Authors: Eileen Cook
With Malice (13 page)
A thought tickled my brain. “There is someone who hates me.”
Everyone looked at me surprised, as if they'd forgotten I was even in the room.
“I had a blog a year ago,” I said.
Dad chuckled. “Ah, yes, the
Feminist Manifesto
from my favorite liberal.”
I ground down a layer of enamel on my back teeth. “That's not what it was called. It was the
Feminist Caller.
”
“How could I have forgotten,” Dad deadpanned.
“Keith,” my mom said, her voice a warning.
I forced myself not to rise to his argument. My dad had never been a big fan of my views. He used to send me links to Rush Limbaugh's website to make me mad. “My point is that I shut down the blog because there was someone trolling me. He said a bunch of really nasty things,” I said. “It was . . .” The word zapped out of my head. I hated how all of them stared at me, waiting. It made the word even harder to push out.
“Hurtful?” Mom offered.
“Upsetting?” Evan chimed in.
“Personal,” I spat out finally. “What he said was personal. It wasn't just that he disagreed. He didn't like me.”
“Who was it?” Evan asked.
“I don't know. I never figured it out.” Evan dropped his pen on the pad of paper, and I could tell he was losing interest. “Maybe we could look into it nowâ” I suggested.
“Not worth it,” Evan said, cutting me off.
I was annoyed. “It might be. You said you were looking for a possible other th-th-th-theory.” I forced myself to take a deep breath. My speech pathologist had warned me the aphasia would be worse when I was stressed or trying to push through it. She talked about having to talk with the current instead of swimming against it. After another deep breath, my chest loosened. “This was a guy who talked a lot about how much he hated me. Maybe he's out to get me now and making up all these . . .” Breathe. “Stories.”
“With Evan charging us three hundred fifty dollars an hour, I think if he says it's not worth the time, then we should be listening,” Dad said.
Evan smiled at me. “I appreciate your idea, but we need viable options. I'm not saying that this troll was a nice guy, but it strains believability that he harassed you online, then, when you shut down your blog, stalked you for a year, followed you to Italy, and killed Simone while framing you. We'd be better off trying to blame aliens.”
It sounded stupid when it came out of his mouth, and I was embarrassed that I'd brought it up at all.
Evan pinched the bridge of his nose as if he was trying to marshal his thoughts. “I know this isn't easy. I'm not trying to upset you.”
I wanted to yell out
Bullshit.
He didn't care if I was upset. I could tell whatever I wanted to say would stay trapped in my throat, so I kept my mouth shut.
“What do we do?” my mom asked.
Evan tapped his folder on the desk, organizing the papers. “We'll have Jill focus on her rehab. If the Italians push the idea of having her return, we want to be able to point out that she's fully engaged here and that it would be against medical advice for her to leave.” He looked across the table at Dr. Weeks. “That's fair, isn't it? I may need you to write up something if it comes to that.” He didn't wait for her to respond. “In the meantime, I'll be working with another one of our firm's partners who has some solid international law experience. With your okay, I'd like to hire a lawyer in Italy.”
“Is that necessary?” my mom asked.
“I'd feel better if we had someone on the ground there, someone who speaks the language and is going to be on top of the Italian system. This is no time for us to be on a learning curve.”
“Are they going to send me to jail?” I asked.
“Not if I can do anything about it,” Evan said with a confident smile.
I noticed that he didn't say it was impossible.
Anna balanced on the back two wheels of her chair. It always made me nervous when she did that. I could picture her leaning too far, tipping over, her head smacking hard onto the tile floor.
“So what are you going to do?” Anna asked.
I shrugged. “What can I do? I can't make myself remember. Dr. Weeks talked to me after the meeting and stressed that I needed to be careful I didn't set myself up with false memories. She said it's likely I wouldn't know a real memory from a fake, that if someone tells me a story, it would be super easy for my brain to convert it from something someone just told me to what I believe is the truth.”
Anna's face screwed up. “That seems weird. How can someone convince you to believe something that's not true?”
I snuck my pinkie finger down into my cast and tried to scratch my leg. It itched all the time now. “She says it happens a lot, especially with brain injury, but also to anyone. She was really clear that I can't try to trick myself into remembering, that I have to let the memories”âI scrambled to think of the term she'd usedâ“organically return.”
