When you're asked to rate a person, irrespective of how crass that request is, you expect to be rating an individual who, though they can be offended or hurt by your assessment, will move on from the exchange relatively unscathed. Especially when you're still in college, you never expect any experience to harm you forever. You think that college is a stepping stone, yes, one that will lead you to the rest of your life, but permanent harm does not seem like a possibility.  

​​​

But what happens in college does not stay in college. 

​​​

The name Gamma Sigma Pi, years after my own college experience, still haunts me to this day. It sometimes comes to me at night without warning, like a jump scare, and leaves me prostrate in the dark, hyperventilating my long way back to normality. 

​

And I'm not even the one who was hurt the most by that fraternity. Others never made it out alive.

​​

I recently bumped into Riley, an old pal of mine. We could both see that we wanted to bring it up but neither had the courage to. Eventually, I made the leap, and he went pale. 

​​​​

'Yes,' he said. 'I remember. The shit people do for fame.'

​​​​

He walked away then without a smile or a goodbye. I stared at his back as he walked farther and farther away and I must have mouthed the word coward numerous times. 

​​​

We are all cowards for never bringing it up, for never writing about it, talking about it, never reporting anything. We let it all happen and we didn't say a thing. 

​​​​

This is me saying my piece. What happens in college doesn't stay in college anyway. So, fuck it: here's what happened seven years ago. 

​​

​​​

*

​

​​​​

We were freshmen: there was Nick Vrabel; Riley Griffith, who we called Ghost on account of how pasty he was; Keenan Battenberg; and me, Dave Mayfield — they called me May. We were all guys from high school, the old group of friends who fortunately stayed together, nerdy Michigan boys who were born in Michigan, would study in Michigan, and eventually die in Michigan. 

​​

All four of us started renting an apartment together in Ann Arbor. We were Ro-Ro boys from Rochester in Oakland County, so we didn't live far from campus, but we decided we'd start our adult life together on the side of Lake Erie that wasn't familiar to us. We'd been schoolmates, now we were roommates, and we had no doubt we'd be friends forever. I don't remember us ever arguing before college.

​​

I still recall our very first day. The college guides organized an ice-breaker event — orienteering — but we skipped it because all four of us hated the great outdoors. So we thought we'd explore Ann Arbor on our own instead. We knew Nick would be late waking up so we told him the night before to meet us in the city when he was ready. When he eventually showed up, he looked like he'd slept under the bed. 

​​

Nick made it to college not because he tried but because he was a genius, one of those people who wasted his talent either through a lack of ambition or laziness or a combination of both. He never tried to do much of anything because he believed most things were a waste of time. He just wanted to get through life comfortably and this he managed very well.  

​​

We all wanted to go to a different spot that day. Ghost wanted to go to a robotics shop; Battenberg said he'd love to visit the campus itself — he had heard that the law quadrangle was a thing of beauty; Nick, when prodded for an answer, shrugged and said he wouldn't mind the arcade; and I just wanted to have a walk down the streets, absorb the general vibe of the place. 

​​

The latter is what we ended up doing. We walked alongside the Huron River, took a stroll on the pier and saw a massive winery building that was a combination of stonework and pale wood, we eventually went to the heart of the city and tried our hands at the games in the arcade. In the end, we acquiesced to Battenberg's wish and visited the campus itself. ​

​

The main building was in classical revival style. We passed through the large portico and then through the colonnades around the lush courtyard. We walked to the very back of this and came through another enclosed walkway that led to a lawned quadrangle. The paths were paved and surrounded by gothic buttresses and pinnacles, intricate stone carvings over stained windows. There was something very English about it and its atmosphere. ​​

​

'This is it,' Battenberg said. 

​

He sat on his heels and observed the buildings with a mix of dreamy-eyed awe and happiness. This was our Battenberg, a poet lying in wait. He was as practical as they come, a logician and a chess master, but beauty always halted him and upon his shoulders was the heavy weight of words he wanted so desperately to express. 

