Campaigning for Christopher (5 page)

“What if I was wrong?” she whispered into the wind.

Her chest tightened, and she shoved her hands in her jeans pockets, turning away from the river and back toward the garden entrance. Despite the cold, her cheeks burned and her heart raced, a barrage of uncomfortable questions assaulting her as she made a quick retreat back to the bus stop.

What if Black Hat was wrong?

What if she’d been used for someone else’s nefarious ends?

What if she’d let her own fears and prejudices overrule her sense of justice?

It’s not possible
, she told herself, panting as she reached the bus stop and pulling her bus card from her hip pocket.

But the only way to be positive would be to go home, open her laptop, and get to know Christopher Winslow.

***

It took several excruciating, agonizing hours.

An hour of reading every word published on his candidate website had made her heart—her stupid, naive, easily influenced, prejudiced heart—beat faster and faster, as her eyes scanned the pages, hoping to find some shred of truth in the words Black Hat had fed to her. Alas, there was nothing to condemn him.

According to his website, Christopher Winslow was the furthest possible thing from a racist. He supported equal pay for equal work, access to health care, and education programs. Under “key issues,” he had a tab dedicated to human rights, stating that he wanted to work on the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission once in Congress so he could “promote, defend, and advocate internationally recognized human rights norms in a nonpartisan manner, both within and outside Congress.” He supported official recognition of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, praised the efforts of grassroots neighborhood rejuvenation in and around Philadelphia, and seemed determined to preserve state and federal green spaces.

He seemed a paragon of virtue.

“Okay, okay,” she said, closing his website, her fingers trembling violently over her mouse. “But Black Hat implied he was a closet racist. It wouldn’t be in neon on his website, stupid.” She gulped, taking a deep breath, and, grateful for a temporary respite as her terrible panic receded a little. “You
saw
the video.”

She’d
heard
him saying despicable things with her own ears.

Clicking on the mouse, she entered the address for YouTube and typed in his name. She found dozens of videos of Christopher giving various talks, speeches, and press conferences, and starting watching them one by one.

With a horror she’d never experienced in her life, she found out that when Christopher Winslow’s comment “Unwed mothers? Not my problem” was taken out of context.

He’d
actually
said, “My Republican counterpart loves to say, ‘The poor. The out of work. Unwed mothers. Not my problem.’ But I say it is. I say, they are. They
are
my problem because they are the people of this great commonwealth, and they deserve the same compassion and consideration that I would show to . . .”

She clenched her jaw, clicking on the next video, which included Black Hat’s clip “Why should a woman be paid as much as a man?” immediately followed by Christopher Winslow’s answer: “Because she works just as hard! People, I believe in equal pay for equal jobs, and I will legislate to ensure that women are paid the exact same . . .”

The sound bite of Christopher Winslow saying “I’m qualified to tell you what a single, minority woman needs: a kick in the ass” had been spliced from a sentence in which he had said, “The day I say that I’m qualified to tell you what a single, minority woman needs, is the day someone needs to give me a kick in the ass.”

And so it went—sound bite after sound bite that had been manipulated, cut, spliced, and butchered until Christopher Winslow sounded like a bona fide sexist and racist asshole.

After three exhausting hours of Internet searching, during which her stomach threatened an epic session of vomit more than once and tears flowed freely down her face, Julianne wanted nothing more but to curl up in a little ball and disappear or die. Her heart was broken in half. She was revolted by herself and appalled at the sheer magnitude of her recklessness.

“Oh God. Oh God.” Turning to her cat, Shappa—a Lakota name that meant “red thunder”—she moaned, “I’m a
terrible
person.”

Despite a deep and unequaled sense of dread, she forced herself to reopen her browser, clicked on Google News, and entered his name.

An article dated the day before popped up immediately, and she could barely breathe through her tears as she read that Christopher Winslow—a young, talented financier—
had been
a serious contender for the U.S. Congress until pictures of him in compromising positions with an employee of his family were published on Twitter.

Article after article bashed his character and ridiculed him, using words like “substance abuse,” “drinking problem,” “sexual misconduct,” and “closet racist.” The very pictures she’d taken were being used as evidence of his debauched nature and his disrespect to women. His platform was summarized as feel-good political bullshit, and he was painted as another entitled, rich, white asshole who was finally getting what he had coming.

She whimpered softly, and Shappa meowed from deep inside his old tom throat, stretching his tabby legs into a patch of sunshine.

Heartsick and beaten, Julianne closed her browser with a soft click and sat back in her chair, shaking until she could hear her desk chair rattle.

Stumbling to her easy chair, she curled up in a ball and wept with shame and unyielding remorse. She cried with deep, heaving sobs, disgusted that she’d allowed herself to be manipulated and furious with Black Hat for his destructive, unscrupulous ways.

But mostly she cried because she’d single-handedly ruined Christopher Winslow.

He wasn’t just a good man, he was a
great
man, and she’d willingly and enthusiastically been the vehicle of his destruction. But the very worst of it was that she’d deprived the people of Pennsylvania of someone who actually could have done some good on their behalf. She had not only destroyed his future—she might well have destroyed the potentially better future of thousands of people she’d only wanted to help.

“I am a
wakte,
Shappa,” she whimpered. “A slayer.”

She lay in stunned silence for so long, with tears rolling down her face, she had no idea how much time had passed, but her stomach wouldn’t settle and her eyes burned from crying. It was as though her body couldn’t bear the shame of being the vessel that contained her, as though her body physically hurt because it wanted to run away from her, to escape from her, to be free of the terrible, awful, shameful spirit it contained.

