Blackout (7 page)

“It is important,” said Glyn. Some of her
gloom had lifted. “We need something to rally around. A name and
some kind of symbol. It’s too bad we can’t use Kelsey.”

“Well, we can’t,” I said. “We’ll have to
invent a composite and give her a name. And a face.”

What was I doing? Was I creating something
important or unleashing a monster? It would take a lot of time. In
a couple of weeks, I’d be starting my senior year and I wanted to
get into a good college. Ben had done it, even with his job at
Frosty Dan. But Ben had brains in spades. All I had was one tiny
brain that couldn’t cover everything.

That just made me stubborn. I could and would
do it, along with everything else I had to do. I tried to think of
a few things I could cut out.

Cree slapped her hand on the table. “We need
a name for our composite girl. Then we can publicize and maybe out
of that we’ll get a name for our group.”

“It’s got to be more than a group,” I said.
“It’s a crusade. Okay, give her a name, and then I’ll write an
article for the paper.”

“The school paper?” she asked.

“No,
The Chronicle.
” That was our
community rag.

“Can I help?” asked Glyn.

“Um . . .” I wanted to do it my way, with my
own ideas. But that was bad leadership. So I said, “Sure. I’ll need
your input anyway about what led up to it.”

“You’re not going to use my name!”

“Of course not. No one gets named, not even
the jocks who perpetrated the outrage.”

Cree shook her head at my vocabulary. I went
on, “Even though they deserve it. But as soon as they get arraigned
we’ll go at them with guns blazing.”

We mulled around for a bit and came up with
the name Alice Field. I hoped it wasn’t anybody’s real name but
probably it was. Anyhow, it sounded generic enough so maybe no one
person would think we were singling her out.

We went upstairs to my room where I grabbed
some paper and started jotting notes.

“Alice Field. Let’s make her seventeen. She
lives in the suburbs, a fictitious one.”

“Why not make it someplace different?” Cree
suggested. “Completely different, like a farm in the Midwest.”

“Because the burbs are what we know. We want
it realistic.”

“East Bridge,” offered Glyn.

“That’s too close,” I said. “They’d
guess.”

“So what if they do? We disguised her name.
Isn’t that enough?”

“How about Eastridge, without the b? Damn
that Evan. It’s mortifying that I ever liked him.”

“How could you know?” Glyn had said it
before. Glyn liked him, too, after I split, even though she would
never admit it. She must have thought she was getting away with
something.

And he had a lot of skill when it came to
turning on the charm. Psychopaths are good at that.

“We need a name for him, too,” I realized.
“Not that he deserves it, but we don’t want to start trouble.”

Cree said, “It would help protect Kelsey,
too, if he can’t be identified.”

I hadn’t considered that angle. “Okay, so
Alice goes to the party. She’s shy and terrified and hooks up with
a classmate. Or maybe not terrified, just a little bit shy. Anyway,
she goes to the party and hooks up with—”

“Callie Grimsby,” said Glyn.

“Is that your alter ego?”

“No, it just popped into my head. It might be
a name I heard somewhere. That’s usually the sort of thing that
pops into my head.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Even if it’s a real
person, we’re not saying anything bad about her. Now give me a
blow-by-blow account of what happened.”

I wrote it all down as she described it. Some
of the details would have to be changed but I kept the Tom Collins.
They do taste nice, as I knew from experience. Sweet enough to
dilute the gin, which isn’t very good by itself. I never understood
people who could drink it straight.

Next, we came to Evan. I decided to keep his
initials, or reverse them. Stu Edwards? Stefan Edwards? Ha! Even
closer.

“I saw them going upstairs.” Glyn covered her
face. “I should have grabbed her then.”

“But you didn’t because?”

“I was chicken. I knew the jocks would get
antagonistic and smarty-pants and everybody’d be on their side. I
wasn’t thinking of any long-term results.”

“Okay, I’m going to use those thoughts for
Callie, okay?”

“Be sure to have her really beat on herself,”
Glyn said. “Even if she’s not the primary victim, it’s a lesson for
everybody. And don’t forget the pictures. That tells us
everything.”