​

It is in this beautiful quadrangle that we first saw the devil. He was there that day but we didn't pay much attention to him though he was loud and commanding the attention of a small group of people. 

​

He was a guide, telling the freshmen about the history of the place. He looked over at us at one point. He had a face we couldn't forget: a large aquiline nose hanging over pomegranate red lips, black eyes, and a pointy head wearing a dark buzzcut. 

​

L.J. Breton, fraternity president and scion of aristocracy, son of one of the biggest businessmen in the US. His father was a Michiganian on Forbes and a mega-donor of questionable politicians. 

​

We didn't know all this then but I remember locking eyes with him and thinking, this guy is important. 

​

He was.

​​

​

*

​​

​

Our first few weeks were a blast. We didn't say no to most opportunities, so we ended up going to some parties which we initially felt uncomfortable at, we learned about the big names who ran certain events — and, here, L.J. Breton was mentioned a few times — and we participated in games and late nights. Ghost was even hailed as the new star programmer in college. In a freshman coding marathon, he pulled off developing a mini game about the secrets of the 200-year-old campus. We celebrated by going out to drink and returning to our apartment completely wasted as the sun was coming up.

​

It was soon after this that there was a rumor going around: someone had just launched Facemash 2.0 from his dorm room. 

​

At first, people thought that Ghost, on the back of winning the prestigious freshman marathon, was following the footsteps of Mark Zuckerberg by creating a website that rated the girls in college. 

​

We knew Ghost too well — he would never waste his time on something like that; his talents were better suited to creating worlds out of thin air, games that made you think about humanity. Secondly, we thought the rumor was simply untrue. We hadn't seen this website for ourselves and our new friends from the ICT department hadn't heard of it. 

​

'There's no such thing,' one of them told us. 'They run a tight ship here. If something like that ever happens, whoever's responsible gets flung out the window.'

​​

But it happened and there was no flinging. 

​

It was Ghost who found the website one night while we were working on our papers in the library. He was using one of the public PCs and someone had left the link in a Notepad file on the desktop. 

​​

'It's real,' he whispered. 

​​

We all pulled up chairs beside him and looked at the screen. The website was called Slay Queens. One picture of a random girl at the college was in the middle of the page. Below the picture was an input field and underneath was the text, Rate this girl from 1 to 10. 

​​

'This is wrong on so many levels,' Battenberg said. 

​​

'But is she hot though?' Nick asked. 

 

'This isn't funny,' Battenberg said. 'Whoever's behind this is screwed.' 

​​

'Rightfully so,' I said. 

​​

'Yes,' Nick said, 'but listen, it can be fun if we tap into the user interface and figure out which picture is getting the most votes.' 

​​

'I don't think we can scrape that information,' Ghost said. 

​​

'Nah, it's easy.'

​​

Nick squeezed closer to Ghost and took over the keyboard. 

​​

'See that number?' he asked us. There was a tiny number in greyscale on the bottom right of the page. 'That number,' he continued, 'is the number of times this photo was voted on, which means the counter is public information.'

​​

'Yes, but the ranking isn't,' Ghost said. 

​​

'Doesn't matter,' Nick said. 'The count is all we need.'

​​

We were on the edge of our seats, looking from Nick to Ghost. This was not Battenberg's or my territory. His field was engineering (not the computer kind) and mine was field biology. 

​

Nick pulled up a programming language tool and started typing away. Ghost was standing now and looking over Nick's shoulder, analyzing every letter that Nick was typing on the black screen.

​

'Beautiful soup,' Ghost said. 'Again, you're doing a lot of assuming here.'

​

'Yes,' Nick said, 'let's assume that photos are classed as photos and votes are classed as votes.'

​

'You still won't be able to parse the highest rankings.'

​

'I can,' Nick said. 

​

Battenberg scoffed. 'This is the sort of thing that gets you fired up, Nick,' he said. 

