The Trial

by Laura Bates

  DAY 15

  The next morning, Hayley finds Shannon in the quiet shade of the grove of mango trees, their reddening fruit bulging from the branches, their vivid green leaves moving gently in the morning breeze.

  On the way she passes Jason, sitting at the edge of the beach with his back against a tree, staring out at the waves. He looks small and crumpled, like a little boy on a time out. Hayley knows he doesn’t understand. He hasn’t had some great epiphany, some sudden rush of empathy or gender bias education. She doesn’t know if he ever will. But he knows that everything has changed. The ground has slipped from beneath him, whether he changes his mind, or his behaviour, or not. And they did that. They can’t make him understand, any more than they can force Brian to change. But they can change the reaction. They can change the response guys get to those behaviours. And Jason looks like he’s realising that. Hayley almost feels sorry for him. Everything he knows, everything he’s grown up being taught by his friends, his favourite movies, his video games, his online world, even his own parents… it’s all falling apart. And that’s a scary place to be.

  But it will never be as scary as what Shannon has been through, she thinks, as she passes him and makes her way into the cool of the trees.

  ‘You’re up early.’

  Shannon nods, quietly turning over a waxy-skinned fruit that has fallen to the forest floor with her toe. On one side, it is perfect, the dark red blush slowly transitioning to bright, luscious green. When it rolls over, the other side is rotten and putrefying, its orange flesh darkened and congealed like treacle, ants swarming greedily into the gashes in its skin.

  ‘You didn’t murder Rocket, did you?’ The thought pops suddenly into Hayley’s head. Had Shannon tried to sabotage their water supply as well?

  A wry smile flickers around Shannon’s lips. ‘No, I swear. May he rest in raccoon heaven.’

  Hayley nods.

  ‘I never wanted to sabotage our survival, Hayley. I could’ve, if I’d wanted to. All it would have taken would have been one of those beach apples. Squeeze the sap into that tarpaulin. It would have been so easy.’

  Hayley feels suddenly cold. The fact that Shannon has had this thought throws her. Before they got here, she thought she had so much figured out. Standing up for what was right. Fighting for justice. But nothing here is easy, or black and white. Shannon is a survivor, she believes that. Believes she deserves justice and support. But is what she did to the others acceptable? Forgivable?

  ‘You didn’t do it, though,’ she says, more to herself than to Shannon. And she realises how much that matters. How bad Shannon’s pain must have been to even have had that thought in the first place.

  ‘We voted. In your favour.’

  Shannon nods again. Hayley feels deflated. She doesn’t know what she was hoping for. She suddenly feels very young, and inexperienced. Foolish for thinking that she could somehow fix things. She felt proud that she’d managed to get to the bottom of what had happened. She’d advocated for Shannon, powerfully enough to get the others to agree. But she can’t fix it. It’s not really justice, for a few of them to realise how fucked up the whole night was, and how much they all had to do with it. It doesn’t change what happened.

  Will it stop it from happening again? Will it mean one of them is more likely to step in, to stop the downward spiral that becomes a sexual assault before it happens? The part of the spiral that we don’t usually see, the bit that consists of all of us, our jokes, and split-second reactions and the moments when we decide whether to say something or to look away? Hayley doesn’t know. Maybe.

  Perhaps just trying to make those little changes, in the small moments nobody knows are important, perhaps, Hayley thinks, that’s as important as the big, triumphant exposé It’s not the satisfying ending she’s used to tying up with a neat payoff in her articles. It’s not the neat perfection Hayley Larkin is used to striving for. But maybe moving forward has to be messy and imperfect, or we’ll never move forward at all.

  She wishes she were better at this. Wishes she knew what to say. Wishes she had Jessa’s easy warmth or May’s wit.

  She knows enough, at least, to realise that Shannon doesn’t need to know how close the vote was. That Jason and Brian both voted against and Jessa only came down on her side at the end.

