The Venus Fix

by M. J. Rose

  When Timothy clicked his pen for the fifth time in a row, I asked him to tell me what was going on.

  He shrugged.

  Charlie cleared his throat.

  Jeremy turned and looked out of the window so that I couldn’t see his face.

  Amanda opened her bag and fished around in it for a few seconds, brought out a Band-Aid and proceeded to put it over the cut.

  “Timothy?” I asked again.

  He didn’t respond.

  The Goth girl, Jodi, leaned over and whispered to him. It sounded to me as if she’d said tell her, but I wasn’t sure, so I asked her to repeat what she’d said so we all could hear it.

  “It was nothing.”

  “Timothy, do you want to tell us what Jodi said?”

  He shrugged.

  “I think she said ‘tell her.’ Is that right?” I pushed.

  Timothy still didn’t answer.

  “Jodi, is that what you said?”

  She looked at me but didn’t respond. Living with a teenager myself, I knew that more often than not, no answer was code for the affirmative. But why wouldn’t she answer? What was she scared of?

  “Tell me what, Timothy? You’re not going to get in trouble, but let’s get it out in the open.”

  “I was online, okay?”

  I ignored the sarcasm. “Good, thanks for telling me. Did you try to call anyone before you went online?”

  We’d set up a buddy system, and each kid was supposed to call and at least discuss his urge to go into a chat room or porn site before giving in to it. To date, we hadn’t had much success. In other addiction-therapy programs the act of stopping to make the call worked well and I was still hoping it would have some effect here if I could get the kids to make the calls. The problem was these boys couldn’t understand what was wrong with what they were doing other than that adults were telling them they shouldn’t be doing it.

  “No, I didn’t try to call anyone.” Timothy sounded irritated.

  “Did you even think about calling?”

  “What happened…wasn’t about me getting off. It was about what I saw.”

  “What did you see?”

  He was, once again, silent.

  Amanda was playing with the edge of the Band-Aid she’d just affixed.

  “Timothy, what did Jodi think you should tell me?”

  “I saw something freaky online, okay? It was bad. Now, can we drop it?”

  “Bad?”

  “Oh, Jesus. No matter what anyone says, you have another question,” Hugh said impatiently.

  “None of you have to answer any of my questions. Most of the time, you don’t. I know some of you guys don’t want to be here. In fact, I know you’d rather be anywhere else. But it’s nonnegotiable. Hugh, why do you think you’re here?”

  “Because we go online.”

  “Just go online?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “We go online too much. You think, everyone thinks, that we have no control.”

  “When you are sitting there and you haven’t clicked the mouse yet, but you’ve typed in the URL of the porn site, what are you thinking about?”

  He shrugged.

  “It’s not a test, it’s just a question. Think about sitting there. The screen is on your homework, but the Web address of a porn site is typed in…. You don’t have to click over…you don’t have to give in… What are you thinking?”

  “It’s not about giving in,” Hugh said. “It’s just there. It’s so easy. Why shouldn’t I go? Who the hell am I hurting? That’s what I just don’t get about this. Who cares so much?”

  I looked around the room, waiting to see if anyone was going to respond.

  Ellen was watching him. They’d gone out. She was frowning. Pressing her lips together. Wanting to say something, holding back. “Ellen? Is there something you want to say?”

  “If you can control it, how come you don’t?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Amanda lifted the corner of the Band-Aid and then pressed it back down. It was Barry who blurted out a response, his voice strident. “I’m not hurting anyone. None of us are. I like watching who’s online and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

  He’d said hurting anyone.

  Amanda continued her picking at the outer edges of the adhesive strip, lifting, pressing down, lifting.

  “I know you’re not hurting anyone, Barry. I know none of you is intentionally hurting anyone.” I looked around the room, trying to make eye contact with each of them. Merry inched forward in her chair.

  “I can’t…it’s hard to…I mean, I don’t want to have to do that stuff all the time to get someone to like me.”

  “Do you mean sexual stuff?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Does it hurt, Merry?”

  “Well, not like someone cut me. But even with what I did, it was still better to look at those girls than me. I don’t know. That sorta sucks.”

  No one responded.

  “You’re not hurting anyone, are you, Timothy?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Do you think you’ve ever hurt anyone by going online?”

  “Maybe,” he blurted out.

  “How?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  His answer made no sense to me, but I didn’t want to stop and make him explain himself and risk damming him up.

  “What should you have done?”

  “I couldn’t. If I told anyone what I saw they’d know I’d gone online. Three strikes and I’m out. That’s my father’s fucking stupid rule. Shit. If you tell them now, I’ll be thrown out of here.”

  “But I won’t. We have a deal in here, right? You can talk about whatever you want and I keep it confidential. I promised you all that in our first session and I haven’t broken that promise.”

  Someone to Timothy’s left murmured something, but I ignored it.

  “Timothy, what did you see?”

  “No.” He said it too quickly.

  The rest of them knew what he’d seen. They’d talked about it before the group, I sensed.

  “Leave him alone,” Hugh said loudly.

  “Why?”