​

'Because it happened in the moment — I don't need to plan, don't have a deadline, doesn't inconvenience me in any way. It happened to us now and I'm doing it.'

​

'So it's your destiny?' Battenberg asked. 

​

'Call it whatever you want, Romeo,' Nick said. 'I call it easy. Piss easy.'

​

Nick let the script do its work and when it finished, the URL returned with a list of text. The word photo was repeated numerous times with some minor variation each time. Next to each word was a number. The top number ran into the hundreds. 

​

'OK,' Ghost said, 'so these are how many votes, right? What now?'

​

Nick tapped the PC's screen. 

​

'This,' he said, 'is simply to get the average. We don't care about the rankings of the photos who were voted on just twice, right? We want the highest-ranked photos of girls who were voted on at least a hundred times.'

​​

He copied the top ten variations of the word photo and pasted them in a Word document. 

​

'These are the URLs of the photos in question. We want the highest ranked girl out of these ten because this will be the quote-unquote hottest one according to the hundreds of voters.'

​

Nick opened up the tool again and started typing with one hand and scratching at his dishevelled head with the other. He was in the zone, completely unhinged by the project in front of him. If the library had started falling brick by brick around him, he'd be oblivious. He'd hang by a thread on the edge of the world if it meant that he could finish the task at hand.

​

'I'm assuming,' he said, 'that rankings are in a table somewhere with the class ranking-table. I'll use append. I want the rank, so I'll use the URL of the photo, which I now have, and the number of votes, which I also have.'

​

He pressed Enter so softly as if he were dipping his finger in poison. I could tell that Nick was worried that this would not work. And I knew Nick like the back of my hand. He wasn't worried because Ghost would tell him I-told-you-so, he wasn't anxious about impressing us, he simply didn't want to have wasted time that he could have spent playing RuneScape while writing his paper. He was a two-birds-with-one-stone kind of guy. 

​

The script returned with yet another list. Nick smiled. The light from the PC made his sharp face look a little sinister. 

​

'Baby cakes,' he said. 'Sweet cheeks. This is it right here. So we have a list.'

​

'You're a genius, Nick,' Ghost said. 'My God, you're good. So—'

​

'So what we have here,' Nick said, 'is what is known as a list of tuples. All we have to do is work out the average now. A simple mathematical effort.'

​

Nick copied the text and pasted it on a document. 

​

'I can do it,' Ghost said. 

​

And Ghost worked it out in his head and typed a single number next to each pasted line of text. 

​

Finally, we had a result.

​

'This one,' Nick said. 'Photo412 has an average ranking of 9.3 based on 922 votes. This girl must be a stunner.'

​

'So what?' Battenberg said. 'We can't see who she is.'

​

'Of course we can, Batty,' Nick said. 'We copy photo412 and paste it as the slug or resource identifier after the slash in the URL. That brings up her photo, my man.'

​

This is what Nick did. He copied, he pasted. He pressed Enter. 

​

We held our breaths and inched ever closer to the screen. The photo was loading. Dark hair first and a pale forehead, rather thick eyebrows, then the eyes — large, sad hazel eyes — a small nose and a nose ring on her right nostril, a full upper lip over a thin, glossy lower lip, a wisp of wavy hair curling around her small round chin. 

​

She was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. 

​

'I know her,' Battenberg said. 'I mean I know who she is. She attends a poetry credit.'

​

'Jesus,' I said. 'This poor girl must have an awful life.'

​​

'Yeah and, with this website, it's going to get worse.'

​​

'We could protect her,' Nick said. He was still glowing from his success. 'We could tell her that 922 creeps on campus will be looking to find her but that we could be her bodyguards.'

​

'Look at us,' Battenberg said. 'We probably look more like creeps than the actual creeps.'

​

'So, what's her name, Batty?' Nick asked. 

​

'I believe it's Andrea. Andrea Duprey.'

