Arch/Eternal - Chapter Seven

Prep School Terrorism

This is Arch/Eternal, a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

If you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

And if you’d like to follow along with the world-building behind the story, take a look at the companion series shamelessly titled A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

If you’d prefer to follow along on the app, you can do that here:

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Prep School Terrorism

YOU ARE THINKING OF THE SCHOOL. WRITE ABOUT IT.

Of course I am. 

But hang on, I just realized I left out an important thing. I need to talk about that conversation between me and Rita right before Adam left. 

Feel free to remind me about the school thing if I forget. 

OK, so Rita Freeman was a friend of my parents from their school days. We all loved her. The boys, Kaden and Kyle, would always fight over who got to sit closest to her when she came over for dinner, or when we all played games in the den. I never participated in the contest because, as the only girl, I knew Rita liked me best.

When I was 11 — this would have been a few months before the Lacrosse Massacre — Rita Freeman came to visit. Adam was 16, and more than ready to leave the nest. I knew they’d been talking about him leaving for some kind of an elite program or something, but it was all very mysterious to me. 

Anyway, after we all hung out and caught up and ate dinner,  Rita and Adam met privately in my parents’ shared office, which they had soundproofed shortly after the twins arrived. To this day, Rita alone knows what they discussed in that room. They were in there so long that I started getting ready for bed. But then I heard a soft knock at the door. 

“Come in,” I said as I finished pulling on my flannel Star Wars PJs. 

Rita pushed the door open, slipped inside, and closed it behind her. I sat down on my bed, and she sat crosslegged on the floor. 

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” she asked.

What a stupid question. It disappointed me. I told her so.

“Then give me a better one,” she said.

“How about… what are all the things I want to do with my short life on this big, crowded planet,” I said. 

“Good. So what’s your answer?”

“I don’t know,” I hedged. “What do you do?”

“I’m a historian. You know that.”

“Yeah but what does a historian do?”

“I study the history of people. I try to understand how and why things happen the way they do. I try to find connections between things that have happened in the past, things that are happening now, and things that may or may not happen in the future.”

I refrained from rolling my eyes. 

“OK, but what does that mean? Like, you read a lot of books?”

She nodded. “And go to a lot of places, and talk to a lot of people. And spend a lot of time thinking, and writing.”

I knew all about reading and writing. But my 11-year-old bones were itchy for action. Suddenly, like the ignition of a road flare, I knew what I wanted. But just as soon as it came clear, I shrunk away in self-consciousness. 

It would be a while before I learned to show only what I wanted people to see, so Rita saw it all — from the boredom to the insight to the embarrassment. 

“What is it?”

“What is what?” I blinked quickly, badly pretending confusion.

“The thing you want most, but you’re too afraid to tell me.”

I swallowed, frightened at what seemed to me like telepathy.

“This is safe,” she said, palms down on the floor. “What do you want.”

“Power,” I said. “I want to change the world.” Oh how bitter those words turned in my young, proud mouth. I grimaced and looked away. “Just like every stupid kid in the whole world.”

“No,” Rita said, shaking her head. A rejection of my attempt to dismiss myself.

My heart thumped with eager trust. Did this woman really understand me? I’ll tell you now, reader, that I believe she did. I believe she understood what I could not say at the time, and still struggle to say today. That the huddled masses of this world, so full of confusion and suffering, ever thirst for someone to lead them, to show them how to do better, to be better, to rise to the glory stitched into their untapped genes.

Oh I knew all about the failed dreams and broken promises of history. I wanted a piece of the future. I wanted to build it with the force of my own will. I wanted to make the world a better place by leading its people to their birthright.

Those feelings, those yearnings, that thirst coursed freely through me. My throat was closed with the emotion for which I had no words anyway, and Rita saw it all. 

She stood, straightened her pants, and held her fingers up in the loose imitation of a field goal.

“Don’t let go of your hunger, Ms. Quinn. Teach it, tame it, find its course. It’ll be messy. It’ll hurt. But don’t you let go.”

I nodded. She left.

A few weeks later, so did Adam. We didn’t hear from him much over the next few years. Or at least I didn’t. 

WERE YOU ANGRY THAT HE LEFT?

I know what you’re getting at, but no. It felt more like an opportunity to prove myself. I mean of course I missed him, and it was painful for him to be gone, but at the same time, suddenly his shadow was gone, and it was like I could see myself for the first time.

So it wasn’t buried rage that got me banned from lacrosse, it was a desire to prove myself. I was stretching out, testing my limits. Learning how to be something other than Adam Quinn’s kid sister.

DO YOU REGRET YOUR ACTIONS?

