by Leanne Davis
She slipped into a seat in the back. Unseen. Mostly ignored. She wasn’t all that popular. Not in the daylight or during class times. She was overlooked, ignored, whispered about. She now was a social outcast, way more so than last year. All due to the sin of sleeping with the wrong girl’s boyfriend. She was startled at first by how another female could be as evil as the one who was currently spreading gossip about her.
She listened the entire class period as the female professor talked about the merits and demerits of the media’s impact on society. They had a paper due on it by the end of the week. Kylie didn’t take any notes, but she quietly took in the professor’s entire lecture. She got up minutes before the end and slipped out to miss the crowd. She exited the building and fumbled around in her bag to find her smokes. She found a loose cigarette and lit up, inhaling and exhaling as she sighed with pleasure. While getting the cigarette all arranged, she wasn’t watching where she was going and she managed to trip over a root that had pushed up under the concrete to make an uneven lip about three inches up.
She dropped her cigarette and bag as she stumbled right into someone walking the opposite direction. She started to mutter an apology, glancing up at who she had nearly shoved herself into, when her thoughts scattered like the leaves around her feet. Her cigarette continued to smolder on the path. She stared at the guy who had caught her, his arms still under hers, almost cradling her to hold her steady. It normally would have been considered a chivalrous thing to do. He smiled at her, his white teeth shinning and dimples deepening. “You okay?” He nodded to where her foot had turned weird. He cocked his head to the side, considering her. His eyes roaming her face. “Kylie, isn’t it? I know you, right?”
Her hand started to shake. Her stomach twisted in revulsion… and fear. So much fear. It made cold sweat break out over her entire body. Her skin was hot and cold with stickiness. It was instantaneous. It’s his smell. His cologne. It came off his skin in a strong aroma. It was his sickly-sweet cologne smell that she remembered the most clearly, more than anything from that night. As she and Tommy had stood talking and flirting, she had been overwhelmed by the strong scent of him.
Thomas Tamasy. Tommy, to most. She had dreaded this moment: running into him around campus. So far she had rarely. If she saw him, she avoided him. She didn’t go to parties at his fraternity anymore. Once, in sophomore year, she had walked into her chemistry class and he was seated there. She’d walked out and dropped the class. She’d done everything to avoid being close to him. But now? Here she was in his arms. It had happened.
She snatched her arms from his grasp. She shook her head in acknowledgment he’d gotten her name right as she kept her face down and gaze glued to the ground at their feet.
He leaned down to get right in her line of vision. He smiled again. Full charm on. He was like that. Outgoing. Life of the party. Flirt and friend to all. “Hey, didn’t we… hang out some? Last year?”
Tears threatened to blind her. Her eyes ached. They were burning with the unshed salty tears. She kept her head down. She shut her eyes to keep them in and the images out. She never dreamed he’d bring this up. “Maybe…” she mumbled, barely coherent.
Hanging out? That’s what he thought it was? That’s what he called it? He raped her. Of all the things that happened to her since school started, much of her behavior and actions were self-induced, but she hadn’t deserved what this boy had done to her. But then again, she wasn’t entirely sure of the facts. She couldn’t one hundred percent say.
So she never did. She didn’t tell anyone. She went to the campus clinic and monitored herself for sexually transmitted diseases and had taken medication to make sure she didn’t get pregnant. That was the only medical help she got.
But she was eighty-five percent completely sure he had raped her while she’d been passed out.
But then, here he was, all smiles on his handsome, all-American, pretty face. Maybe she had it all wrong. He had even brought it up. So if he had raped her or at the very least taken advantage of her, why would he bring it up? Could this be real? What she pictured about him? She didn’t remember much about that night… could she be wrong? That night was fuzzy. So fuzzy that she could not for sure tell anyone what happened or what it felt like. She had clearer memories of the evening when she got to the fraternity and an ABC party was raging. She knew an ABC party meant to wear anything but clothes but she hadn’t done so. People were dressed in duct tape, newspaper, pillows somehow plastered in the right places, and sheets. It was funny. A prank. Fun. She had gone there because she had been admiring Tommy, who was a year older than her, ever since she first spotted him on campus her second week at Peterson. She’d made it her business to follow him and figure out where he was going to be. She figured out he was pledging the biggest fraternity on campus and made it her entire focus to be at those parties. To be one of their groupies. But she’d held back, kept herself away from Tommy. She’d been unsure he’d be interested in mousy, skinny, freaky her. She was sure he would not. So she admired from a distance, tongue-tied in wonder if he ever even passed by her.
She had sex with a friend of his. And then hung with that friend another night and Tommy had come to the party. That’s all she wanted: him. Her sole focus was on him. She wasn’t sure why exactly. Maybe his looks. Sure. But there were a lot of cute guys at college. Maybe it was because he was unattainable for someone like her, so she enjoyed the fantasy of it.
She had gone to the party for Tommy, and ended up getting him. Just not in a way she had ever considered getting it.