Her mind finally boiled down to one place: Home. Her
Ina
. The comfort she didn’t deserve of her mother’s deep, sensible voice. She pulled her cell phone off the end table beside her and dialed.

“Huh?”

“
Ina
?” she said, her voice breaking.

“Wichahpi?”

“It’s me.”

“It’s Monday. I work on Mondays.”

“I know,” she said, bending her head to look down at her bare feet. “Sorry,
Ina
.”

“You’ve been crying. Are you okay,
chuntay skoo ya
?”

Hearing the endearment fall from her mother’s lips made more stinging tears fall from Julianne’s eyes.

“I want to come h-home.”

“No, you don’t. You are finding your way in Philadelphia.”

“I’m not. I feel really far away,” she said, sniffling. “And stupid. And bad. And young.”

“Far away from here is a good thing. And you
are
young, Wichahpi, but you’re not stupid or bad.”

“I did a stupid thing. A very, very bad thing.”

“Ch-ch,” tsked her mother. “Is someone dead?”

“Not technically.”

“There is no bad thing that can’t be made right.”

“It’s too late,” she sobbed.

“It’s
never
too late to make amends, Wichahpi. There is always time to reverse a wrong. Where there is right, there is a way. You know all of this,” her mother said impatiently. “Where is the girl I raised?”

“In Philadelphia.”

“The girl I raised has the same heart whether she’s here or there.”

“But,
Ina
. . .”

“Fix it,” she said sharply, with no-nonsense conviction. “Be strong. Make me proud.”

Julianne’s tears fell in rivulets as she thought of how very ashamed her mother would be if she knew that Julianne had ruined a man’s life in the most sordid, disgraceful, irresponsible way.

“
Oh ya hey he
,” her mother said more gently. You can do it.

“
Thečhíȟila
,
Ina
,” she whispered.

“I love you too,” her mother answered, hanging up the phone.

Julianne set the phone back on the end table with shaking fingers and let the last of her tears flow freely. When she was finished, she wiped her eyes, lifted her chin, and went into her bedroom to change.

***

“Chris, just to review, you’re going to say that traces of Rohypnol were found in your system,” said Simon as Christopher’s sister-in-law, Elise, dusted his face with powder to mute the shiny beads of sweat dotting his forehead. “Keep it short and sweet: you were drugged at your sister’s wedding, and when you woke up, compromising pictures of you were all over the Internet.” Simon turned to look at Slater. “Meanwhile, Slater will upload the results of the drug test to your website, and Lori will call her press contacts and let them know they’re there. We all on the same page?” The all murmured their affirmation. “I’ll tell them you’re coming out in five minutes. Be right back.”

Simon opened the door and squeezed out of the campaign headquarters to speak to the crowd of reporters.

Christopher clenched his jaw as a rush of pure rage made him momentarily breathless. She had drugged him. Fucking drugged him so she could take advantage of him and kill his election hopes. Why? Who was she? And what in the fucking hell had he ever done to her?

If I ever have a chance to meet her face to face
—

“Chris, you okay?” asked Elise gently, cocking her head to the side.

He nodded curtly.

“Sure?” asked Preston.

In the mirror, Christopher locked eyes with his brother, who stood behind his wife. “I’m about to go on live TV and claim that I was drugged by a waitress. Good chance I come away looking like the moron of the century.”

Preston shrugged. “What else can you do? It’s the truth.”

“Who wants to vote for someone who gets taken advantage of like that?” He spat the words, hating them, hating how weak they made him look and feel.

“How could you have possibly known?” asked Elise, her soft voice a ballast to Christopher’s fury.

“I couldn’t have.” He turned to Lori. “Give it to me straight. What are my chances?”

She winced. “Twitter is still calling you UA, but there’s more and more hashtagging of ‘UnlikelyAlcoholic’ instead of ‘UniversallyAppealing.’ At least a dozen national temperance groups are demanding you drop out of the race, and a couple of bloggers have taken potshots at your family’s money. The entitled thing has come back to roost, and it’s not good.”

“So I’m an alcoholic, entitled playboy?”

Her lips twitched as she nodded. “Something like that.”

“What about the racist stuff?”

Lori sighed, typing something into her keyboard and clicking on the mouse. “Yeah, you’ve got a fair number of haters out there, but your platform is so strongly in favor of equal rights and human rights, most of your followers don’t appear to be drinking that particular pitcher of Kool-Aid.”

Christopher nodded, feeling marginally better.

“But Chris,” said Lori gravely, “you need to know. Your numbers . . .”

“Yeah?”

“They’ve tanked overnight.”

Christopher blinked at her, the words reverberating in his head like gunfire.
Rat-tat-tat. Tanked. Rat-tat-tat. Overnight.

“Interestingly enough, it’s Duncan Cavanaugh’s comment yesterday on
Good Day, Philly
that keeps being recycled.”

“Which comment in particular?” Christopher bit out.

Lori grimaced. “I counted over a hundred different memes of you reimagined as the spokesperson for Killarney’s. I think that’s why the alcoholism angle is holding on so tight. A picture says a thousand words.” She shrugged. “That said? You’ve got national attention now. If there’s any way we can possibly turn this around, you’ve got a far larger audience than you had before.”

“So now I’m nationally notorious, instead of regionally loved,” said Christopher in a tight voice.

“No press is bad press?” asked Lori with a hopeful wince.

“Unless you’re a politician,” said Preston. “Then the bad feels like a crucifixion.”