Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

  “She’s at the Mohawk Nature Center,” she said, sounding both patrician and annoyed. “She’s having a meeting for …some sort of club, I believe.”

  Score. I thanked her profusely—probably way too profusely—and pulled back onto the road. The nature center, a hippie enclave that teaches kids how to spin their own yarn and make tea out of tree bark, is on the far side of Jaspersburg. I’d been there plenty of times when I was on the schools beat. I’d even covered a pagan wedding there once, where the bride and groom had worn nothing but robes made of cloth they’d loomed themselves.

  On the drive through Jaspersburg, another thought occurred to me: What if Dorrie and Lauren were in on it together? Wasn’t that more likely than Lauren plotting the whole thing on her own?

  The answer, it seemed to me, was yes. So should I turn the car around? Somehow, I didn’t think so; I still had to find out if I was on the right track. And besides… for some reason, I couldn’t picture myself being actually scared of Dorrie—or, come to think of it, Lauren, either. Was that a pretty solid indication that I was off on some ridiculous head trip?

  I was still debating the question when I turned into the center. There were a couple of cars in the parking lot—including Dorrie’s own red Beetle—but all the lights appeared to be out. As I went up to the front door, an outdoor safety light went on. I could just make out the words on a handwritten sign taped to the window:

  TRI-COUNTY EARTH DAY PLANNING COMMITTEE

  7–8 TONITE

  RACHEL CARSON LOUNGE

  UPSTAIRS

  I checked my watch; it was coming up on eight-thirty. I tried the door, but it was locked. The meeting must be over by now, but Dorrie was obviously still here. Deciding to do a loop around the building, I grabbed my trusty Maglite out of the car. I’d just made it over to the right side when I heard some talking and giggling maybe thirty yards off into the woods. Then a voice said, “Shh! Somebody’s here!”—plenty loud enough for me to pinpoint where they were. I shone my flashlight in their direction and saw a clutch of kids gathered on the ground; even from a distance, I could smell the pot smoke.

  The minute I fixed them with the light, they scattered, amid the snapping of twigs and the crinkling of potato chip bags. I had no idea which one might be Dorrie, so I did the only thing I could think of; I went back to wait in her car, which she’d left unlocked. About fifteen minutes later, she plopped herself in the driver’s seat.

  “Do you really think,” I said, “that you’re in any shape to get behind the wheel?”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said, “you scared me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  Her voice sounded odd—not slurred like a drunk, but… mellower, a little distracted, maybe vaguely amused.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said again. “Can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “No.”

  I let the word hang in the air for a while. Finally, she got uncomfortable enough to say something.

  “Why not?” The words came out in a whine, which she directed to the steering wheel. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? Why do you have to keep bugging me?”

  “Because I need to know what happened.”

  “What happened when?”

  “Last year. At Melting Rock.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, banging her head dramatically against the center of the steering wheel. Then she struggled to pull a set of keys out of her pocket and stick them into the ignition. I grabbed the ring out of her hand.

  “Hey,” she said. “What do you think you’re—”

  “You’re in no shape to drive.”

  She looked around the now-empty lot with a shrug. “My buds already left.”

  “They’re not my concern at the moment. You are.”

  She let out a beleaguered groan—the kind of sound a person is constitutionally incapable of uttering after age twenty-one—and let her noggin fall back against the headrest.

  “Would you please just leave me alone?” I flicked on the overhead light, and she shrank from the glare. “Jesus, what’d you have to go do that for?”

  She flicked it off again, but not before I noticed she had a serious case of the bunny eyes. “If you want to talk in the dark, that’s fine too.”

  “I don’t want to talk at all. Now would you please get out of my car so I can go home?”

  “I doubt very much you’d want your parents to see you like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Stoned out of your gourd.”

  “Oh.”

  She didn’t seem particularly offended—just particularly zonked out. True to form, she leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes.

  “I’m not that stoned,” she said. Then she let out a manic giggle. “Okay…I’m pretty stoned,” she said, and giggled some more.

  When she recovered from the laughing fit, she took a few long pulls from a plastic water bottle, put it back in the cup holder, and grabbed her backpack from the backseat. She fumbled with the zipper, finally got it to work, and yanked out a bag of blue-corn chips—which she then had a hard time opening. I did it for her.

  “Hey,” she said after jamming a handful into her mouth. “What do you want, anyway?”

  “Just to ask you some questions.”

  “About what again?”

  “Melting Rock.”

  “What about it?”

  “About what happened there last year.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, head still reclined against the seat. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You know, you really might feel better if you—”

  “No. No way.”

  If she was starting to get upset, it didn’t seem to impede her appetite; eyes still shut, she grabbed some more chips and stuffed them into her mouth. I decided to take a different tack.

  “How come you decided to change the way you look all of a sudden?”

