Endangered (2 page)

NINA APPLETON, THE GIRL KEACHIN HUMILIATED
, is not my friend. I don't have many of those.

I like her, though. Before last week, I would've said everyone in school liked her, too.

Nina has cerebral palsy and walks with the aid of forearm crutches. That's not what's most memorable about her or the reason she's so well liked. She's not the school's pity mascot for disabilities or anything like that. People like Nina because she's funny as hell.

We had algebra together once, and Mr. Ambrose worked this problem on the whiteboard. It was all this exponential, carry the such and such, divide it by whatever stuff. In the end, the answer was “69,” and you could just about hear him curse under his breath as he finished writing it.

He spun around, saw the grins on all our faces, then stared Nina down.

“Go ahead,” he said, anticipating the dirty joke he'd set up, “I walked right into it.”

Nina's eyes bounced over the room—her audience—then she threw her hands up, exasperated. “I got nothing.”

It was enough. Perfect timing. Expert inflection. Playing against the tension and buildup. The class roared. Even Ambrose smiled, appreciating how classy she'd been in the moment.

Class Clown three times running, she was quoted in the last yearbook as wanting to be the first disabled regular on
Saturday Night Live
. Personally, I think it's foolish to bet against her. As long as her spirit's not broken. An atrocity Keachin may have already committed.

That atrocity must be repaid.

Funny kids have a way of pissing off humorless people. When Nina, perhaps thinking herself brave, interrupted Keachin's reaming of a lowly freshman girl to say she saw Keachin's new red leather jacket on sale at Goodwill as part of a Santa outfit, it put her on the Fashion Tyrant's radar in the worst way.

I didn't see what happened in the bathroom after that, but I heard. Everyone heard.

Nina's crutches got “misplaced,” and she was forced to crawl across the filthy floor, crying for help. No one heard her until class change, over an hour later. The vice principal had to carry her to the nurse's office while everyone watched.

When the administration questioned Nina about the assault (make no mistake, that's what it was—not a joke, or some “kids being kids” BS), Nina kept quiet in some misguided attempt to honor the code of the streets. Snitches end up in ditches, or something.

I don't blame her for that. I've been there.

But now I'm
here
, doing what Nina can't do for herself. I depress the shutter release, capturing Keachin's tryst with Coach Eric Bottin, gym
teacher and fearless leader of our district champion football team.

I take more photos, fighting the unease of watching such a personal, and possibly illegal,
performance
. Of all the times I've done this—of all the secrets I've exposed—this is easily the most mind-blowing.

Get every detail, Panda
.

Increasing my aperture, ramping down my shutter speed, and a bunch of other tiny in-the-moment adjustments are the difference between crisp images and blurry abstractions in such low light. I make all these changes across the mission control–style menus in my camera without looking. Like Petra Dobrev—a celebrity in the wildlife photography community and my idol—says you should.

“When you're shooting a pride in Africa,” Petra says in her instructional photography DVD,
Lensing Wild Things
, “you want your eyes on those hungry lionesses, not your switches and buttons.”

Then again, Petra also says, “If you're determined to shoot hungry lionesses, I recommend a camera trap. The plastic and metal are much less appetizing than flesh and bone.”

A camera trap shoots without a photographer being in the vicinity. Great if you know where your prey will be ahead of time. My work rarely has that sort of predictability, so I have to know my camera the way a blind man knows Braille. I use it the same way I use my lungs. Inhale, adjust exposure. Exhale, shoot.

The car's bouncing motion increases with such verve, I hear the suspension squeaking. There's a final groan from the shock absorbers, and it's done; a panting Keachin hurls her sweaty self into the driver's seat as if Coach Bottin is suddenly too hot to touch. He twists and shifts oddly. After a second, I realize it's the motion I use when I tug on my jeans lying down.

Maybe they're too tired to perform whatever limber maneuver got them into opposite seats, because they open their respective doors and circle to the rear of the car, where Keachin adjusts her skirt and gives him a brief peck on the lips before reentering the vehicle for Coach Bottin to drive her home. I've got shots of it all. The hungry lioness never knows I'm there.

There's another piece to Petra's advice, though. A piece I forget. Or ignore because I'm giddy over the debauchery gold that's now stored on my SD card.

“When you're watching a beast, ensure no other beast is watching you. Lest you're caught unaware. The roles of ‘hunter' and ‘prey' can reverse with a breath and a pounce.”

Coach Bottin and Keachin drive away, and I gather my equipment to make the hike back to my own car. Never realizing that I'm not alone, and I'm not talking about a raccoon.

We're all something we don't know we are. In that moment, I have no idea that I've gone from watcher . . . to watched.

