Chapter 2: The Accidental Blackmailer, Part One

"Bonjour, Monsieur Martin," said Ms. Lee as she opened the door of her apartment one Friday evening. "Avez vous les papiers legaux?"

"Oui, Madame," I answered. Barely a month into the semester, Ms. Lee had no intention of letting up on her rule that her students could address her only in French, even if they met out of class. My father had prepared some document or other for her as a favor, and my mother had asked me — told me — to take it over to Ms. Lee's house to have her sign it. A four-mile trip by bike that had taken me the better part of a half-hour.

"Etes-vous prêt pour l'examen?" Ms. Lee asked as she closed the door behind me and sat down at her dining room table with her pen.

"Oui, Madame," I answered. We had an examen coming up on Monday, and while I wasn't really ready for it, I figured I'd get in less trouble this way than if I said I intended to spend Sunday night cramming for it.

I fished the papers out of my backpack and put them in front of her. Standing beside her, I couldn't help but notice once again the way that her hair had been pulled back into a bun, which had made her look more severe during today's French class but which, from this angle, exposed her long, supple neck when she bent over to look at the papers. I couldn't help but inhale the subtle fragrance that her body gave off, whether natural or not I had no way of knowing. I couldn't help but peek down her blouse, which hadn't appeared to have any buttons when I'd tried not to stare at it under the jacket she'd worn during school. Now, with the jacket thrown over one of the other chairs, it was obvious that the two sides of the blouse connected somewhere near the little bow on the white mesh bra that she wore —

"Voilá," she concluded as she signed the last of the indicated pages and prepared to hand the documents back to me.

As a result of all my earlier helplessness, I also couldn't help spilling the contents of my backpack onto her table when I went to replace the papers. Smirking at my clumsiness, she helped me pick up a couple of notebooks, and then reached for my phone, which had flipped open on its skid across the table top.

"Where did you find this?" she hissed.

"Madame?" I asked. At that point, I was on my hands and knees fishing for my pen, and I popped my head up over the table to find out what she was talking about. "Le — le téléphone?"

I was racking my brain. It was a pretty standard Motorola, I thought, from that store in the mall. What the hell was the French word for shopping mall?

"This picture, Terry," she said, turning white and starting to tremble. "Where did you get this picture?"

I was about to offer to get her some water, because she looked like she was about to faint, when I realized what she was talking about. Oh, shit.

I sat down at the table.

"The, uh, the Internet?" I said softly, more of a question than a statement.

"This picture is on the Internet?" she was clearly horrified, and was starting to shake.

I took the phone from her. It was actually a cropped version of the full picture, just showing her head and her right tit, because the full picture would have been too small on the little screen.

"Uh, yeah," I said. "This magazine? College Spread? They have a —"

"Oh, God," she started to gasp for air. "It's going to be all over school."

"Well, no," I said, trying to calm her. "It's a kind of obscure site. You know, you could probably hack into it and change it so your name wouldn't come up on the search engines."

"Search engines?" she cried. "You can just goggle this?"

"Google," I told her. "It's called googling it."

That didn't help.

"Terry, I don't know anything about the Internet," she wailed. "I don't even own my own computer. I can't do anything like what you're describing."

"I could do it," I volunteered. Maybe. "But not from my computer."

That's all I'd need, to have Mom find out I did that.

I could see her eyes light up as she grasped at the admittedly slender straw. Then she slammed her palm on the table. "Damn, that stupid science fair has the school computers tied up all weekend long. I could sneak you in there next weekend. But shit, it'll be all over the school by then."

"It's pretty hard to find," I said. "So it's not very likely that anyone else will find it."

"Anyone else?" she asked coldly. "You mean unless you tell them?"

"Excuse me?" I asked.

"And what is the price of your silence, Mister Martin," her voice was growing hard. "An "A" in French?"

"I thought I already had an "A" in French," I was puzzled. I'd aced both the quizzes so far, and I wasn't any worse in conversation than anyone else.

"What, then?" she was screaming at me. "Do you know how much trouble you could get me in, you little prick, when you show this to your fucking little jock buddies in your French class?"

That pissed me off a little. I mean, there weren't any other swimmers in her class. The other jocks were soccer guys, with a few football players scattered around because they enjoyed the scenery. It's not like we had a club or anything, and I didn't appreciate being lumped in with the rest of them.

"Look, ma'am," I said, my peevishness starting to show. "I don't have any fucking jock buddies, little or otherwise, in your French class. But hey, yeah, maybe they would like to see their teacher spreading herself all over the back of a chair."

"You have the whole picture?" her eyes grew wide as she dropped to her knees. "Oh, God, Terry."