I’m not sure if I should say yes, but the answer is no. Because even though it cost me the sport I loved, that muddy October day also taught me to hate physical violence. The taste of blood was sweet poison, tempting and corrosive in a way that scared me. I vowed to never cause physical harm to another person. 

But politics was different.

I won’t get into the boring specifics of how a part-time student at an elite private school wound up running for and winning class president in her first year (I’m not bragging you are), but it’s important context for what happened shortly thereafter. 

Also important for context: I was fourteen.

Franklin Prep was a good school. High academic performances, reasonably healthy social ecosystems. I liked it, especially since I didn’t have to spend nearly as much time there as the other students. (Privileged, blessed, lucky, fortunate.)

But not too long after I got elected as the youngest student body president in the school’s history, a renewed emphasis on dress codes descended from the board of trustees. There were nuances of money and other tangled incentives that failed to interest me at the time because, and I feel it’s important to emphasize this again, I was fourteen. And perhaps a little drunk on the acceptance of my peers. 

The Franklin Preparatory Dress Code, as all dress codes are, was caustically unpopular with everyone, but it fell hardest on the girls. Hems and necklines became stocks and shackles. They even hired extra staff to stop people in the hallway, do measurements, and send people home for failure to comply. 

I know, it sounds overwritten even to me, like I’m painting the broad villains of an 80s teen movie. So imagine the effect that nonsense had on high school students in the late 2010’s. It was going to be a catastrophe. 

Because I was going to make damn sure of it.

My plan unfolded in four parts. 

Part One: Foment Discord

First, I got almost every girl in the school signed in to an encrypted messaging group by setting up an underground marketing campaign using the handle #deathbydresscode. They filtered themselves in. 

As the group grew, I did my best to escalate everyone’s resentment. This was not hard, thanks in large part to the hallway hem police who contantly added fuel to the fire. I encouraged people to keep breaking the rules in new ways, to ride the line between feigned ignorance and serious disciplinary action. 

Once the bitching had reached fever pitch, I sent out a succinct and convincing invitation:

Sick of this shit? 

18 Gallbright Circle

7pm

Part Two: Fashion Show!

One of my friends, Jackie, had a big, beautiful house that she mostly haunted alone, since her parents were both high-powered attorneys that worked extremely long hours and traveled a lot. If that also sounds tropey to you, maybe sit back and consider how fucked up it is that this is common enough to be a cliché. 

Anyway. Jackie and I and some other people bought plenty of food and booze, and got all set up for a party. We turned a few big bedrooms into pop-up studios with lights and backdrops, then placed some lucky photography students (it wasn’t hard to find volunteers) on standby. 

When people showed up (mostly girls), they were promised full access to the food, the booze, and the dancefloor, on the condition that they surrender their phones. There was some grumbling, but no one put up a real fight. Mostly because booze.

Once the party got going, I started inviting people, one by one, to get pictures taken. Nothing salacious or compromising — just an excuse to strike some poses. I was the only one who knew the whole plan, so when people asked what for, I just gave ‘em a wink and a smile, and say, “You’ll see,” then promised to send the pictures later. Everybody had a blast. People loved it.

And this is how, in one night, we got glamour shots of every girl that came to the party — over two hundred, all told.

The morning after, along with the promised photos, every attendee got an encrypted message outlining the rest of the plan, which included an option to opt out. Very few of them did. Surprisingly few.

Part Three: Special Delivery

The next part was time consuming, since there was no way I was going to get outside help. And thanks to Adam (who had left home by this point) I had enough tech savvy to do it all myself.

Basically, I hacked into the private email accounts of the board members who had been most vocal about the new emphasis on dress code rules, and made it look like they had requested, received, and shared hundreds of pictures of the girls in the school. 

I know what you’re thinking, but listen — you have to remember that none of the pictures we took were nudes, or anything else that suggested anything sinister. Yes, they were all underage, but it wasn’t like I was distributing child porn. My intention was to embarrass these people, not get them thrown into prison. 

I did the whole thing using an untraceable set of anonymous accounts. I wanted to get it all done in one night, but it took three, so I had to rely on my hunch that once they found this stuff, they’d be too spooked to tell anyone right away. I was right. No one said a word. 

Part Four: Anonymous Tips

One anonymous tip can be ignored, especially if an investigation will be awkward, expensive, and politically dangerous. But six anonymous tips, all from different sources (again, thanks Adam), that all basically point to the same thing… 

I’m not clear on the details, but I did hear that one of the board members was a little too slow to answer the door when the police came knocking, and had to replace the whole thing out to the frame. 