IT'S 10:37 P.M. WHEN I GET
home, nearly an hour past my weekday curfew, and there's mud on my steering wheel.

I'm in my beat-up Chevy, parked in the driveway behind Mom's Honda and Dad's truck. I have four missed calls from my parents, and every light is on in our house, like they're looking for me behind the furniture. I peel off my dirty gloves, shimmy free of my dark zippered hoodie. Hitting the switch on the dome light, I check my face in my visor mirror for smudges, sweat, and/or blood. When you're sneaking through the woods, hopped up on adrenaline, you might not feel a stray branch or briar scrape you. With my complexion, the slightest scratch looks like I've been mauled.

I'm claw-mark free, so I take the time to mentally rehearse my story while I pop my trunk to stow some of my more nefarious tools. My rolled-up shooter's blanket goes into the duffel bag with my climbing gloves, grappling hook, night-vision goggles, lock picks, a couple of wigs, and a few other knickknacks relating to my, er, hobby.

I push all that to the corner of the trunk and gently dress the bag in a bunch of car junk—jumper cables, a rusty jack, half-full bottles of tire cleaner.

I slip my Nikon case into my school backpack. That goes inside with me. Always. Before I start the show, I remove the battery from my cell, drop it in my hip pocket.

When I enter the house, hobbled by my heavy bag, they descend on me immediately. Parental hyenas.

“
Wo warst du, Lauren?
” Mom says. I can tell she's irritated because she's speaking German.
Lauren, where have you been?

“
Bei Ocie, lernen
.”
At Ocie's, studying
. I answer back in German because it seems to calm her. She likes the bond.

“Try again,” Dad says. “Ocie's mom said you finished studying over three hours ago.” He sounds every bit the army drill sergeant he used to be. Sometimes I let him believe his intimidation voice still works on me. Like now.

“Yes, that's true.” I reach into my bag and produce a kettlebell-heavy copy of
The Complete Shakespeare
, purchased yesterday. “We're doing
Macbeth
in Lit Studies, but the school's copies are all scuzzy. I went to the bookstore to grab my own. When I got there, pumpkin spice lattes got the best of me and I lost track of time in the photography section. Sorry.”

Mom switches to English, but her accent comes through, she's still half-irritated. “There is no point for you to have a phone if you do not intend to answer.”

“Battery died and I forgot my charger.” I hold up my dark, dead cell. “See?”

My parents maintain their wide-legged, crossed-arm stances, and exchange looks. Mom softens first, relieved I'm home and not stuck in
some serial killer's basement. Dad maintains the attitude, but I know how to soothe him. I produce another book, also purchased yesterday. “Saw it in the bio section and thought of you.”

One corner of his mouth ticks, though he recovers quickly. He suppresses his grin as I hand over the biography on the late, great Sam Cooke. Dad's got a whole playlist dedicated to Cooke's songs, having proclaimed the singer/songwriter a genius many times. I suspect Mr. Cooke's music has some significance to my parents grand back-in-the-day romance. Unlike the
Blachindas
, I haven't heard any backstory here and I don't want to.

Mom glances at the book and they exchange looks again, this time with the
ewwww
factor cranked up. If I have a new sibling nine months from today, it will only be a mild shock. I sneak upstairs to my room while they're distracted. To finish my work.

Nudging the door shut severs a column of hallway light, leaving me in darkness, where I'm most comfortable. I unpack my camera and power it up. The hi-def display flares, casting me in blue light before tonight's photos appear. Cycling through them, mentally flagging the best shots, I'm short of breath.

“This is real,” I say, the depravity stuttering before me like a flip book.

Pushing a button on my desk lamp illuminates the soft marble eyes of two dozen panda bears. Or rather their glossy photos, plastered on the wall over my desk in a neat grid. I take my chair, plug my camera into my MacBook, and view the images in a larger aspect, each mouse click causing my pulse to snap. I've got more than forty usable shots, but I only need a few to tell the story. The imaginations of my many loyal followers will fill in any blanks.

Minimal touch-ups are needed. A slight hue adjustment makes the
skin tones more natural—wouldn't want Keachin's flawless makeup to go unnoticed. Then, some shifts in the levels to decrease the shadows. Almost done. One final touch, a caption.

Keachin Myer takes phys ed way too seriously
.

I publish the pictures to
Gray Scales
, my anonymous photoblog. The site's done up in all the shades of gray, except for the photos I reveal. I even have the blindfolded justice lady with the sword and the scales as my logo. When I post the Keachin/Coach photos, it triggers an alert on the cell phones, tablets, laptops, and PCs of my subscribers. The whole school.

All my various social media are arranged in separate windows on my desktop. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and, of course, the comments on
Gray Scales
. I watch them refresh for the next hour as the scandal goes wide and the world sees what Keachin Myer really is.

