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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Turn on Sky News right now!!! Stan texted me just as I was getting ready to leave for the office after working from home most of the morning. I headed right back inside the house, hurrying to the living room. I turned on the TV above the mantel and pulled up the guide to find the channel, since I rarely watched the local news.

Miguel and Rachel had been doing the morning show for the last twenty years. Hunter and I made fun of their bad plastic surgery on the rare occasions when we did watch. Rural Wisconsin didn’t have the best plastic surgeons, and I always told him I’d go somewhere else to get work done if I were them. They looked like cartoon characters with their shiny, botoxed foreheads and ridiculously plump lips. Eyebrows off-kilter and crooked. This morning they were joking around, bantering back and forth as they returned from the commercial break. The camera focused in on them while they got ready to introduce the next segment.

“And now, for our next story,” Rachel said, turning to Miguel. “Why don’t you tell everyone what we have next?”

Miguel nodded enthusiastically, then his face turned serious. “The Danes say a terrible assault occurred three weeks ago when their freshman daughter was at a local party. The assailants recorded a video of the girl that’s now being passed around school. The parents are asking for your help in identifying the people involved in the attack, and bringing their daughter justice. They’re here with us today to talk about the incident, and they’re asking for anyone with information about the video or the party where it was recorded to come forward.”

I froze in front of the TV. Everything stilled. I could barely swallow. It’d been two days since I’d heard from the girl—I’d replied to our last text chain a couple times to see how she was doing, and if she’d told her parents, but she hadn’t responded. I’d taken it as “no news is good news” and hoped she didn’t need me anymore because they were helping her. That was the point in making her tell them, and I thought it had worked. This was all supposed to be over.

A separate window with a video popped up on the TV screen. Mr. and Mrs. Danes sat together on a sofa in what I assumed was their living room. Mrs. Danes looked distraught. Her eyes were red and puffy. She’d probably been crying since she found out. Mr. Danes looked angry. She leaned into him for support, and he sat tall like a stiff board. His lips were pressed in a straight line. A vein throbbed in his jaw while he anxiously worked it, desperately trying to keep it together.

“Mr. and Mrs. Danes, thank you so much for being here today. I know this must be incredibly hard for you,” Rachel opened. “Can you tell us a little bit more about what happened to your daughter?”

“Absolutely.” Mr. Danes stared directly into the camera. His deep brown eyes seared into the audience. “The community needs to know we have predators in our midst. Our daughter, Chloe, came to us a few nights ago and let us know she’d been raped and assaulted by a group of boys while she was at a party.” He spoke like even the words tasted bad. Like he was spitting them out. “This is TV, and there might be children watching, so I’ll spare you the details, but they brutalized my daughter. The things they did to her…” His voice cracked. Mrs. Danes gripped his hand while he struggled to gain control of his emotions. “And as if that wasn’t enough, those monsters recorded her. They made a video, and it’s been circulating on social media for almost a week.”

Miguel’s and Rachel’s faces filled with concern. Both of them were parents, too. Miguel spoke first. “Before we go any further, I just want to say I’m so sorry that happened to your daughter. She—”

“Chloe.” Mr. Danes interrupted him and stared into the camera. “Her name is Chloe. She’s not just some anonymous girl in a video that you can trash-talk online. She’s a real girl with hopes and dreams. One that has parents and siblings that love her. Who plays volleyball and runs track in the spring. She’s an innocent little girl, and she has a name.” He reached beside him and grabbed something—a framed photo—that he held up to the camera for all of us to see. “This is Chloe. You see her?” He leaned over and shoved the picture even closer to the camera, pointing to it with his other hand. “That’s who she is. She’s a real person, you monsters.”

I didn’t know her name. Her identity. She’d been just this anonymous voice on the phone. And then suddenly, there she was, right in front of my face. They used one of her school photos from Buckley, and I recognized the navy blue polo shirt with the white letters. The same one Hunter donned every day. I’d helped him find a clean one this morning. She was young—really young. Hazel eyes sparkling with light. Her smile was wide, exposing a set of braces like any other ninth grader’s. A dash of freckles sprinkled across her nose. A tiny mole on her cheek underneath her eye.

Chloe Danes.

That was her name. Having a name and a face made it so much more personal.

Miguel and Rachel were both caught off guard, too. Neither of them had expected the photo. That ripped Chloe’s anonymity wide open, and she was a minor. Had she given her consent to this interview? Did she know it was happening? My thoughts tumbled over each other, trying to make sense of it all.

“We’ve spent lots of time discussing the dehumanization and bullying that happens on social media, especially among young people. What is it you’d like to say to people today?” Rachel asked, quickly recovering from the shock of the unexpected photo—it was live TV, she had no other choice. She couldn’t just end the interview.

