“Are you Edmund J. Schmidt of 282 Tudor Street, South Boston, Massachusetts?” the state trooper had asked. And Luke never told them anything different
.

“No. You’ve got the wrong person. Luke’s twenty-seven and he’s from New Jersey. Toms River.”

“What were you thinking running away with a man more than twice your age, Abby?” my father bursts out. I disgust him. I’ve spent my whole life trying to make him proud, but by going off with Luke, I blew it. Forever.

Maura gets up and talks quietly to Dad, but I think I get the gist of it. Basically, she’s telling him to get lost because it will be easier for me without him there. Maybe she
is
there to support me, even if I’m not really a victim.

Dad opens his mouth to argue but when he looks at Mom for help she mouths, “Go.” He heaves a sigh and splits, leaving just us girls for this merry little inquisition.

After he’s gone, Agent Saunders pulls a piece of paper out of her file and hands it to me.

“We had this faxed to us from Boston. Do you recognize this man?”

It’s a photocopy of a Massachusetts driver’s license belonging to Edmund Joseph Schmidt. And although I don’t want to admit it, the guy in the picture looks exactly like Luke.

“I’m not sure. Maybe.”

“We obtained a warrant to search the Schmidt house, and took the computer used by Edmund Schmidt as evidence. Our experts
are going over it right now. The IP address corresponded to some of the communications that you received on your computer.”

I don’t say anything. I’m trying to take in the fact that Luke isn’t Luke. That Luke is Edmund. But I know one thing. No matter who he is, he loves me. I’m still his special girl, the one he loves more than anyone.

“I need to talk to Luke. I’m sure he can explain all this.”

I feel Mom stiffen next to me.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, Abby,” Agent Saunders says. “And even if it were, I’m sure Schmidt’s lawyer wouldn’t allow it. Nor would I advise it.”

Hearing that Luke has a lawyer brings home to me even more how much trouble he’s in. All because of me.

“How did you first meet this man?” Mom asks.

But I know the question she’s really asking:
Where did Dad and I go wrong?

“It was the website I go on all the time, ChezTeen.com. I talk to all kinds of people on there. That’s the whole point of the site, to talk to people.”

“I thought you only chatted to people you actually know in real life,” Mom says. “That’s what they tell us you should do in all the PTA talks about safe use of the Internet.”

I roll my eyes.

“But, Mom, this site is different from, like, Facebook. They have the latest movie trailers, new music videos, and virtual concerts and things like that, and you can talk to other people about all that stuff.”

“And it’s geared to teens, and whenever a site brings teens, it attracts predators, unfortunately,” Agent Saunders explains with a sigh. “We try as hard as we can to keep up, but new
sites pop up constantly, and teens migrate to them.” She looks at Mom. “And as you saw in this case, when the servers aren’t in this country, we have a real problem getting timely access to the information we need to protect a child from harm.”

“Luke would never harm me!” I protest. “You don’t understand him. He really cares about me. He …”

I’m about to say “he loves me” but both Maura and Agent Saunders are looking at me with pity in their eyes like
You poor gullible kid, that’s what they all think
.

Well, fuck them. They’re wrong. I know they are. I need Luke so bad. I want to call him, but they’ve taken away the cell phone he gave me as “evidence.” I can’t e-mail him because they took away my laptop as “evidence,” too. I might not ever get it back, even. How much does
that
suck? And there’s no way in hell Mom and Dad are ever going to buy me another one after this. They’ve taken my underpants as “evidence.” I’m surprised they haven’t stuck me in one of their stupid plastic bags and marked me as “evidence,” too.

Agent Saunders takes out another piece of paper from her folder, and hands it to me facedown. “Abby, does this look familiar?”

I turn it over and the bagel I ate for breakfast threatens to come back up. It’s a picture of me, topless, in my bedroom. It looks like …

“Where did you get this?”

“Our agents downloaded it from a child porn site. Edmund Schmidt uploaded it, along with several other pictures of you. The ‘Abby series’ is being discussed in pedophile chat rooms.”

She waits while I stare at the picture. I wrap my arms around myself and rock back and forth, as if the motion can bring me back to being a baby, before all this happened.

“I’m afraid it gets worse, Abby,” she says.

Worse? What could possibly be worse? No … No …

“You’re so beautiful, baby. I need to capture the moment when every sweet inch of you finally belongs to me….” — fingers hard on my chin, turning my face toward the video camera — “Stop bawling, baby, and look like you enjoy it
!”

The next morning, he leaves me in the motel room while he goes to buy breakfast, and he takes the camera with him “in case I accidentally push the
ERASE
button on the best moment of his life, ever
.”

He wouldn’t. Not Luke. He loves me. He said it was just for him, for us, because I was so beautiful.

Maura comes and sits on my other side as Agent Saunders takes out a small laptop and opens it. She pushes
PLAY
and there I am naked, on that ugly plaid bedspread in that crappy motel room, my legs spread wide, and Luke is saying all the things he’s going to do to me. The video Abby says something — it’s hard to tell what because my words are so slurred — and Luke laughs and holds my head while he gets me to drink some more. Then he …

“STOP IT! Make it stop!”

I feel dizzy, because the floor has just collapsed under my world.
Luke
did this?
My
Luke, who said he loved me? Luke, who said I was his special girl? He put pictures of me on the Internet, on porn sites, for
perverts
to see? He put
that video
up for everyone and anyone to see under the caption:
VIRGIN PUSSY GETS SLAMMED
so
HARD SHE CRIES.

This isn’t real. This can’t be happening. It’s a bad dream and I’m going to wake up and it’ll all go away and life will be normal again
.

