Copyright 2026 by James Breitbart, all rights reserved
[5,702 words]
* * * * *Chapter 26
Tyler Keever
Thanksgiving
Day sucked. We ate at Grandma Keever’s, so at least I didn’t have to
deal with Dale’s family. What I did have to deal with was my poser
cousin Bo bragging about getting on the JV football team, Uncle Marty’s
opinions, and Aunt Joyce’s questions about Nolan.
“How’s he liking that fancy school?”
“Good. I think he’s making a lot of friends there.”
“My nephew Cody says he saw him in the cafeteria at Sissipahaw High the other day. Did he get kicked out or something?”
“No. He just wanted to see some of our old friends.”
“Cody says he’s wearing earrings now. Tamara down at the beauty salon says that school must have turned him queer.”
Bo laughed. “That boy didn’t need to go away to school to learn to be queer.”
If I’d said what I wanted to, Dale would’ve whupped me for sure.
Instead, I just said, “a lot of straight boys wear earrings nowadays,”
and kept quiet the rest of the meal.
When we got home, Mom
insisted that instead of going to my room and sulking like I wanted to,
I had to stay in the family room and “be sociable” with Cody and Blake
until it was their bedtime. Then I finally got away from my family. Of
course, with no TV, cell phone, music, or weed in my room, there wasn’t
much to do, but I at least had my skate mags. Dale had wanted to
confiscate those, too, but the school guidance counselor convinced Dale
and Mom that they should let me read them so at least I wouldn’t turn
out totally illiterate.
It was shortly before midnight when a
small pebble plunked against my bedroom window. By that point I was
pissed off enough that I didn’t care about getting my hide tanned or
sent to live with Dad. I was up for whatever Jace had in store. I
opened the window, but to my surprise it wasn’t Jace who appeared. It
was Nolan ‘the Brain’ Pierce, formerly known as the most well-behaved
kid at Sissipahaw Middle. They’d literally given him an award for going
all three years without getting written up once.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered.
“It’s a surprise. Come on.”
“Lemme get dressed first.”
“No need.”
“Dude, I don’t have shoes on!”
“Neither do I. Come on.”
Curious, I climbed out the window and followed Nolan. He hadn’t been
lying about not wearing shoes. All he had on was a pair of shorts, a
t-shirt, and earrings.
“Dude, you really did pierce your ears! I can’t believe Aunt Joyce was right.”
“What?”
“She was gossiping about you. Cody Hargroves saw you in the cafeteria
and her hairdresser thinks that boarding school turned you gay.”
“Christ, I hate this town.”
“Yeah, well you’re lucky. You get to leave in two days.”
“Mm-hmm.” Nolan picked up the pace and led me to the parking lot behind
Food Lion, where we’d used to skate back in the day. Micah, Eli,
Cassie, Parker, and Leah were there too.
“Ok, you want to tell us what the big surprise is?” Micah asked.
“We’re going streaking.” Nolan announced.
“Streaking, like, naked?”
“Yeah. I joined a streaking club up at Wilson, but it’s too cold up there now.”
“It’s cold here, too. It’s November.”
“It’s 58, I checked the forecast. We’ll be generating body heat.”
Nolan proved his point by taking off his shirt and then dropping his
t-shirt. I saw him naked for the first time in my life, and…
“Holy shit! Are those tattoos?”
“Yeah. This one,” he slapped the ink on his left ass cheek, a circle
with some writing in Spanish or something on it, “is for the secret
society I joined at Wilson. This one,” he slapped the ink on his right
ass cheek, “is because I’m gay.”
“Woah,” Eli said slowly,
“that is so fucking epic.” He began to take off his own clothes. First
his hoodie, then the shirt he had on under it, then his shoes and socks
and finally his pants and underwear. The rest of us followed suit, even
Cassie and Leah. I caught myself checking them out but quickly looked
away. Somehow it felt wrong.
“We’re going to run to First Baptist and back,” Nolan announced. “Don’t make any noise.”