“First, stop sharing the video and stop watching it. Please. You’re no better than the monsters who recorded it, and you’re breaking the law since she’s a minor. All you’re doing by watching that trash is further victimizing her. Stop.” Mrs. Danes started silently weeping next to her husband. She buried her face in his shoulder while she cried. I could feel her pain through the screen. “Our daughter was drugged while attending a party at a local student’s house, and we’re going after everyone involved. The parents who hosted the party. The people that gave her the drugs. Whoever sold the drugs to those guys in the first place. We’re going to find every single person involved in hurting our daughter, and we’re going to make sure there are serious consequences for what they did to her.”

“Has an official report been filed with the police?” Rachel asked.

“Of course. It’s the first thing we did once we found out, and the police are working hand in hand with us to bring those monsters to justice. This is what happens when you let grown men attend high school. They were men that attacked my daughter.” Mr. Danes furiously shook his head.

Rachel raised her eyebrows. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I’m following you.”

The more he talked, the angrier he got, while his wife curled more and more into herself like she wanted to disappear from the entire moment. “It was an upperclassman party that she got invited to. Do you know how many seniors at Buckley are actually nineteen and even twenty years old? You let your boys be held back so they can play sports and develop advantages, then put them in class with children? We’re going after every single one of them.”

“Are you saying that she knew her attackers? They were her classmates?”

Mr. Dane shook his head. “Like I said, she was drugged, so she’s having a difficult time identifying who they were, but I know those boys were there. It’s why we didn’t allow her to go to the party in the first place. It’s why we keep her away from all that. Our young girls should not have to go to school with grown men.”

Miguel quickly rattled off the statistics of how common it’d become, especially within the last five years, to hold boys back in kindergarten and again in middle school. By the time they got to high school, they were a full two years older than the rest of the students in their class. He talked about how there were two nineteen-year-olds at Buckley and one twenty-year-old—two were basketball players and the other a football player. I knew it happened, but Hunter was a runner, and that sort of thing didn’t happen in his sport. The last thing you wanted in a runner was for them to be too big. Size gave no advantage. So I never thought much about this practice or its implications.

“If we find out that one of them was involved, we’re suing the school. Because guess what? There’s a reason we don’t let our teenage daughter hang out with men, especially around men drinking alcohol.”

“You’ve come here today to ask for the community’s support. What can we do to help you?” Rachel asked. Her eyes were kind.

“The investigators have created an anonymous tip line for anyone with information about that night, or the drugs, or the video to come forward.” The number flashed on the bottom of the screen.

Mrs. Danes finally lifted her head from her husband’s shoulder and pulled away from him. She gave her first look at the camera. The devastation in her eyes rocked me to my core. The unrelenting pain of a mother who’d discovered her child had been hurt. We felt it in our bodies, like it was happening to us.

“Please… please…” Her voice warbled. She was doing everything she could do not to burst into tears while she spoke. “They hurt my baby girl so bad, and you’ve got to help us find who did this to her. Please.”

Rachel’s eyes filled with tears. She had three girls of her own. One of them was a junior at Buckley. “I’m so sorry this is happening, and we wish you and your family all the love and support possible while you go through this difficult time.” Rachel shifted her gaze to the camera, to everyone watching. The tip line number flashed back on the screen. “The number to call is at the bottom of your screen, and we’re asking all of you to help find Chloe’s attackers and bring them to justice. If you can think of any information that might be helpful, reach out. Talk to your kids. See what they know. And please, don’t share the video.”

Mr. and Mrs. Danes gripped each other tightly. “Thanks, Rachel.”

Miguel’s and Rachel’s faces were grim as the video box of the Danes disappeared.

“Wow,” Miguel said solemnly. “What a terrible tragedy. I hope our viewers are able to help.”

“Yes, me too,” Rachel agreed, nodding her head. “I think we might need a break after all that, and when we come back, maybe we can show clips from last night’s puppy show at the 4H building? Feel like we all need something to help us feel better.”

“Definitely,” Miguel said, turning around to face the camera. “We’ll be back soon with the Winston Dog Festival.”

They cut to commercial. I sat in front of the TV while my brain swirled. When I said she should go to her parents, I’d never expected her parents to go to the media. I wasn’t prepared to see a victim’s face, especially a child’s, broadcast on live TV like that. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. All I could think about was Hunter and how private he was. He didn’t even like me posting anything about him on social media to my small handful of friends and followers. I used to post all the time: cute photos of us out and about around town, or celebrating holidays. But once he hit middle school, he started getting embarrassed by it, so I only posted stuff he gave me permission to.

Chloe— I paused. That was her name. It felt strange to think of her with a name. And now a face. Because Mr. Danes had plastered it all over the screen. Was he supposed to do that? I’d seen Rachel’s and Miguel’s expressions when he did. They’d both looked totally surprised, then quickly brushed it off, but I’d caught it. Didn’t we try to keep victims’ information private? Especially when they were minors?

I just couldn’t imagine Chloe wanted this. She’d been so secretive. And mortified. Her father had brought up the video and asked people not to watch it, but that seemed like wishful thinking to me. Telling people there was a video out there probably just piqued their curiosity, and they could be googling it right now.

What had I done?