Chapter Thirty-Two - Mac
I spread my legs, wild grin on my face, as I crash into Ellie. She goes flying backwards, but I wrap my arms around her tightly and we fall together instead, me landing squarely on top of her.
“Are you OK?” I ask, checking to see if she hit her head.
“What the hell are you doing?” Her eyes are flashing mad and her cheeks flush with heat once she realizes everyone is watching us. “Get off me!” She squirms under my body and I shoot her a cock-eyed grin.
“Don’t move around too much, Miss Hatcher. I’m warning you. That weekend of sex we just had is still fresh in my mind.”
She clenches her jaw and her small fists pound on my back, but I just grab her wrists and hike them over her head, pinning her to the floor. “I get to have my say, Ellie. You’re not walking out of here with half the information. It’s not happening. So we can do this the easy way or the hard way, but we’re doing this.”
“The easy way is with you straddling my body, holding my hands over my head?” she yells.
“That was just my way of getting your attention, Miss Hatcher.” I get up off her and extend my hand. “I’m happy to do it like this instead.”
She looks up, past me. I look around, then up. Hundreds of faces peer over the sides of the Atrium, all the way up to the seventh floor where Alexander Stonewall is one of them. I can’t tell from this distance if he’s raging mad or smiling.
I’m going to go with raging mad, but I don’t care.
“Take my hand, Ellie. Come on, let’s do this.”
She does, and I pull her up to her feet. But she leans in and growls out her words past her gritted teeth. “Do what, Mac? Make a fool of me? Don’t you think Ellen has done enough of that?”
“Raise your hand if you give a shit about Ellen Abraham!” I shout. Ellie and I look around for several seconds. We even look all the way up the Atrium, searching the hundreds of people leaning over the balcony railings as they watch us, but not one hand is raised.
“OK,” I yell again. “Raise your hand if you care about Ellie Hatcher.” Hands start raising before I even finish the sentence. “Give me a big, ‘Hell, yeah,’ if you think she’s adorable.”
They don’t really shout it. It’s kind of unconventional and I’m just getting them warmed up.
But Jennifer shouts down from the seventh floor, “Hell, yeah!”
“Hell, yeah,” someone else says a few feet away. Then another, and another.
“Ellie Hatcher, we don’t think you’re ridiculous, we think you’re adorable.” More people shout out in agreement. “I like the fact that you have days-of-the-week outfits. I like your M&M-sorting skills, and how you keep celebrities on time and on their toes. I especially like the fact that you almost killed a rock star two weeks ago. I like that you nickname people, even if it’s a little insulting, and I’m jealous that I wasn’t on that list. I’m dying to know what you’d call me.”
Ellie is starting to look uncomfortable, like she has no interest in hashing this out in front of the entire population of Atrium employees. So I switch back to me.
“Look, Ellie, I was going to tell you the truth about who I was.” I look around to everyone now. “All of you. I was going to tell all of you. She just distracted me that first day and took over my life.” I shrug. “What can I say? I fell in love with her immediately.” I look back and Ellie and take both her hands in mine. “But I had every intention of coming clean. So I’m just going to do that now.”
“Mac, look, you don’t owe me an explanation.”
“I do, Ellie. You’re right. I saw inside you without your permission when I read those messages. And I never gave you that opportunity.” I take a deep breath and drop her hands, turning to face everyone else. “I’m not Alexander Stonewall’s son.” People gasp in surprise and then all the whispering begins. “My real name is Maclean Callister. People still call me Mac, so that hasn't changed. And you probably know me better by the moniker the media gave me ten years ago. Mr. Perfect.”
It takes a few seconds, but the whispers begin. The rumors, the accusations, the final outcome. I hear bits and pieces of all of that as I wait.
I turn back to Ellie. “I’m Mr. Perfect but I’m definitely not perfect. I’ve made a lot of mistakes but I didn’t rape that girl and not one of us had anything to do with her death. I’m sorry she died because her lies live on. No matter what, no one will ever hear her admit that she set me up. She set up my friends. She got us kicked out of school, almost put on trial, and made our lives a living hell for two years. No one wants to believe people are capable of such evil, but they are. All we have to do is look at Ellen Abraham here at Stonewall to see this kind of evil play out on a smaller scale.”
I hear more whispers. Agreement? Disagreement? I’m not sure. But I started this so now I have to finish it.