​

'You believe?'

​

'I know.'

​

'Of course you do, B—'

​

The door to our working room swung open and thudded against the wall. The senior librarian walked in our direction as he took off his spectacles and put them in his shirt pocket.

​

'Time's up, boys,' he said. 'Please start heading out.'

​

'We should have another ten minutes,' Battenberg said, looking at his watch.

​

'Time's up.'

​

The librarian crossed his arms and looked down at us. He was defiant. He looked very old, his face creased all kinds of ways, but he looked spry and dexterous. This was monstrous to us and so we found him intimidating. The moonlight from the window illuminated his pale but wizened face. 

​

'Yes, sir,' Battenberg said. 

​

We looked back at our screen and saw that Slay Queens was still there, specifically Andrea Duprey. We hoped the librarian didn't know what he was looking at. Nick closed the page and logged off. The rest of us picked up our papers and packed our bags. 

​

'With me,' the librarian said, and we followed him out of the working room and into the main hall. 

​

We didn't know what we were looking at at first. We thought they were library staff but we recognised the face in the darkness. At a table just inside the main door of the library was L.J. Breton surrounded by his posse and we could have sworn we saw a bottle of whiskey on the table. If the amber liquid within the bottle and the glasses weren't enough proof, the sweet oaky smell of bourbon surely was. 

​

My eyes locked with Breton as we were heading out. He was important but he was also dangerous. I could see that then. His black eyes seemed to be telling me that he would remember me forever and that I had better watch my step. My body went cold. 

​

When the librarian closed the main door behind us, we stopped and looked at each other. 

​

'Why are those guys allowed after hours?' Battenberg asked. 

​

'Didn't you see who it was?' Ghost said. 

​​

'Breton,' Nick said. 

​

'So?'

​

'So, haven't you heard? His father is a god.'

​​

'And, by extension,' Ghost said, 'so is he.'

​​

​​

*

​

​​

A cold blast of air was blowing across the lake. We heard some students say that the water in Lake Superior was practically freezing already. The colors on the banks were green and gold, ripe orange and stale yellow. The weather was dry and crisp. 

 

By the time Halloween was around the corner, we were all so individually busy that the fear that we would drift apart became real for the first time. There was no ice between us, never any breaking to be had, but there was some slippage. 

 

Holding onto Ghost was like trying to grip a bar of wet soap on most days. He was the ICT department's new wunderkind. The other freshmen treated him as a kind of guru that would solve all of their programming problems. And the sophomores and juniors wanted him to be their protégé. This was the first time that Ghost was getting a significant amount of attention and, contrary to what we thought would happen, he was actually enjoying it. We didn’t blame him but we wanted him around; he was often the voice of reason.

 

On the other and more familiar hand, Nick was sleeping more than usual. His parents must have played a significant part to get him to attend high school classes regularly and to be as much of a diligent student as he could muster. But this was college and he was the farthest he’d ever been from home. There was no authority figure that could get him to do the most basic things. We couldn’t make him do much of anything most days. So, he slept, talked in his sleep, and occasionally sent us a text to ask us where we were when he remembered that he shared an apartment with us and we weren’t home.

 

I ended up spending most of my time with Battenberg but he too was severely occupied. At least his head was. When I talked to him, he didn’t participate in the conversation; his thoughts were elsewhere. This was Battenberg, so I knew what was going on. I asked him plainly one evening at one of the bars we went to after classes.

 

‘Who’s the girl?’

 

Battenberg stopped looking down at his drink and met my eyes. 

 

‘Ah,’ he said, and took a sip of his cranberry juice. ‘What do you know?’

 

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I just know you. There’s a girl and you’re in love.’

 

‘Well, in love is a little…’ 

 

‘Too much?’ 

 

‘I’m obsessed is the right word here. Infatuated most definitely.’

 

‘With whom?’

 

‘Photo412,’ Battenberg said. 

