Piper's Price Read online

  “That was brave of you,” one of the anonymous girls said to her.

  “You’re so pretty,” said another. “I could never do that.”

  And then she saw him—saw him looking at her.

  Did she recognize him?

  She offered him a finger wave in passing.

  After she had gone, Michael clapped Robbie on the shoulder. “You can haul your jaw back up off the floor anytime you feel like it, bro.”

  Robbie shook his head, struggling with his disbelief. Had it been her? Had she really just modeled for the women’s art class—at her age?

  “They get … students for that?” he asked, somehow stricken, torn between sympathy for her and a simple but merciless jealousy of her classmates.

  “Sure,” Michael said. “Easiest recruiting there is, I bet. College isn’t free, my friend. And we are adults, after all.”

  Transitional, Robbie thought. We’re not really adults until we’re done here. There’s so much we can’t do yet. So much we’re not allowed to know. “I suppose,” he conceded, feeling suddenly rather downcast.

  “You disappointed? C’mon, Robbie, it’s not like there was a roomful of horny, frustrated guys like you in there leering over her. Look, you should be happy. She waved at you.”

  “No, you’re right. Never mind me. It’s just…”

  As the last of the first class departed, Robbie caught his breath. The young woman bringing up the rear was carrying her sketchpad under her arm, and it was open. The pencil-drawn image of Maddy Piper, naked with her hands in her hair behind her head, bounced right past him. The artist’s arm was over Maddy’s waist, but her breasts were visible.

  They were perfect.

  It’s a drawing, Robbie, he said to himself. Grow up, for crying out loud.

  He felt dizzy.

  “Two hundred bucks is two hundred bucks, amigo,” Michael said. “Where else you gonna get work for a hundred bucks an hour around here?”

  It was a fair point, especially from a guy who doubled as a charity scholarship student and gym janitor. Robbie had never had a friend so in need of money in his life. It opened doors in his perspective.

  Anyway, it was a gender-separated section. The course in Human Form, freshman level, maintained the same protective wall of modesty around the students that all of society did. Only the post-graduate class presumably allowed for the sketching of the opposite sex.

  But Professor Veda Mack taught both sections. And that meant…

  “Wonder who signed up for our group?” Robbie wondered aloud as the guys started filing in.

  “Like I said—two hundred bucks is two hundred bucks. I’m not in this class. Neither is she, I guess.”

  Robbie stopped, thunderstruck.

  Michael laughed good-naturedly. “Hell, man. I can’t draw. Don’t be weird about it, all right?”

  Robbie shared in the laugh. “Whatever, man. Doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

  Robbie, you perv, he thought. If Maddy knew what went on in your head half the time, she’d want nothing to do with you. And she probably won’t anyway.

  It was a misery familiar to him since high school. By law, he’d been allowed to have a girlfriend from the age of sixteen, provided the relationship stayed within the boundaries of basic decency. And in spite of his money and his looks—Robbie fancied himself a fairly handsome young fellow—he’d never gotten one. He could hardly even talk to girls.

  That’s got to change, he said to himself. Like, now.

  He followed Michael into the studio.

  ****

  “And where have you been, young lady?” Jasmine asked, affecting an older woman’s tone. She and Heather had taken a seat near the back of the cafeteria, by the stage where would-be poets waxed political and the occasional garage band came out of hiding to play a set. In front of her, a fresh but untouched cup of coffee steamed. “We were looking for you.”

  “Sorry,” Maddy said, plopping down with them and blowing steam from the rim of her own cup. “Should have said something. Missed our run, I guess.”

  “We didn’t go,” Heather groused. “Didn’t you get my texts?”

  Probably sent them while my phone was in the bag behind the partition, Maddy thought, along with the rest of my things.

  She drew her phone out. Three messages—two from Heather, one from Jasmine. “Okay, now I feel bad,” she said. “Got busy. Lost track of time. How do I make it up to you?”

  “Thought you’d been abducted,” Jasmine said. “You said you’re never late for anything.”

