The Year We Hid Away (2 page)

But I was too happy to be here to let their indifference bother me. And Room 31 was in a gorgeous old U-shaped dowager of a building. The Katies and I had been assigned to a triple, which had a tiny bedroom for Ponytail Katie and a slightly larger one for Blond Katie and I. Our suite also featured its own wood-paneled common room with a window seat looking out on the courtyard.

It was pretty darned cool.

“We need a sofa, like, yesterday,” Blond Katie observed. “They’re selling used ones outside.”

“Okay, I’ll chip in,” I agreed, sounding for all the world like Miss Eager. But after the lonely, friendless year I’d endured, all I wanted was to be one of the girls. And even then, I didn’t need much from them. I didn’t come here to be popular or extraordinary. I just wanted to blend.

Even if I had to lie all the time to do it.

“We’ll look at them on our way to the dining hall,” Blond Katie suggested.

“Great,” I agreed.

An hour later, I followed The Katies out of our dorm toward Turner House. At Harkness, the student body was divided into twelve Houses. It was like Hogwarts, but without the sorting hat. Every First Year living in our entryway of Vanderberg had been assigned to Turner House, but we wouldn’t live in the Turner building until next year. For now, we were housed with other First Years on Fresh Court.

Swiping my ID at the Turner House gate, I heard another satisfying click. It was hard to conceal my glee when Ponytail Katie swung the unlocked gate open and held it for us. Scarlet Crowley was
in
, people! My escape was working.

The Turner dining hall was old-fashioned in a stately way. There was a vaulted ceiling two stories overhead, leaded glass windows set into marble sills, and a giant fireplace at one end. I followed the Katies into a kitchen area, where we had to make sense of the various lines and self service bars.

“Okay, that wasn’t so hard to figure out,” Blond Katie said after we’d found three seats together.

“My boarding school dining hall wasn’t this nice,” Ponytail Katie observed. “It always smelled like bologna.”

“Ew,” Blond Katie agreed. “Where did you go to school, Scarlet?”

“I was home-schooled,” I lied. I had spent the entire summer crafting the story of my new identity. I could have chosen a Miami school to claim for my own, but that posed the risk of eventually running across someone who had actually gone there. And wouldn’t
that
be awkward.

“Wow,” Ponytail Katie gasped. “But you seem so normal!”

I laughed. If she only knew.

That night, I came to sudden wakefulness on a gasp. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. The room was strange. And my dream still clung to me.

It was the same dream I’d had all year. I was playing hockey, of course. That was no nightmare. But in the dream, I darted out of the crease to get the puck, which skidded away from me. The crowd was yelling, wanting me to send it zipping away from our net. But the puck kept going, pitching into a dark hole. Even as the voices around me grew more urgent, the hole was dark and frightening, and I did not want to fetch the puck from down there. Something in my gut stopped me.

At that point, I always woke up in a sweat.

Lame, right? You’d think my mind could come up with something better, like chainsaws, zombies or vampires. But it was always the same dream.

I rolled over in my narrow dormitory bed, and listened to Blond Katie’s snoring. I’d let The Katies drag me to an off-campus kegger that they’d heard about. I’d drunk a warm beer from a plastic cup, and swayed appropriately to overly loud music. The purpose of the party was not at all obvious to me, but on the way home The Katies tallied up the several dozen numbers they’d added to their phones.

“And that lax player with the tattoos? Oh my God — so hot!” Blond Katie had enthused.

“I heard he’s pierced…
down there!
”

They’d shared gale after gale of laughter. The Katies were proving to be the sort of girls who Knew Things. They knew the name of the football quarterback, and which fraternity he’d pledged. They knew the names of the secret society buildings littered around the campus — odd granite, windowless buildings. (“You’re supposed to call them ‘crypts,’” Blond Katie had emphasized.)

It was also proving apparent that The Katies had much more in common with each other than with me. They both loved Sephora! They’d both played field hockey in high school! They were both into Maroon 5!
LOL
and
OMG
and
WTF!

I wasn’t jealous. Not exactly. (Field hockey?
Please
.) But I was keenly aware that the past year had put a wedge between myself and the rest of the world, which even a complete identity change could not undo. By dropping out of life for a year, I’d become an observer — a watcher and a thinker. Before that, I’d been a doer and a go-getter.

I used to be more of a Katie. Well, technically I’d been a Shannon. But… same thing.

To amuse myself, I tried to imagine how it would go if I told The Katies the truth about me. What would happen to the perky expressions on their faces?

Well, Katies, I’m not from Miami, although we used to go there all the time on vacation. Actually, I’m from New Hampshire, where my father was a famous hockey player and coach. He was a Stanley Cup winner for Toronto before I was born. He coached defense for the Bruins when I was little, and then he took a college coaching job when I entered kindergarten.

Unless they were uber perceptive hockey geeks, the Katies’ faces would still be lit with interest at this point in my story, considering all the hot athletes I would (and did) meet over the years.

Also, my father started a charity whereby underprivileged kids all over New England could learn hockey for free. Wasn’t that a generous thing to do? Especially since my dad always was — and is — a hyper aggressive asshole. But in hockey they pay you more for that. Anyway, things went swimmingly for him — and me — until about a year ago, when a kid two towns over decided to kill himself
.

Were I to say these things out loud, the Katies’ faces might start to cloud with concern at this point, whether or not they read any of the major national newspapers.

The boy — his name was Chad — left a suicide note. And in the note he told the world that my father had raped him repeatedly the year he was twelve
.

