I try to open one eye, but it feels like the whole room tilts and swirls into another dimension, pouring my consciousness from one place to another in a stream of thick tar. My body feels weighted, and an ominous wave of nausea starts to roll in on me like a storm in the distance. I try to sit upright, but my balance drips away from me, and my vision goes double. The inside of my mouth tastes like a wad of cotton that’s been soaked in witch hazel, and my eyes feel puffy and zipped closed. My body hurts from the inside, with the unfamiliar heaviness of an ache whose exact location I cannot pinpoint, but which I can feel rippling through even—and especially—the nonphysical parts of me. My insides pulse with the pain of something that feels at once horrifyingly present and suddenly absent, like a pressure and a theft. And from the waist down, I feel like one giant bruise. I’m wearing a man’s T-shirt and nothing else. Despite the specter of unfamiliarity and the fuzziness of the details, I know where I am and that I am badly hurt. I search desperately for my clothes, to no avail. I don’t have time to make sense of the situation—I have to get the hell out of here.
My phone. I spot it on the floor on the other side of the room. I scramble off the mattress and crawl on my knees to it, and by a miracle of God, there is one bar of battery left on it. Twenty-seven missed calls and sixty-five texts from my mom. She must think I am dead or missing, because when she texts me the words “are you safe,” as per our mutually agreed-on code for safety protocol, I’m supposed to answer back with the number “4” to confirm that I am. But now the words “are you safe????” appear in distress-laden repetition on the screen of my phone. I text her instantly, miraculously recalling just enough detail to let her know where I am.
4!!!!!!
come pick me up.
i’m at the yellow house at the end of the cul-de-sac.
there’s a dented minivan parked outside.
Clutching my phone, I crawl out of the room on my hands and knees, terrified. I try to pull as much of the T-shirt as possible over myself. The stale smell of smoke and sweat hangs in my nose, and my exhales are laced with the nasty aftermath of cheap vodka. With every inch of pale blue carpet that I manage to traverse, I resist the urge to vomit. I make it to the kitchen, where the four boys are sitting around eating bowls of sugary cereal, crunching with open mouths. I sit still and wonder how I can get by without them seeing me. They look as if it were the most normal Saturday morning in the world.
“We thought you were dead” is how I am greeted after they notice me on the floor. I look around frantically, and they begin to laugh. But it’s a laugh tinged with a new sense of panic, which makes me realize that they truly are surprised—and perhaps even terrified—to see that I am still alive. Are they really this fucking inhuman that this whole time they have been considering the possibility of having killed me? Is this an episode of The Twilight Zone?
Where the fuck are my clothes? I think, trying to drown out the obnoxious sound of their crunching and laughter and manic hungover energy. These guys are fucking pigs. I have to get the hell out of here—I don’t even care about my clothes. I begin to crawl so fast that my elbows start to chafe raw. Ivan shoots up and tries to block my path, but a jolt of new terror courses through my body in the form of adrenaline and I manage to get all the way to the front door, which I open with shaking hands. I slither out like an animal, and right away see my mother’s silver Honda Civic parked outside. Thank God. She got my text and reacted fast enough. They won’t dare come after me now. A massive feeling of relief eclipses all the fear percolating within.
I stand up and limp my way to the car, my knees shaking, hoping to look less panicked than I am. I can feel that my body hurts but my fight-or-flight mechanisms are mobilizing me. I don’t dare look back to see if anyone has followed me. I shoot forward steadily and manage to get myself into the passenger seat of my mother’s car. I am at once escaping from what I fear could be death and trying to act calm for her.
“What the hell happened to your clothes?” she screams, with a look in her eye that I have never before seen. She stares me up and down, baffled. This is not the daughter she knows—this is a beast in the aftermath of a mess that neither of us understands. She doesn’t know whether to scream or smack me. This is unchartered territory for both of us.
“I threw up on them” is all I can think to say, my voice so hoarse it sounds like gravel. I can’t explain to her what I don’t comprehend myself.
“You stink,” she shoots back, and I can tell she’s beyond furious, but maybe also relieved to see me. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“My… my ringer was off,” I slur, which is the only recourse on which I can lean as I try to sift through the jarring scenes of the previous night for myself. How can I possibly tell her what I think I remember? It all feels like slush in my brain right now. But I can feel my mom’s wrath burning a hole in me.
“I thought we agreed you weren’t going out last night,” she says, and goes on to berate me for disobeying her, for disrespecting her, for being reckless, for scaring the life out of her, for forcing her to leave my baby cousin in someone else’s care so that she could deal with me, for putting her in a bad position with my father, for letting her down—all of which would, under any other circumstance, upset me to no end. But her words sound muffled, distorted, and strung together. I can’t tell where one sentence ends and a new one starts, the anger just rolling out at me in constant waves. I don’t respond. I can’t. I stare out the window blankly, at the front door of that yellow house, praying it doesn’t open, praying its awful secrets don’t come tumbling out.
