Chapter 1

Thursday September 24

It’s funny. I had expected that when I came back to college this year, everybody would hate me. The Chi Omicron sorority was kicked off campus and a bunch of teachers were fired thanks to my whistle-blowing. I figured that enough people knew about my involvement that I’d be an outcast. Surely the Chi Omicrons would have poisoned everyone against me before their club died out or something. But so far nobody has bothered me about it at all.

Actually, now that I think about it, I seem to be doing better than expected, socially. I’ve been asked out by strangers three times since the semester began a month ago. Is that a college thing? Guys asking out girls they don’t know? It certainly didn’t happen last year, my freshman year. Maybe the Chi Omicrons did spread some kind of rumor: “Lexi Green is a total slut who’ll do it with anyone, anywhere,” or something like that. Whatever. When a guy does ask me out I just politely say no, because I’ve got a boyfriend - Miles - and he’s the most wonderful guy in the world.

This terminal is so fucking slow. I’m writing from a UNIX workstation in the Computer Science lab. The teachers all grade programming assignments according to how they run on these computers, so that cross-platform quirks can’t be blamed for failure. That makes sense. They also demand that we use the university’s chat program if we want to contact our professors or teaching assistants electronically. It’s not a very good chat program.

Friday September 25

Okay, I figured out why that terminal I was using yesterday was so damned slow. It looks like the university fucked up when they wired up the network. For some reason, that workstation and one other one in the computer lab are hooked directly into the wire that carries all of the network traffic from the school library. That must be a mistake - nobody would deliberately set things up that way.

In the course of figuring that out, I made another discovery: that chat program that the university wants everyone to use doesn’t encrypt its messages. Everything everyone types is available in clear-text on the network.

Pop quiz: Having discovered a security weakness that puts other peoples’ privacy at risk, does Lexi Green: a) Report the problem to the university’s IT people, and then patiently wait for a fix; or b) Spend a Friday afternoon eavesdropping on her classmates. Yeah, that was an easy one. I wrote a quick script to show me some of the conversations.

Here’s one such conversation:

Rich: Check it out - I don’t think Shelly is wearing a bra.

William: So?

Rich: So it’s fucking hot.

William: No, it would be hot if she had tits. But she doesn’t, so who cares?

Rich: She’s got tits. Sure, they’re small, but she’s got them.

William: No way. She’s as flat as a board. You could use her to draw lines on architectural diagrams. Honestly, I don’t understand why she ever wears a bra - it’s not like there’s anything there to support.

Rich: Whatever. I like her body.

William: Yeah, well, you like the body of a twelve year old boy. Sounds like you’ve got some personal issues to work through.

Rich: Oh, just fuck off.

Wednesday September 30

Another chat log.

Bea: See that grl? The 1 who just said hi to me?

Mary: Yes

Bea: Shes a cunt

Mary: She seemed pretty nice. What’s wrong with her?

Bea: Shes 1 of those Chi Omicron cunts. Cant get by on studys so they have 2 fuck teachers 2 graduate. No respect.

Bea: She had the nerve 2 try 2 pledge our house this semester. All smiles like we didnt know she was a gigantic whore.

Mary: They can’t all have been part of the sex scandal, can they? Maybe she’s innocent.

Bea: Dont matter. She was either doin it or covering it up.

Bea: Real worlds gonna come knocking for those girls real hard real fast. I bet we see half them selling their bodies on Miracle Mile before the end of year.

They could have been talking about anyone, but it pained me to think that they might have been talking about Hailey. Hailey was my roommate and then my friend last year. She was pledged to Chi Omicron during my investigation, and only became a full member right before I went public about the scandal. Only the full members knew about the sex-for-grades operation; the pledges were completely innocent. They were initiated just in time to suffer with the rest of the house.

Every once in a while I think about calling or writing to Hailey. She probably still hates me for using her. Sometimes I’m tempted to see if her old password still works: to log into her email and read her diary. If I got caught doing that, there’s no way she would forgive me, ever.

Enough of that sad shit. I’m going home this weekend, and I’m going to spend most of it with my boyfriend. Life is good.

Saturday October 3

Home is a two hour drive from college, so that was most of Friday night. I would have liked to have spent last night at Miles’ apartment, but my mom would have been really hurt if I didn’t spend at least some of the time with Dad and her.

Dad informed me that they would be having company for breakfast this morning, and that they would love it if I would join them. I was amused to learn that the guests would be TJ and Andrea Donohue.

I had never met the Donohues - not directly - but I had spied on them plenty. It was the spyware on their daughter’s computer that lead me to their “bridge club”, where they engaged in group sex while watching secret videos of each others’ teen children. Mr. Demarco had shown them, and the other orgy guests, a video of me begging him to fuck me, and then screaming like a fire truck once he did. TJ had asked Mr. Demarco if he could have me once Mr. Demarco was done with me. He also expressed some interest in seeing me in pigtails and a Catholic school uniform.

I couldn’t resist. I just couldn’t. So this morning I did my hair in twin braids. They’re not very long - just down to my shoulders - but that’s probably about right for the look I was going for. And then I wore my Saint Frances skirt and a dressy top like the school requires. I don’t know if my glasses made me look any more innocent, but considering I can’t see without them, they were non-negotiable. When I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t really tell if I looked like an innocent or a tease.