Mom’s hand covers her mouth as she stares at my image frozen on the screen, like she’s trying to hold in the guts she’s about to puke out from the sight of her oldest daughter losing her virginity for everyone and anyone to see.

Then it’s like she visibly tries to put on her Mom Face.

“Are you okay, honey?” she asks. “You look pale. Do you want some tea?”

She can’t look at me. She can’t wait to escape from my presence; she needs some excuse to be away from me, because what she’s seen disgusts her so much.

No, I’m not okay, Mom. No, I don’t want tea. I just want to be Abby again, not some Internet porn star with my own “series
.”

“This has got to be an awful shock for you, Abby,” Maura says. “And it must feel like a terrible betrayal.”

“Can you … take it … take them … down?” I ask, my voice shaking. The thought of all these perverts out there looking at me, looking at pictures of me that were meant only for Luke, makes me want to go run to the shower and scrub my skin until it hurts.

“We will make attempts to get these images and the video taken off the servers,” Agent Saunders says. “But the problem with most of these child porn sites is that they’re not located in the United States, so we have no jurisdiction.”

“That’s the same problem that we had when we were trying to find you, Abby,” Mom tells me. “The server thing. If it weren’t
for Faith being able to guess your password, we might not have found you in time.”

Faith. How did she guess? Well, duh. I suppose if anyone was going to be able to hack my account, it would be Faith. She knows the way I think better than anybody. Except for Luke. But I bet even Faith couldn’t imagine me being an Internet porn queen.

What happens if people at school find out about this? I might as well just die now
.

I reach deep inside for my numbness blanket but it’s gone. I’m forced to feel and what I’m feeling is so overwhelmingly awful that I wish I could rip my skin off. Maybe that would make me feel less dirty.

Agent Saunders starts asking me questions about Edmund Schmidt again. I still feel like she’s talking about a different person, that it’s this horrible Schmidt guy from Boston who took the pictures of me and put them online, not my boyfriend, Luke, the one who loves me, who tells me I’m his special girl.

“You weren’t the only girl he was chatting with, Abby,” Agent Saunders says. “Schmidt had chats going with at least four other girls, from the ages of twelve through fifteen, from all over the country.”

Her words shatter me like a plate-glass window. I don’t know what hurts me more — the pictures and videos of me being posted online or the realization that if Agent Sanders is telling me the truth, then everything Luke said to me is a lie. Which makes me the world’s Biggest Fucking Idiot, as well as someone whose half-naked photos are being gawked at — and probably worse, gross — by a bunch of perverted weirdos. And
whose loss of virginity is now a major motion picture of the porn world.

How could you do this to me, Luke? You said you loved me, that I was your girl. Is that what you were saying to all these other girls, too?

I don’t realize that tears are streaming down my face until Maura hands me a bunch of tissues.

“Abby, we realize this is incredibly difficult for you,” Maura says. “But the more you can tell us about him, it’ll help us to make sure that he doesn’t do this to anyone else.”

I don’t care about anyone else right now. I just want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head and never have to face anyone ever again. I just want to never have to feel anything, ever. I just want to be numb. Forever
.

“Maybe we should take a break,” Mom says. “Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat, sweetheart? Or to drink?”

I just shake my head, covering my face with my hands to try and block them all out. To block everything out. To try to find the comfort of nothingness again.

CHAPTER 30
FAITH
DECEMBER 12

“So, what happened with Abby? Did, like, she get raped or something?
”

If another person asks me that, I’m going to scream. It’s been like this all day. I told two people, Gracie and Billy, that Abby had been found and was home, and all of a sudden it’s like the whole school knows and turned it into “Abby got raped.”

The thing is, I don’t even
know
what happened to her. Mom’s taking me over to see Abby after school, but she said I shouldn’t ask her, that if Abby wants to speak about her “traumatic experiences,” she will, in her own time. But I’m her best friend and if it weren’t for me, they wouldn’t have found her. She
has
to tell me.

This whole Luke thing — I can’t believe it all happened in the first place, that she would be stupid enough to run off with this guy. Abby’s usually so smart about everything, way smarter than me. How could she fall for a creep like him?

“It’s none of your business,” I tell anyone who asks what happened to Abby.

They all probably heard on the news that the police arrested Edmund Schmidt, age thirty-two, of Boston, Massachusetts. They’ve
all probably seen Abby’s eighth-grade yearbook picture, the one she hated, on their TV screen. But it’s not like any of them were such good friends to her before.

When Nick Peters and Amanda Armitage come up to me in the hallway and start peppering me with questions about Abby, I finally blow.

“What do you care?” I shout at Nick. “You couldn’t even remember her freaking name, you moron!”

I burst into tears and run for the bathroom. Gracie follows me.

“OMG, Faith, you should have seen Nick’s face,” she says, laughing. “I don’t think any girl has
ever
called him a moron before. And Amanda … she looked like she just drank a diarrhea milk shake.”

“It’s not as if they even
like
Abby,” I say, grabbing some toilet paper to blow my nose. “Amanda’s been a total witch to us for as long as I can remember. They just want gossip, that’s all.”

“Can you blame them, Faith?” Grace says. “Seriously. This is the biggest thing that’s happened at Roosevelt High ever. There are
TV cameras
outside.”

“But … can you imagine what it’s going to be like for Abby to come back to school? I can barely stand it today and it’s not me that it’s happened to.”

Gracie looks away.

“Look, Faith, you’re probably going to be really mad at me for saying this, but I’m going to say it anyway. Maybe Abby should have thought about that before she ran away with that Internet creep. I mean, seriously. What was she thinking?”

I feel this rush of anger at Grace, but when she meets my eyes, finally, it fades away because the truth is, I’m wondering the same thing.