“But we can’t use them.”

“Of course we can’t. But we can describe
them.”

“How?” I asked. “If we didn’t see them.”

Glyn looked momentarily abashed. “I did.
That’s how I know. They didn’t leave out much, not even Evan’s
arse.”

“Ew!” said Cree. “How could he?”

“Men don’t mind showing off their thingie,” I
said. “They’re proud of it.”

Glyn corrected me. “Not his thingie, his bare
ass, or part of it. He pulled his trousers down but not off. It
wasn’t a courtesy he extended to Kelsey. They took everything off
her.”

I almost asked if she was as skinny as she
looked, but caught myself in time. That was not the issue here.

What if she’d been having her period? Would
that have turned them off, or were they too rabid to care? As Cree
had already expressed it.
Ew-w-w.

The notes made a sort of first outline. I
looked them over, fleshing them out in my mind. “I wish I could
interview Kelsey. Don’t worry, I know I can’t, but it would be
interesting to know if she had any awareness of what was going
on.”

“You’ll have to put yourself in her shoes,”
said Glyn. “Get drunk and see how much awareness you have.”

“Different people get drunk differently,” I
reminded her. “Did you see her after it happened?”

“No. I fled.”

“They could have added something. A date rape
drug or something. We’ll never know until they grill Evan and the
others, and the police won’t tell us anyway.” Not even Rick, while
they were still investigating. Not even for the sake of my
article.

Glyn rolled her eyes. “You’ll be lucky if
they find out anything. He’ll cop a plea. Or his parents will get
him out of it.”

With that discouraging prospect, we broke up.
Cree drove Glynis home and then went off somewhere with Ben.

Once again, I called the hospital. She was
still in ICU, awake but groggy. She had no phone by her bed so I
couldn’t talk to her or to anyone who might be there with her. Even
if I paid an in-person visit, I couldn’t see her. They only allow
family members into ICU. Even without that restriction, I very much
doubted that she would want to see me. Instead, I got to work on my
article.

We needed a name for our group. How about
Women Are People, Too? It wasn’t catchy, it didn’t form a word, and
as an acronym, WAPT read awfully much like a radio station. Aren’t
acronyms supposed to make words? If they didn’t, it was just a
bunch of initials.

All I could think about was Kelsey and the
horrible thing that had happened to her. If she was the sort of
girl who liked to flaunt herself she might have been able to endure
it. Maybe. It seemed to me this called for Dr. Schiff cutting short
her vacation. Mom said therapists need vacations, just like
anybody, but right now Kelsey needed her even worse.

As for Evan, I wished there were something I
could do. Some way I could entrap him. I’d tried that once before
and it didn’t work. He couldn’t still be living in his parents’
basement now that that had been found out.

Forget about Evan. He was a stinker but first
and foremost I needed to get my article out there and start people
thinking.

I looked through my computer for anything I
could find. I had to narrow down the search because of course there
were a billion things about rape. I narrowed it to “drinking and
rape” and found a beautiful article that had both those words in
the title. It was all about
not
blaming women for men’s
violence. It’s the rapist’s crime, not hers, even if she’s blotto.
That’s what I’d been thinking, but he said it better.

Yes, the author was a man. Three cheers and
more for him. He used the word “misogyny” a few times and I
realized that had a lot to do with it. Men who can’t accept that
women are human beings, who brutalize them with rape, may well
harbor hostile feelings toward women. I put that in my article
along with the words “power” and “control.”

This was getting too much for ignorant little
me. I went out to the back patio where Rhoda was still gardening.
Daddy must have finished the
Times
and gone off
somewhere.

I reminded her of what I’d told her earlier
about Kelsey, adding more details. Her jaw dropped almost into the
canna plants.

“Why,” I asked, “do they hate us so
much?”

She didn’t tell me I was exaggerating. She
only blinked and thought about it.

“I doubt that there’s any one reason,” she
finally said. “Everybody’s different, and a lot of men would deny
that they hate women.”