  ‘We’ll report him, if we ever go back. All of us. We agreed to stand with you. We’ll tell the police what happened, and back you up. And nobody is going to mention any of what happened here, on the island.’ She pauses, wondering how to word this delicately. ‘As long as it’s over now.’

  Shannon takes a slow, deep breath, tilting her pale chin upwards so that the dappled sun plays over her face.

  ‘No. Nobody is telling anybody anything.’ She says it with a quiet finality, the tone Hayley recognises from moments in practice when they’d been debating a new move or a change to the sequence and Shannon had held up a hand and ended the discussion, overruling them.

  ‘What do you mean? I got them to understand. I spoke up for you.’ Hayley feels stupid, and a slow glow of embarrassment spreads through her stomach as she realises how hurt she is, how much she needs to make this right. ‘I don’t get it. I thought you wanted justice. That’s what you wrote, isn’t it?’

  Shannon shakes her head. ‘Justice isn’t available. It doesn’t exist, not for me, not for this. Not back home. Not without a cost that’s not worth paying.’

  She looks at Hayley. ‘You know what happens to girls like that. Girls from places like Dillard Park. People will find out where I live. And what my upbringing was. And the story will change. You know it will. You’ve seen it.’

  So she does remember, after all.

  Hayley starts to reach out a hand towards her but Shannon twists away, turning her back and reaching a birdlike arm to start plucking plump mangoes from the tree.

  ‘Did you look it up, for that article of yours?’ She looks at Hayley, that hollow, haunted look on her face. ‘Did you check what percentage of rapists ever spend a day in jail?’

  Hayley swallows. ‘Two point five percent.’

  ‘Exactly. So it’ll be my turn. My turn to be the gold digger, the liar, the slut. My turn to be ripped apart online, to be disbelieved if I didn’t scream loud enough, or my injuries aren’t considered bad enough to prove it. My turn to be cast as the vindictive bitch ruining an innocent athlete’s chance of a shining college career. It’ll become who I am. And for what? His shine won’t even be tarnished. He’ll just shine brighter than ever. I won’t let this define me. If his life won’t be defined by it, why should mine?’

  ‘So, this was all for nothing?’

  ‘Not for nothing,’ Shannon says, quietly. ‘The others. What they did? That doesn’t even count. There’s no punishment, no crime. Even though none of it might have happened without each one of them. What they did that night will affect me for the rest of my life and before this they’d never even have thought twice about it. They wouldn’t even know.’

  ‘But now they do,’ Hayley says.

  ‘Exactly. Now they do.’

  And suddenly Hayley realises that the trial hasn’t just been the last forty-eight hours. They’ve all been on trial, the whole time. On the island, at the party; the whole time they’ve been living in a world where treating one half of the population like disposable objects is so normal you don’t even notice it. They’d all been complicit, one way or another. Some just more than others.

  ‘Shannon, can I ask you something? Was I right, about Jason? About the part he played?’

  Shannon smiles dreamily. ‘Jason Angel. Jason always shines so bright, always has, no matter what he’s done.’

  She closes her eyes, letting the breeze gently stroke her cheeks. ‘A guy from the Duke team came over at lunch, the day of the final, and asked me if he could borrow the salt from our table.’

  Hayley frowns, but waits.

  ‘That’s what the fight was about, at the party. He only wanted the salt, but Jason thought it migh
t be something else. Jason is always seeing things that aren’t there.’

  ‘He was honestly mad at you because someone asked for the salt?’

  Shannon smiles. ‘That was nothing. When we were fifteen, I wore my hair in a French plait for a varsity match one afternoon. Jason thought I was trying harder than usual with my appearance. He said he suspected me of trying to “catch the eye” of one of the guys on the opposite team. “I thought you’d be wearing your hair in a bun, the way you know I like it,” he said, and I knew something was off because his voice was kind of low and flat, but I thought he was just in a weird mood.’ She sighs. ‘When we were on our way home that night, we stopped to get a burger. Jason went in to pick up the food, and he handed mine to me in the passenger seat. When I bit into it, there was a pebble in the bun. I chipped my tooth.’