But he was staring at her, now over two years later, and a small smirk started to climb up his cheeks. Oh yes, he was remembering it. He was remembering who she was and how he knew her and… most likely, what he did to her that only he could remember. Because Lord knew, no matter how hard she tried to remember, for she had desperately tried to get the images to form and take shape in her brain and give her some idea of what had happened to her that night. She could not figure it out. She could not play the picture she so knew happened to her.
But he remembered.
His smiled changed, his eyes gleamed and his fingers shot out to dig into her wrist. How had she not seen the Mr. Hyde behind his gorgeous and fake Dr. Jekyll on the outside? He liked what he was remembering. Kylie gasped and tugged her arm back. She jerked her book bag back up onto her shoulder, tapped the cigarette with her foot, and then simply passed around him. Running away.
She was shaking. Her entire body was trembling and her stomach was gushing up acid into her esophagus. She made it towards the outer perimeter of campus before she ducked behind a tree and collapsed onto her knees, catching herself on her hands as she started throwing up all over the grass. Snot streamed down her face to mix with the bile now heaving from her.
When she was done, when there was nothing left for her stomach to spew out of her, she fell back away from it to her butt and pulled her knees to her chest, burying her face in her knees.
She had tried so hard to avoid him. She had succeeded thus far. She had started to gain some of her confidence back. She’d quit doing the drugs she’d used, at first to try and block out that something happened to her, and later, to maybe try and tap into it. As if while high she could flush out the memories that had to be lurking somewhere up in her mind. But no. Nothing. Other than how she woke that morning with the absolute assertion something very bad had taken place.
It still didn’t make total sense to her. How could it affect her so much when she didn’t remember it?
Chapter Two
HOME. SHE NEEDED TO go home. To Calliston and her mom. That’s all Kylie could think about as she nearly sprinted to her small apartment just three blocks off the campus of Peterson College, a private university located in Marsdale, California. She dumped her book bag down and thumped around the small dump she lived in. It was a studio. Her bed was right in her living room and she used it as a couch. The kitchen was only a few feet away. But at least she lived alone. She
like to be alone. When she wasn’t partying, she needed to be alone.
Her hands were shaking from the encounter with Tommy. His smirk. His knowing. That was what most spurred her frenetic search of her messy place, his knowing. She kicked around her stuff until she could find a few clean clothes to take home with her. She stuffed it all into a backpack, grabbed her keys, and hightailed it out of there. It was just over an hour drive to Calliston; she’d take the bus. It would give her time to think. To decompress. To not show up a shaking mess, who her mother would then start grilling over whether she was on drugs… again.
Kylie sighed, leaning her head against the smudged glass of the bus’s window. She closed her eyes and tried to let her body release the tension she felt bound up in, like it was rope wrapped all around her. There were times when going home was more of a hindrance than a help. She knew how her mom worried over her, and the guilt of disappointing her was strong and made Kylie hide at school. She made sure Olivia and Ally didn’t tell her mom what she was actually doing at school. Olivia was her cousin by marriage and her best friend. Ally was her older sister. Just a year older in school, Ally was the perfect version of the girl Kylie should be. She never lived up to it though. Ally was on her all the time. Monitoring how her grades were, if she was going to classes regularly, how much partying she was doing, and even concern over her weight.
They all tried to monitor that. They took how skinny she was as a sign that something must cause it. She knew how her mom and Aunt Gretchen were always discussing it. Gretchen, a psychologist, had offered numerous counselors for Kylie to try. They had all been at her for years, really. To talk. Share. Be different. Explain how she felt. She just didn’t know how to give them what they wanted of her. She especially didn’t know how to give them this.
How did she tell them about something that happened to her but didn’t happen in her memory? She scrunched her knees up to her chest and shifted on the bus seat. She sighed, admitting the real reason to herself.
It would hurt her mom.
Mom would be horrified and embarrassed and hurt to find out the way Kylie had been behaving. Her mom would think it was all her own fault and somehow Mom was the failure, not Kylie. So Kylie didn’t tell her mom she had been sleeping with boys and partying hard, drinking and doing drugs in casual ways. She also knew she was at fault. She had put herself in the situations countless times that she had been warned about since she was young. Watch your drink. Don’t go out alone. Don’t sleep with boys at parties. Don’t be a slut.
She didn’t tell anyone because she had been doing all those things. She had gone to parties, alone. She had slept with boys she didn’t know, in places she was unfamiliar with, and in partying settings she couldn’t fully trust. She had drank what was handed to her. She had done it dozens and dozens of times. She had acted recklessly. She had in some ways set herself up to be raped like she had been.
It had started innocent enough. She had sex a few times in high school, and liked it. That was it. Her big sin when she started her freshman year in college. She liked to have sex. It made her feel good. Orgasms made her feel in control, powerful, and interesting.
The thing was, she was extremely reserved and shy. She had no capability for flirting or expressing herself in the ways that got guys to ask a girl out. She could only accomplish it by drinking. Drinking loosened her up and made her talk more, act out, flirt and draw guys’ attention.
