Save Yourself (23 page)

Verna nodded and they went through the sliding glass doors to the backyard, where three plastic lawn chairs sat water-spotted in the grass. All of the chairs were broken, so they sat on the edge of the small patch of concrete outside the door. It was a communal yard, shared by the entire complex. The different sections were divided by short lengths of plastic fence, just a few feet long, jutting into a broad field of grass. The people who lived in the apartments had tried to fit everything people normally kept in their yards into their tiny little squares of protected space: barbecue grills, potted plants, children’s toys gone gray with exposure. As if, despite the wide lawn, only the spaces between the plastic fences were sacred. Verna felt sad, thinking about the cramped space people called their own here, about how important it was to them. Or maybe she just felt sad.

“You know it’s only noise,” Justinian said. “Everything they say. They’re just ducks, quacking themselves to death. You’re the lucky one.”

Verna didn’t feel particularly lucky.

“Think about it. They play football together, they go drinking afterward—but they don’t care about each other. They’re alone. You’re not. You have us.”

He put an arm around her. Surprised, grateful, she let him. He wasn’t Jared; he was Layla’s boyfriend. He felt safe. Somehow this afterthought of a place, this measly scrap of land divided up sixteen ways, felt safe, too. Kyle Dobrowski and Brad Anastero surely lived in one of the subdivisions across town, maybe Sunset Lake or Paradise Village. They had never been here. They would never come.

“You saw the message about Wolf-boy, I guess,” Justinian said.

She nodded.

He flicked his cigarette. “We knew about the website this morning. I told everyone to wait, to give him a chance to defend himself. What did he say?”

“He wanted to know if it was true about you and me.” She looked at him. “He was mad.”

“Well, sure. He spends all weekend telling everybody he had sex with you, then come Monday it turns out that the whole school thinks he’s just one of many. Sort of takes away his bragging rights.”

The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. Jared should have been angry for her, he should have been concerned. But he wasn’t either of those things. He was just mad because the entire world knew he’d taken a slut to the movies. She’d let him touch her chest through her shirt, she’d let him press up against her. His—she could barely think the word—his erection.

Verna closed her eyes, leaned her head on Justinian’s shoulder, and wished for all the world to go away. Except for him. Except for them. Except for right now.

They wrote
I love it Doggy Style
on her locker. Big, white, sloppy block-print letters. When she opened the louvered metal door, dozens of slips of paper cascaded out: penises and vulvas and other unidentifiable body parts doing other unidentifiable things. Printed on somebody’s dad’s color printer, cut so they’d fit through the vents. How long had the project taken? she wondered. How early had they woken up this morning to torture her this way?

She went to the principal’s office, a few of the pictures tucked into her math book as evidence. Mr. Serhienko didn’t want to see them. He told her to throw them away. He was a big man with florid cheeks and a vast wardrobe of gray suits and gray ties. His hair was gray, his eyebrows were gray, the light outside his office window was gray. “Go down to Facilities. You know where that is?” Verna didn’t. He told her, and then said, “Mr. Paul should be down there. Ask him for some solvent, tell him you’ve got some graffiti on your locker. I’ll write you a pass out of first period.”

“Why?”

Mr. Serhienko stared at her. “To clean it off. You don’t want to leave it there, do you?”

“But why should I have to clean it off? Shouldn’t whoever wrote it have to clean it off?”

“Do you know who wrote it?”

Verna’s fists clenched in frustration. “It has to be either Kyle Dobrowski or Brad Anastero. Calleigh Brinker, maybe.”

“Maybe. So you don’t know for sure.” He looked exasperated. “Okay, fine. I’ll have a word with them. But meanwhile, Mr. Paul has his own job to do. If you want your locker clean, I’m afraid you’re going to have to do it yourself.”

Fuming, Verna went down to Facilities and got the solvent, which smelled sickeningly of lemon. It took the paint off, but slowly. She had lots of time to think. Lots of time to wonder what kind of weird world she’d found herself in, where someone else wrote obscenities on her locker and she missed class to clean it off. Solvent parching her hands, making her skin feel burned. As if it were a punishment. As if she’d brought this on herself.

At lunch, she told the others what Mr. Serhienko had said, and they merely shook their heads. Yes, this was what they’d expected. “He won’t help you. He’s one of them,” Justinian said. “Let us take care of it.”