We followed him down the deserted street. It was totally silent except
for our bare feet slapping against the pavement. My mind was still
trying to process the fact that Nolan Pierce had tattoos.
When we got to the church, Nolan walked right up the front steps and
opened the door. The rest of us followed him inside. He flicked on a
light and walked straight up the center aisle, totally unbothered by
the fact that he was naked in church. When he got to the front, he
faced the pulpit with both middle fingers extended. I heard Cassie gasp
behind me.
“Fuck This Town!” Nolan shouted. If we had been
outside, it definitely would have woken somebody up. He turned back to
us. “Anyone else want to go? It feels good.”
I put my middle
fingers up and shouted, “Fuck This Town!” It did feel good. We ran all
the way back to the parking lot. Nolan stood in front of his backpack,
which he’d left there before getting me.
“Congratulations. You are now the founding members of the Sissipahaw Streaking Club.”
“So, what do we do now?” Leah asked.
“You look out for each other. Make sure everyone makes it out of here.
I don’t want to come back here for Christmas when I’m 30 and find y’all
still hanging around this parking lot.”
“Easy for you to say,”
Micah scoffed, “you’re getting on a train to boarding school with a
bunch of millionaires in two days.” He had always been the most loyal
of the friend group back in middle school. I think he took it
personally when I ran away to Jace and Nolan ran away to Connecticut.
Now I was worried that it was going to turn into a real fight, the kind
you couldn’t be friends again after.
“I got out.” Nolan said, “you can too.”
“We’re not fucking geniuses like you.”
“You’re smarter than you think. All of you.” He looked right at me when
he said it, and there were tears in his eyes along with a really
intense look of determination. It gave me goosebumps. Ok, it might have
partly been the cold, but it was still totally epic. “You’re smarter
than your Aunt Joyce, and Cody Hargroves, and Amberleigh Shook and the
Ridenhours and Brenda McClure and Pastor Graves and Reverend Proctor.
And you’re a hell of a lot better than Jace fucking Havelock.”
Nolan reached into his backpack and pulled out a book. “I’m reading
this book a kid up at Wilson gave me. There’s a fake Latin phrase in
it, Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum. It means don’t let the
bastards grind you down. That’s what they want to fucking do, okay?
They hate that we’re better than them. They want to bring you down to
their level and keep you stuck in this shithole so they can look down
their noses at you and tell themselves they’re better than you. You
have to promise me you won’t let them do that. You have to promise
you’ll get out.”
“I promise,” I whispered without thinking about it.
“Everybody say it with me – Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum!”
“Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum!”
We all gathered up our clothes, and went our separate ways for the time
being, but I returned to my room feeling totally different than I had
when I left. I was done letting Dale and Jace and those fuckers at
school tell me I was no good. I was going to write my own story.
Chapter 27
Nolan Pierce
Thanksgiving
had involved more excitement than I’d planned, and I was looking
forward to seeing Owen and the rest of my dorm again by the end of it.
I hugged Mom and Dad goodbye at 8:00 a.m. Saturday and boarded the
train. I’d restocked my reading list from my bookshelf at home: Slaughterhouse-Five, The Great Gatsby, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. We got delayed outside of Richmond again, but it only cut into my layover in DC, so I didn’t mind.
I’d finished Gatsby and Wallflower by the time we got to DC, so I bought a copy of Freakonomics and The Atlantic Monthly at the newsagents. At Wilson, The Atlantic had a reputation as being a somewhat more intellectual travel read than Time or Newsweek, although this edition had a big article about how Hollywood was embracing Jesus movies. Gross.
It was 8:00 by the time I actually got to Wilson. Most of my floor was
already there, having come up on Saturday, but I knew Owen was going to
get in later. His parents were each trying to maximize the amount of
time he was spending with them instead of the other one,
which ended up maximizing the time he spent back home altogether. I
said brief hellos to a few people and got naked before slipping into
bed and going straight to sleep.
I was woken up few hours later by a warm body slipping into bed with me.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“2:30, Owen answered.”
“I should probably be getting up.”
“Stay with me a minute.”