  “I did?” She sought her brain for the memory, found it, and frowned, sipping her coffee. “Usually, I’m not. Look, I had a thing to do this morning. Won’t happen again.”

  The cafeteria was mostly empty. It was past lunchtime. The ensuing silence quickly got thick.

  “She had a thing to do,” Jasmine said to Heather, as though explaining the obvious to someone tragically slow, brushing an errant lock of ginger hair out of her eyes and giving her drink a small, tentative slurp. “Yeah. That’s helpful.”

  Should I tell them? Maddy thought. Do I dare?

  “Everything okay?” Heather asked.

  The obvious thing to do would have been to offer to run with them now, get it in before the two of them had swim practice in an hour. But she didn’t think they’d want to go straight from one workout to the next, and coffee did not make for great hydration prior to a run. Her own legs felt unaccountably … wobbly, at present.

  Might as well, she thought. People will talk, even if I don’t.

  It was unavoidable.

  Jasmine studied her sidelong. “Go ahead,” she said. “Spill.”

  Maddy sat back, defeated. “I got a job this morning.”

  “Mm, hm,” Jasmine said. One corner of her mouth curled, expectant.

  “What?” Heather asked them both, as if Jasmine even knew.

  “If I tell you, you promise not to laugh? No teasing of any kind. I don’t think I could take it.” She reached for the sugar, adding a pinch. “I need encouragement today. I … I have to go back tomorrow and Friday.”

  “Oh, my God,” Jasmine said, cluing in completely now.

  “You didn’t,” Heather said, eyes wide with sudden understanding.

  “I did.”

  The perfect O of Heather’s mouth melted into a wide grin. “How exciting!” she crowed. “But—so many people answered that ad. How did you do it? I mean, good for you, but there must have been at least ten applications just from the bulletin board back at the dorm.”

  “I know,” Maddy said, shaking her head at the unlikelihood of it all. “And I don’t know, if you get me.”

  “Well, you are kind of gorgeous,” Jasmine said. She made a clucking noise with her tongue—Tchock, tchock—and looked at her over her coffee. Her expression was friendly but more than a little scandalized. Pleasantly scandalized, Maddy could not help but observe. “You got some nerve, girl. I’ll give you that.”

  “What, Jas?” Maddy pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “It was only other women in there. Like, no different from cleaning up after a workout.”

  “Right!” Heather agreed. “Oh, my gosh. When I saw that ad, I could not believe how many people wanted that job. Never thought one of them would be you, though.”

  We haven’t known each other that long, Maddy thought. But she understood. If she were to be completely honest with herself, she was still trying to get a handle on what she’d done. Cleaning up after a workout was not the same as being the undivided center of attention for a room full of art students. Modesty was one of the virtues of innocence. There were twelve of these in total, and six of them weren’t legally lifted until the age of twenty-two. Girls and young women simply didn’t display themselves in that way.

  “It’s art,” she said. “It’s ‘The Human Form’. They, uh…”

  “Needed a human?” Jasmine supplied.

  “Yes, damn it,” Maddy said, slightly exasperated.

 
; They laughed, the three of them together, and Maddy was only slightly distracted when a boy she recognized—also in their government class—came in, presumably for a late lunch. He was a furtive thing, this quiet young man who had stolen surreptitious glances at her all through the opening lecture. A little sneaky, even, but not so skilled as to have gone unnoticed.

  She thought he looked familiar, as though she had seen him on TV at some point, but she could not for the life of her recall from where.

  Kind of cute, she thought, hoping the conversation would now turn to something else.

  “Go for a run later?” she asked her friends.

  ****

  Two days later, when the bell signaled the end of their morning government class, Robbie hurried out of the room after her. He was painfully aware of how she was, again, sandwiched between Jasmine and Heather. But Michael’s words, “Go get her, Tiger,” uttered at the moment of dismissal, reverberated in his ears like a challenge. Like a dare. Here goes nothing, he thought. Watch me work, Dad.