“You’re lucky I brought you your gymnastics clothes,” she says, grabbing a plastic bag from the backseat and tossing it onto my bare lap. “If you think you get to skip tumbling practice just because you were stupid enough to get stinking wasted last night, you got another thing coming.” Her voice is loud, her nostrils flare. I hear her, but the questions in my own mind take over, and I’m desperate for her to push the gas and drive off. Flashes of moments from the night come up and just as quickly disappear, like lines drawn through water. “I’m taking you home, first. You need a shower. And here’s some gum, for the love of Christ. You smell like death.” Death is right. It feels like I have been killed alive.
“I’m so sorry, Mom. I won’t ever do anything like that again,” I say, absorbing the fault, with tears streaming down my face, pooling into my open palms. What the hell am I going to do? Tell her? I can’t. I can’t tell her, because there are no words for it, and even if there are, I am not going to utter them, because those fuckers do not deserve it. Still, I try and try to remember the details, but I just can’t catch anything concrete. All I know with certainty is that something terrible took place last night.
I stand in the shower, unaffected by the fact that the water temperature is freezing cold. I don’t even bother to make it warmer, because I am numb to all sensation, unplugged from the very core of my nerves. Maybe the freezing-cold water is powerful enough to wash away the truth. Maybe the shock to my system will wipe it all away. Each time I try to replay everything in my mind, the scenes shuffle in and out of order faster than I can keep track, as if a magician with a deck of cards is making every effort to guilefully trick away any inkling of my understanding. I watch the icy water trickle down my legs, observing whatever is left of my innocence wash down the drain with it. There is blood between my legs, and I remember that my period is in fact due right around now. I watch the dark red swirl of blood centrifuge down into the shower drain, wondering if it’s period blood or something else.
Mom drives me to my private tumbling class, where I’m slated to work on back springs and back tucks that day, the thought of which, in the throes of my still-nauseated state, makes my stomach turn, but I’m thankful for a solid point of focus. I try to keep it together and walk into practice as if the last twenty-four hours simply hadn’t occurred. Also, since the class is private, it costs my folks $60 per hour, which is a lot of money and t
hey’ve already paid up front. Mom gets out of the car and this time stays through the class, watching from the bleachers, biting her nails the whole time. I can feel her disapproval on my back. I surprise myself at practice, catching more air than usual, and showing zero fear of falling flat on my face. I almost wish I’d fall and shatter every bone in my body, because at least that would allow me to rebuild from scratch, to not feel myself as I am right now—broken.
When I wake up on Monday, my mind is caked with uncertainty, and every fiber of my body tells me not to go to school—a feeling that I swallow whole for the sake of my parents, whom I won’t dare bring into this catastrophic blur. I tell myself that the more normal I act, the less abnormal everything will feel. It’s a matter of hitting delete on that particular event and moving on with things. So I go through the motions of normalcy, feigning the rhythms of my routines, pretending to be a person.
BAD TO WORSE
Mom drops me off, and from the moment my sneakers touch the asphalt, I can feel my feet rejecting any motion forward, the weight of my whole body bearing down on the ground, an involuntary protest of mobility. I want to plant myself into this little piece of earth and not take a single step forward into reality. I want to lock myself into time. I still cannot make sense of the last forty-eight hours, so how will I be able to face the next twenty-four? The only clues in my possession are a throbbing in both my inner thighs and the feeling that someone has taken a rake to the inside of my lower abdomen. As an athlete and dancer, I have always had a certain amount of pride in being consciously connected to my physicality, to my anatomical awareness. But today there is a chasm of unknowing between me and my body, a void where my connectedness used to exist. And despite the aches and pains of tenderness that tug at various parts of my bones and muscles, I feel completely severed from myself.
I linger at the car, and Mom looks at me, both wistful and confused about my demeanor and unusual pace. For fear of upsetting her even more, I curl my lips into a shape that’s meant to resemble a smile, hoist my bag up onto my shoulders, and force one foot to move in front of the other, fighting every urge to run back to her and weep.