I rolled over so that I was facing Owen and wrapped my arm around him,
gently stroking his back as we lay in bed together. “Do you want to
talk about it?”
“No, I’m exhausted.”
“Then do you want to hear about the Sissipahaw Streaking Club?”
“Mm-hmm.”
I told him about Tyler’s predicament and my plans to give him an
alternative outlet for his rebellious energies while undermining the
mixture of religiosity and regional chauvinism that controlled
Sissipahaw, and creating a ready-made group of kids who could be used
to run errands for the Illuminati (although Tyler didn’t know about
that part).
When we walked to the cafeteria, a light snow was
falling. It was still exciting for Henry and I even if Wilson didn’t
grant snow days for anything under a foot. They were serving ziti (some
combination of pasta, tomato sauce, and cheese was a perennial favorite
for the cafeteria staff).
Jamie was waiting for me when I got back to the dorm.
“Have you checked your email?”
“Not since I got back.”
“You’d probably better.”
When I got back to my dorm, I discovered another email from the Conduct
Council. I had a hearing scheduled for Thursday. The hearing itself
wasn’t a problem, as my schedule for Thursday had cleared out with the
seasonal suspension of the Wilson Streaking Club, and I knew I was
likely to get a favorable panel that would swing things as far as
possible in my favor. Still, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it,
and feared that I would get an actual detention.
The snow had
all melted by the time I made my way to the conduct council hearing
rooms Thursday evening. I found that my panel was chaired by Jamie, and
included Ethan Rothschild, Jonah Haverford, Bram Callister, and Declan
Walsh.
“Sorry to keep you in suspense,” Jamie opened the
meeting, “but we think Jas might have ratted you out again and I didn’t
want him to overhear and come after me for leaking information to you.”
“Ratted me out for what?”
“The tattoo. We got an anonymous report stapled to a printed out copy of Delvecchio’s blog post.”
I groaned. That blog post was causing me no end of trouble. “Can I
plead that, like, Delvecchio didn’t read me my Miranda rights or
something?”
“You don’t have to,” Haverford replied, “I checked
the student handbook, with a full keyword search. There’s nothing in
there about tattoos, and we double-checked with a lawyer. Now, the
person giving you the tattoo could theoretically go to jail for 90 days
or be fined $100, but it’s kind of a gray area if you’re a minor.”
The ‘gray area’ was enough for Jude to begin offering his services for
a fee after the results of my hearing were published in the conduct
council’s official log of reports. If the fear of parental disapproval
hadn’t been enough to dissuade me from additional ink, Jude’s prices
were. He was demanding $25 for a small design the same size as my
interlocking male symbols, and I’d blown through most of the cash I
made selling short stories over Thanksgiving.
I decided that
to replenish my funds, I would write another story, an imagined account
of Tyler’s trial, with the names changed to spare the real Tyler any
embarrassment. I was also emailing back and forth with the real Tyler,
and Parker and Leah, to coordinate the activities of the Sissipahaw
Streaking Club.
When I saw an email from Leah, I was expecting
it to be about the Sissipahaw Streaking Club. I was totally unprepared
for what I was about to see. The message was a simple question: “Do you know about this?”
Underneath
the question was a link to a web forum. Someone had posted videos,
mostly of Sloane Kensington. The disturbing thing was that the videos
appeared to be from hidden cameras, and they were all sexual in nature.
Sloane getting fucked by Dylan and watching Dylan with Finn. I was in
some of them two, worshipping the other boys’ feet. I blushed in shame.
I was quite happy for the world to know I was gay, but still
embarrassed about anyone who wasn’t in my hall or The Circle knowing
about my foot fetish. If people back home saw this…
Dylan had
admitted to voyeurism during his initiation, so I initially thought
that it might be him, something intended to only reach a small
audience, maybe even something that Sloane was in on, but that had gone
farther than it was intended to. I forwarded the email to Dylan with a
message of my own.
Dude, did you do this?
Dylan’s response came back a minute later.