That’s the point in the story where any self-respecting Katie would run in the other direction. Their tentative warmth toward me would never survive that kind of darkness. It wouldn’t matter to them that I’d learned about my father’s alleged crimes in the
New York Times,
just like everyone else.

This past year I’d come to understand something about bad news. It didn’t come quickly, like the bad news in movies. It was never just a midnight phone call, or a knock on the door during supper. Real life bad news — the messy stuff — came at you slowly. The midnight call was just a preview of coming attractions. It would be followed by one news truck in front of your house, and then two. And then ten. And even when the trucks went away, it was only a temporary reprieve. Because three other boys would eventually come forward with similar stories. And then the whole cycle began again.

When I’d told the Katies I was home-schooled, I’d almost wished it was true. Last year, I’d kept exactly one friend. One person stood by me while the whole town turned their backs. And worse. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t the one accused of a crime. No one except for my friend Anni would sit next to me, ever. I didn’t go to a single party or event for a year, because I was a pariah. The hockey team voted me off my captainship a mere two weeks after voting me on. Even the coach began to favor the younger goalies. (Unless we were losing. And then he had no trouble playing me.)

Public opinion about my father had congealed into horror almost a year ago now. He’d been arrested and then indicted for just about the worst thing a man could do. And it didn’t matter that I hadn’t known —
still
didn’t really know what had happened. I was the product of a sick man, from a sick home. And anyone in our town who treated me civilly risked getting too close to the stench.

So it’s no mystery why I’d gone to the courthouse this summer to file for a legal name change. And then, when the paperwork came through, I called the Registrar’s Office at Harkness and gave them my new information.

Shannon was gone, and Scarlet was born. I hoped she could save me.

There was always the possibility that I’d be recognized and outed. There was really nothing I could do about that, short of adopting a cheesy disguise. Luckily, there was only one guy at Harkness who’d gone to my high school. He was two years ahead of me, and I didn’t know Andrew Baschnagel well, aside from remembering that he was a pretty big nerd. Since the college’s undergraduate student body was 5000 strong, and I’d never had a real conversation with Andrew, it was a risk I could stomach.

Not that I had a choice.

Scarlet Crowley had no Facebook account, and no Twitter handle. If you Googled my new name, you found very little. (This was lucky, because I didn’t check ahead of time.) Apparently, there was a Mrs. Scarlet Crowley who taught 8th grade algebra at a middle school in Oklahoma. Her students didn’t seem to like her very much, judging by the things they tweeted from her class.

But,
please
. If the choice was to be mistaken for an ornery teacher who gave frequent pop quizzes, or for the daughter of the most infamous alleged pedophile in the nation, which would you pick?

I’d take the algebra teacher every time.

Chapter Two:
Hello, Stalker

—
Scarlet

Okay college. Let’s do this thing
.

It felt good to be striding into the September sunshine on the way to my very first lecture. Thanks to Labor Day, the first day of classes was a Tuesday, so I navigated to the hall where Statistics 105 would be taught. The course was a requirement for the pre-med major, and I was a little afraid of it. Setting my pack on the floor beside a vacant chair, I glanced around at the other students filing into the room, as if inspecting them would reveal whether or not I was smart enough to keep up in the class. Would there be other nervous-looking freshmen? Or would they all be hardened math whizzes?

The results of my search were not encouraging. I saw a lot of skinny boys with rumpled hair. There was not a Katie to be seen for miles.

My sweep of the room ended when my gaze fell on a set of broad shoulders two rows ahead of me. They were attached to an exceptionally handsome guy, with a thick head of dark red hair. As I admired him, he turned his head, catching me in the act. Too late, I dropped my eyes to the notebook open in front of me.

Luckily, the professor began speaking then. All eyes turned to the front of the room, where a thin man in a stiff white shirt introduced himself. “We’re going to dive right in with the concepts of estimation and inference! Let’s get to it.”

With a white-knuckled grip on my pen, I began taking notes. Within a half an hour, it became very clear that statistics was a course requiring coffee as a side dish. As the professor drew yet another graph on the white board, my gaze wandered back to the only interesting person in the room.

His hair was a lovely warm tone — like dark caramel with a hint of cayenne. He looked strong, but not hulking like a no-neck football player. His was a chest you could lay your head upon. I was busy admiring the twitch of muscle in his arm as he took notes when he looked up
again
to meet my eyes.

Ugh. Busted twice! How mortifying.

I stapled my gaze to the professor for the rest of the hour. The moment that class was dismissed, I snatched my things and bolted outside. My next lecture — music theory — was three buildings away, and I had only a few minutes to get there. But the lecture hall didn’t seem to be where I’d thought. So I dug the campus map out of my bag feeling just like the idiot First Year that I so obviously was. Reorienting myself, I ran off in the right direction. When I finally reached the door, someone held it open for me. “Thanks,” I panted.

“No problem,” said a deep voice. The hint of amusement in it made me look up.

It was
him
— the hottie with the auburn hair. He gave me a quick grin. I took a tiny fraction of a second to admire the freckles on his nose before darting past him into the lecture hall.

This time, I sat in the front of the room, where I wouldn’t be tempted to stare.

—
Bridger

For the first twenty minutes of music theory, I was doing fine. The professor began by explaining how sound waves vibrate the human eardrum. Science had always appealed to me, and the material was easier than the graduate level chemistry courses I’d been taking. Giddyup.

But then the lecture veered in another direction. “When sounds are organized into music, and that music is played slowly, and in a minor chord, the listener will often become sad,” the professor said. He hopped over to a sound system and hit “play” on a three-minute segment of Mozart’s Requiem Mass.