If this is sounding a bit disjointed, I apologize. It's not intentional. It is a byproduct of the fact that our lives were a bit hectic during that time period. You know some of why it was hectic. We were busy coping, and trying to prove to our parents that we deserved to be parents ourselves. But there was something else that happened which caused even more upheaval in our lives.
Mr. Thompson (sorry, I don't know his first name), Jerry's father, listened to some religious radio channel, and I guess there was a commentator one day who said it was a parent's duty to be intimately acquainted with what was on their children's' computers. I gather that porn was mentioned. So Mr. Thompson felt it was his duty to go examine Jerry's computer.
Jerry, it seems, had snuck a flash drive into Vlad's studio and made a copy of the first movie in which he got to fuck not only Cindy Jenkins, but Natalie Watson as well. And, of course, Kerry fucked both girls too.
And Mr. Thompson found it.
We've thanked our lucky stars more than once that he didn't get anything of us, either in still shots or movies. We know this because the police never came to talk to us. That also gave us reason to thank our lucky stars that the other four never ratted us out. That didn't repair things between Addie and Cindy, but we were still very thankful.
It hit the news, of course. I don't think that was Mr. Thompson's intent when he went to the police with the whole computer, demanding that whoever "visited this abomination on my son" be found and prosecuted immediately, but of course something like that is impossible to keep quiet. It didn't help that the police decided they needed to search the rooms of all the "juvenile participants", and showed up with lights blazing, instead of in unmarked cars. But we're a small town fifteen miles from the metropolis the university is in, and we might not even have an unmarked car, for all I know. We certainly don't have high profile juicy sex scandals, which is also probably why it couldn't be kept quiet. Somebody told his wife, who told her friends, and on and on.
Anyway, when that story exploded in the paper, that's when we found out about one of the more difficult decisions our parents had been required to make. Believe it or not, neither Addie nor I thought about the fact that our parents never went after Vlad. Legally, I mean. Thinking back on it, I might not have been surprised to find out my father had murdered him and cleaned out the house and then drove the truck with all the evidence in it into a lake somewhere. I'm kidding. I think. I mean he'd have to have been gone a long time to do that, and I'm sure I'd have noticed that.
But the point is they were faced with making one of two decisions. Report Vlad to the cops, whereupon his studio would be searched, and all the pictures and films we'd made would be confiscated ... and viewed by who knows how many people. That decision would also mean that everyone would eventually learn how Addie had gotten pregnant, and by whom.
The other decision was just as hard to swallow: do nothing about Vlad.
What would you have done? You could seek justice and the protection of many more than just your own kids, but would run the risk of destroying your children. What if Social Services decided you were bad parents, and took your pregnant daughter away from you? What if there were some law that had been violated that meant your son had to go to prison until he was an adult?
Or, you could look at the facts at your disposal and decide that the kids who had gotten involved in this illicit scheme were stupid, but that nobody seemed to have been coerced into anything, or injured in any clearly visible way ... and do nothing about the man who had helped seduce them.
I suppose you could leave a cryptic message on his door, saying, "We know what you do here. You have until noon to get out of town, or we're coming for you."
The point is that none of those are good choices. But you have to make some choice.
So what do you do?
My parents decided to concentrate on salvaging what they could from their children's situation. They chose to concentrate on our mental and emotional health, instead of tilting at the windmills that society might demand they do.
Actually, I don't know about that cryptic note business. It wouldn't actually take much to do something like that. It could be done quickly, in the dark of night, and the risk of capture would be vanishingly small. But the thing is that I can't see my dad doing that. Knowing what kind of skill set he probably still has left over from the Army, and knowing how he must have felt towards Vlad for corrupting his little girl, I just can't see him stopping at putting a note on the door. Now my mother, on the other hand ... I have no problem envisioning my mother marching up to his door and putting something on it that would make him pull up stakes. She would have thought of that as protecting other kids. She's been in a lot of foreign countries, where you had the government, which you had to cooperate with to be there at all, and then had the local elders or whatever, who had their own rules about justice and such.
Anyway, when the shit hit the fan, our parents recognized the possibility that we might get dragged into the whole mess. After all, we had parked the bug behind his house dozens of times, and some neighbor must have seen it there. That would come out in interviews, and someone would try to track down the owner of the vehicle described. And then we'd be interviewed, and just that fact, whether we admitted anything or not, would bring the stain of shame upon us all. I guess they didn't see any good that could come from that, especially since the paper said the mysterious Russian man had disappeared without a trace ...
So they sent us both to Montana for the summer, to work on our Aunt Maureen's horse ranch.
TBC