All the girls who opted in knew what to do: Claim ignorance. Yes, we remember getting those pictures taken, but we have no idea how these creeps got their hands on them. 

Which, in some sense, was true. I had gone out of my way to give everyone plausible deniability. Sure, some of them suspected I was behind everything, but no one knew for sure, and no one could prove it, so it was easy enough for them all to pretend they didn’t know what was going on. 

But despite my comprehensive precautions, things escalated in ways I failed to anticipate. There were legal charges and death threats and portents of the apocalypse. It turned out that the relatively tame nature of the pictures themselves helped the whole thing burn faster and hotter, since no one bothered to refrain from sharing them around. “Look what we found on their hard drives!”

I’m not sure how my mom knew it was me. It probably had something to do with the cloud of horror I carried around with me as our community melted down. I felt guilty, and confused. Hadn’t I done something good? Hadn’t I punched upward? Wasn’t the absurd overreaction everyone else’s problem?

YOU KNEW BETTER.

Of course I did. I didn’t want to, but I did. You can’t read and write and think as much as I had by then without some kind of ethics rubbing off on you, and I knew damn well that my actions represented an inexcusable abuse of community trust. What haunted me was the dissonance created by my effort to deny what I knew: I did a very bad thing, and the results were calamitous. 

Seeing as there was no way I was going to seek out my parents’ council under my own volition, I guess I wasn’t surprised when my mom showed up at my bedroom door one evening while I pretended to work on some project. She waited for me to turn and look at her before she entered, then sat down on the edge of my bed. 

“Hey mom.” I meant to be nonchalant, but my voice was salt-brined lumber. 

She stayed quiet, and fixed me with an expression I couldn’t decipher. What I would have given for her to start throwing accusations. Those, I was ready for. After all, I’d been practicing defenses against my own guilty heart for days. But she just watched me, and waited.

As my blood pumped horribly in my throat, I realized that silence was its own kind of confession, and tried to say some casual thing, like, “How’s it going?” or, “What’s up?” But the words died in a painful swallow.

Finally, I blurted out one of my prepared defenses, “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

She said nothing.

“They deserved it! Their fixation on an inch of skin on a teenage girl’s thigh is obscene! It’s perverted! And that’s not to mention all the damage they were doing to people who already struggle with body image issues — I mean how can you possibly justify more objectification? Somebody had to do something, and nobody else was doing anything. So I did something.”

“OK,” she said softly. 

I blinked, derailed.

“OK,” I repeated back to her, flinching inwardly as I waited for the other shoe to drop. 

Her eyebrows knit into an inquisitive frown. “What are you going to do now?”

Oh god.

See, that was the question I had been avoiding with all the energy of my soul. Nothing! I wanted to scream, and then find a hole to hide in until the heat death of the universe. In that question existed the unendurable agony of responsibility.

But there it was, hanging in the room, resting its whole weight upon me, blasting away all the ropes and cords of self-justification, leaving only the bright, burning certainty that I had made a mess, and I could either help clean it up, or accept the damning loss of my own integrity.

What are you going to do now? 

My cheeks burned. My hands and feet went numb. I thought I might vomit as I stared at the floor. I said, “I’m going to try to fix it.”

“That’s my girl,” she said, then stood up, and walked out of the room.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

This is me letting out a big sigh.

Even after coming clean, making sure no one went to jail, and (probably) saving a marriage or two, the consequences of my big plan were ruinous. I did my best not to get anyone else involved, but word got out, and caused a different kind of social backlash. I became a hero and a pariah. I was banned from that school forever, and a lot of my former friends stopped speaking to me. Some of them in the performance of sanctimony, some of them as punishment for what they saw as snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Meanwhile, the moral grandstanding via overzealous enforcement of puritanical dress code policies got worse, from what I heard. 

And even though my parents weren’t close chums with the board members, they caught a whole bunch of shit for what I’d done, too. In fact, looking back, my mom had to know that her efforts to steer me back onto the path of virtue would come back on her and dad worse than it did on me. 

I was a smart fourteen year old, but no matter how good of a brain you’ve got, wisdom doesn’t come cheap. Neither does integrity, for that matter. And the truth is, without parents so rich in both, it’s hard to imagine I could have afforded either.

TALK ABOUT GOING TO BOSTON.

Right. So it was around this time, after I had managed to turn myself into a public enemy, that my parents decided it might be a good idea for me to get away for a little while, and oh guess what — Adam is done with that super secret program…would I like to go visit him in Boston?

I would have been over the moon if my tail hadn’t been so firmly between my legs, but still, I was excited. I had so many questions.

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