“And don’t let those psychos catch you alone,” Layla said, and Verna remembered what they’d done to her hair. She began to regret going to Mr. Serhienko. She began to hope he wouldn’t say anything to Kyle or Calleigh, after all.

On her way up to Bio, she dawdled as long as she could, and that was probably why she ran into Jared. Or maybe he was waiting for her. “I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said, before she could say anything. “Are we friends again?”

“Not if you’re telling people lies about me,” she said.

He stared. “What?”

“Lies.” Had he been planning this all along, all the way back to
the angel wings? “I never did those things you’re saying. And anything I did do, I only did because—because—”

She couldn’t finish because she didn’t know why she’d done those things. He wasn’t who she’d thought he was. She wasn’t who she’d thought she was. Jared said, “Verna, hang on,” but she couldn’t hang on, she couldn’t look at him. She fled up the second-floor staircase and ducked into the first bathroom she saw.

The floors were teal, the stalls bubble gum pink. She ducked into one, latched it behind her, and waited until the urge to cry had mostly passed. Then she came out and splashed water on her face.

“Oh, look,” a voice cooed behind her. “It’s Venereal Elshere.”

The back of Verna’s neck prickled. She turned around.

Calleigh. Three others. One from gym class; the remaining two were strangers.

“I have to go to class,” Verna said.

Calleigh smiled. Like Kyle, she had a beautiful smile. “No, snitch. You don’t have to go anywhere.”

At first, Verna thought it was just Bio, except in the second-floor girls’ bathroom. She thought that if she just kept repeating
No, no, no
, that they’d eventually get bored and go away or a hall monitor would come. Something.

Nobody came. No students. No hall monitors. The four older girls drew in, closer and closer. The door was miles away.

It made Verna’s ears hurt, the things they said. Did Kemper do Verna and Layla at the same time; did he make them do each other; did they take it from his dog, they’d heard he had a big old Great Dane, how did that feel. What about Criss, the fat little carpet muncher. Had she taken a bite out of that tuna fish sandwich. How many cocks could she fit in her mouth at once. They heard she was an expert on blow jobs. Maybe she could give them a lesson.

By the time Calleigh brought out the banana, Verna was crying,
from fear and humiliation. Not hard, not sobbing, but the tears were there. And Calleigh gave her that sweet, sweet smile, and held the banana out.

“Here, honey,” she said. “Show us how you do it and you can go.”

“We want lessons.”

“We’re not cheap sluts like you who give it up to everyone who asks.”

“Show us, Venereal.”

Verna looked at the banana. “I can’t,” she whispered.

Calleigh began to wave the fruit in the air. Back and forth, as if she were teasing a dog with a bone. “Suck it. Now. Or we’ll beat the shit out of you.”

No, Verna thought, dimly; they wouldn’t. These were popular girls, respectable girls. Volleyball-team-starter girls. Honor Society, Homecoming Court girls. Not the kind who tore at each other’s hair in the stairwells. This was all a joke, an impossibly cruel joke. “No,” she said.

Something heavy—a book—hit the back of Verna’s skull, and she felt her knees hit the tile floor.

More books. On her legs, her back, her arms. Everywhere but her face. When Verna cried out, they told her to shut up. On and on and on it went. Verna had never been hit in her life. Reduced to a writhing thing on a bathroom floor, flailing and reaching and finding only cruelty—had she thought the door was miles away? It was light-years away. Galaxies. She could barely see it through her stinging eyes.

She had always wondered how the martyrs bore their flaying and breaking and stoning and now she knew. They bore it because they had no choice. Verna bore hers as long as she could. After an eternity of pain, she let them pull her to her knees. They held up their phones as Verna, sobbing and shuddering, took the banana from somebody’s outstretched hand and, shakily, put the stubby end of it into her mouth like a Popsicle. It tasted bitter and unclean.

“Not like that,” Calleigh said. “Like you mean it.”

Verna didn’t know what they wanted. Calleigh grabbed her wrist and forced the banana in and out of her mouth. “Like that.”

Verna tried. She wanted them to go away. She wanted this to be over.

“Jesus Christ, don’t you know anything?” Calleigh grabbed Verna’s hair, pulled her head back.

“Careful,” one of the girls with phones said. “Don’t get in the shot.”

But Verna’s face, yes, that they wanted. All she could see were the unblinking black eyes of the camera lenses on her.