  She opened one eye. “Huh?”

  “I was looking at some old pictures from last year’s Melting Rock, and you looked… totally different. Your hair was longer; you didn’t have any piercings or anything—”

  “What’s wrong with the way I look?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “All I’m saying is that in August you looked one way, and by the time the school pictures were taken a month later, you looked completely different. And I was just wondering… what might make a person change so much in such a short time?”

  She shrugged. “What do you care?”

  “I just do. And I was thinking …maybe one reason might be because a person went through some kind of trauma.”

  Now both eyes were open, and she was looking at me like she’d love to boot me out of the passenger’s seat.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Before she could figure out what I was doing, I reached over and yanked up the sleeve of her sweatshirt to reveal her forearm. What I saw, unfortunately, was exactly what I’d been afraid I might find: a line of horizontal cuts, both new and scarred over, marking the skin at varying intervals.

  She jerked her arm away. “What do you think you’re—”

  “I was wondering why you always wear long pants and long sleeves, even at Melting Rock when it was hot as hell.”

  “So what if I—”

  “Are you cutting your legs too?”

  She bit her bottom lip and stared down at her lap. “None of your business.”

  “You can get help, you know.”

  She laughed again, but this time there was no humor in it. “Don’t even go there.”

  “I had a friend in college who cut herself. I know what it’s about—you feel all this pain and the only way you can block it out is to hurt yourself physically. And the only way you’re going to be able to stop is if you talk about what—”

  “I’m fine, okay? I don’t even do it that much anymore.”

  “Some o
f those cuts look pretty fresh.”

  Her sleeve was already covering the marks, but she pulled it down even farther. “Would you just leave me alone?”

  “Dorrie, what happened to you at Melting Rock?”

  She stared out the driver’s-side window. “Nothing.”

  “I want you to tell me the truth.”

  “Nothing.”

  “I know what they did, Dorrie. I know those boys hurt you. I know they were your friends, and you thought you could trust—”

  Her head whipped around to face me. “Stop it.”

  “Jesus Christ, Dorrie. You’ve got to get this thing out in the open so you can deal with it.”

  She started crying then, with a hysteria that probably wouldn’t have been possible without chemical assistance. “Please,” she said, “please just stop it.…”

  “Somebody killed those boys for a reason, Dorrie. It’s taken me a long time to figure it out, but I think I know what they did. And I think I know who they did it to.”

  “No.” The word became a wail. “Noooooo.”

  “Dorrie, please—”

  “No. No. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You have no fucking idea—”

  “They raped you, didn’t they? Something happened, maybe everybody was high or something, but the situation got out of control and they attacked you. Didn’t they?”

  “No.” She was crying so hard she seemed in actual danger of choking on her own tears. “No—no—no. You’re wrong.”

  “That’s why you did this to yourself. That’s why you shaved your head and—”

  “No. You don’t understand. You don’t understand anything.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “It wasn’t me,” she said through the sobs. “It was Trish.”

  “WHAT?”

  “It was Trish. They raped Trish. Not me—Trish.”

  I stared at her, face mottled and wet. “Are you serious?” She just kept crying. “Dorrie, are you telling me the truth?”

  “Yeah.” Her voice sounded small and faraway.

  “Trish? They raped Trish?”

  “Y—” She gulped at whatever was running down her throat. “Yeah.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  She turned on me, suddenly furious. “What do you think happened? They raped her, okay? The four of them—Billy and Shaun and Tom and Alan—they got all fucked up on E and they gang-banged her.”

  “They were on ecstasy? But I thought that …I mean, I heard that when guys take it they—”

  Another humorless laugh. “Can’t get up for the party? Sometimes. Not this time.”

  “Jesus, Dorrie… what happened?”

  She shook her head and bit her lip again, this time so hard it had to draw blood. Then she grabbed her bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She flipped open the top and offered me one first, like the stress of the situation was somehow making her revert to proper Benson family manners. I took one, she did the same, and she produced a lighter and lit mine first.

  She sat there smoking for a while, blowing gray clouds out the open window. When she finally started talking, she was still looking away.

  “It was the last night of the fest,” she said. “We were having a great time—I mean great. Everybody was talking about how it was the best year ever. And the guys, they decided they wanted to go for a swim in the creek. It was kind of cold, so the rest of us blew it off.

  “But after a while, Trish decided she wanted to go find them. She… she kind of had this thing for Alan back then. She really liked him a lot, but he didn’t even notice. Far as he was concerned, Trish was just one of the guys. But she really wanted to hang with him, ’cause it was the last night and all. So even though she didn’t really feel like swimming, she went down there anyway. And”—she took a long drag of the cigarette—“she really wanted me to go with her, but I wouldn’t go. I just met Axel the day before and I wanted to, you know… hang with him. Some best friend, right?”

  “You and Trish were best friends?”