  She opens her mouth and points to a nick in one of her teeth.

  ‘And Jason just kept his eyes on the road and said “it’s not nice to find something different from how you expected it to be, is it?” In that same flat voice.’

  She looks up at Hayley, like she’s checking to gauge her reaction. Like she’s worried she might not believe her.

  ‘He’s always liked me being friends with Jessa. Said he thought her chastity would “rub off on me”. Not that I’d ever so much as looked at another guy. But last year, I went over to study at May’s house and he turned up at the door, all charming and apologetic, telling her mom he was there to drive me home, even though I’d never told him I was going. He’d used an app to track me there. Said he didn’t like me hanging out with her alone, thought we might be gossiping about guys, or planning to sneak out to a bar together. May was too “loose” he said. And when I left with him, May’s mom was practically swooning over how lucky I was, to have a guy so dedicated and sweet that he’d come all that way to get me home safe.’

  Shannon picks up one of the mangoes and uses a fingernail, grown long and sharp since their arrival on the island, to slit its skin from top to bottom, a single, glistening cut.

  ‘It started so, so slowly. When Jason and I first met, I was so new, I didn’t know anyone or anything about Oak Ridge, and he sort of took me under his wing, guiding me, introducing me, helping me. And somehow, somewhere along the way, the guiding became more like controlling. But he always made it seem like he was just doing it for me. Helping me. Letting me know what people would think of me if I wore that top to school… for my own sake. Checking I really wanted to eat that cookie… because he knew how much I cared about making it onto the cheer squad. And so, for a long time, instead of feeling angry, I felt—’ She looks down at the mango, swallowing, forcing her fingernails under the skin and peeling it back.

  ‘I felt grateful. And stupid. I didn’t know why I kept making so many mistakes. And I felt lucky Jason was there to help me.’

  She lifts the fruit to her lips and takes a small bite.

  ‘There were times when I did stand up for myself, a little. I think. But each time I did, Jason would drop something about Dillard Park, just in passing, just a casual mention. And I’d feel myself freeze. I’d see everything I was working for sort of hanging in the air above his head, like it was suspended in a bubble, and it would have been so very easy for him just to reach up and pop it. Just like that. So, I learned how to please him, most of the time at least.

  ‘I love my mom, I love her so much, but I don’t want my life to look anything like hers. After my dad left, she had almost nothing. She had me so young. She never went to college, didn’t have any qualifications. She moved to a completely different neighbourhood, saved every penny of my dad’s alimony for the Oak Ridge fees, worked two jobs to make rent, bought my uniform second hand and sat up at night for a week taking it up to exactly the right length so it looked new. I’ve spent the last decade making up increasingly elaborate excuses for why my friends can never come round to my house, all the while working to make sure my story will be different. Mom was never going to be able to pay for college, and I’m not academic enough for a scholarship, but I knew I could get a free ride with cheerleading, if I was good enough. And you know as well as I do, being good enough isn’t the only thing that matters.’

  ‘Jason,’ Hayley says, finally beginning to understand.

  ‘Yes. Jason. He was my ticket to freedom. But he was also dismantling my freedom, he just did it so slowly and so lovingly that I didn’t really realise what was happening until it was too late.’ She shrugs, licking the juice off her fingers. ‘It just became a habit, like second nature. I didn’t even think twice about it. I’d dress the way I knew he’d want me to. Never send a message I wouldn’t want him to see if he checked through my phone. Be where I knew he would want me to be and when.’

  She looks up at Hayley. ‘I think, that night, I just wanted to be free, for a little while. After I had that drink, I started to feel out of control, and at first, it scared me. But then I realised it was the first time I hadn’t been in control – tight, tight control – for as long as I could remember. It wasn’t about the guy. It was about being me, about making my own decisions, the intoxication of being unshackled, just for one night. And I didn’t want it to stop. Until I did.’