WTF
No! I like watching people do it, but I’d never blast their shit out
all over the internet. Sloane is going to be in so much trouble!
Somebody’s spying on us, then. I
forwarded the whole exchange to Jamie and got a reply from him seconds
later. He told me to act normal, and specifically said not to wear
clothes when I ordinarily wouldn’t to avoid tipping whoever it was off.
Feeling self-conscious in a way I hadn’t since running the Freshman
500, I stripped off and immediately got into bed. I felt a little
guilty when Noah came in. I didn’t know if we were being watched so I
couldn’t tell him what was going on. He stripped naked and jacked off
on his bed before going to sleep. If we were being watched, the whole
thing would be caught on video.
Noah found out along with the
rest of the Crimson Circle on Friday evening. Ellie Whitman stood at
the dais and announced in a grave voice.
“We have been made
aware of a very serious breach of the Illuminati’s security, perhaps
the most serious since 1826. Someone has surreptitiously installed
cameras in the dorm rooms and common areas at Wilson, obtaining videos
of both our sexual exploits and private discussions, including those
related to the Illuminati.” A murmur of shock ran through the
congregation as Ellie continued. “They are selling the sexual videos as
porn and posting our discussions related to the Illuminati to various
conspiracy websites. The matter is currently being investigated by the
FBI and a special panel of the student conduct council.” She went on to
tell the whole group basically the same thing Jamie had told me. We
couldn’t tell any plebs or teachers, and we had to keep up our normal
patterns of activity to avoid tipping the perpetrator off – including
having sex that we now knew was being watched.
Chapter 28
Jamie Calloway
We
put our clothes back on and filed out of the catacomb, all feeling
outraged and humiliated. For many of us, the anger and embarrassment
were mixed with sexual arousal. It was a strange combination of
feelings, but I was used to it, having first felt it in freshman year
when Ms. Hodes began abusing me. For many of the others, especially the
freshmen, it would be new. When we could speak freely again, I would
talk to them about it, help them process it and understand how it would
affect their sexual interests moving forward. For the time being, I had
to worry about them keeping up the ruse. Many of them were likely to
curtail their activities once they knew they were being watched, no
matter what we’d said back in the catacombs.
I wasn’t going to
be one of them. As soon as we got back, Ellie and I had sex, putting on
a bit of a show for whoever was spying on us while trying not to look
at the spot on the ceiling where the camera must have been placed. She
slept over and we did it again the next morning. Hopefully, our
performance would give them what they needed to keep the business
going, and they wouldn’t notice any reduction in the overall amount of
sex at Wilson or they would just chalk it up to exam jitters.
After having sex, Ellie and I both got up and went to the showers. Finn
was energetically fucking Dylan, and I breathed a sigh of relief. A
confirmed exhibitionist, Finn would help me keep the supply of sex
tapes coming.
Nolan, on the other hand, was clearly spooked.
He stayed naked as we cleaned the floor, obeying my instructions to
keep to his regular routine, but he got dressed as soon as the cleaning
session was over, bundling up against the cold before leaving for the
library. He spent way more time than usual away from the dorm over the
weekend, and I knew that getting him to have sex in the showers was
going to be a problem. I decided that I would deal with it after I took
care of my assignment Sunday.
Both Jas Whitfield and his
roommate Lukas Weiss went to the Protestant chapel service Sunday
morning. As the prefect, I had a key to their room, and a special USB
drive the FBI had mailed to my campus mailbox. When I plugged it into
Whitfield’s computer, it automatically downloaded every file on the
computer. If the videos turned up, it would be enough evidence to
formally search his computer. He wouldn’t be criminally charged, as a
favor to his father, but the case would be put on the conduct council’s
docket for immediately after the Christmas holidays. Rick Whitfield
would have a chance to withdraw his son without anything showing up on
the official records.
It took the USB drive about five minutes
to download the content of the laptop. I took it out and carefully
placed the laptop exactly where it had been when I came in, and left
the room just as Nolan was walking down the hall to go to the meeting
of the student senate Wilson Together caucus. They had to carry on the
meeting in the library just like they normally would to keep from
tipping off Jas, or whoever else it was, and the Illuminati would be
watching.