“I left college ten years ago and never went back. None of us did, you know. Mr. Romantic opened some clubs out in San Diego. Mr. Corporate started a high-level headhunting business. Mr. Mysterious… well, disappeared, to be honest. I haven’t heard from him in years. And Mr. Match opened a dating service with one of his sisters. He was only eighteen. Did you know that? Mr. Match’s life was ruined at eighteen. For two years this kid sat around trying to figure out what he ever did to that girl. We all did. Two years.”
I look at Ellie and try to read her face. It’s not very telling. She’s holding her cards close.
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything but take that girl on a date, buy her dinner, drop her off at her apartment, and then go home. But I’m the privileged offspring of a one-percenter. My father is so rich, he owned fifty percent of this company and no one knew it. He never set foot on this campus. Just collected dividends every year. And this girl and her partners wanted to take that privilege away. Steal it by any means necessary.”
It’s sad. Everything about this story is sad and I hate talking about it, but I owe Ellie more than what I’ve been giving her. I owe her the truth, but beyond that, I owe her some sort of reassurance that I’m not the monster the media turned me into.
“They made it all up,” I say. “All of it. And that girl was a victim, but not my victim. She was the victim of the evil men who came up with that plan and decided she was nothing but collateral damage. I don’t even blame her. They plucked her out of obscurity and student loan hell and made promises that were far better than anything she had going for her at the time. Bigger than anything she could ever imagine. So no, I don’t blame her for falling into their trap. They used her like an animal. And when their plan started falling apart, when I made all the Misters come together and form a united front against these bogus charges, when her history started being the front-page news instead of my present—they killed her.
“And then it was all about me again, right? Not only was I a rapist, now I was a murderer. I killed her. We all did. Somehow. Some way. No one knew how because the five of us were all accounted for the night she died, so you know, most people would say that excludes us. But we’re rich. We’re privileged. We work magic with money and buy people off. That’s how it’s done, right? We have power.
“Well, that’s true. I do have power. I have the power to do a lot of things, but clear my name wasn’t one of them. I do not have the power to change the public perception of me or my friends. I do not have the power to create genuine respect from people. I do not have the power to make people trust me.” I pause and look around. Meet hundreds of sets of eyes. It feels so good to be able to finally say this. And to these people especially. People who matter to me.
“But I do have the power to change the world. To make it less hateful, less angry, less difficult. And maybe if someone had helped that girl’s family out when she was younger she wouldn’t have fallen into the trap her co-conspirators laid. So I took my trust fund and set out to make a difference. I’ve been gone for ten years, but I haven’t been hiding. I’ve been changing the world one family at a time through my charity, Change the World. I can’t change anything big,” I say. “I can’t change governments, or stop wars, or prevent draught or famine. But I can take one family at a time and change their future.”
The whispers get louder and the confusion and tension eases out of the faces.
“Because I learned a very valuable lesson from the woman who falsely accused me of rape. I learned that something as small as a few words can have a profound impact on the future of five boys. And if words can do so much damage, then surely there are things equally as small that do so much good. A few dollars in Africa can feed a family for a week. Give out a million of those dollars to the right people and I just fed the population of a city.”
“Shit, Mac,” Ellie says with a sigh. “I’m sorry.”
I shrug. “You didn’t know. No one knew. I didn’t want to do good deeds to be rewarded for them. I just wanted to do them to prove to myself that not everyone is bad. That I’m not the greedy kid they made me out to be. And when I found out that Alexander needed to retire to take care of his health, and he wanted me to come claim my fifty percent interest in the company and head up the North American branch while Heath took over the developing market in Asia and Camille ran Europe, well, I was reluctant. Why should I leave behind what I built for this? For people I don't know and, more importantly, people who might not need me as much as the ones I’m walking away from?”
I turn to the Stonewall employees. “I came here to sell it,” I say, raising my arms. “Just sell it off. I didn’t see the value. Not compared to the work I was doing. But I was wrong.” I turn to Ellie. “You, Ellie Hatcher, have value. You’re an exceptional employee. And I know you have big plans in your future, so I’m not going to ask you to stay. But I want you to know that I value you.
“I value all of you and if Alexander still wants me, I’m in. I’d be honored to help keep Stonewall Entertainment the number one corporation to work for. Not just America, but the world. I’d love for us to change the future together.”