Jack sighed helplessly, shook his head.
“Blue…” Maya said sternly. “Jack, you should stay.”
“No, he shouldn’t,” Blue said. “Besides, we have a thing
to get to too.”
“We do?” Hannah said.
Blue saw Jack signal to Pete at the bar.
“Well,” he said to them. “It was great seeing you guys.
Keep in touch or…whatever.” He glanced one last time at
Blue, seemed to sigh, then walked away.
Renee came out of the bathroom, saw what was happen-
ing, looked to Blue as if willing her to stop it.
But by then Jack was already at the door, exiting Blue’s life as quickly as he’d reentered it.
For a moment no one spoke.
“Well then,” Maya said.
A horrified quiet sat with them amid the detritus of empty
glasses and sopping napkins.
“Good riddance,” Blue said too loudly over a quiet, build-
ing grief. She picked up Jack’s abandoned beer and took a sip.
“Nostrovia, everyone! That’s Russian for ‘let’s get drunk’!”
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They stared at her. She chugged the rest of the beer.
“You’re cut off,” Maya said.
“Okay, but first a round of shots.” She was desperate for
more booze, desperate for oblivion. Jack was gone. The ser-
rated edges of that reality sharpened inside her chest with
every breath.
She saw Hannah reach for the half-full drink Peter had left
and slide it out of her eyeline.
“Maybe we should go,” Hannah said.
“Screw that! We just got here,” Blue said.
A man at the next table leaned over. “Excuse me? We’re
trying to have a nice dinner here.”
“I’m so sorry,” Renee told him, looking mortified. “We
were just leaving.”
“No, we weren’t,” Blue said. Taste of vinegar in her mouth.
Renee aligning with this stranger in shared horror at her be-
havior. Apologizing for her. Her focus narrowed. This was all Renee’s fault. This whole disaster of a night, all of it.
Maya stood, grabbed Blue by the arm. “Come on, babe.”
Blue tried to make herself deadweight but gave up almost
instantly. Maya was strong, and also, she suddenly didn’t care, wanted to go, to be gone from this place, to be not home but
nowhere. Maya got her to her feet. Blue pitched slightly as if caught in a gale and then righted herself, marched out.
The others followed her.
“I’ll bring the car around,” Maya said. “I had to park down
the street.”
“I’m calling a cab,” Blue said, fumbling for her phone.
“What? Why?”
“Don’t wanna be near her.” She pointed at Renee.
“Me? What the hell did I do?” Renee said.
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Blue rolled her eyes so hard she almost lost her balance.
“What the hell did I do?” she mocked. She rifled through her
bag, hoping for a stray cigarette. “You’d think that someone
with a fiancé might have the decency not to flirt with someone’s date,” she muttered. “But no. Not Renee. Renee has to
take everything.”
“Are you kidding me right now?” Renee said. “I wasn’t
flirting. I was being polite. Because you wouldn’t talk to him.”
“Whatever,” Blue said, zipping her purse, glancing around
for a stranger with a smoke. “Go away. You’ve ruined my life
enough.”
“I’ve ruined your life?” Renee said. She turned to Maya and
Hannah. “I have singlehandedly ruined her entire life, now?”
“Yep,” Blue said. “Ya did.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Maya said. “What is with you? Look,
I don’t know what happened between you two—”
“Right,” Blue said. “You don’t.” Her mind felt clearer than
it had in hours; the alcohol seemed burned off by the torch of her sudden fury. “So maybe stay the hell out of it.”
“Okay,” Maya said. “I can do that. Or…here’s a crazy
thought…you could just go ahead and tell us! Just put it all
out there—”
“Oh yeah. That’s…that’s brilliant. Can’t think of anything
better than spilling my guts to you guys so you can tell me again to get over it. I’m gonna go ahead and take a pass on that.”
“Fine. Don’t tell us, then,” Maya said. “But then you don’t
get to hold us hostage to a question you refuse to answer and then blame us for not understanding you.”
“Right. Whatever,” Blue said. She turned and stormed back
toward the restaurant. Screw this. She needed another drink now. But no. The engine of her anger was gunning, already
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set on its course. She doubled back. “Did it ever occur to you that it was too painful to tell you? Or, like, that I was worried you couldn’t handle it? Did you ever think that maybe, just
maybe, I wanted to know you even gave a shit? ’Cause you
know what? As far as I could tell, you didn’t want to know.”
In the distance, the sound of amateur fireworks. They all
instinctively flinched.
“Well, you’re wrong,” Maya said. “We do want to know.
We’re your best friends and you’re important to us so just
freaking tell us, for God’s sake.”
