Dirty Rush (35 page)

“I think it'll just be easiest,” she continued, “if I rip the Band-Aid off and we just tell you . . . slash . . . show you what's going on.”

She glanced over to Hailey, who was giving her a thumbs-up. What the fuck is going on?

Meg started walking toward the back of the room, “Alright. I've already seen this and it can't really be unseen so I'm gonna pass on a second serving. Hailey will show you about a minute of it and as soon as it's over, Kenadie and I are going to need someone in this room to either confess immediately or explain what in the name of FUCK this is all about.”

She turned the lights off. The room went dark apart from the dim of the idling TV set.

“Enjoy.”

Hailey pushed a few buttons on her computer, then her desktop appeared on the TV screen. She double-clicked on a file called “theBZgirl.mp4,” and a video box popped up. She hit play.

The video was not great quality, so it was hard at first to tell exactly what I was looking at. I could make out that it was a dorm room that didn't look too different from mine. The same beige color, one painted brick wall, the same window treatments, and cottage-cheese ceilings. The light was dim and the details of the room were blurry. A Mike Jones song played in the background.

Then the camera moved.

Two athletic and familiar-looking guys were sitting on a bed with no sheets on it, and a third guy was sitting in a chair at the wooden desk next to the bed. They were all facing the same direction, yet their faces were blurred. Someone had altered the tape to conceal their identities.

Then a girl walked on screen, wearing only a bra, boxers, ski mask, and what looked like a bright red Halloween wig. I was immediately reminded of Pussy Riot and
Spring Breakers
, obviously. Considering that she just walked into a room full of boys in her underwear, I had a hunch where this was going and I wasn't exactly excited.

It was embarrassing; some of the girls in the room started to laugh uncomfortably. Whoever was holding the camera or iPhone followed the girl as she walked over to the guy sitting down on the bed.

That's when we all saw what was printed on the back of her baby-pink silk boxer shorts: two unmistakable Greek letters—a beta and a zeta. The same shorts we'd each gotten as a gift from our Bigs while we were pledging.

“Oh my God,” Jane
whispered. The gasps around the room got louder when the ski-masked ingénue dropped to her knees in front of the three drunk guys and proceeded to slide their basketball shorts and khakis off, respectively.

The girl was now giving head to one of the guys on the bed and the rest were all laughing and cheering him on, then she moved on to the next, and the next. Even the cameraman got some. A lot of girls in the room were covering their eyes; I couldn't turn away. I'd actually never watched a sex tape. Not even the Colin Farrell one, and I think Colin Farrell is really hot.

Who is this girl?

Basically, without a face to identify her by, and the fact that the camera was moving around so abruptly, this could have been lots of girls. Based on what I could see, no one in our pledge class looked enough like her that you could tell.

“Pretty fuckin' good for a freshie,” one of the guys said loudly and directly into the camera. They all laughed. One of them said, “Fuck yes, my dude! Fuck yes!” Then Hailey stopped the video and the lights were flicked back on. They seemed brighter than when they'd gone off.

“We felt that this would be enough to give you an idea of what this tape is all about, without deeply scarring you for life,” Meg said loudly from the corner of the room.

“Luckily,” said Kenadie, as she walked toward the center of the group, “we're pretty positive that we've gotten ahold of the only copy of this thing. Y'all don't need to know the details, but when Colette and I got word that this shit was out there, through a source at the gnarly frat responsible for the four dickheads who made this fuckin' thing, we made damn sure it was
deleted immediately. After we sent it to ourselves, of course.”

“What actually matters,” Meg added, “is that someone in this room thought it would be cute to advertise that not only is she an epic gaping hole of a slut, but she's also a proud member of this Beta Zeta pledge class.”

“It's literally so disgusting,” Kenadie chimed in. “This type of bullshit is not okay, y'all. This is not us. Honestly, I'm embarrassed that I didn't sense this type a behavior in one of y'all before we let y'all's dirty, smelly, basic ass into this chapter. So, here's the deal we're making: until one of y'all decides to come forward as the amateur porn star, you'll all be stayin' in this basement.”