 

At first, I didn’t get the reference. When I eventually did, I shuddered. That website had given me the creeps.

 

‘Andrea Duprey,’ Battenberg said. ‘I see her most days at the poetry classes. There’s something off with her…’

 

I asked him to repeat on account of the loud music but he got lost in his own thoughts again. The seniors at the bar were barging into our table and some of Battenberg’s juice leapt out of the glass. Battenberg seemed unfazed by this. 

 

I nudged him. ‘Let’s go outside for a bit.’

 

We took our drinks and went out into the cold air. Battenberg zipped up his jacket and finished the juice. He left the glass on a ledge. I put my hands in my pocket and watched my breath smoke up my view of the lake across from us. 

 

‘Did you talk to her?’ I asked.

 

‘I try to,’ Battenberg said. ‘There’s something wrong. She wasn’t like this in the first few weeks. She’s going through something, I know it.’ 

 

‘So ask her.’

 

‘I tried. She’s not very communicative.’

 

‘Welcome to my world,’ I said and elbowed him. 

 

Battenberg didn’t take the bait. He sighed and looked out at the lake. 

 

‘Cheer up, man, she’ll come around,’ I said. 

 

‘I think it has something to do with—oh, I don’t know. I should just stop thinking about her. And don’t give me that platitude of plenty of fish in the sea. She’s a mystery, she’s a poet, and all I want is to read her for the rest of my days or until I realize there’s not a lot to her, that it’s all in my head.’ 

 

‘Relax,’ I said. ‘You tend to get like this. Remember Jenny? Every guy in school was obsessed with her, and every guy survived, including you.’ 

 

‘I think I’ll just move on,’ Battenberg said, and smiled for the first time in many days. 

 

That very same night, I was curious about whether Slay Queens still existed. When we returned home and while Battenberg was showering, I looked it up on my laptop. The website opened up on a random picture of a girl, one I didn’t recognise. There was an added piece of text under the website’s title. 

 

Brought to you by Gamma Sigma Pi. 

 

The idea of fraternities and hazing made my skin crawl. I waited until Battenberg came out of the shower, hesitated about whether I should bring it up, and then told him. I turned the laptop screen in his direction and showed him the text.

 

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘They’re fucking proud of it now. How is this shit still live?’

 

‘You know the fraternity?’

 

‘All I know is that the satanic deviant is their president,’ Battenberg hissed. 

 

I think I knew who he was referring to but I wanted to be sure. The image of that aquiline nose over pomegranate lips came into my head and, though I hadn’t interacted with Breton until this point, a cold wave still passed right through me and like a metallic weight into my legs. Breton was like a monster in the janitor’s closet, a cautionary school tale, except that nobody dared to get close to the closet door. It would have been pointless anyway because the door was open and the monster was out.

 

Battenberg removed the towel around his head and flung it in the direction of the still lit bathroom. He laid down on the bed. 

 

‘Which satanic deviant?’ I asked. 

 

‘The untouchable L.J. Breton,’ he said. ‘I’m here writing lyrics and poetry about a girl and I’m so embarrassed at the thought that they might come to light while this piece of shit is advertising his sexist, predacious, and probably illegal website.’ 

 

‘Show me your poetry,’ I asked. 

 

‘Not even you will get to see my cheese, May.’ 

 

I was hoping his poetry would be an antidote to the terror that that name came with. An antidote for me. Instead, we put on a movie to pass the time. Battenberg fell asleep soon after we started. I didn’t manage to finish it before I heard Ghost returning home. I was relieved. Ghost looked at the sleeping Battenberg and gave a smile. Then we started talking quietly about each other’s day. Ghost said he was given a mammoth task by the other programmers: he was to head the design of that year’s game submission for the annual coding competition. 

 

‘But it takes too much time. Maybe I can get some fat cat to fund us,’ he said. 

 

‘Speaking of fat cats,’ I said, ‘we now know who’s behind Slay Queens.’ 