Blue tilted her head back, found the moon. Nope, that made
her dizzy. Instead she sought its reflection on the water. So much noise. Everything so loud inside her.
“Blue,” Hannah said, her voice soft. “There was blood on
you that night. I remembered that on this trip. Is that true?”
“Yeah,” Maya said. “Why was there blood on you?”
“What did he do to you?” Renee said.
Blue laughed bitterly. “Oh now you want to know? Now you’re concerned about what he did? Go to hell, Renee.”
“Blue, I’m concerned. What did he do?” Maya said.
“He didn’t…?” Hannah said.
“Please no,” Renee said.
Blue knew what they were asking, blinked against the
words. Of course they thought it was rape. If she told them
the truth, they would probably say she was lucky it wasn’t.
Renee might even offer up an infuriating “Thank God!”
And it was true—she was lucky, if you could call it that. And that was the worst part in some way, because she sure as hell didn’t feel lucky, and that made her feel guilty and ashamed of her own suffering.
“You really want to know?” Blue said. They were all watch-
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ing her. Hannah, Renee, Maya—all of them so still and ex-
pectant. Her head felt clear and sober, though she knew she
couldn’t possibly be. “Will it make you feel better? Sate your…
your…curiosity? Comfort you if I say no he didn’t rape me?”
“We really want to know,” Hannah said. “And not because
we’re curious. Because we care.”
Blue looked away. Tried to imagine saying the words out
loud. But there was so much resistance, like a weighted dumb-
bell sitting on her chest, asphyxiating the words before they could be spoken. She couldn’t have pushed them out even
if she wanted to. She thought back on that night, her mind
stumbling into a darkness black as a grave, tripping over mo-
ments of that horror still so alive, so vivid.
“Blue,” Maya said.
The men chasing Hannah up the walkway. Her friends
screaming. Though in Blue’s mind there’s just silence, open
mouths and fear-lit eyes, their hands and bodies lunging to
grab Hannah, pull her in to safety. Henry shouting for some-
one to get his dad’s rifle in the closet. And then they were falling backward, the door flying open, the men inside the house.
Oh God. She could still taste the hot panic. Sour and cor-rosive.
Now she forced herself to look at Maya. But instead of being
comforted by the new softness she saw in Maya’s eyes, Blue
was enraged. Because it was too damn late. It had all come
too late and all she wanted was to hurt someone, to stab with words, to discharge all the poison that had been put inside her.
All these years she’d held on to the secret, and now what she wanted was to wield it as a weapon. A weapon against Maya
for asking her to forgive. A weapon against Renee for deserv-
ing no forgiveness. Screw it. Screw them. They wanted her
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story. Well then, they should get it, they should have to live with it. Renee should have to live with it.
She looked at Renee, saw those darting eyes. Saw the way
her arms were wrapped around herself, defended against what
Blue might say. The anger Blue felt in that moment acted as
a Heimlich maneuver, suddenly propelling the words out of
her. She wasn’t going to let her escape this again.
“We ran.” She jammed her finger toward Renee. “She was
in front of me.” Through Henry’s kitchen and out the back
patio door. The night air like freedom. The sleeping neigh-
borhood oblivious to their terror.
“They were chasing us. One of them at least. I could feel
him behind me but I didn’t want to turn. I just kept my eyes
on Renee. She jumped the bushes into the neighbor’s yard.
I was right behind her. Running so fucking hard. Thinking
if I could just get over those bushes. If I could just…like they were some kind of…magic divider he couldn’t cross. I was
right there. He grabbed my shirt. I tried to shake him off but I couldn’t. I was screaming, ‘Renee, Renee!’ And she stopped
and turned. I saw her stop and turn. He told her to come back.
He told her he’d kill me if she didn’t. Remember that, Renee?
Remember him saying that?”
Blue looked away, tears so long unshed, now pooling.
“She looked right at me. I was so scared, so scared.” Blue
paused, the weight of the next memory almost too heavy to
speak. “Then she turned around and ran.”
The air was thick with their silence.
“Blue,” Renee said, moving toward her now.
Blue backed away. “I watched you go. I watched you leave
me there with that…you left me there to die! How could
you…how could you just—” She shook her head against the
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slimy tentacles of memory. Nauseated with emotion but there
was no turning back. “He told me he was going to have some
fun with me first.”
Hannah’s eyes were wet, tears threatening to spill over.
“Next thing I knew, my face was in the dirt.” Blue could
still taste the damp grass when she hit the ground—that fa-
miliar smell of childhood play and softball games in center
field—only turned dark and wormy as a burial pit. Even now
it was the first thing that came to her, that damp green smell, his stale breath, her own rancid fear.