“Of course they don’t,” I agreed. “We make
wonderful playthings and they always want to play. But why is it so
hard for so many males to think of us as real, genuine, actual,
live human beings with a brain and feelings? Haven’t you had any
patients like that?”

She smiled. “I’m pretty sure a true
misogynist would want a male therapist.”

“Unless he wanted a female so he could fight
with her.”

“Come to think of it, I did have somebody
like that once. He was quite antagonistic, but he didn’t stick
around long. I refused to lose my temper and that galled him.”

“Okay, now a person like Evan. You said he
might have an inferiority complex that he just can’t deal with or
even recognize.”

“I said
might
have. There could be
other reasons. I wouldn’t know without getting inside his
mind.”

“But isn’t a lot of it cultural?” I asked.
“Where males grow up feeling superior just because they have bigger
muscles? And because they’re superior, they get to kick us
around.”

“Maddie, what you’re doing here is you’re
generalizing. As I said before, everybody’s different. There may be
certain general factors but different people process those factors
differently. Each person has different life experiences—”

“Oh. Okay.” I didn’t want a big long speech
in psychobabble. Furthermore, psychology is an inexact science and
I was perfectly capable of figuring out a few things for myself and
drawing my own conclusions.

“Don’t you have to dig those up in the fall?”
I asked, diverting her attention to the cannas.

“These and the gladioli. But it’s not time
yet. It can wait till October.”

“Do you want me to do anything about
dinner?”

She seemed surprised that I would offer.
Usually I didn’t take the initiative about that, but I felt bad
about interrupting her big speech.

“You can set the table. Daddy’s gone to get
Chinese take-out.”

What were my parents coming to? Was it all
because of Ben leaving? Mom stood up and went to clean the garden
off her hands. I set the table and put my computer to sleep just as
Daddy and Ben both drove in.

We had a lovely dinner, including some
vegetarian stuff for Ben. Rhoda was sad. Her little boy was all
grown up and leaving her.

“I’ll be back,” he assured her. “Probably for
Thanksgiving, if not sooner. And you can come and visit any
time.”

“Why, thank you. We’ll do that,” she
said.

That night I went to bed still trying to
think of a name for my campaign.

Chapter
Six

During the night, I thought of a gimmick. I
could end my article by announcing the crusade and holding a
contest for name suggestions. It would get everybody involved, and
with that settled, I managed to sleep for a few hours.

When I woke, it was one day nearer the start
of school. Still, there were a few days left. And school usually
started
fairly
slowly, without a lot of huge assignments. If
I worked really hard, I could get the crusade underway before the
deluge began.

It being Monday, the first thing I did after
shower and breakfast was add that final paragraph to my article. I
knew I should have discussed it with Cree and Glyn but I didn’t
think they’d be up yet. I read the whole thing over and printed
it.

Rhoda was leaving for work when I went out
and locked the door behind me. “Where are you going?” she
asked.

“Newspaper,” I said. “Didn’t I tell you I was
writing an article?”

“The school paper?”

“School hasn’t started yet.
The
Chronicle.
”

She blinked at that, got into her car, and
drove away. I hoped Phil Reimer was there, my special reporter
friend. Cree got to know him first when the baby she sat for was
kidnapped. Then Phil found out it was my house Evan broke into the
time he tried to drag me away. Phil had heard about it on his
police scanner and was delighted he could interview me
personally.

The Chronicle
office was all the way
down in the lower village, next to the Metro-North railroad tracks
that ran alongside the Hudson River. It wasn’t far from where Cree
lived, on Riverview Boulevard, just above the lower village. I
thought of asking her if she’d want to go with me. More likely,
she’d rather spend the day with Ben on his last few days at
home.

Poor Kelsey. She should have been leaving for
college, too. I wondered if she would. Or maybe she wasn’t able to
yet.

The Chronicle
was on one side of the
station plaza. I entered a large room with several desks, several
food vending machines, and several office cubicles along one wall.
The presses were in another room. They weren’t running today.
Southbridge wasn’t a large town but the paper covered the whole
area and mostly survived on advertising revenue. It would make a
good beginning for our nameless campaign. You have to start
somewhere.