“What the fuck?” Jane said loud enough for the room to hear.

Kenadie's eyes darted in her direction.

“Oh, you can leave, Jane. And so can Leyla, Ruthie, Lauren L., Kate, Katie, Lauren S., Katherine, Gillian, Abby, and Emily. The rest of you are stayin'.”

Um. What?

“You can go, like, right fucking now,” Meg said to the girls whose names had just been listed, who all bounced up and scurried out. Jane mouthed a sincere
What the fuck?
at me before rushing out.

“Those girls don't have the body or boobs to be the dummy in the tape,” Kenadie announced. “So instead of assaulting all twenty-one of y'all with a ton of boring questions, and to avoid some sort of a witch-hunt situation, we're just going to wait until one of y'all is woman enough to come clean.”

“Have fun!” Meg said as they walked out of the room and upstairs, with Hailey trailing behind them like a baby duckling.

No one was saying anything. We sat there looking at each other silently for I don't even know how long. How was this a good way to solve this problem?

Brie White, who I barely knew, walked over and sat next to me against the wall.

“Hey, um, some of us are wondering why you didn't want to confess?”

“What?” I was shocked.

“It's clearly your body,” she said.

“Are you serious, Brie?”

“Yeah, I'm fucking serious. It literally looks like it could be you and I'm over rotting in this basement. My pores are suffering.”

“It's not me. But thanks for your concern.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Brie. One hundred percent,” I shot at her.

“Okay, fine. Sorry for asking. I just thought I'd try to speed this shit up a little bit, but never mind. If you say it's not you, then whatever.”

She walked back to her group of friends, who were all looking at me.

Eventually we all started talking. Everyone in the room denied having any involvement in the video. Some girls tried to sleep, but the lights kept me wide awake. Cruel and unusual were the words that kept racing through my mind. Hours passed.

Just as we had all come to our personal edge, the door to the basement flung open. I looked down at my phone; it was 6:30 in the morning.

It was Meg.

“We're
gonna let you go because you have class and we don't need people asking us where you are. But, since no one has bucked up yet, consider this the first drop of rain in a shit-hurricane of ‘fuck you.' This kind of thing has consequences. BZs may be frisky and we may be good at partying, but one thing we are NOT is stupid. And whoever did this shit is straight-up mentally challenged.

“Newsflash, you stupid dicks: you can never, ever, ever let someone film you or take a picture of you doing something that you wouldn't want your grandmother to see. No one is gonna want to hang out with us if we're in fucking pornos. Jesus. Part of me wants to literally walk around this room and slap every single one of you, one by one. Okay, enjoy your day. Also, go fuck yourselves.”

I stood up with my bag and started toward the door.

“That's not you is it?” Meg whispered to me as I passed her.

“No! Of course not.”

Did it really look that much like me?

“Okay,” she said, “I didn't think so. I don't know what's going on. Text me later.”

“ 'Kay,” I said and basically ran out of that house and to my dorm room as fast as I could. I felt filthy from sitting in that basement and wanted nothing more than to shower for the next hour.

It wasn't until after I got back to my room, cleaned up, and turned on my phone that I saw Jonah's text.

Jonah 6:40AM
Taylor please tell me this BZ blow job vid on TotalFratMove isn't you. Please please please. People are throwing your name around. Where the fuck are you?

“G
oddamnit!”

I must've spoken louder than I'd realized, because as soon as the word left my mouth my roommate, Morgan, sprung up in her bed.

“What?! What's happening?” she shouted, her eyes darting around the room and eventually landing on me and my bed and my phone in my hand.

“Sorry, Morgan. Go back to sleep, it's fine.”

“What's going on? What time is it?”

“It's early. I'm fine, go back to sleep,” I pulled my sheets up over me.

“No, I'm up,” she yawned. “Once I'm up then I'm up.”

“Ugh, I'm sorry.”

“It's alright,
I was gonna go for a run anyways. What's up? You seem intense right now.”

