Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-09-08 19:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | rosario ortiz |
WHO Rosario Ortiz
WHEN August into September
WHERE Brooklyn
WHAT Dead end after dead end
WARNINGS None
August whipped by, summer turned to fall, and Rosario’s binder of research grew. She had bios on just about every Alpha Pi Omicron brother whose schooling overlapped with one or the other elder Archer Goldenhawks. She had dozens of pages of old Spectator articles, endless reports of one or the other elder Goldenhawks shattering athletics records or dazzling the social scene or inspiring the student body or dramatically subduing as pair of burglars. She had articles from glossy alumni magazines touting one or the other elder Goldenhawks’ burgeoning careers as they went from success to success. She had real estate listings for the home addresses she and Lyra had dug out of the student directories (both luxury Manhattan apartments, both resold several times in the past couple decades), as well as a bunch of material on each of the elder Goldenhawks’ post-college employers (a civil engineering firm and a biomedical lab, respectively). She had a damn novel’s worth of information, but when you got down to the granular detail of it she still had jack. What she knew boiled down to this: Archer Goldenhawk II was a campus legend, a king among students and the undisputed centre of the Alpha Pi Omicron frat. Just like his daddy, and just like his son. He was crazy rich, just like his daddy, and just his son. He was a perfect student and a perfect athlete and, basically, he was just stupid perfect at anything he put his hand to – just like his daddy, and just his son. He even looked the spitting image of them both. And, same as his daddy before him, when he hit about twenty-five, he just… vanished. One minute he was a wunderkind, the guy everyone expected was gonna be the Next Big Thing, and then all at once he was gone. If Rosario were a more credulous person, she might have started to suspect that Lyra was right, that they were dealing with a damn vampire. Archer seemed like exactly the kind of asshole who would sparkle in direct sunlight. Nah. Archer Goldenhawk II wasn’t a vampire. And he wasn’t an alien or a clone or— whatever crackpot fantasy PhantomTruth was hung up on at the moment. What he was was an annoying sonuvabitch. Worse than that— If he’d just been your standard-issue rich creep who cheated on his taxes and hit on his daughter’s friends at fancy golf clubs, maybe (Rosario told herself) she could’ve pushed the whole thing out of her mind. But he was an equation that didn’t balance, and that? That was something she couldn’t leave alone. So fine, assume the guy was rich enough or sketchy enough to keep his name out of print. Rosario had a whole binder of people who’d met him face-to-face – lived with him, partied with him, worked with him – and he couldn’t buy his way out of their memories. New tack, then. It had taken a couple of days, between shifts at the lab and shifts at the diner, to scrounge together a list of email addresses. A couple more painstakingly drafting and redrafting an email, vacillating over how much to ask, how much to say. The truth was out, obviously. I’m Archer Goldenhawk’s secret illegitimate daughter? Nah. That’d land somewhere between crazy-person territory and potential-lawsuit territory. Hard pass on that. But she figured she had to have some legit reason to be asking questions or they’d probably all be just as quick to blow her off. An article for the alumni magazine touting his achievements, that sounded feasible, and her Columbia email address gave her a little cred... except all it would take to catch her in the lie was one call to the press office, and then it’d be goodbye, scholarship. Shit. The couple of days had blown out into a week of bouncing ideas off Lyra, the two of them brainstorming more and more elaborate subterfuges (how hard would it be to spoof an email? how easy would it be to trace back a spoofed email? Mary Mother of God, what was her life?) before settling on a practical bare-bones approach. There were no outright lies in it, nothing provably false (that was for the best, Rosario decided, since she was a terrible liar). She was a med student at Columbia, and she was writing a piece about the accomplishments of several notable alumni (if by ‘piece’, you meant ‘a private dossier’ and by ‘several’ you meant ‘two guys with the one name’). She didn’t mention the name of any publication, just gave a line about how the story of Goldenhawk’s success would be ‘inspiring to both current students and alumni’ and hoped they’d draw the logical conclusion from that. It had all been a lot of work for nothing. She’d had not a single reply. (In fact, the queries had provoked a number of emails, though none in Rosario’s direction: forwards, mostly, to a handful of email addresses linked to Archer Goldenhawk II, and in one case, to a tenured professor at NYU’s Wagner School, whose keen grey eyes had narrowed at the message. Athena had read it twice, before picking up the phone and dialling the Columbia registrar’s office. By the evening, she had an academic record, scholarship details, date of birth, place of residence and employment, and, conspicuously, no evidence that anyone by the name of Rosario Lucía Ortiz had ever written for any school publication. Now, wasn’t that a curious thing?) Fall semester began this week. On Friday, Rosario would have to walk into a lecture theatre where – no question – Archer Goldenhawk III would be holding court. She didn’t have to say anything to him. Chances were better than good he wouldn’t even notice her, he’d be too busy with his adoring public, and that was exactly how Rosario wanted it. Exactly the same as it had been before. (Except that now she knew something about his dad and his family that he didn’t, and why did he get to kick his feet back and swap easy banter about summer vacations in the Caribbean while she was stuck with this stupid broken-ass equation living rent-free in her brain?) She didn’t have to say anything at all to him, but it infuriated her that she didn’t know what the hell she’d say if she did. It hadn’t escaped Carla, either, what the start of semester would mean. She’d slipped into Rosario’s room the Sunday night before semester began, given her shoulder a soft squeeze and asked the question. “It’s fine,” Rosario told her mom. “For real, I wasn’t even thinking about it. I don’t even know him, he’s just a guy Lyra hung out with a couple times.” “I’m not upset anymore, seriously,” she told her father. “Like, I wish you’d told me before, but… I get why you didn’t. I’m fine with it.” “Honestly, ‘Buela?” she told her grandmother, “I got more important things to think about that some rich frat boy I never even met.” She was fine. It was the not-knowing, that was the only problem. It nagged at her thoughts like a torn nail or a smudge on a lens, the kind of irritation that wouldn’t let up until you got off your ass and dealt with it. And Rosario was gonna deal with this. She wasn’t giving up, not even close. She clicked her empty inbox shut, opened her binder and got back to work. |