They would also be taking note of what went on on Beattie 3rd.
Even if the spy didn’t notice it, if the guys failed to obey their
directive, it would impair their progress within the Illuminati. I
decided that in order to help Nolan, I would have to break one of my
own rules.
I put the USB drive in the return envelope and
dropped it into the outgoing mail slot, then hung around the library
waiting for Nolan to get out of the senate meeting. I followed him back
towards the dorm and walked beside him until we were well out of
earshot of anybody else.
“Are you doing anything when you get back to the dorm.”
“I have some homework, but it can wait. Why?”
“I want to have sex with you.” Nolan stopped short and gave me a
surprised look. Aside from the group masturbation sessions in the
shower, I had avoided having sex with any of the boys on my floor. It
was traditional for prefects to take advantage of the freshmen they
supervised, but thanks to my experience with Ms. Hodes I was perhaps a
little oversensitive to the power imbalance. This, I told myself, was
different. It would benefit both Nolan and the Illuminati, and by
helping to protect the Illuminati, it would benefit the entire world.
“You know, the damage is already done at this point.”
Nolan nodded. “I guess you’re right. But if you fuck me, you have to fuck Owen. We have an agreement.”
“Okay, but you first.”
We hurried back to my room. Nolan put his glasses on the bedside table
and stripped. I had him lie facedown on the bed and got on top of him.
It was the position that would require the least work on his part, and
my body was partially shielding him from the camera. Whoever was
watching would mostly see my ass clenching as I thrusted.
Initially, Nolan just lay there, but he gradually got into it and began
whimpering in pleasure. By the time I came, he was fully hard. I rolled
him over and jerked him off while kissing him. After he came, we both
walked to the bathroom and showered off.
The next morning, I
fucked Owen in the shower. The other boys, including Nolan, jerked off
as they watched us. He seemed to be handling it a little better now
that the initial shock had worn off.
With that out of the way,
I went to my classes. The overall atmosphere of the school was still
subdued and nervous, although the plebs had no idea why. After my last
class, I hurried to the administration building. They had done a sweep
of the conduct council’s hearing rooms and discovered no cameras, so we
were safe to use it as the headquarters for our investigation. Lydia
Han, who had taken over as president of the conduct council from Nell
Van Allen, was chairing the panel, which consisted of all society
members – me, Tamsin Clarke, Corbin Slate, and Ethan Rothschild.
Our first witness was Agent Whitney of the FBI’s Cybercrimes Division,
who had analyzed the evidence I collected. “I think we can pretty much
rule out Jasper Whitfield. All he had on his computer was commercially
produced pornography, and pretty tame porn at that. We tracked the
financial transactions and found the uploads on the school’s internet
connection. They’re all from different students’ accounts. Our working
hypothesis is that whoever it is logs in from laptops that students
leave unattended.”
“That could still be Whitfield,” I pointed out, “he has a motive that would correlate with the poster’s rhetoric.”
“Speaking of the poster,” Tamsin asked, “how long is it going to be before we can get those posts taken down?”
“We’ve identified 27 websites where either the original poster or
someone who bought pictures posted pornographic images, and the NSA
helped us track down the individuals who downloaded them. Our field
teams are going to be kicking down doors 30 minutes after we get a
positive ID on the perp and all the websites will be dark within 24
hours.”
“You’re going to make a big production out of this?” Lydia asked.
“The owner of the first site to host the pictures is a major donor to
antisurveillance activists, who are going to be spending the next
several years explaining why there are pictures of them shaking hands
with a child pornographer.”
“Is Wilson going to be mentioned?”
“No, there are laws in place to protect victims of child pornography,
which you all technically are. We’ll describe it as a ‘nationwide
distribution network’ in the press release, and the only people who see
the videos will be on the juries.”
“So, is there a way we
could leave our laptops out intentionally and you could tell when
someone used them to access the sites.”