When I pop the battery back into my cell, it immediately buzzes with an incoming text. I already know who it's from.

The texts go on, Ocie having a gossip aneurism, me playing dumb. I'm still watching my monitor so I see the email the moment it comes in.

The sender's address is unfamiliar,
SecretAdm1r3r
. I might've written it off as penis-growth spam and doomed it to my junk folder if not for the subject.

A PANDA in her natural habitat
.

I want to believe it's innocent, some marketing thing triggered by all the wildlife sites I visit. But the caps lock on “PANDA” makes me uneasy before I open my in-box. Part of me knows.

I preview the message, dropping my phone when I see the embedded photo.

It's me, skulking through the woods at the scene of Keachin's tryst. Another message arrives, same subject, but this one is a wide shot of me taking pictures of Coach Bottin's car. A third message/photo comes through, this one of me by my car as I lose my footing and plant both gloved hands in a huge mud puddle to keep from falling on my camera.

Me. Me. Me.

The pictures even come with a caption:
How do you get the color Gray? Throw a Panda in the blender and turn it on
.

Even though the sender's grasp of color theory is suspect, I get the point.

I'm busted.

WHEN I STARTED THIS WHOLE GRAY
business, the second person I exposed was Darius Ranson, a Portside baseball star who'd developed a pregame ritual known as “Target Practice.” It went like this: Darius and his storm troopers snatch some frail/shy/defenseless underclassman and drive him to Kart Krazy, a run-down arcade and go-kart track. Also on the premises, batting cages.

The owner was a huge baseball fan who gives—
gave—
any Portside Pirate player the run of the place, which was all but deserted on weekdays. Darius and his teammates used one batting cage exclusively, having removed most of the safety netting to meet their needs. In that cage, they tied up their victim somewhere
behind
the pitching machine. If Portside's next-day opponent had a weak left fielder, the underclassman got positioned to the left. If the right field was vulnerable, he was placed to the right. Then, Darius and the rest would take turns popping line drives over the kid's head. If he was lucky.

Stupid. Illegal. Dangerous. All words applied. Inevitably, something went wrong. A concussion-and-broken-nose wrong. Claiming the injury happened innocently—intimidating the battered kid to back up a ridiculous story—Darius snaked out of any consequences and resumed Target Practice with updated safety regulations. New targets got an umpire's mask.

I did my thing, taking pictures of a Target Practice session from two hundred yards away with a telephoto lens. Had to climb a tree for those shots. Among my pictures were a few of Darius making a shady exchange with Kart Krazy's owner. Cash for a crumpled paper bag. It got me thinking about our star shortstop, and how he excelled beyond so much of the competition in the district. A couple of days later, I snuck into the team's locker room during a Saturday practice and picked Darius's lock. That's how I discovered his steroid stash.

A few quick snaps with my cell phone and I had a complete collage.
Gray Scales
was new then, so it took days instead of hours, but word spread.

Kart Krazy was shut down, the owner arrested for dealing dope and endangering minors. Strict drug-testing rules were implemented for all Portside High athletes. Darius got kicked off the team, then expelled thanks to zero tolerance. Harsh, maybe. But so was bouncing baseballs off other humans for fun.

Busting him was a flagship moment for my crusade. What I did made a difference.

I think of Darius as I click through the candid photos of me spying on Keachin and Coach Bottin. On to the next I go, not seeing myself, but the unsuspecting faces I've dragged into the light of day over the last three years, exposing their twisted moments.

Darius threatened to kill “the guy” who outed him. Surely the dozen
others who've suffered his fate have similar vendettas. This is so, so bad.

There's always been a buzz around the school. Who is Gray? Whenever a new scandal debuts on the site, along come new theories. An angry friend or jilted ex. It
has
to be someone close to the exposed. Everyone watches too many cop shows.

It's never personal. Not after that first time. That's how I don't get caught.

Until now.

How could I
not
notice someone else with a camera out there? How many of
my
targets think the same thing?

I hit REPLY on the first email, type, and send a single-line message:
Who are you? What do you want?

The mystery photographer won't reply. That's what I expect. But I'm wrong. I get a response almost immediately.

    
;)

That's all. An emoticon. I resist the urge to demand answers, realizing the stranger's response is an accurate one. He's enjoying my anxiety. Winky face.

Ocie keeps texting past midnight, but I don't have it in me to respond. I sit up all night, scared, barely noticing the Sam Cooke music coming through the walls from my parents' room. I wait for the secret photographer's pictures to go live somewhere, outing me as I've done to so many others. At dawn I'm still waiting. It never happens.

And that scares me more.