“He flipped me over, pushed my sweatshirt up to my neck,
tore at my bra. I fought.” He hadn’t been terribly strong, only just stronger than her own adrenaline-fueled body. “I kept
thinking Renee would come back. That help would be com-
ing.” I just need to stall him. “But then he pinned my arms above my head. I tried to kick him. I was thrashing and kicking,
trying to get away. He put a knife to my throat.” She hadn’t
remembered seeing him hold it, only felt the poke of the blade against her skin. “I begged him to stop. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to do this.’”
He’d pressed it into the thin skin of her clavicle, just enough that she could feel the sting, the tickle of blood tracing its way down her breast.
“Do you know what it felt like to have to say that? To have
to beg?” Her voice caught, remembering how she’d loathed the
sound of her own whimpering, so meek and cowed, in the face
of such revolting evil. “But I had to do it… I had to stall. Because Renee was coming back, right? She wasn’t going to just leave me there. I kept thinking, What’s taking so long? I kept thinking, Hurry! Hurry! ” The words looping over and over in her mind, a refrain against his body on top of her, against his sickening odor, East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 284
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his enraging weight. “He pushed up my skirt.” She’d never worn skirts before. But she had that night because she’d dared to believe she could be a pretty girl, had dared to embrace her own femininity in the face of Jack’s attention days before.
“And then…” He’d been removing his belt when he’d
stopped suddenly, froze like a squirrel sensing danger. A million times she’d tried to remember what had made him pause,
but her mind was a skipping stone, jumping from one dis-
connected moment to another. What she remembered next
was him looking at her, staring deep into her eyes, into her
vulnerability, as she lay utterly helpless and exposed beneath him. “He said…” She stopped. Shook her head. She couldn’t
say it. How could she say it?
“Blue,” Maya said.
She swallowed. Her body shaking with the force of keep-
ing the words in. “He said, ‘You’re too ugly to fuck anyway,’
and he stood up and ran.”
She looked at her friends.
They stared back, mouths hanging open. A hush over the
group like a winter.
“Oh my God,” Maya said.
Blue breathed. It seemed the first time she had done so since she’d started talking. But she didn’t feel better. She didn’t feel purged. She was still, in some way, trapped there, stuck in
time, the old film playing to its inevitable end, only to start over again. She remembered the relief of weight being removed, not just of his body but of a nightmare ending. Or
so she had thought. It was only later, after the adrenaline had worn off and the men were captured, after a plea bargain of
second degree attempted murder had been struck to spare the
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faded and things had gone back to “normal,” that she’d re-
alized he was still on top of her, all that weight crushing her and the disgusting residue he left on her that made her feel as hideous as he said she was, hideous to the core. One of the
worst parts was that it wasn’t even new. He’d just reinforced the belief about herself she’d been raised with.
She turned to Renee. “I waited for you.” She was trying so
hard to fight off sobs, to climb over the lump in her throat, to stand solid and big in her anger, not liquefied and reduced by grief. “I waited for you to help me. I believed that you were coming back. That you were my friend. That you were the
one person, the one person in my life…” Tears were bubbling
over now, burning as they spilled out of her eyes. She wiped
them furiously away. “Well, friend, congratulations! He didn’t rape or kill me. Your conscience is clear.”
As soon as the words were out, something broke in her,
all her defenses crashing in one instant, leaving her with the devastation of having been abandoned by the one person she’d
always believed loved her. Her body crumpled as if struck.
She pressed her palms to her eyes, waiting to hear dumb
platitudes. But when she looked up, she saw that not only
Hannah but Renee and Maya were crying.
“No!” Blue said, all of her anger returning in a rush. “You
do not get to cry, Renee. Do you hear me? You got away. You went to the neighbors— safe and sound! And you never once apologized. You never once even bothered to ask what happened to me after you left me there!”
Renee sobbed harder. “I know!”
Blue scoffed. “You know.”
“I was too scared to ask. I knew you must hate me. I swear
I was just trying to get help. And I did. That should count
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for something, right? That I got to a phone? That the police
came. That that sicko is in jail now? But I know I left you. I can only imagine how that felt. And I have to live with—”
Blue laughed short and hard like a scrape. “Oh, you’ve got
to be kidding me. Poor Renee. What you have to live with.
Tell us. Go ahead. What do you have to live with, Renee?”
“That I’m a coward! That I couldn’t be there when you
needed me. I know I should have said something. I know I
pretended like it didn’t happen. I just didn’t know how else
to live with the guilt.”
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