  She takes a long, deep breath and lets it out slowly. Hayley knows, instinctively, that this is the only time she has ever talked about this to anybody.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Ask the others to keep their mouths shut. If they could decide to go to the police for me, they can decide to do that instead.’

  ‘I mean about Jason.’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought about trying to end it a few times, especially recently. But you don’t know what he’s like, Hayley. What he might do. I’m so scared he’ll come to my house, or he’ll undermine me with the squad, somehow. After everything that’s happened, I just want it to be over. I don’t want this to define my life and I don’t want to let Jason control it either. But I don’t know how to get out. I don’t think he’s ever going to let me go. Even after this. There were times before, when he was so angry, like he was disgusted by me, and I thought maybe it was over. But then he’d change, after a few days. He’d need to have me again. And he’d flood my locker with flowers or bombard me with love songs and gifts. Everyone else always thought it was so romantic. He always finds a way to trap me.’

  ‘We’ll do it together,’ Hayley says, immediately. ‘You can stay at mine, for as long as you want – Jason doesn’t know my address and nor does anyone else on the squad… or in the school, for that matter,’ she realises, slightly embarrassed. ‘My mom will be thrilled to think I’ve got a good enough friend to stay over.’

  She falters for a moment, over the word friend. And looks up, half expecting that dreaded eyebrow, a shriek of laughter, a scathing putdown. But it doesn’t come. Shannon has set the mango gently on the ground, her hands in her lap, her face softer, somehow. She’s crying.

  ‘And if Jason tries anything, we’ll fight back. We’ll expose him for who he is, we’ll tarnish his perfect image: we’ll put it on the front page if we have to. He’s not taking you down, Shannon. I won’t let him.’

  That’s when the shouting begins. They look at each other in alarm, and Shannon shakes her head slightly to answer the unasked question in Hayley’s eyes. ‘I haven’t done anything else. I swear.’

  They move through the trees towards the noise, half expecting another disaster, an emergency with Brian’s leg, but instead there’s a plane. A seaplane floating gently just off the beach.

  There is no dramatic screaming from a helicopter, no rescuers hanging out and urging them forward. No billowing storm of whipped-up sand. There’s barely even a ripple.

  And Hayley feels none of the huge relief, the dramatic joy, the hysteria she had imagined when she pictured this moment.

  She watches, as the others stream across the sand towards the plane, splashing through the shallows, Elliot and Jason supporting Brian between them.

  Inside the plan
e, she can see Jessa talking rapidly as she gestures towards her arm, a medic hunched over her. May stroking her hair, sobbing with relief.

  And as she and Shannon walk across the beach, side by side, Hayley looks back over her shoulder. The island is watching them go. Their footprints shimmer for a moment and then disappear.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In the past 10 years, I have visited over 500 schools and universities, working with tens of thousands of young people in mixed sex and single sex, private and state, rural and inner-city settings. I have never visited a school where sexism, sexual harassment and sexual assault aren’t problems. In the same period, I have received around 50,000 testimonies from young people describing their experiences of being harassed by adult men on their way to school, being groped and spanked by peers in school corridors and playgrounds, being abused both on and offline.

  The young people I work with feel that sexual harassment and assault is so commonplace it has become a ‘normal’ part of childhood. They feel that coercive control and other forms of abuse are hallmarks of any relationship. They feel abandoned by adults who tell them that ‘boys will be boys’, or send them home for ‘distracting’ their male peers with short skirts. They feel forgotten and failed by a legal system where rates of charging and summons are so low (1.5%) that rape has effectively been decriminalised. And they are furious at a world where men accused of sexual harassment and violence go on to receive sporting awards and cultural accolades, to be elected to government office and seats of ‘justice’.

  This is a generation of girls who are courageous, powerful, resilient and bold. They are finding their own ways of fighting back, speaking out and refusing to be silenced. They are keen to redefine our societal understanding of consent and our idea of what relationships look like. And above all, in the face of a world where they feel that justice isn’t available to them, they are absolutely determined to create change. This book is my way of standing with them.