Page 86 of Hunter's Hidden Camera
A: Move!
N: I’m not chatting with gay dudes!
A: I said move!
N: I’m not gay!
(A pushes N.)
N: What the fuck are you doing?!
A: Leaving!
I pick up another sheet of paper from off the ground:
(N straddles A and starts choking her. A struggles. A dies.)
I look up at Alessandra. “So what I saw . . . on the video . . .”
“None of it’s real,” says Alessandra. “Nash scripted the whole thing. He thinks he’s some kind of brilliant writer or something. I told him I thought his dialogue was dumb, but apparently you bought it.”
“But . . . why?”
“Because!” Alessandra is getting worked up again. “You’re sick! You’re disgusting! You’re a horrible human being! I mean, how could you?! Not only did you secretly record your brother masturbating in the shower, but you started a porn businesswith it. You chat with gay men to get them to give you money.”
Oscar, Patricia, and Jo are looking at each other, confused.
Alessandra continues: “By the time my little brother stumbled on those jerk-off videos online, you had already moved the spy cam out of the bathroom, but we knew you had moved it to Nash’s bedroom. We read everything you wrote to all those gay guys that you were replying to in the comments section. Things like, ‘Wait ’til you see me fuck my girlfriend,’ and ‘How much would you pay to see me bang my girl?’ So we knew. We knew you must’ve put the camera in the bedroom, and were recording me and Nash having sex. You were going to putmeon some porn site? That’s totally fucked up, Hunter. And yes, we confirmed it when we found your spy cam in the smoke alarm. Then, Nash had a friend of his hack into your computer and erase the file of us looking at the spy cam. At college, real hackers are everywhere, not like the amateur shit you and your stupid friends are doing.”
I’m at a loss for words. First of all, Oscar, Patricia, and Jo all know what I did. Everybody does. Secondly, I don’t understand how I got duped.
“So it was all fake,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“But why this? A script? A prank? Why not just confront me about it and get it over with?”
Alessandra smirks. “We wanted to teach you a lesson. We wanted to fuck with your mind. Honestly, we were surprised we pulled it off.”
“How do you even come up with something like this? You callmesick.Thisis sick. Staging a murder?”
“Nash has always been interested in acting. You remember how great he was in high school. How many compliments he got. So he continued to pursue that in college, on the side. Both of us have. We’ve been in plays, shot some short films. He never told your parents because he knew they would object. Since they were paying for his college, he had to have a major they approved of. But Nash wanted to do what he wanted to do. So he got into acting and a bunch of other stuff that your parents don’t know about.
“Anyway, he wrote out this whole crazy scenario for me and him to act out. And we had another friend of ours, who’s a fight coordinator in theater shows, to help us with everything. He showed us how to fight with each other so it would look real without either of us actually getting hurt. He showed me the angle I had to fall so that the camera would make it look like I hit my head against the doorknob. We rehearsed it all like a million times, and then we erased all those video files of us rehearsing it.”
My mind is spinning as Alessandra explains the rest of it. The night I watched that video footage, Nash came back home to tell me it was a prank and to scold me for violating his and Alessandra’s privacy—but Oscar and Victor were at my house. So Nash waited for them to leave.
While pacing in the garage, Nash got an idea to take the prank even further, by removing my shoelace and leaving that boxsticking out to make sure I would find it. He wanted to trick me into believing that he was going to frame me for murder.
Then, after he was sure that I was sufficiently fooled (because he installed a spy cam inmyroom),he got his friend to erase all of the video “evidence,” get rid of every video file I had stored on the cloud, and delete my porn account.
“You almost killed Nash tonight,” says Alessandra. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I was gonna die,” I say. “Nikolai was gonna shoot me in the face!”
A voice responds. “No, he wasn’t!”
All of us turn our heads.
