Page 41 of I Will Ruin You
There wasn’t much, not even when I searched for “William Finster.” Combing through social media and other sites, I managed to turn up a real estate agent out in Arizona who also handled time-shares, a special effects expert in Hollywood, an expert in unplugging toilets north of the border in Ottawa, and a Billy Finster on Twitter with two followers whose mug shot didn’t look anything like my blackmailer. There was no local phone listing for a B or W Finster, but that wasn’t surprising, since most younger people only had cell phones.
When I returned to school Monday, I’d search the office’s stockpile of old yearbooks and see what more I could learn about this guy. I was looking for anything that might give me leverage, something that might give me an idea how to handle this.
Because I definitely needed some points on my side of the board.
The next day, Bonnie was behind the wheel, I was up front next to her, and Rachel was in the back, all of us on the way to Trent’s house. Rachel was playing some game on her tablet that we had asked her to mute so we wouldn’t be driven mad by relentless beeps and explosions. Bonnie glanced my way.
“You’re pretty quiet today.”
“I’m fine. Wrapped up in my own thoughts, I guess.”
“You’ve been glued to your phone.”
I’d been checking to see whether there’d been any nibbles on the boat. None so far.
“Wasting time, is all.”
“I get why you’re stressed. But is there anything else going on you need to talk about?”
“Not really.”
“I’ve been wondering whether you should go for the counseling.”
She was aware the board was offering it for those of us impacted by the LeDrew incident.
“I’m okay.”
“You had another nightmare last night. You were kicking your legs, like you were fighting off somebody. Do you even remember?”
I didn’t.
“Really, I’m fine.”
“Okay, then,” Bonnie said, and nothing else was said until we reached our destination.
Rachel and the Wakelys’ daughter, Amanda, who was ten, hit it off immediately. Amanda, it turned out, was into bugs. An aspiring entomologist. Amanda asked Rachel whether she wanted to come inside to see her beetle collection, which she kept in the garage because her dad didn’t want any bugs—alive or dead—in the actual house. Rachel was uncertain at first. Like, really? Beetles? But once she was gone, we didn’t see them again until it was time to eat.
We sat out back on their deck. We’d brought a six-pack of Modelo and some flowers Bonnie spotted at a roadside stand along the way. Melanie went into something of a tizzy trying to find the perfect vase for them.
“So nice to finally meet you,” Melanie commented several times to Bonnie, as if she’d forgotten she’d already expressed the sentiment.
Trent had fired up the barbecue. There was a second one tucked up close to the house, no longer in use. Couldn’t control the flame very well, Trent said, so he’d bought another one. While we waited for the new one to get hot enough to start cooking the hamburgers, Melanie invited Bonnie to join her in the kitchen while she pulled together a salad.
“You seem preoccupied,” Trent said when we were alone. Bonnie wasn’t the only one to notice.
“Kinda,” I said.
“What you went through, something like that doesn’t fade away in a few days.”
“It’s not that.” Trent waited while I opened a second beer. “Let me bounce something off you. A hypothetical.”
His brow furrowed. “Okay.”
“This is between us. I haven’t discussed this with anyone. Not even Bonnie.”
Trent nodded his understanding of the conditions.
“Suppose you had a former student, someone you hadn’t come in contact with for several years, actually maybe never taught at all, but you might have had some interactions with at the time. And now this kid—an adult—shows up out of nowhere and makes an accusation against you.”