  Out on the quad, hundreds of students alternately hurried or milled about, all well within earshot if he should raise his voice and call after her. He jogged closer, trying to affect an ease—an air of casual—that he couldn’t make real. He came upon her rather sooner than he had expected, and the three of them turned to him in a group.

  “Look who it is,” Heather said. “Robbie McNeal, right? The McNeal?”

  Well, crud, he thought. He’d wanted to keep that family stuff on the down-low. People would get the wrong idea about him, think he was all high and mighty and too good for—

  Jasmine’s eyes lit. “I thought you looked familiar!”

  But Robbie’s eyes never left Maddy. She looked so friendly, so inviting—so … well, social.

  “Robbie, yeah,” he said. “Just Robbie, though, okay?”

  They introduced themselves, shook his hand amiably enough. His flesh seemed to burn when Maddy, the last to do so, wrapped her fingers around his. “Maddy Piper,” she said. “No major just yet.”

  “I know,” he replied before he could think himself out of it. “I mean—I mean … well, I heard you at roll call. It’s nice to meet you.”

  Jasmine made a noise with her tongue—Tchock, tchock—and said, “Oh, boy. Here it comes.”

  Heck with it, Robbie thought. I don’t know if this is going well or going to hell, but it’s now or never.

  “I was hoping we could go out sometime,” he said. “Maybe catch the game after the homecoming parade.”

  Jasmine and Heather laughed—but Maddy’s face suffused with a blush, and for one agonizing second, Robbie had a moment of burning, white-hot hope that she would say yes.

  “Bold move,” said Heather, and Jasmine looked him up and down as though considering his offer herself, and his worthiness.

  They didn’t matter. Only Maddy did. Time stretched.

  “I don’t even know you,” she said. “I’m sorry,” she quickly added.

  They walked off together, Jasmine and Heather laughing, Maddy shaking her head.

  “She doesn’t like football,” Jasmine called back to him, eliciting more laughter from Heather.

  “Fuck,” Robbie muttered under his breath. It was the first out-loud swear word of his life. He’d pray for forgiveness later, but for the moment, he thought God might understand.

  You tried, he told himself. Step in the right direction for you.

  Still, he was more than a little crushed. It was a full ten seconds before he realized he wasn’t even watching her anymore. He was looking at the ground, at his shoes. He turned his head up, hoping to call out, suggest something different they could do together instead. But by then she was gone, swallowed up by the teeming masses of students on the quad.

  ****

  Not far off—right outside the Carter Building, in fact, where they’d all just escaped Government 101 ten minutes early—Michael watched over the entire, sad scene with a pitying smile on his face. Poor guy, he thought. “A” for effort, though.

  “Robbie,” he said, catching up to him, putting an arm around his friend’s shoulder. “Don’t look so glum. Lots of fish in the sea, you know?”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “I ought to be. Look—go get your gym stuff. Meet you in the weight room.”

  “This is not the time,” Robbie said. “Not in the mood.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Michael said, giving him a brotherly squeeze. “Nothing like pumping a little iron to get your mind off things. Work out some of that frustration.”

  Robbie didn’t answer that.

  “Indulge me,” Michael said. “Later, I’ll tell you something I freakin’ guarantee you want to hear.”

  ****

  That night, Maddy sat at her desk, trying to concentrate. She had her Government textbook open, but she wasn’t seeing it. Instead, in her mind, she saw only the face of the boy she’d let down earlier today. The senator’s son. Robbie.

  He caught me by surprise, she told herself, again and again and again. Heather and Jas were with me. Bad form on his part. Not my fault.

  He’d looked so disappointed. So hurt.

  She ran her hand through her hair. Adjusted her glasses. Made herself read.

  Then, next to her hand, her phone lit up with an alert. Something in her government class study channel—but restricted. A private message, only for her. Could be anyone.

  Could be Robbie.

  But it wasn’t. Instead, when she tapped open the message icon, she found a message from another boy, someone named Michael.

  I have to warn you about something.

