Innocent or Guilty?

“And it’s an online only thing? Like YouTube?”

“It’s a podcast. It’s audio only. Most people listen from their phones. Obviously, we have a website though, where we post updates, and sometimes transcripts or other artefacts that listeners can read for a deeper understanding and experience.”

Ethan’s brow furrowed, the light leaving his eyes a little. “But people really listen?”

“Yeah, they really listen,” Kat said.

“They average about 250,000 downloads per episode,” I added, Kat turning to me in surprise. “I looked it up last night,” I said, shrugging.

“And that’s a lot?” Ethan asked.

“That’s a whole lot,” I assured him. They had a TV in the rec room, and there was internet access from some ancient computers, but sometimes it was hard to truly fathom just how far the prison, and therefore the prisoners, lagged behind the rest of the world. Ethan lived in a time warp where the word ‘Netflix’ meant DVDs arriving by mail, and Instagram nothing at all. It always brought me up short in conversations with him; he hadn’t even joined Facebook before being imprisoned, that’s how long ten years was in the 21

century. To someone raised on the viewing figures of Friends or CSI, 250,000 people must have sounded inconsequential.

“Okay,” Ethan said slowly, turning his attention back to Kat, “so, what’s the point of your show? Are you going to prove I’m innocent, somehow?”

Kat took a deep breath and shifted in her seat so she was sitting up a little straighter. She was wearing the same yellow head wrap she’d been wearing the night before, a deep yellow color, almost gold, but the rest of her outfit was grey and black, in contrast to the colorful get-up I’d seen her in at the restaurant. “We never set out to prove if someone is innocent or guilty,” she said, “that would mean we were starting from a hypothesis and that’s definitively what we do not do. In both the cases we’ve worked on before there was strong indication that there had been a miscarriage of justice, and I think we’ve been able to help shed light on that, and maybe even bring about some real change. But really this is about figuring out what happened and why there’s still doubt hovering over any one case.”

She spoke like she did on the show, in full, thoughtful sentences that sounded as if they might have been written beforehand, but in this case clearly weren’t. Maybe it was the way she always sounded – it was certainly how she’d come across last night, but I found myself wondering what she’d sounded like before she started podcasting, or when she was two bottles of wine in and sloppy and drunk.

“And is this going to be on the podcast?” Ethan asked, motioning between the two of them to indicate he meant their current interaction.

“No. They wouldn’t let me bring my cellphone or any recording equipment in, so I’m not recording this. I’ll take notes though, and if we decide to go ahead with the show – all of us – then what I’ll probably do is describe this initial interview to the audience. Does that all sound okay to you?”

“Okay. So, how will you actually interview me, then?” Ethan asked, looking puzzled.

“Probably over the phone. If you give your consent, that is. We wouldn’t be able to keep coming back and forth from here anyway,” Kat said.

“Right, okay,” Ethan said, although I thought I could detect a tremor of uncertainty as he glanced over at me.

“Okay, so. Tell me about Tyler,” Kat said and my stomach rolled over. I hadn’t expected her to ask about him, although why not, I’m not sure.

“Tyler?” Ethan asked, his eyes locked on mine.

“Yeah. You must have known him, right?”

“We both did,” Ethan replied, his gaze returning to Kat.

5. (#ulink_ddd12e0c-3f15-5884-a774-1483653f32c0)

THEN (#ulink_ddd12e0c-3f15-5884-a774-1483653f32c0)

The judge calls for closing arguments and I turn instinctively to the jury. I’ve been studying them, searching their faces for weeks now, scouring for anything, any little thing, that gives their sympathies away, and I’m still none the wiser. Any time one of them shifts in their seat, sighs from bodily discontent, or shrugs a shoulder, my eyes swivel to them like the search beam of a lighthouse. But they all sit up a little straighter now, their attention trained on the prosecutor; they like him, I realize, or maybe they’re just relieved to see light at the end of this tunnel, a way home and a way out. At least for them.

“Tyler Washington was eighteen when he died, his whole life ahead of him,” the prosecutor begins and I think, despite myself, here we go. It’s not that I don’t feel bad for him, or for his family, but this is the way every statement about Tyler Washington, from the very first news article, to his obituary, to the opening statements of the trial, have begun. At first they stopped me short; dead at eighteen, a life cut so very, very short, but it’s been almost a year now and hearing the same sentences over and over has worn me down. The jury is listening though, alert, not quite jaded. Only one juror is sitting slightly slumped in her seat. She’s young, the youngest on the jury by quite some margin, and as I stare at her, her eyes flick from the prosecutor, straight to me. As if she could feel me watching her. She has sullen, hooded eyes and the look of someone who doesn’t spend much time outdoors, which is unusual around here. I wonder if she went to the same high school as Tyler, as all of us, maybe a few years ahead, and then I realize that the prosecutor is still talking and I’m missing the whole thing.

“It wasn’t just that Tyler was class president and captain of the basketball team, or even that his mother is mayor of this city. It’s that his teachers described him as ‘charming’ and ‘cheeky’, his friends would call on him to help move furniture, to drive them out to a new climbing spot, to lend them money even, and he’d invariably say yes. His peers knew him as friendly and affable, even caring and kind and his family relied on him for cheer and quick wit, even in trying times. ‘He always seemed to have a smile on his face’, his former vice principal said. In comparison, people have very little to say about the defendant. Ethan Hall doesn’t stir up happy memories, or a long list of complimentary adjectives. At school he was a loner, and if he hadn’t killed Tyler Washington, his peers say they barely would have remembered he even attended Twin Rivers High with them.”