It was easier at college. There was a party every night if she wanted, where young, drunk people congregated. She could find guys easily and she didn’t have to talk. That was the conundrum of her personality; she wasn’t actually very social or pleasant to be around. She didn’t have much luck getting the boys she liked to actually want to date her because she didn’t flirt very effectively. And more than that, she was painfully shy. It was hard for her to find the words in a dating situation. Her mind went blank as if she were almost deaf and dumb. She lost track of conversations and her nerves kept any witty or interesting response from coming out. Instead, she’d learned to maintain an impenetrable silence. She could be quiet that was her gift. She could hide her anxiety and her shyness.
But at these parties, no one cared. There was no need to get the boy to like her. They simply could skip all that. It was an environment where she could just start kissing and groping a boy and that was okay. They got to forego all the things that caused her painful embarrassment and go right to the thing she knew she could do. And that was have sex.
But there was something wrong with that. She soon started to learn, it was okay for the boys she slept with to hook up with her. At first, all she hung out with were the fraternity guys. But then… things started to get said about her. Derogatory, rude, crude, downright mean slurs and names. It was confusing at first. It would make her want to hunker into herself and shame burned bright in her cheeks. She was the tramp, skank, ho, hooker, slut, and mostly a whore. She was called those things simply because she had sex. What was so bad about having sex? She was old enough. She was single and unattached. She made no commitments. She used protection each and every single time. She didn’t hurt anyone. Yet she was deemed wild and slutty.
It hurt at first. She would cower in her dorm room and cringe to meet people in her classes. Did they know? Did they hear what she was? Did they hear where she’d been over the weekend or who she’d slept with?
For this reason, socially, she kept to herself even more. She isolated herself even further. Even if she still partied.
When she went to the parties there were guys there, hooking up as much as she did. Yet they weren’t particularly called anything. And stranger still, they were often the source of the name calling.
Then January of her freshman year, she went to an ABC party at Tommy’s fraternity.
She withdrew completely for a while after it. No parties. No boys. No drinking. No drugs. No classes. But Ally had come and kept checking on her. She was afraid her mom would hear. So she started to go to classes. She tried to function. She tried to be good.
She didn’t know why it wasn’t easy for her to be good. She was raised right. Her mom… her mom was the kind of mom every girl should have. Tracy was kind and supportive and funny and smart and irreverent, and Kylie knew her mother put Kylie’s well-being and happiness before her own.
It wasn’t her mom’s fault Kylie was such a failure.
Was it her father’s? She supposed it was. She didn’t know what else would make her so not fit into the mold of who and what her family was. Her aunt and mom were straight-laced, good moms and wives and members of society. Olivia and Ally both were too, and were going to be just as good as their moms.
Just not Kylie. Maybe she was like alcoholic, flaky, flirty Aunt Vickie, Mom and Gretchen’s baby sister, who had disappointed and embarrassed all the family on numerous occasions. But Vickie was fun and sweet and personable, and people liked Vickie, even if she drove them nuts. She was the life of every single party, drunk or sober. Nowadays mostly sober.
And Kylie had nothing in her personality that accomplished that. So she wasn’t really like Aunt Vickie either.
Her father, the criminal. There was no one else she had to compare herself to. No one else to blame for why she was so awful when those around her were so good. He had stolen money from his clients. He had disappeared one day when Kylie was merely ten years old. One day she had a big house on a lake, with two parents who were happily married, and she thought she had a normal, typical, good family. And then the next, her father was gone. He’d ditched them. Her mom. Her. Ally. He’d thrown them out of his life as if they were trash. Refuse. Shit. They were flushed out of his life like his own shit. She had clearly, that day, gotten his message.
No matter how nice and wonderful her mom tried to be about it, there was nothing she could do to make up for that moment. The before and after moment that defined her childhood, and sometimes she suspected her personality. The moment she had a dad, and the moment she didn’t.
She
could not seem to assimilate the changes. It was so hard. Her father was there, then gone. Poof. Just like that. She had a family and then she didn’t. Mom was a happy stay-at-home mom, then not. Kylie’s childhood was secure, stable, and full of love and normalcy, and then it wasn’t. She had not understood as a naïve child how quickly her life could stop and be destroyed on the whim of another.
Ally adjusted. She got epically angry and rebellious at Mom for a while. And it scared Kylie. She didn’t like all the volatile conflict and loud fights and slammed doors. She wanted Ally to just shut up. What if Ally drove Mom away too? People left. Didn’t Ally fully now comprehend that? Even people you love and are supposed to be there forever and unconditionally, even those people could choose to leave. At least Kylie learned that. Ally didn’t. It took a while but Ally finally siphoned through all her anger and after a few years, she assimilated it. She let go of her anger and she let go of the idea of who Micah was to them.
Kylie didn’t, however.
Micah came back years later. He did prison time for his crimes and being a fugitive. He tried to contact them but they both told him to fuck off. They told him one time in a response email and then deleted or threw away any contact since. Ally had said that’s what they had to do. There was no other choice. He had deserted them and Mom. How could they ever contemplate even speaking to him? Or entertaining his apology, if he even had one? They would be betraying their mom to do so. They would be somehow sanctifying everything he did to them, and mostly to Mom. And Mom hadn’t deserved it. Any of it. Didn’t Kylie totally know that?
Still, she did wonder sometimes if Micah would have apologized to them if he was given the opportunity.