  Hugh, Timothy and Barry invariably looked out for one another in our sessions, defending one another if they felt I was being too tough on one of them. This time, both of the others were quiet.

  “Why do you feel the need to protect Timothy from me?” I asked, pushing Hugh harder than I normally would.

  Now Barry leaned forward; he clenched his hands together. “Leave him alone. He’s been going crazy.”

  “I don’t want to leave him alone, I want to help.”

  “It’s too late to help.” It was Amanda. “Again.”

  “Why? What do you mean ‘again’?”

  She turned to Timothy and they exchanged a pained glance.

  “Amanda?”

  Her fingers hadn’t stopped fussing with the Band-Aid.

  “Do you think it would help Timothy if he told us what he saw?” I asked her.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Her finger stopped playing with the Band-Aid. “Not anymore. No one can help.”

  “You know, this is stupid,” Ellen said. “These guys don’t want us to help them. They don’t want anything from us. Except blowjobs. And even then, they keep watching the girls online. Right while we’re doing it to them. You might as well be dead….” She was hissing now.

  Amanda’s eyes widened, frightened, pained. Her fingers worked the edge of the strip of plastic.

  “Amanda, what is it?”

  She shook her head back and forth. “Nothing.” And then with one fast jerk, she pulled off the adhesive, baring the line of dried blood.

  Fourteen

  Five hours later, my daughter was sitting at the island in the middle of the kitchen while I went through the refrigerator looking for something ready-made that I couldn’t ruin.

  Having a late-night snack after Dulcie got home from the theat
er had replaced having dinner together. Now we talked over the day while she tried to come down after the performance.

  “Hot chocolate or hot cider?” I asked.

  “Hot chocolate. Definitely.”

  I took out the milk and grabbed the powdered mix from the cabinet.

  “Can’t we make it the real way?” She meant the way Nina taught her—melting quality chocolate and then adding enough milk to give it the right consistency.

  She was already pulling out the double boiler. When I had remodeled the kitchen, I updated all the pots, pans and utensils. Everything was state-of-the-art. The appliances had stainless fronts, the floor and splashboard were white tiles with black diamond accents, and the countertops were granite. It was all very elegant. A chef’s dream. Except I wasn’t a chef. Far from it. In fact, I could barely manage to broil a chicken and hardly used a double boiler.

  That’s the problem with being a Martha-wannabe but not having any intuitive homemaker skills. Sure, everything gleamed in my kitchen. You just stepped inside and imagined fresh pies cooling on a rack and homemade tomato sauce simmering on the stove. In reality, I ruined tuna fish out of a can with too much lemon juice, and overcooked frozen food.

  Dulcie, on the other hand, was gifted in the kitchen, a talent she’d inherited from her paternal grandmother, and which her aunt Nina encouraged. Since the play had opened, I’d missed having her in the kitchen, egging me on, teasing me and saving dinner on more than one occasion.

  “I don’t have any chocolate. You’ll have to settle for powdered chocolate,” I said, putting the tin on the counter. Dulcie took the milk out of the fridge and went over to the stove, where she poured it in a saucepan and turned on the burner.

  “That’s my job,” I protested.

  “You’ll burn it, Mom, you know you will.”

  While she stirred, I sliced two apples and opened a package of Pepperidge Farm Milanos. Even though they were Dulcie’s favorite cookies, I wished I were one of those mothers who bake for their kids.

  “So,” I said once we were back at the island with our steaming mugs, “how was your day?”

  Ever since she was little, it’s been our tradition at dinner to talk about what had happened that day, but with caveats. For everything that had gone wrong or that you complained about, there had to be one thing that had gone right or that had made you happy. Always a balance.

  Dulcie took another cookie and chewed it, thinking. “Well, I don’t like our new teacher. At all.” Major emphasis on the word “all.” My little drama queen.

  “Why?”

  “She wants us to read a book called War and Peace. Do you have any idea how big a book it is? I’ll be fourteen before I finish it.”

  I laughed. “No, it won’t take that long. The hardest part is keeping track of all the Russian names, but you’re good with languages.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “It’s been years since I read it. How about I get a copy and we read it at the same time? Then we can talk about it together.”

  She sort of shrugged an okay, but clearly I was more interested in the mother-daughter reading concept than she was. “So what was good today?”

  She gave me her slightly shy look from under partially lowered lids. It was an expression she’d fall back on when she didn’t want to brag but still was proud of herself. “Six curtain calls.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  She broke into a smile. “Isn’t it?”

  I smiled back.

  “And you, Dr. Sin, how was your day?” she asked.

  My daughter had never come right out and said she was embarrassed by what I do for a living, but she didn’t need to after the day, three years ago, when she introduced me to her friend’s mother as a heart doctor. The moniker Dr. Sin had been coined one night when we’d been arguing about her curfew and she’d accused me of not trusting her.

  “Why are you so worried I’m going to fool around or something? You’re Dr. Sin. You’re supposed to understand about this stuff.”

  She rarely called me Dr. Sin when anyone else was around, but she did it often enough at home for it to annoy me.

  “Should we start with what was wrong today?” she asked me. “Or what was right?”