“I can do you one better. We can remotely access your webcams.”
Still thinking that Jas was the perpetrator, I made a point to leave my
laptop out in the common room overnight. Nothing happened the first two
nights, but when I came back into the common room Thursday morning, I
discovered an email from Agent Whitney, on which each member of the
panel had been CC’d. It instructed us to meet him at lunch time.
When we got to the hearing room, Agent Whitney showed us a poster print
out of the screenshot he’d taken from my laptop the previous night
around midnight. To my surprise, it wasn’t Jas, but Haley Ferris, Ms.
Hodes’ daughter.
“We went back through all the schools’
surveillance camera recordings with facial recognition technology,”
Agent Whitney announced. “It looks like she has accomplices. Other kids
from her high school. Now we just have to figure out how we’re going to
make the bust.”
I smiled. “I might have an idea.”
Chapter 29
Jordie Shriver
I
was watching a live feed of Jamie Calloway and Ellie Whitman. They
fucked every Friday after the Crimson Circle meeting and were one of
the most popular straight couples with our clients. Tonight, we had an
even better view than usual. Instead of lying down on the bed, he bent
her over and fucked her doggy-style. We got a great view of her tits,
but then everything went to hell. Jamie stood up on the bed, punched
through the ceiling panel, and pulled out the camera. I knew then that
the ride was over, but I thought we could still get away with it. We
had covered our tracks by using the names of Wilson students. It would
take them months, maybe years to clear all of them, and by that time we
would be long gone. But then Jamie looked directly into the camera and
spoke.
“Hi, Haley, Dylan, Simone, Ty, Kendra, Jordie. Did you
enjoy the show? Ellie and I like putting on a show for you, but the
problem is that not all of our friends do. So what we’re going to do is
have a little meeting to settle this. Midnight tomorrow night at the
fifty-yard line of the football field.”
I was terrified, and I
didn’t know what to do. Should I run away? Would they come after me? I
had watched enough to know that they had connections all over the
place. Ty called me up the next morning in a panic. He said he wished
he were dead and I was really afraid he might kill himself, so I said
I’d go with him.
All seven of us were there at midnight. We
walked to the football field and then slowly out to the 50-yard-line.
Jamie was waiting for us with two adult men.
“Who are you?” Dylan asked.
“Strip.” The man barked. “All of you. Shoes, socks, jewelry, piercings, glasses, everything.”
We all stripped off our clothes and stood there naked, shivering in the
cold December night. The two men went through our pockets, I suppose
checking for recording devices, while Jamie introduced them.
“This is Mr. Hawthorne, the Headmaster, and this is Special Agent Whitney with the FBI.”
Kendra got down on her knees and begged. “Please don’t send us to jail. I’ll do anything.”
“The statute of limitations for production of child pornography is 20
years,” Agent Whitney said coldly, “so for the next 20 years you work
for us. Is that agreed?”
“Yes, sir.” We all nodded.
“You will receive further instructions after you have returned home.”
“Haley, your mother will be dismissed from her position at the end of the term,” the headmaster announced.
“Please don’t!” Haley pleaded, “she didn’t know about it. She didn’t do anything.”
“She blackmailed me into having sex with her for a bit of weed,” Jamie said angrily.
“That was strike one,” the Headmaster said, “strike two was when she
made those boys clean her residence naked, and made Jamie have sex with
her again to keep her hands off them.”
“I had Nolan search the
archives of the paper,” Jamie said, “four years before I started at
Wilson there was a freshman boy in her dorm who killed himself. At the
time they said he couldn’t handle the adjustment, but…”
“Strike three,” the headmaster said. “She’s immensely lucky she’s only being dismissed and not criminally charged.”
“Now put your clothes back on,” the FBI agent snarled.
