What Happens Next (5 page)

“Can I use the restroom?” I ask.

Mrs. Winthrop sighs.

“Fine, but hurry up. We have to get going.”

I go into a half-bath off the kitchen, remove my coat, and start to realize what has happened to me. My sweater is on inside out and I’m bleeding. My period isn’t for another few weeks, and it’s never hurt like this before.

“You okay in there?” Mrs. Winthrop asks, knocking on the door.

“Uh… yeah,” I stammer. “Just a minute.”

I don’t have the time or sense to think about what I should do. I clean myself up and walk out, trying my best to mask the shaking of my limbs by folding my arms across my chest. A voice inside me screams:
Open your mouth! Tell this PTA mom what happened! You need to go to a hospital!
But overtopping the voice is the awful banging in my head. A sick regret washes over me in rising waves until I’m drowning in thoughts of:
What have you done?
I walk back to the table, sit down, and tell them what happened.

“We watched TV and fell asleep,” I say.

I tell them what I pray happened, what I desperately wish would have happened. And I spin the yarn—I am the Sleeping Beauty who slept too long. I pump the pedal on my little spinning wheel and weave us all a Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. My heart is pounding and I want to run away so badly, but the
What have you done?
voice calls out to me. Softer this time. It whispers to me from that hollow pit in my stomach, that place where fear lives, and it talks me through it. It helps me believe my own lies.

… You can wrap the Fairy Tale Lie around you like a blanket. You can bring it to life with inflection and embellishment, and when it all fits, you can just click your heels together and
poof!,
it will become real. You’ll be home in your bed saying it was all a dream, it was all a dream….

When Mrs. Winthrop and the officer and Cougar Di are satisfied and convinced and thoroughly disgusted with Sid Murphy and her selfish, selfish choices, the officer hands down my punishment. I can see from his name badge that he is isn’t real police. He’s resort security officer Barry C. Mayfield of the eight-dollars-an-hour-with-no-benefits set. Barry fills out a form detailing a curfew violation, rips it off the tablet, and hands it to me. We head out of the condo and onto the buses. I look for Kirsten and Paige but Mrs. Winthrop instructs me to sit up front with her and Diane. She doesn’t want any more, as she puts it,
shenanigans
out of me. I sit down in the front seat with Cougar Di, while across the aisle, Mrs. Winthrop sits surrounded by a sea of disposable bags filled with souvenirs, snacks, books, and knitting supplies.

“You can take this up with your mother and Principal Watson when we get home,” Mrs. Winthrop says, pulling out an issue of the Oprah magazine and peeling down the wrapper of a Snickers bar. “I’m done stressing about it. Honest to Pete, I don’t know why I volunteer for these things.”

Cougar Di pulls out a nail file from her purple croc-skinned purse and starts sanding away. She looks at me sideways and whispers, “Sorry, kid. But you really had us worried,” and shoots me a half smile. She’s trying to be nice. I return the awkward smile and then lean my head against the seat and close my eyes.

When we pull in, I can see my mom’s car sitting front and center at the school curb. I seriously don’t know what I’m going to say to her. I’ve spent three hours stuck between Cougar Di and Mrs. Winthrop, trying to get the words right in my head, because I need to tell my mom the truth. I’m going to tell my mom the truth.

The bus pulls around back. I step off and the terror ripping through me launches me into a delusional dream state. I just stand on the sidewalk, a river of brightly colored ski jackets flooding past me in a blurry current. I try to pick out Kirsten’s and Paige’s jackets but I can’t; the world has become a hundred melted crayons. But Starsha and Amber? Oh, they slide by in slow motion, Starsha’s fuchsia jacket blazing in the sunlight, her mouth stretching into a sneer when she sees me. “You are fuuuucked, Ginger Bitch,” she says, with a slow sort of dullness. “Totally and completely fuuuucked.” She and Amber laugh, then disappear into the Technicolor swarm.

I squeeze my eyes shut and snap myself out of it. I force my legs to force the rest of me to go find my mom. As I’m about to walk around the building, I hear someone calling me from the crowd. It’s Kirsten. But I can’t deal with her and Paige right now. I need to find my mom. I need to get in the car and go home. I want to be in my bedroom, in my bed, and I want to be there now.

I round the building and there she is, without my little brother—thank god—leaning against the car. Her face is like Kirsten’s and Paige’s, sunken and swollen at the same time. Her face is beaten in two from crying.

I walk toward her and psych myself up and commit to telling the truth. I’m just going to get into that car and say it. Just tell her what happened and go from there. She’ll drive me to the police station, or to the hospital, or to the cliffs at Nelson Ledges; to wherever it is that mothers and daughters go when something too horrible for words happens.

I walk up and stand to face her. She looks up at me and her eyes tell me that she doesn’t know how to feel, that she’s waiting for me to tell her something.

Horror or anger—the choice is mine.

And out it comes: “I-met-a-guy-we-went-to-his-condo-and-watched-TV-and-I-was-exhausted-from-skiing-all-day-and-fell-asleep.”