Ethan’s shoulders have stiffened; I’m watching them. This is the same shit Ethan’s lived with most of his life, and for most of that time I was part of it, I helped fuel it. I wonder if we weren’t twins it would have happened differently. If Ethan would have blended in to the background more if it wasn’t for me, constantly calling attention to myself. But we’re so different it was constantly remarked upon; the cheerleader and the loner who somehow once shared a womb. So far, this is nothing compared to what’s been written in newspapers and discussed on TV screens, or even what was shouted at him in the hallways of our high school, way back before any of this happened, but the prosecutor’s just laying the ground work. There’s more to come.

“When Tyler Washington left his friend’s house that night, do you think there could have been any way he thought he might not make it home? No. Of course not. That’s not a thought that ever crosses an eighteen-year-old’s mind. At eighteen, you are invulnerable, indestructible, immortal. But Tyler wasn’t any of those things. All he was doing was trying to save time, to cut a couple corners and get home through the woods a little quicker. But Ethan Hall had other ideas. We may never know if Ethan followed Tyler into those woods with the intention of killing his former classmate, but let’s focus on the things we do know. Ethan had been hanging out that night at his friend Kevin Lawrence’s house, just a twenty-five-minute bike ride away from where Tyler was at Jessica Heng’s house. So, when he left Kevin’s house he would have entered the woods at almost exactly the time Tyler Washington is believed to have died. Remember that the medical examiner estimated and testified to the fact that Tyler most likely died between 1:45 and 2:45 on the morning of Sunday August 24, and that Kevin Lawrence has stated that Hall had left his home somewhere between two and two thirty a.m.. Did Ethan watch Tyler enter the woods and seize on an opportunity, or did he happen upon him and the two get into a fight, as the defendant admitted to in a confession he has since recanted?

“Ethan Hall is not to be trusted. His refusal to stand by his initial confession and plead guilty to this crime proves that. Don’t be confused by his quiet demeanor and slight frame. Ethan may not be the strapping basketball player Tyler was, but he trained as a fencer for much of his young life, and as we heard in witness testimony from a fencing expert, this kind of training could easily give him the advantage, even in a fight against a larger man.”

I knew it wouldn’t take long before the fencing came up. It’s been over four years since Ethan did any seriously and yet here we are, talking about how it’s possible he might have killed someone based on the fact he used to be able to point an unusually thin sword in the right direction. The prosecutor has been standing in front of the jury bench the whole time, attention focused on them, impassioned words underlined by hand movements and gesticulations, but now he turns to Ethan and his demeanor changes. Ethan’s does too. His shoulders fold in on themselves, he shifts lower in his chair, shrinking. It makes me want to grab him and pull him up, force him to sit straight, to look ahead, to face these accusations with both eyes wide open. But there’s nothing I can do, and I can see in the way most of the jury members look at him, that they think this shrinking, this shirking, makes him look guilty.

“And what then, of motive?” the prosecutor asks, the words puncturing the room. He’s still looking at Ethan, as if he’ll get out of his seat and answer the question directly, but then, smooth as butter, his attention shifts back to the jury and he leaves Ethan alone.

“Tyler was the golden boy, liked – loved even – by all, as I’ve already mentioned. Who could possibly want to hurt – to kill – him in this savage, unprovoked way?”

6. (#ulink_baab38d3-4961-5714-a56d-add149bfc3d0)

NOW (#ulink_baab38d3-4961-5714-a56d-add149bfc3d0)

“Tyler was …” Ethan, trailed off, leaving the air blank.

“Tyler was kind of a dick,” I finished for him, “especially to Ethan.”

“And that’s what they focused on, right? In the trial? That you had cause to kill him because he’d been bullying you for so long?”

Ethan swallowed, not looking at either of us, not making eye contact. “Yeah, ‘bullying’ makes it sound kind of … I dunno, after school special. Ha,” he interjected himself suddenly, “I guess it all was.”

“Tyler was that kid, the guy. Every school has one, right? The person everyone looks up to and emulates and yet also basically hates?” I said.

“Sure, I know the guy you’re talking about,” Kat said, “I know the girl too. Safe to say none of us here were that person.”

“Well, actually, Olivia kind of was,” Ethan said.

“I wasn’t – not really. I mean, I was no Tyler Washington, that’s for sure.”

Ethan raised both his eyebrows at me and then turned to Kat, “Olivia was popular. Like, pop-u-lar,” he reiterated, sounding out every syllable. There was something in his voice that sounded teasing, light, and yet I detected the edge of it too. I always could.

“Oh, so you and Tyler were actually friends then?” Kat asked. “You were close?”

I swallowed, pushing something down, away. “We were friends, sure, but we weren’t close. We were in the same group.”

Kat nodded, scribbling something down in her notebook and I resisted the urge to lean forward and read over her shoulder. “So, if we go ahead with all this, how would you feel about the fact that I’ll be talking to people who were close to Tyler too? Who might have a slightly different opinion of him than you do?” she asked Ethan.

Ethan didn’t answer for a while and I watched a cloud pass over his eyes before he said, “You really think they’ll be willing to talk to you?”

“I hope so. Otherwise this might not happen at all.”

“I don’t know. What do you think, Liv?” Ethan asked, turning his gaze on me.

I shrugged, leaning against the table, looking between him and Kat, “There’s two sides to every story, right?”

Except I didn’t really believe that. There weren’t two sides to every story; there was more like eight, and most of the time all eight sides existed inside just one person.