 

‘Who?’

 

‘L.J. Breton. The website now says that Gamma Sigma Pi is behind it.’

 

‘So of course he’s getting away with it,’ Ghost said. ‘That guy...’

 

‘You heard something?’ 

​

‘The rumor mill says that he’s hosting a Halloween party at his place.’

​

‘So?’

​

‘Girls only.’ 

​

‘Jesus,’ I said. 

 

I looked over at Battenberg who was still completely out of it. His mouth was hanging open, his hand dangling over a small bowl of uneaten popcorn. Our world was so different from the worlds of other students out there. We were still relatively innocent, concerned mostly with our cerebral passions: for Ghost it was coding, for me it was — at least at that particular time — the Mount Hanang chameleon and its small habitat, for Battenberg it was poetry and the pursuit of true love, for Nick it was a long period of undisturbed and un-disturbing sleep. 

 

It was later that very same evening that I rechecked the website. I typed photo412 at the end of the URL to have a secret peek at her again. Her photo came up and, I had to give it to Battenberg, I too swooned and hoped, from the bottom of my heart, that whatever she was going through was a minor hurdle, that she would be OK. I refreshed the website and another random girl came up on my screen.  I didn’t think much of it then because I was tired and it could have been my eyes but, before I closed the page, I thought I saw that the frowning girl staring at me had a bruised eye and a split lip. 

​​

​​

*

​​​

​​​

We brushed against the satanic deviant for the first time at a house party hosted by a law student we knew. The house was a three-storey Civil War Era home on Broadway Street. Huge aspen trees flanked the boulevard and Mitchell’s front lawn was no exception. We could barely see the wood cladding through the foliage. 

 

Mitchell was the son of esteemed criminal lawyers. He was an extravagant guy and someone we immediately disliked, but Battenberg had done him a favor during freshers’ week by writing his letter of interest to join the Law Students Association. The letter had been successful and Mitchell was, by this point, the association’s PR officer. As thanks, Mitchell invited Battenberg (et al.) — that’s what the email invitation said — to the biggest party of the year. 

 

We didn’t think we would go but, at the very last minute, Ghost said we should. He found out that a girl he liked from the ICT department was going to be there. We’d been good friends since we were kids, so of course we wouldn’t deny Ghost the opportunity. Even Nick, who often thought these things beneath him, said he would make an effort and comb his hair. 

 

We showed up on Mitchell’s doorstep just after sunset. The party was already going strong. The house music was more or less confined to indoors but it was noisy on the lawn nonetheless. We immediately lost Nick right after he said he needed to use the bathroom. Knowing him, he could have gone anywhere from a bush to a neighbouring house. 

 

Ghost grabbed some beers for us and we hung out on the spacious deck in the backyard. Overlooking the deck was a paved walkway that led to a small pool — some people were sitting on the edge of it and dipping their feet. 

 

All along the fencing was a string of multicolored lightbulbs. There were some students hanging around by the fence, having drinks, trying the finger food on the tables there. We just leaned against the railing of the deck and watched, or rather waited, for Ghost to spot the girl he was pining for. 

 

Battenberg had come back to himself by this point and he hadn’t mentioned Andrea Duprey in weeks. I couldn’t help but feel that I was the only one amongst my friends who was somehow missing out on the college experience. I hadn’t made new friends or fallen in love. I was interested in my subject and was enjoying the lectures and the fieldwork but it didn’t inspire me in any particular way. I couldn’t even get bored because there were plenty of opportunities to waste time, but these were opportunities — like playing video games and watching movies — that closed me off from the rest of the world.

 

Nick returned to us as dishevelled as ever, looking completely confounded. 

 

‘I think I might be high on something,’ he said, ‘because if what I’ve just heard is real, I’m out.’

 

He was flicking his thumb over his shoulder, so we went in, and he led us to the bizarre reality he was questioning. 