  Chapter Three

  Court

  Twelve Days Later

  “Will the defendant please rise?”

  The judge reentered the courtroom from the back. She was a shrewd, severe woman with short black hair and dark eyes, both of which matched her robe only too well. She had a reputation for fairness. The lawyer Robbie’s father had picked for him hadn’t wanted her to get the case.

  “You don’t want a jury,” Dawson had said. “Trust me. And I’d rather we’d gotten Hawking or Dunning at gavel, but I still think we can work with this.”

  But today, for the first time since the whole miserable process had gotten underway, Judge Corinne Stephens looked angry.

  Oh, this can’t be good, Robbie thought, running his right hand over his left wrist and missing his Smartwatch. Remembering he had been told not to wear it—or anything in the way of “jewelry”.

  Otherwise, he had dressed his best, precisely according to instructions. He wore a starched, white, long-sleeved dress shirt without cufflinks and unassuming business-black slacks. The tie was pressed but unadorned. It was blue, which was supposedly more sympathetic than red. Or so said Mr. Dawson.

  It’s like a movie, Robbie thought, standing from behind the table. There were cameras everywhere. He was a legal adult—had been for three weeks—a senator’s son, and fair game for the media. Worse, he was Senator McNeal’s son, which made him big news. And even though these particular cameras were turned off at the moment, his image, his story, was doubtless already plastered far and wide across the Internet.

  Mr. Dawson remained seated, eyes focused on a blank notepad. His fingers clutched nervously at a pen but wrote nothing.

  “You’ll be fine,” his mother had said. “Your father will take care of it.”

  Robbie looked over his shoulder, into the gallery. Neither of his parents were there. How could they be late for this? Fear tickled at his chest—not nervousness, like his attorney was showing, but actual fear. He’d never been in trouble before. He was a…

  “Good boy,” his mother had said. “Be brave, won’t you? People will be watching.”

  You should have let me confess, Mom, he thought desperately. I should have said I was sorry. It was a mistake—a bad decision. God, help Judge Stephens see that’s all it was.

  She sat. She looked down on him as though from a height. Her features were now inscrutable.
The lines in her face might have been cut from granite.

  “You have nothing to worry about,” his mother had promised him. “Daddy’s fixed harder problems than this.”

  But they weren’t here now, and that couldn’t be good, either.

  Michael was here. Right in the front row, flanked on either side by his parents. He smiled at Robbie reassuringly. He held up his hands to show crossed fingers. But he, too, was worried. Robbie could tell. It was obvious.

  He ought to be, Robbie thought, bitterly. It was his dumb idea.

  But you did it, Robbie. You. Only you.

  His accusers were here as well: Maddy, Jasmine, and Heather—three of the prettiest, most popular young women in his freshmen class. And they were out to get him.

  For fun. For their personal amusement. Even Maddy, for whom he still harbored an unshakable crush. They wanted their share of justice, and they intended to enjoy every minute of it.

  Father had said they wouldn’t be here. They’d be making their retractions, trying to avoid punishment themselves. This whole circus would be called off.

  But I did it, he reminded himself. If it happens, I deserve it.

  Maddy brushed a lock of dark hair over her shoulder. She was staring at him. Her bright green eyes behind those erudite wire-rimmed glasses hardly blinked. Of the three of them, she seemed to be enjoying this spectacle the least. Her features betrayed no malice toward him, no delight in his situation. Robbie supposed that was something.

  “Robert McNeal,” Judge Stephens now said, drawing his attention back to the bench, “have you anything to say on your behalf before I render a verdict?”

  I’m sorry, he almost blurted out. Can I go home now?

  He wanted to ask where his parents were. He wanted to cry. Most of all, he wanted it over with, one way or another.

  He lowered his head and shook it. “No, Your Honor,” he said, his voice trembling.

  ****

  “You’ll do what I tell you, and nothing more than I tell you,” his father had said. “It’s bad enough that you put me in this position. You say nothing. We’ll take care of it my way. Jesus Christ, Rob, what were you thinking?”