“Like this, slut,” Calleigh said, and her strong hands forced the banana deep into Verna’s mouth. Farther. Into her throat. The rough end scraped the back of her throat but Calleigh kept pushing. Verna started to gag and still she pushed. Deep, deep, the horrid bitter taste of banana peel in her mouth and nose, the fibrous peel under her teeth as she bit down, she couldn’t help it, she was choking. The girls laughed.

“All right,” Calleigh said, “that’s enough.”

In the terrible soft silence of her bedroom and the terrible soft silence of her mind, time bled. The quiet was pressure in her ears like water, like the bottom of the lake at church camp, weeds brushing her legs and soft muck sucking her toes. The murky water, the brown light. The taste of lake water. Sometimes another kid dared you, said,
let’s see who can hold their breath longest
, and so down you went to the bottom and your lungs cramped with the need to breathe and finally you pushed up toward the sun and the surface of the water broke into glinting shards of summer daylight and you laughed, laughed with the relief of the air and the light.

All Verna could taste was banana. When she inhaled she smelled banana. There was no
up
, no relief to be had.

For a while, Layla was there, lying next to her on the bed and
stroking her hair. Whispering that everything would be okay, that it was over, that she was safe. Verna could not believe her and could not respond.

At dinnertime, without her, Verna’s family talked. Down the hall, the dining room light stopping short of where she crouched at her cracked-open door, she listened.

“Poor thing,” Mother said, “when I went to pick her up in the nurse’s office, she was just green,” and Dad said, “Must be a bug. Is it going around, Layla?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s going around, all right. The whole girls’ volleyball team is sick.”

“That’s awful.”

“They deserve it.”

The faint clink of silverware on china, like a wind chime three houses away. “You know, Layla, high school—your whole life, really—will be exactly as difficult as you make it. I was pregnant in high school. How easy do you think that was?”

“Less easy than getting an abortion would have been, I bet.”

“God wanted us to have you, Layla.”

“In His infinite wisdom, huh?”

Mother said, “His works are perfect, and all His ways are just. My point is, if you put sweetness out, you’ll get sweetness back.”

“Exactly what kind of fantasy land do you live in?”

“The same one you used to live in,” Dad said. “The one where God helps us see the good in the world instead of only the ugliness.”

“There’s a fuckload more ugliness.”

“Layla, language!” But Mother’s protests were halfhearted, without conviction.

“You see what you look for, Layla,” Dad said. “When Toby first started coming to Worship Group, he used to tell me how jealous he was of you girls. Because you grew up in a world full of the brightness of God and he was only just now starting to experience it. Now listen to the way you talk, the contempt you have for everything. The cynicism.
Toby fights so hard to find just a little bit of that brightness, and you seem determined to drown every last bit of it.”

“So adopt Toby.” There was the screech of a chair being pushed back.

“Go ahead,” Dad said. “Leave. I’m getting tired of trying with you, Layla.”

Alone in her bedroom, Verna was Bathsheba. She was the Whore of Babylon. She was all four of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, she was Salome, she was the Beast, she was the apple. She was one of the nameless children who died in Sodom when fire and brimstone rained down from the sky.

EIGHT

Caro worked that night and for once she was glad. To put up her hair and wear earrings and stand in Gary’s nice clean white-tablecloth restaurant as if she belonged there, as if her life was as tidy and careful as the space around her. She had a table that night, two couples eating together: one ordinary and the other beautiful, unrumpled, effortless, and expensive. The man, particularly, or maybe their kind of good grooming just stood out more on a man. His hair was cut as well as his jeans, and when Caro took their drink order she smelled interesting cologne that he clearly hadn’t bought on special at the drugstore. He and his wife—she had a big fat diamond on her ring finger—were both in their thirties, with about ten years on Caro, and Caro could not help thinking that she did not expect the next ten years to treat her as kindly as the last ten had clearly treated them. When the man ordered his cranberry and soda he looked straight into her eyes, friendly and warm with just a hint of a smile. The part of her brain that kept track of such things found him extremely attractive but the rest of her merely made a note and moved on. Because the beautiful man had a beautiful wife and no doubt their life together was beautiful,
too. A magically silent dishwasher and someone to fill it, real art on the walls, vacations to islands where all the signs were in French. She imagined them lounging about in thick white bathrobes, like people in hotel advertisements, drinking Italian coffee and reading smart books. Classics and current events and biographies of major political figures throughout history. Somewhere, they probably had beautiful well-behaved children whose noses never ran.