"You're upset," I nodded, thinking that a restatement of the obvious would help as I stood up and started to back away slowly. "I can understand that. I'm just gonna go home now."

I turned and ran for the door.

"Terry!" she called after me.

"Keep the phone!" I yelled as I slammed the door behind me and raced for my bike.

She was already at the house when I got there, her hot-looking Trans Am parked in front of the closed garage doors. She was pounding on the front door as I cycled up the drive.

"You wanna see the site?" I asked.

"Terry!" she jumped and clutched at her chest. Apparently she hadn't heard me coming up the walk. "Where's your mother?"

"Bar convention," I told her. "So, the website? With the pictures?"

"Pictures?" she gripped my arm. "I thought it was just one."

"Uh, no," I admitted. "I think there are two of 'em."

"Oh God, Terry," she wrapped her arms around me and I could feel her trembling. I unlocked the door and kind of pushed her into the house. Fortunately, it was fairly dark by then, and I didn't think that anyone had seen us. Ms. Lee appeared to be sort of numb at this point, and she just kind of followed me upstairs to my room.

"Look," I said, pulling out the chair at my desk for her and firing up the computer and its internet connection. "I'll show you how hard it is to find."

My home screen, the Google search page, popped up.

"What do I do?" she asked helplessly.

"Okay," I said, "First of all, I want you to type in your name there."

She typed "Pam Lee," and, again at my instruction, pressed "search."

"What does it mean?" she stared helplessly at the screen. Honestly, how could you be 30 years old and know this little about computers?

"It means that you'd have to look through 45,000 websites before you found the one with your pictures on them," I told her. "You're fortunate you have the same name as Pam Anderson. In fact, try Pamela Lee.

"See, three hundred thirty thousand hits," I said. "So the chances of somebody running across the site between now and then are like, infinitesimal."

Her breathing was a little less ragged now, a little calmer. Her chest was going up and down in regular, measured intervals, almost hypnotically —

"All right," she said, "show it to me."

"Oh, yeah, the site," I said. "Okay, type in, um, Pam Lee and, uh, coed."

"Nine results," she read the screen, "meaning only nine sites?"

"Yeah," I told her, pointing to the screen. "This first one leads to the second so let's go there first. Put the cursor on the title and click. Here, with the mouse."

I thought she was tense when I took her hand to guide the mouse. But when the site finally appeared, she was board-stiff. It was entitled "College Spread," the same as the title of the magazine in which her picture had appeared. I placed my hand over my teacher's and scrolled down to "Back Issues."

"Oh, God," she said, tears welling up in her eyes. There it was, Volume 3, Issue Number 5, May 1997. Her name jumped out at her: "Coed of the Month: Pam Lee."

"Why is my name in blue?" she asked.

"The highlighted names are links to other pages on the web," I explained. "With this magazine, you can preview a couple of the pictures in each of the issues. Click on it."

Pam numbly put the cursor over her name and clicked.

It was the full version of the picture I had on my phone, with her kneeling on a chair, her perfect butt in full view. She was smiling back at the camera over her shoulder, turned just enough so that her right breast came into the picture. Pretty tame stuff. The caption was relatively mild, too: Maybe a quick trip to the library will help her calm down.

Unfortunately, that was only one of the pictures. I put my hand over hers on the mouse and put the cursor over the "Pic 2" at the bottom and clicked it.

She gasped as the picture appeared. It was perhaps the most obscene of the whole photo shoot. Lying on her back, her eyes half-closed and her lips parted, Pam's left hand was under her left thigh, pulling her legs wide open. Her right hand was cupping her pubic mound, her index and ring fingers prying apart her labial lips while her middle finger was knuckle-deep inside her pussy. Her arousal was evident from the thin glaze covering her right thigh and her erect nipples.

She looked at the caption: The young romance language student knows exactly what she wants: "A nice young stud with his big, fat, hard cock deep inside me. Yours looks perfect."

"Oh, God. Oh, God." the trembling teacher repeated. "Anybody could find this."

She slumped forward in a faint, and I barely managed to keep her head from hitting the computer screen. I pulled her back and tried shaking her, and then tapping her lightly on the cheek. She was dead to the world, although her breathing — there was that chest again — suggested to me that she was probably just sleeping. At this point I figured that's what she needed, anyway. So I very gently lifted her in my arms and carried her to my parents' bedroom. They were away all weekend, and this was the most comfortable bed in the place. Covering her with a comforter, I turned off the lights and returned to my room. I watched a movie on television, watched another movie that I hadn't realized had even made it to HBO yet, and finally went to bed myself.

Having finally gone to bed at around two, I was dead to the world the next morning, burrowed beneath my sheet and blanket and bedspread. But did that prevent someone from putting their hand on my shoulder and shaking it? It did not.