  “Back then, yeah. Not so much anymore.”

  “Tell me what happened next.”

  “Trish went off to find the guys. I went looking for Axel.” She exhaled another smoky contrail. “Never found him, though.”

  “But what happened to Trish?”

  “I don’t know everything. She wouldn’t tell me. I went over toward the creek looking for Axel, and Trish came running up the hill all messed up. She looked awful—her clothes were all wet and she was crying like crazy. And she told me …She said that all four guys did her. At least she thought they did—she was still pretty high.”

  “She took ecstasy too?”

  “Yeah. And Trish was never as into that shit as the rest of us, probably because of her dad being a cop and all. But I guess she wanted the guys to think she was cool, so she took it. And it must’ve been pretty strong, because she was all”—she shrugged—“… I don’t know how to describe it. I just never saw anybody on E be so wacked. She was practically…What’s the word?” She thought about it for a few seconds. “Catatonic.”

  “And that’s not normal?”

  Her look said I was an idiot. “Of course not. E can make you all manic—you talk a mile a minute sometimes—or else kind of mellow, like you’re crazy about the whole world. But Trish was totally… just out of it.”

  “She was probably in shock.” Dorrie didn’t answer. “And she told you… what? That she was attacked by all four guys?”

  Her eyes welled up again. “She said …I mean…I knew… Trish never did it before, okay?”

  “You mean she was a virgin?”

  The word sounded as oddly Victorian as ever, and I immediately felt stupid for saying it. Dorrie didn’t seem to notice.

  “Yeah. And… she said she didn’t want to do it, that everything just got crazy and they were all just on her, and everybody was laughing and she told them no, but they wouldn’t stop….” She squeezed her eyes shut, either to stop the tears or to blot out the image. “She said it was like a big joke to them, that they just laughed and laughed. And she said”—Dorrie finally shifted in her seat to face me—“it was like she wasn’t even there, like they fucking raped her, but they still didn’t notice her. Can you believe that? Can you fucking believe it?”

  “Did you take her to the hospital?”

  She shook her head again, then pulled some Kleenex out of her backpack and blew her nose. When she pulled it away, there was a bubble of goo stuck to her nose ring.

  “She wouldn’t go,” she said. “I tried…I told her she had to see a doctor—that, you know, it would be a good idea if she got the morning-after pill. But she wouldn’t even talk about it. And the worst thing was… she was just so fucking calm.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She was talking about all this awful stuff that just happened to her, and she was like… like a robot, you know? It was …I don’t know, just really scary, okay? It was way worse than if she’d been all crying and upset. It was like she was half dead or something.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “She took off.”

  “What?”

  “I tried to get her to come back to our tent, but she was afraid she’d run into Lauren or Cindy—she said she didn’t want anybody else to see her like that. And then she said she was really thirsty from the E, so I went to get her some water. When I got back, she was gone. I told her to wait for me, that I’d be right back, but she just… left.

  “So I spent the whole night looking for her, but I couldn’t find her anyplace. And after I got home from Melting Rock the next day, she called me and said the whole thing was a big mistake. She said she wasn’t really raped after all, that the whole thing was her fault. And she swore me to secrecy about it, made me promise never to tell anybody what she told me. I didn’t see her again until school started.”

  “And did you tell anyone?”

  The look in her eyes turned from anguished to offended. “Of co
urse not.”

  “Not even Lauren or Cindy? Not anyone?”

  “I told you,” she said. “Trish swore me to secrecy.”

  “And did you believe her?”

  “About what?”

  “Did you believe Trish when she said it was all a mistake?”

  “Are you crazy?” Dorrie spat out. “I saw her. She was fucking traumatized.”

  “So why did you let it slide like that?”

  Less fury, more tears. “What was I supposed to do? She tells me it didn’t happen, and then she hardly talks to me for weeks, and then she practically starves herself to death and she has to go away to some treatment place.…”

  “Didn’t you even try to get her to talk about it?”

  “Yeah, a couple times, but she… she pretty much acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about.” She focused on the glowing end of her cigarette for a while, like she found it hypnotic. “And maybe…” Her voice trailed off, eyes still on the burning butt.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe I wanted to believe her,” she said. “Maybe I wanted to believe it more than anything in the whole goddamn world.”

  CHAPTER31

  You mean, it was better than believing that the four of them had… assaulted her?”

  “Yeah,” Dorrie said to her cigarette. “Billy and Alan and Tom and Shaun… they were my friends too, you know.”

  “You know, Dorrie …it’s pretty obvious that Trish isn’t the only one who was traumatized.”

  She finally looked at me again. “What are you talking about?”

  “You see Trish completely messed up. You find out she was raped by four guys she trusted. You can’t confide in anybody about it. You don’t even know what to believe. And to top it off, you lose your best friend. No wonder you—”