***
We met during her lunch break. She worked as a temp in a tall office building in Westwood. “I only have forty-five minutes for lunch,” she said on the phone, “so it’s going to have to be salads from the café in the lobby. Hope that’s okay.”
We sat across from each other at a rickety metal table on the sidewalk in front of her building, cars on Wilshire zooming past. Laura was taller than I’d expected, dressed in what was probably one of her interview suits. We peeled the plastic lids off our prepackaged salads and started eating. “You went to UCLA?” I asked.
“Just graduated with a degree in communications.” She rolled her eyes. “I should have gone to grad school. The job market is shit.”
“I know I told you I wanted to talk with former students about Cory Dempsey, but I was hoping you could give me a little background on a side project I’m working on.”
She looked up from her food, wary. “I’m not going to talk about Kristen,” she said.
“Actually, I want to ask about a different classmate of yours. Meg Williams.”
Laura looked relieved and poked at a piece of cucumber with her fork. “Wow, I haven’t thought about her for a long time. What do you want to know?”
“Some people think she was the one who exposed Cory Dempsey.”
Laura stopped chewing, her fork suspended in the air, a smile playing across her face. “You’re kidding me. How’d she do that? And why?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. People close to him think she targeted him. That it was deliberate.”
She set her fork down and gave a loose laugh. “To be honest, I didn’t know her well. Meg was a loner, always lurking around on the edges of things. Kristen was friendly with her, but Kristen was friendly with everyone. Girl code, she used to call it.”
“Do you think Meg was also a victim of Cory’s?”
Laura shook her head. “I doubt it. She was a mousy thing, not at all his type. He liked fire. Personality. He mostly ignored girls like Meg.”
“Do you think Kristen would have confided in her?”
“If she did, she never said anything about it to me.”
“What would Kristen have told her about Cory?”
Laura gave me a shrewd look and took a sip of her soda. “I told you I’m not talking about Kristen.”
I turned off my recorder and capped my pen. “I don’t want to write about Kristen. In fact, we can put this whole conversation off the record. That means I can’t quote you or paraphrase you. I won’t even tell anyone other than my editor that we’ve talked. But whatever happened to Kristen, I think Meg knew about it, and that’s why she did what she did. It might explain why she put herself in Cory’s home, under his influence.”
I waited, letting Laura think. I’d already decided I wasn’t going to push it. Forcing a woman to talk about sexual assault—even if it wasn’t hers—wasn’t a line I was willing to cross. “The court documents that have been released don’t include any details about what he did to her,” I said. “Secondhand accounts are my best bet. If it was revenge, I’d like a clearer picture. Revenge for what?”
“Off the record?”
“Off the record,” I confirmed.
Laura dropped her plastic fork on top of her half-eaten salad and pushed the container away. “It started in September,” she said. “Little things at first. Extra help during lunch. Then small gifts—a braided bracelet, a cute necklace—nothing expensive, but not exactly appropriate either.” Laura played with the straw in her soda, poking it down into the ice, and continued. “There were privileges. Inside jokes. I think she was flattered by the attention. Mr. Dempsey was handsome, and he’d picked her. What high school girl doesn’t love to feel chosen? Soon she started making up excuses to stay after school. He’d text her, and suddenly she’d remember a study group she needed to go to.” The wind kicked up and Laura’s napkin flew off the table and into the busy street. We both watched as it skittered across four lanes of traffic before getting flattened by a bus. “I told her it was creepy,” she said. “We fought about it a couple times, so I stopped bringing it up and hoped she’d move on. But in October she broke up with her boyfriend. She stopped eating lunch with us, wouldn’t go to football games. It was senior year and she just vanished. I mean, she was there, but she wasn’t, you know?”