I could not believe what I had seen.
I couldn’t look at him after I saw that movie. But of course I had to. He lived next door. Our yards were connected. My sister was still in love with him. There were few things as horrible as that. Or at least I didn’t yet know how bad things could get.
I decided to talk to Becky about it because she was Junior Hacker Extraordinaire.
She had long since stopped talking to him after the stuff with little Brian.
“It’s not that hard to get some spyware on his computer, but finding out stuff that he has buried by using a Trojan horse or trapdoor is going to be really hard.”
“Can you do it?”
She looked really uncomfortable. “I can. But it’s the breaking and entering and doing something illegal that I’m not so into.”
“Are you kidding? For this guy?”
“I think we should stay away from this guy.”
“Can you teach me how to do it?”
She looked at me for a long time, like she was trying to figure out if I was smart enough.
“It’s tricky,” she said. “I could see you getting frustrated and messing things up.”
“Can you make a thing—whatever you said, Trojan horse or secret passage or whatever—can you make one on your computer and then show me how to get into it?”
She nodded. “I can. But listen, I don’t want any more part of whatever weird shit is going on with this kid. I’m pissed at him, but honestly, Tate, I’m scared of him. I’m scared of him and then sometimes I think he really is one of our friends and we should try to understand him and make him stop doing weird things. I mean, you know how it is. You’re super weird and we love you. Declan’s some kind of freaky Buddhist nerd who still studies up in his tree house. Graham’s just a little further on the fucked-up scale than we are. I don’t think we can figure all this out on our own. I don’t think this is something we can do.”
“NO?” I shouted. “Then who is going to do it? This guy sold movies of you and Brian and God knows who else to pedophiles! He has weird movies of all of us probably.”
“Yeah, but that’s not what he was trying to do. He thought people just loved his art. He was just stupid.”
“Becky! Listen to what you’re saying. I don’t know if that’s even true, and think about this carefully. When you get right down to it, is there any real difference between stupid and dangerous?”
She sighed. The days of us hanging out and getting high and listening to music and walking around in the woods were over. She was doing full-time computer programming and code writing and making jewelry out of sea glass. What happened to Brian was sobering, except to Declan of course who was never really sober and never really slowed down for anything. All the terrible events didn’t make him pause and go back to doing homey things like it had Becky. It made him get high more and study more; he bought Rosetta Stone language courses for Swahili and Cantonese. When I asked him why he said the world was a strange place and knowing how to communicate better meant you had more options to go become a hermit somewhere. So I guess maybe he was kind of affected too in his own way. Had some long-term escape plan going on. But Declan was easy to interest in any kind of investigation.
The problem was I wanted to see the films Graham was hiding but I did not want to discover them with Declan. I was afraid of what we might find. Afraid that there would be worse things or that he had movies of me and my sister that no one should see.
And I wanted to find out what he meant by all this stuff about making movies like he did with Eric—how he was involving my sister in something he had been in serious trouble for. He wanted her to be the new Eric, that was for sure.
I needed to see what else he had. To learn what Becky knew and do it myself.
“Please, Becky, just show me how to do it. I won’t involve you in any way. You’re not responsible for anything. Besides, you know it’s the right thing to do.”
She sighed and looked at me again, incredibly sad. Then she reached over and held my hand, saying, “Be careful, Tate.”
I got back into the house with no problem. The Copelands for all their wealth and art never locked their windows or had alarms. That’s because they were always home. But I was fortunate enough to live next door and be able to see when they all left—to talk to them about where they were going.
I had my chance on Sunday when they all went out to some advance screening of a film Kim’s friend had made. They were dressed up and I stood in the driveway talking to them for a few minutes. Graham came out to the car last and he looked high as a kite. I don’t know why his parents were so naive and unable to tell he was on drugs but they were. Maybe they just figured that’s how people look when they’re on Adderall. In any case we talked for some time and then they drove off. I waited for fifteen minutes and then let myself into the house from an open basement window near the back garden. Then quickly made my way back to Graham’s room.
I turned on the computer and went back to the main menu of all his movie files. There were so many marked “Allyson” it freaked me out to even think of what he had there. I called up his website, Copeland Productions, and began applying the things Becky told me about so I could break in and see what was behind the shiny arty veneer, what secret movies he might have.
Suddenly, a pop-up appeared asking for an authorization code. I did what Becky showed me and sure enough a whole new page appeared with a much different list and prices written next to each film description. The films were titled “The Girl Next Door” and they all had a number following them; there were “The Girl Next Door” videos volumes 1–70.
The first one I clicked on was of Ally lying in Graham’s backyard naked. I gasped. I felt sick. It was terrible to see. It was hard to make out her face in the dark but it was clearly her. We have the same freckles on our chest and a birthmark in the same spot. It was clear she had no idea she was being filmed. I knew I had to get rid of these videos, but I was getting angrier and angrier and felt like I should just get rid of Graham instead.
I logged out of the secret site and made a note of the things I saw there so I could go to the police.
I was about to go but then I thought I should look for the video he told Ally about. The one of Eric that he said he had hidden. He had a wall of old albums—vinyl—they must have been from his dad’s collection like back in the eighties—and a turntable. I don’t know why it suddenly hit me but if he was going to hide something he’d hide it in plain sight—a thin little disk slipped into an album would be the perfect hiding spot. It was like I could feel something there calling out to me or maybe I just suspected.
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.”