So there you have it—my mouth, my mind, and my heart choose anger. They choose anger because anger passes. Anger passes because my mother knows exactly what to do with it. Katherine is the master of anger; she dominates anger. She takes anger in her hands and twists its neck, ripping its head off. She throws anger against the wall and stomps it to death. Her voice rises, it changes, it conjures up ghosts and cusses in a spitting Irish brogue. Then, when she’s tapped out empty, she picks anger up between a thumb and a forefinger and carries it outside and drops it in the trash. On her way back, she scoops up forgiveness like a bouquet, sniffs it deep and arranges it in a vase. She sets forgiveness down, shining in the middle of everything.

So anger? I can give her anger.

But horror? I can’t give my mom that, because horror doesn’t pass. Horror is forever.

I hold my breath tightly and watch the anger rise up in my mom’s eyes as “What in the goddamn bloody hell were you thinking?” comes screeching out, and I’m thankful for it. I breathe out and a calmness seeps in because I’m thankful that I don’t have to watch my mom fall to her knees and cry forever.

“Mom, I’m so, so sorry,” I say, over and over. And I listen to her anger the whole drive home, looking out my side mirror at all the things in the world getting smaller. My dead grandmother’s biting Irish brogue rears up, that voice that’s been boiled into my mother’s DNA fills every space of the car. Her anger is like music; a familiar, raging, beautiful song that I can cling to. I cling to my mom’s anger like a raft. I hang on tight and leave horror behind me.

5

I’ve showered.
Thoroughly. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

It’s Sunday evening about five. My mom went to the grocery store and I’m babysitting my six-year-old little brother, Liam. Or pretending to, anyway. I stick him in front of Nickelodeon with three juice boxes, a wet rag, and a box of Fiddle Faddle. I tell him he can eat the whole thing and I won’t tell so long as he doesn’t wipe his fingers on the drapes or move a single inch from the couch. It’s almost dark out and I just lie on my bed and look out the window, opening and shutting my eyes to the tune of the landline ringing downstairs. Rinnng! Open. Rinnng! Shut. Over and over until, thankfully, it goes silent and my eyes stay closed.

It’s Kirsten or Paige—I know from the customized ringtone. They’ll be calling back in another fifteen minutes or so.

I open my eyes and continue the game, waiting for the phone to start up again. I’m trying to gather mental snapshots of the dimming sky, collecting the pictures and laying them out in my mind, so I can remember and make sense of it. So I can figure out how the world went dark right in front of me.

But I can’t do it. It isn’t working. All I see when I close my eyes is blinding snow followed by everything that came after. The ski trip plays and replays in a circular, endless loop in my mind.

The last thing I remember about last night was standing in the condo kitchen talking to him. Then the sound of breaking glass and the sensation of being carried. I was leaning against the countertop, holding a glass of ginger ale that Dax, or whoever he was, had poured for me. Things went blurry and the glass slipped from my hand, crashed into pieces at my feet. And I was falling, and then floating, being lifted.

Then nothing. Just the white hotness of snow and the jolt of being pierced by those caramel-yellow eyes.

I’ve tried all the mind games I can think of to reason my way out of it. Like,
If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, then did it really make a sound?
Some would argue no. If they’re right, then if a person who is raped can’t remember it, maybe it didn’t really happen. And trust me when I tell you that I don’t remember it. At all. Not a single solitary moment of it.

Breaking glass. Falling and floating. Caramel-yellow eyes.

These are the things I know.

It’s Monday. I get up from bed at six thirty just as if I were going to school.
No sleeping in,
my mom said,
this isn’t a vacation.
I go into the bathroom, pass by the mirror, but only see a flash of red on my way to the shower. I don’t look in mirrors now unless I have to, and it’s not necessarily because of some deep-seated Freudianesque type shame, although that may have something to do with it. It’s because I can’t look in the mirror and not have the Truth staring back at me. Literally.

My mother was the first to notice it, in the car when she picked me up yesterday. She’d finished with the screaming and our faces were soaked with tears, our noses were running, and I turned to reach into the backseat for some tissues. “What happened to your hair?” she said, and reached out to finger my curls. I flipped down the visor mirror and that’s when I saw it.

One long spiral snipped.

Man. Spectacular. These things, they go on forever.

And now he has a piece of it.

It’s Wednesday, the third day of my four-day suspension. It would have been five days, but I haven’t been in trouble since middle school. I had a reputation for being a scrapper back then, but I haven’t had so much as a detention in high school, and I keep a respectable grade point average. The guidance counselor went to bat for me and the principal let me off a little by cutting my suspension down by a day and adding a detention instead.

I’m grounded, of course, and being indoors is unbearable. Every moment feels like the roof and walls are caving in on me, and the only thing that gives me any real relief is stepping outside into the cold air. But then my mom gets upset because I’m supposed to be grounded, which meant “confinement” the last time she checked.