Finally I asked her, “Are you waiting for someone to pick you up?”
She nodded. “I’m waiting for my babysitter. She should be here soon.”
“You don’t walk home by yourself? You seem like a big girl.”
“I do on Wednesday and Friday, but today my babysitter’s taking me to her house. I’m in third grade. My mom says I can stay at home by myself soon.”
She told me she lives on Westmont. While she was talking I was thinking how cool it would be to get little kids to describe the whole geography of the city. How it would be really weird. And I could intercut the descriptions with footage of highways and maybe old pictures of Rockland. I was sure the same people who usually buy my films would pay even more if I had a film with lots of kids talking about their neighborhoods and how they walked around, how they saw it. Maybe I could even get a production company interested in it.
“Do you have any friends who might want to be in a movie?” I asked her.
“Maybe,” she said. “But can I be a princess in it?”
I told her of course. It really didn’t matter what she was going to be. People would buy the movie no matter what.
I lay down on the grass near her and pointed the camera up at the sky—the canopy of trees overhead and the blue and the clouds. And it felt like the world was full of possibility. I left before her babysitter came to pick her up and went out to drive the Austin Healey on the beautiful winding roads of Rockland.
Apparently it was on some kind of automatic system. Once people had paid enough to his PayPal account or bought him everything from his Amazon wish list, the video would automatically download from his site. There were already dozens of films. I thought the worst were the ones of kids. Talking to them about what they liked and then asking them questions about where they lived and went to school and who picked them up and when. The films were basically doing all the groundwork for any pedophile who wanted to come along. I couldn’t believe them when I saw them. He was literally assisting the potential abduction—the potential harm—to a child.
One little girl gave her address, phone number, school, and listed all the streets she walked home on and what time. Our jaws dropped when we saw it.
According to his parents, that was some kind of point he was making with his art. Like the films were a comment on what he was actually doing. That they were about trust and how the world has changed and how we are all constantly being watched and have no privacy and are at risk for people harming us . . . and God knows what other excuses these people came up with for what he was doing. They were blind to what their kid was up to. This was not art. This was some kid with a camera seeing how far he could push it, how much he could get away with. How he could get any attention at all. This is a very sick, very spoiled kid and nothing more. In the end, when I look back on it it’s amazing only two people were killed. The potential harm was so great.
And who knows if some new terror will come out of it.
I probably did it to spite her, I can see that now. Syd told me to stay away from Graham and then she and Declan went over there. Watched movies with him. She literally did that the day after she told me not to hang out with him. I knew that he was just another boy she would treat badly. I’d seen her do it before. I wanted to be friends with him and I wanted to do something interesting in my life before I went off to college. Something daring. I wanted to be with someone who could appreciate me for who I was and also show me things I didn’t know about. Syd is so crazy the way she exaggerates. “Stay away from him or it’ll ruin everything we have,” she said. I mean, please. I was like, “What exactly do we have? We haven’t had one good conversation since we were ten years old.”
Syd never introduced me to her friends. We used to play with Becky together when we were little but Declan—I don’t think he’s even said a word to me. The two of them are always off together. If I come in the room and they are there, she pretends I’m not there and says “Let’s go” to him and he makes kind of an awkward face and then does whatever she wants. I started thinking about all the things Sydney had excluded me from. How after elementary school she pretty much ignored me at all times. And when she started smoking dope, and doing God knows what else she and her stoner friends get up to, it’s like I don’t even exist.
Graham was maybe the first person who hung out with us together a lot because he lived next door. And because of the way we met—all of us standing out there by the edge of the woods. We would sometimes hang out talking together. He seemed to really like both of us and be interested in both of us. He was weird and cool and had something rebellious in him like Syd and he cared about things the way I did. At first, I thought he was maybe one of those academic stars that she always liked to be around and then I realized he was gentler and shier. More like me.
Anyway I had all this on my mind and also the whole thing about going off to college. I used to look at it as a great adventure, but the closer I got to leaving the more I thought of it as being gotten rid of, maybe permanently. I know our parents loved me and that it wasn’t true but I felt like Sydney had outgrown everything about me and wanted me gone. I wanted to get away from her too. I did. But I couldn’t help feeling like I was the one who was being cast out and might never be a part of her life again. Even her talking about us coming together and being unified about things also freaked me out. For some reason it made me feel more like she was getting rid of me—not less. It was so unlike her. I just felt in those days like I was about to disappear.
So I did it. I did. I went over to his house because he invited me. And went up to his room. The house was amazing. Though it looked smaller than I thought it would be after seeing it from the outside. There were these tiny little paintings hanging all over. A whole wall taken up with miniatures that looked like they had been painted with a single eyelash they were so delicate. The house was really tastefully done. Not in the cozy New England style my mother preferred, but in a sophisticated way. Outside in the backyard there was a marble fountain with a single long smooth stone in the middle—it looked like one of those polished stone sculptures we studied in art history. I think the artist was Brancusi.
And I went up to his room. It was incredibly neat. Completely organized. It was more like a suite in a fancy hotel. He had his own bathroom connected to the room and the furniture was all really nice. He had a big old oak four-poster bed. The room was bright and on a corner with windows that overlooked the woods and also our house. His room was right across from our room. It was cool and quiet and he had shelves of interesting artifacts—things he said his parents and grandparents had brought back from traveling, or things people bought him as payment for the movies he made. He had more stuff than anyone I’d ever met. A massive record collection—I mean an actual vinyl record collection—that took up one wall of the room, another set of shelves from ceiling to floor lined with books, and another wall of electronic equipment—film stuff I guess. And then he had a closet full of stuff—some of it still in packages. Different kinds of cameras and lights and cables and microphones.
He also had an extremely thin flat-screen TV and that I guess is what we were going to watch his movies on—or that’s what he asked me over to do anyway: watch movies.