 

In the living area was the devil, sitting in an armchair with a girl on his lap. Across from him was a dartboard hanging on the wall. There was Breton’s usual posse around him. Other people, like us, were gathering around to see what was happening. 

 

Mitchell was standing by the dartboard. In Breton’s presence, he was a completely different person. He wasn’t extravagant, he wasn’t oozing any confidence. He looked like one of us, a geek who happened to be hosting a party that had just slipped from his control. 

 

‘Not much, not much. It’s a simple thing. Simple,’ Breton said. 

 

He had an airy voice, nasal too, like the words were coming out from some old radio behind him. 

 

‘I don’t know,’ Mitchell said. 

 

‘Get up, please,’ Breton said, and the girl on his lap — a girl who looked drugged out of her mind and who was wearing a flimsy black satin dress — went to the wall across from him and set her head against the dartboard. 

 

‘Now,’ Breton said, getting up himself. ‘You will take a dart and you will aim it wherever you please, OK? But you must hit the board. Not the girl, of course, you have to be careful.’ 

 

Breton handed a dart to Mitchell who looked down at it as if it were a severed finger. 

 

‘Why?’ he asked. 

 

‘Because,’ Breton said, ‘I am making it interesting for you. Hard to resist. Gamma Sigma Pi is affluent, we built a very successful business model. What I am saying to you — OK? — is that every time you successfully hit the board without injuring anyone, we will pay you a grand. Maybe I will even double or triple that amount and you could say, by the end of it, that Gamma Sigma Pi paid for your college education.’

 

Even though L.J. Breton was short and wiry, he was intimidating. He moved like an important adult, with confidence and zero hesitation, as if anything that could happen to him in college would not stall him in any way — his life was set and there was a future beyond college that he was certainly getting to. He was not self-conscious at all and talked as if no one but his subject was listening. His black eyes looked into you and beyond you at the same time. They decided whether you were worth a second glance or whether you were important at all to the future that was waiting for him.

 

‘I can’t do it,’ Mitchell said. ‘Please—’

 

‘You can do it,’ Breton said. ‘You are not, to my mind, physically incapable of throwing a dart. Now if you’re saying that you can’t throw it without hitting someone and therefore you can’t win this game that we are playing here, then that’s another matter.’ He took a quick look around the room. ‘But I’m sure there is someone here who would like to try.’

 

A finger pointed right in our direction, right at Battenberg. We saw Battenberg swallow and he was about to turn around when a small, quick arm landed on his shoulder and made him swivel. Breton held Battenberg by the collar of his shirt. 

 

‘Mitchell, give this man your dart. Hand it to him now,’ Breton said. 

 

‘Fuck you, man,’ Nick said. 

 

We would have laughed because, in the past, Nick’s courage often transformed a tentative situation into a thrilling story worth recounting later, but this was L.J. Breton and, while we were aware of his power, we could not yet calculate what he could do with it and how far he was willing to go. 

 

Breton looked askance at Nick and smiled. 

 

‘You’ll be dead before college is over,’ Breton said. ‘Your opinion doesn’t matter.’

 

Nick furrowed his brow and looked at us. Even he didn’t have an answer to such a disturbing and bizarre response. Nick’s face seemed to say, does this guy know something I don’t? 

 

‘So,’ Breton continued, ‘this is how we will settle this. And settling it is important to us because we want everyone to get back to the party, OK? This man here will throw the dart once. If he hits the board without injuring the girl, we pay both of your tuition fees.’

 

‘This is insane,’ Battenberg mumbled, accepting the dart that Mitchell handed to him. 

 

‘Not really, no,’ Breton said. ‘This is life, this is an opportunity, OK? Every time you drive your car, you risk hitting someone, but you still drive it, don’t you? Because it takes you places.’ 

 

Breton shuffled back and crossed his arms and we saw Battenberg consider his options and then take a stance. He faced the dartboard. 

 

‘What are you doing?’ Ghost said. 