We received further instructions a few days later. They were about
where to apply to college and what to study. I went to UConn and ended
up majoring in journalism. While I was there I joined the antiwar
activist group on campus and reported on their meetings to a handler
who was in one of the frats. Sometimes he made me wear a wire. The kids
who were the natural leaders all tended to get in trouble – busted for
underage drinking or drugs or kicked out for honor code violations. By
the time I graduated, I knew that I would never tell anyone what the
Illuminati was making me do because I couldn’t face those kids knowing
I was the one who betrayed them. I lost touch with the others, but I
assumed they were in the same boat.
When I graduated, they
told me to get a job with one of those online gossip tabloids.
Occasionally, they gave me dirt on somebody they wanted to hurt that I
would have to publish, and they made me give them access to the
company’s email so they could read the stories while they were being
reported and kill any that were about people they wanted protected.
After a few years, they collected enough dirt on the blog to sue it
into bankruptcy, and I got another job at a magazine that used to be a
household name until people stopped buying print magazines and it got
bought out for one dollar by an Indian conglomerate that turned it into
clickbait. They had me switch from celebrity gossip to conspiracy
theories, the ones they want you to believe – UFOs, the Kennedy
assassination, 9/11, chemtrails. The red herrings they use to distract
you from what they’re really up to.
While I was doing all
this, Jamie and Ellie were at Princeton joining a finals club. Jamie
starred in a university production of the play Nolan Pierce had written
in his freshman year, and it worked its way up to regional theater and
Off-Broadway before finally making its Broadway debut in Nolan’s
sophomore year at Yale. Jamie won a Tony for it and Nolan got
nominated. After graduating as a member of Skull and Bones, Nolan moved
into film, becoming one of the first mainstream directors to feature
unsimulated sex scenes and winning three Oscars across Best Picture and
Best Adapted Screenplay. He continues to collaborate with Jamie, who
picked up Best Actor for one of Nolan’s films and an Emmy. Owen
Fitzgerald has a Grammy, an Emmy, and a Tony nomination and married
Nolan as soon as it was legal.
Finn Callahan and Dylan Reed
both went to Stanford and continue to vacation together, even though
they’re both married. Finn and Theo Alvarez, who went to Dartmouth, are
both members of Congress and cosponsored a bill to make it easier to
prosecute child pornography. It was hailed as a shining example of
bipartisanship. No one dared to point out that it gave the government
sweeping new powers to search people’s cloud storage. Jas Whitfield
went to Washington and Lee and has bounced around conservative think
tanks, but never really amounted to anything.
Henry Langton’s
father lost his job in the financial crisis but someone stepped in with
a scholarship so he could finish his senior year at Wilson, then he got
a swimming scholarship to Florida and ended up with a couple of relay
golds and a bronze for freestyle at the Rio Olympics. When he retired,
he came back to Wilson to coach their swim team.
Malik
Jefferson went to Emory for undergrad and law school and worked in the
DOJ’s Civil Rights Division during the Harris Administration. After the
2024 elections, he got a job at a big law firm in Atlanta.
Julia Mendel wrote for the Harvard Crimson and then the Washington Sentinel. She
was part of the team that won the Pulitzer in 2015 for breaking the
Trump-Epstein story. I ran into her once at a journalism fundraiser a
few years ago. We both pretended not to know each other.
Owen
Delvecchio went to the University of Vermont, where he led a sit-in to
make the school divest from fossil fuels in his sophomore year. After
graduating, he worked in Bernie Sanders’ office and tried to primary an
incumbent Democratic congressman who was an active Freemason in 2018.
The early polls had him ahead, but the Washington Sentinel ran an
article about him making Nolan Pierce strip naked to prove that he
wasn’t in a secret society, and his campaign fizzled out.
Last
year, I had my last meeting with my handler. He told me that my 20
years were up and that I was free to do whatever I wanted, as long as I
didn’t tell anyone what I knew, which I had no intention of doing. I
went back to school to get my teaching license, and now I teach English
and journalism at Sissipahaw High School in North Carolina. It’s the
school Nolan Pierce would have gone to if he hadn’t gotten into Wilson.
I don’t know if the Illuminati is still fucking with me or if God has a
sick sense of humor or if it’s karma or if it’s just a coincidence. At
least the kids here keep their clothes on.