This was the most Morgan had ever expressed concern for my well-being—in fact, we'd barely even taken the time to get to know each other all year—but she was the closest in proximity and thank God she was, I needed to unload.

“Okay, I'm gonna give you the abridged version,” I said, sitting up in bed.

“Go for it,” Morgan replied.

“Last night I was called to the house for an emergency meeting, so I, like, ran my ass across campus like a crazy person and when I got there, they forced us all to sit down in the basement and watch this marginally offensive and one-hundred-percent gross sex tape of this girl in a ski mask and BZ underwear blowing four guys whose faces were blurred out. And now I get a text from Jonah saying that the video was already leaked and people think it's me.”

“Was it you?” Morgan asked, straight-faced.

“What?! Are you fucking kidding with that being the first thing you ask me?”

“I just—”

“NO.”

“Okay sorry.” She felt bad, I could tell.

I reached for my phone to re-read Jonah's text. My iPhone's screen was now filled from top to bottom with notifications from Instagram and Facebook. I scrolled down and the friend requests just kept going and going. I must've had over a hundred.

Oh my God.

Then texts started coming in. A few more from Jonah, one from Kelly, and one from Jack.

Jonah 7:01AM
Are you sleeping? You need to wake up

Kelly 7:02AM
Tay? I'm getting texts on texts from people about this video

Kelly 7:02AM
Where are you? Call me when you get up

Jack 7:02AM
Taylor where are you? I called you like 100 times

Jack 7:02AM
Have you seen this video?

“What's happening?” Morgan asked. “Your face just went white.”

“Um . . .” I mumbled.

“Are you okay?”

No. I wasn't. But I was in such a fog that I couldn't get the words out. I didn't know what to do. It felt like a lucid nightmare.

“Taylor? Hello?” Morgan's voice echoed in my head.

I was stunned to the point of nausea. I ran to the bathroom to vomit, but nothing came out. I just knelt there with my head leaning over the bowl.

Please, please, please. Be a dream.

A
t some point, Morgan opened the bathroom door and managed to drag me back to my bed. I sat in shock with my computer on my lap. What started as a couple hundred Facebook friend requests in the first few minutes became a barrage of thousands
by noon that day. It didn't matter that I wasn't the girl in the video; social media had found me guilty overnight, and there was literally nothing I could do about it. That's how it works. If Twitter and Facebook thought I was the BZ girl, then the world thought I was the BZ girl.

The texts and calls poured in, asking me if the rumors were true. I eventually had to shut off my phone. I didn't go to my quiz, I didn't leave my bed . . . and I responded to Jack.

Taylor 7:23PM
It's not me. I swear it's not me

He didn't write back.

It wasn't only on social networks that people were talking about it. The video immediately got national media attention. They weren't using my name, but they were describing me. I don't know who started it, but within an hour of the video's release on
TotalFratMove.com
I was being continuously linked to it everywhere. By the end of the day, I had interview requests from TMZ, Howard Stern, and Jezebel, none of which I replied to. I had been tagged in more than seventeen thousand Instagram photos, and I was basically Internet famous for something I did not do. No one seemed to care that the accusation was completely wrong.

That afternoon, Jonah came over with four huge bags of chips and sat with me for a few hours while we ate and just stared at my computer screen. Jonah kept saying, “It's gonna be okay, it's gonna be okay,” but I knew he didn't really believe it. Fortunately, my close friends believed me. Jonah, Meg, Jane, and the twins all seemed to have my back and were super supportive. My parents didn't seem to get how huge of a deal it was, which honestly was fine—I didn't have the time or energy to involve them.

I
made myself leave my dorm room the next day, and it was a nightmare. Everywhere I walked I could tell people were gawking and talking about me. I ran into Steph at the coffee shop and she said she was “convinced it wasn't me, because the girl in the video had thicker thighs than I do,” and that it was probably that girl Blair who pushed me at the first Omega Sig party pretending to be a BZ frosh because “she was still angry at our house.” She said to stay on guard because the whole thing felt fishy. As I left her, a text came in.