“Organic, huh?” Anna sniffed. “Like your brain is Whole Foods.” She leaned forward. “I get what she's saying, but it seems to me you have to do something. Trust me, you don't want to go to jail.”
“I know,” I said. I could hear the tone in my voice turning snippy.
“I spent some time in juvie for shoplifting,” Anna said. She smiled when she saw my expression. “Don't tell your dad. I'm pretty sure he already hates me.”
“He'sâ” The word was gone, but I couldn't tell if it was due to my aphasia or because there was no word to describe my dad. Instead I just waved my hand around as if that explained everything.
“Anyway, it sucked, and I'm guessing it would be like Disney compared to some Italian jail.”
Talking to Anna wasn't making me feel any better. I knew she wanted to help me, but I couldn't escape the feeling that she also found what was happening to me really exciting. Like she had her own room in the entertainment center. If I did go to jail, she'd be able to sell her story for sure. When I closed my eyes, I pictured a dank, dark room with bars on the windows and hard-eyed women looking to mess me up. My only experience with jail was a show on Netflix, and I was willing to bet my cellmates wouldn't have such a great sense of humor.
“Tell me more about this troll,” Anna said.
I flopped down on my bed. “It's stupid. My lawyer all but called me paranoid or delusional, maybe both.”
“But this troll guy hated you, right?” Anna nudged my foot. “In my experience, if someone hates you, there's no telling what they might do.”
I sighed. “I don't even know if the guy knew me at all. For all I know, he just spends all his time on the Internet trying to get a rise out of people. It felt personal at the time, but now I'm not sure.” I remembered when the guy was leaving all the nasty comments for me online, it felt like the worst thing that could ever happen to me. I wished I could go back in time and tell that me to grow a pair and stand up to him. Online harassment sucked, but not nearly as bad as my life now.
Anna rolled over to her side of the room and grabbed a notebook and pen. “Just because your lawyer blows you off doesn't mean it isn't worth checking out.”
“It's probably a big waste of time,” I said.
She raised one eyebrow, the stud in her nose winking in the sunlight from the window. “You've got some other big project you're working on?” When my shoulders slumped in resignation, she clicked her ballpoint pen and opened it to a blank page. “Okay, so what did the guy bug you about?”
“All sorts of stuff. He'd go on and on about rich bitches who should keep their mouths shut and their legs open. How
feminist
is just another word for âfat and ugly.' It wasn't like he was a great orator or anything, he just had this way of getting under my skin. He would make fun of anything that I wrote about, the stuff that was important to me.” I looked over at her. “At first I started the blog because I wanted to have something to put on my college applications, but the more I learned about that stuff, the more it mattered to me. I know it was stupid to think I was going to change the world just by writing about it, but I really wanted to.”
“I don't think caring about something is stupid.”
It felt like I'd tried to swallow rocks, and I had to stare up at the ceiling to give myself a chance to get control before I started crying.
“Do you remember his screen name?” Anna asked.
How would I ever forget? I used to feel nauseated every time I saw it pop up on my screen. He was my own personal bogeyman. “VoxDude.”
“Do you still have anything from when you had the site? Anything you saved?”
I glanced over. She was scribbling notes on the page, her hair falling forward, hiding her face. “Why?”
“I know a guy who's good with computers. He might be able to trace the messages somehow.”
I sat up. “Really?”
Anna snorted. “No, I'm making it up. I just like to mess around with the head-injured. Yes, really. He may not be able to find anything, but he might. Even if we can figure out if the troll wrote to you from your school computer, that would tell you it's likely someone you know, versus if the messages came from Brazil.”
A flutter of fear ran through my chest.
What if it was someone I knew?
I pushed down the thought. “I can get you some stuff,” I said. I'd kept a lot of it because, since I'd mentioned it on my college apps, I wanted to have proof it existed if they ever asked, and also because I'd been proud of some of the writing. I glanced over at Anna again. Would she sell the contents of the blog? I knew my dad thought she couldn't be trusted, and with the amount of attention my case was getting, I couldn't fool myself. Someone would offer her money.
Anna clicked the stud buried in her tongue on her front teeth as she made notes. We couldn't have been more different. Near as I could tell, we had nothing in common, and at the same time, in my gut I trusted her. I wanted to believe she was on my side. I needed to believe it. I wasn't going to survive if I second-guessed everything and everyone around me.
I said a quick prayer that I wouldn't regret this decision.