  I drank some of my cocoa to buy myself some time. All I could think of was how badly the group-therapy session had gone that night and how worried I was that those kids were in more trouble than I could help them with. Since I couldn’t tell her that, I told her that nothing bad had happened and that the good thing had been going ice-skating with Nina at lunchtime.

  “Yeah, well, I believe you that you had fun skating. But I don’t believe that nothing bad happened.” She stared at my face: my little gnome with electric blue eyes and dark curly hair and an impish smile playing on her baby-pink lips. “You’ve got the listening look, Mom.”

  “The listening look” was another of Dulcie’s sayings. She claimed that sometimes, even though I was home and focused on what was going on with her, I got an expression on my face as if I was still hearing what my patients had said that day. “It’s like you can’t stop listening to them. Like if you do, it will be your fault if anything bad happens to them.”

  I used to get up and check in the mirror when she told me she saw the look, but I couldn’t recognize it the way Dulcie could. She was always right, though, when she called it, and she was right that night.

  Fifteen

  Timothy sat in his room, at his desk, staring at his computer, supposedly reading a friend’s movie blog. The ambient glow from the screen was the only light in the room. For the past fifteen minutes, he’d been nursing a beer and was teasing himself with the idea of going online. He was swollen just thinking about it, but he was trying to hold off. Dr. Snow had talked about control. He had control. He knew he did. He had it with all sorts of things; he could have it with this. Especially now. After what he’d seen last week. It was so disgusting. It was still bothering him. How sick had that girl been? What had happened to her? When he’d told Amanda about her, she’d gotten all quiet. Freaked out. He knew why. Knew he never should have said anything.

  He took another gulp of the beer. He’d just go online for a few minutes. No one would know. His parents were out— again—and the apartment was quiet and still.

  Through the window he could see the snow falling, falling as if the heavens had an endless supply of the white flakes.

  Dr. Snow said he should call someone when he felt like this. It was eleven-thirty and there was no one he wanted to talk to, and nothing he wanted to do except go online, find some girl and have her get him off. Maybe he’d find a chick who was into tea-bagging. His erection stiffened. He typed in the porn site’s address, but that was as far as he could get.

  The image of Penny from last week, writhing in pain, stopped him. He’d dreamt about her every damn night and woken up drenched in sweat, because even in the dream, he didn’t do a thing to help her.

  What had happened to her?

  He needed to see that she was fine and back at work, didn’t he? That was a reason to go online: to make sure Penny was fine, even though the small secret voice in his head was telling him something bad had happened. He was afraid she had died.

  If she had, she would be the second woman he’d known who had died. That’s what Amanda had said to him. Reminding him. As if he needed anyone to remind him.

  He put his head in his hands and tried to picture Simone. It was getting tougher to remember. The images had lost their edges. Her face had become less distinct. She was fading. That scared him, too. Is that what happened to you after you died? You just faded away until no one remembered anything about you anymore? He could remember the girl on the Internet from Thursday night better than Simone. But Simone had been flesh and blood and he had touched her. He had smelled her skin and felt her lips on his cock.

  He tried to shake off her ghost, but he couldn’t. She wouldn’t go away.

  Sometimes he fixated on her like this and g
ot himself all worked up over what had happened. His heart would start to race and he’d feel nauseous and panicky. He didn’t want to feel all that shit tonight. There was nothing he could do about Simone. It was too late.

  Timothy clicked on the hard-drive icon, and then the document file icon. Next he clicked on the term-paper file. Inside of that he clicked on the American History file. And within that he clicked on the folder called “Presidents.” Inside were a dozen JPEGs, labeled GW1, GW2, GW3, GW4. And there was one MPEG. He moved the cursor over it and let it hover there.

  No one knew he still had this. He’d lied and told Amanda he hadn’t kept it, and she’d believed him. Since last spring, he hadn’t opened it, afraid that if he did it would alert some spyware somewhere, and his headmaster and his parents and the girls’ parents and every college he had applied to would know that he was watching it.

  That was ridiculous. He was a computer geek. He knew as much as anyone else about how the Net worked. There was no such thing as what he was imagining. But still, he couldn’t do it.

  He wanted to click on the MPEG damn bad. He knew what he’d see if he hit the key. They’d fill his screen. The two of them naked, touching each other, the one pale, the other darker. He knew the way they’d lean toward each other to kiss and…

  His erection strained against his jeans.

  How could he? What kind of animal was he that he could still get a hard-on even now that she was dead? But he needed to come. Besides, it wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t asked them to make the movie. That was their idea—to entice him and show him how sexy they were and how much they were willing to do for him. And Hugh. And Barry. For all of them.

  His head was fighting with his cock.

  Hit the key, watch it.

  Don’t watch it.

  Don’t touch yourself.

  I have to.

  I have to.

  Their images appeared on the screen. He fast-forwarded to the kiss, to where he couldn’t see their faces. He didn’t want to see their faces. Just the fucking kiss.

  There it was. A long, slow kiss. A kiss that went on and on. He was transfixed. Under its spell. Lost in the sensation it aroused. He didn’t even know he was stroking himself. He was too far gone. The pressure was building.