 

But I knew what Battenberg was doing. He was the least privileged of us Ro-Ro boys. His parents lived on Union Street in a house that was in desperate need of renovation. The street was the least secure of the otherwise very safe Rochester. Battenberg had seen his fair share of robberies and carjackings. It’s possibly why he, amongst us, was the poet and it was most definitely the reason why he decided that the dart-throwing could prove beneficial.

 

I almost wished Ghost would shut up so Battenberg could concentrate but Ghost kept questioning our friend’s decision even when he stepped up and took aim. 

 

The room went quiet, Battenberg’s arm shot out and the dart flew towards the board. There was a scream when the dart pierced and stuck to the girl’s forehead and then there was a thin line of blood. 

 

‘Oh, well,’ Breton said. ‘Take a picture and let’s move on to better things.’ 

 

One of Breton’s hangdog pawns stepped forward, took a picture of the girl with his phone, and ran off. Breton followed. 

 

People surrounded the girl as she clutched her head. Battenberg remained frozen in the middle of the room. Mitchell was giving him dirty looks. It was our job to grab our friend and pull him away from the pandemonium.

 

‘It’s not your fault,’ I said to him.

 

‘It is,’ Ghost said. ‘Why the hell would you do it? Let Mitchell take the hit.’ 

 

‘Leave him alone, Ghost,’ Nick said. 

 

‘It could have gone so much worse,’ Ghost said. ‘What were you thinking?’ 

 

‘I said let it go,’ Nick said. ‘It was your idea to come to this shitshow anyway.’

 

‘Fuck you.’ 

 

‘Yeah, whatever.’ 

 

We dragged Battenberg outside who seemed paralysed. I looked at my friend sitting on the curb and felt something completely new. His soul had been darkened, smudged, he had drawn blood from an innocent girl. Battenberg was a pacifist, always found a way to avoid fights in school, never laid a hand on anyone, he minded his own business and he was halted by beauty. For the first time in his life, Battenberg was halted by cruelty. What’s worse is that he had been made an accomplice to it.    

 

‘You OK, Batty?’ Nick asked him. 

 

‘It was not your fault,’ I repeated. 

 

‘I could have done something,’ Battenberg whispered. ‘Andrea stopped coming to classes. She disappeared from the face of the earth.’ 

 

He grabbed hold of his knees and started swaying back and forth, a perfect picture of delirium. 

 

‘What are you talking about?’ Nick asked. 

 

But, again, I knew what he was talking about. I knew what he was referring to even before I was alone in my room in the apartment we shared and with Slay Queens open on my laptop. 

 

I was in bed and shaking all over, I had dragged the covers all the way up to my chin. I typed photo412 after the slash in the URL and my trembling finger hovered over the Enter key for what seemed like forever. That moment is forever for me and will always be forever and it will be one of the things I will think of at the end of my life. Yes, I am a coward, especially because to this day I wish I hadn’t let my finger land on the keyboard that night. But I was braver then — the same way Battenberg was when he threw the dart — and my finger eventually landed on the Enter key.

 

Instead of Andrea Duprey’s beautiful face, there was a photo of bloodied rags piled up in the corner of a room with concrete flooring. It was a dark picture and I pushed my screen back and then forward to make out what I was looking at. 

​

A blood-soaked rag. A filthy rag that was more red than white — clear, bright red patterns on the creased cloth. A lot of darker blood running beneath it on the concrete. I couldn’t look away. It was only until I saw the half-hidden face underneath one of the rags — eyes closed, puffy grey face, skin poked, a nose ring — that I looked for a way to escape. I closed the website and closed the laptop and lay in my bed with that image pulsing in my brain for hours. 

​

Andrea Duprey was dead. She had been murdered. 

​

Her body — or what was left of it — was being displayed on a website that the devil had made. 

​

What I kept thinking about, hours after the image in my head had lost some of its sharpness, were the words underneath the input field: Rate this girl from 1 to 10. 

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