Right away I see Ivan. He’s holding court, as he does most mornings, at the picnic table in the main yard. Everyone knows he’s strong, but today he looks perversely mammoth to me, with his chest puffed out way farther than the rest of his silhouette, and his knuckles protruding like thick knobs at the ends of his fists. His hair is freshly styled with gel, forced into a fake crisp submission, as if his having gone through the trouble of setting his hair, as if a neat little hairdo, could somehow hide the heartless beast that is so visible to me. He’s enjoying a coffee and waves his arms in the air as he talks, the rest of the guys rapt, cackling along. Then I realize that they’re all there, the four guys from last night, a soulless band of assholes. A fury rises in me. I want to scream, act out, go over and fuck them up. My anger grows, shoots up, and boomerangs right back at me—now I’m angry with myself. I suddenly despise myself for being naive, for being so stupid as to think that these assholes wanted to be my friends. I scamper off in the opposite direction. I don’t dare go near them—I must lay low and remain invisible today. But just an hour or so later, while I’m taking a book from my locker, I hear someone scream behind my back, “Look! There she is—Paige Slutton.”
Halloween decorations still linger in the corridors of the school, haunting me. The memory of what happened so shattered that its millions of shards feel impossible to gather. But even the high school principal is aware of the buzz that seems to hang like a black fog over my head, because I discover that the four boys from the night prior are being questioned by the school administration. Apparently, someone called the school anonymously and reported an incident in which I was involved. I don’t know if it was one of the guys, one of the cheerleaders, a suspicious teacher, or someone else. But there is clearly some kind of story circulating, enough to get on the radar of the school staff, and while it appears that I am at the center of it, I don’t exactly understand why. It’s not that I am stupid—I know something bad happened, but the events of the night flicker in and out of focus. Part of me keeps trying to sort it out and the other part keeps pushing it away—it’s like I’m both desperate and terrified to know the truth.
While I am in music class, I feel a tap on the shoulder, startling me out of my own lingering daze. It’s Ivan, and he wants to have a word with me outside. He lies to the teacher and says that the principal wants to see me, and since Ivan is one of the more popular guys in school, he basically gets to do whatever he damn well pleases. The music teacher gives the nod of approval and we both quietly leave the room, the rest of the students following us with their eyes.
“Listen, Paige. They’re interrogating all of us,” he says out in the hall, with accusation in his voice. He looks around nervously to make sure no one is around, then he stares at me, pupil to pupil. There is a line of sweat forming on his upper lip. “I can’t have you messing with my scholarship.”
I stare at him, waiting for more information that might shed light on the events that transpired. I take in the details of his face, searching for clues to help map out whatever has led to my disgrace. His skin is slick with the grease of pubescence in full swing, and his eyes are a blend of vitriol and menace. I try to seek some warmth in them, any little hint of what I thought used to be, but instead I receive cold steel. He is not my friend, is the only piece of certainty that I have right now.
“Look. They’re going to call you in, too,” he goes on. “They’re gonna ask you a bunch of questions about what happened last night, and if you don’t want your life to suck even more than it already does, you’ll keep your mouth shut, you got it?”
I don’t answer—not out of protest, but because I honestly don’t know exactly what it is that I am supposed to keep hidden. That I hung out with them? That I got drunk and blacked out?
“Paige,” he says, with the bravado of someone who is not here to negotiate. “There’s nothing you can do. We already burned all your clothes, so there’s no evidence of anything. You’re shit out of luck. So you’re going to go in there and say that you came over and ended up falling asleep on the couch. That’s it. Simple. If you so much as say anything else, we’re going to show everyone the video we made of you last night. And trust me, you do not want that to happen, you hear me?”
Now I nod yes. A video? It could ruin my life. I’m being blackmailed about something that I don’t even fully comprehend, but the last thing I need right now is even more shame. So when I am finally called into the principal’s office, I do what Ivan said and lie through my teeth. This lie feels more tolerable than whatever really happened, so I run with it, and I allow the truth to fester somewhere far away.
Paige Slutton. Now I get it. People have created this horrific version of my name, Paige Sletten, because there is a crazy rumor going around about me. And rumors, I quickly learn, are like living things, growing and morphing the more they are fed. Everyone is apparently saying that I slept with four guys on Halloween night. The rumor ripens and blossoms with such vigor that this narrative about me starts to usurp my actual identity. I am swallowed whole by this ever-evolving lie; a lie that oddly, in the deepest depths of me, somehow starts to feel true. The more I try to act normal, to carry on with the day-to-day of life, to focus on my schoolwork and cheerleading, the more the rumor rears its head, haunting me, taunting me—like a beast that takes pleasure from watching me squirm. No one in school speaks to me, and when they do, their words are laden with cruelty. “What’s up, slut?” I hear as I make my way from class to class, the words come at me razor sharp, ripping through my dignity. How can I possibly be a slut if I’ve never even had a boyfriend? How can a virgin be a slut?
I try not to think about Halloween night, which is the only shield I have against it. It’s not even denial—it’s a rewind in time, in which I literally have to act as if the night didn’t occur, like it’s a blip in my personal history
that I have to stamp out like an ember. In order to erase it from reality, I must obliterate it from my memory. I bury it so far deep that it may as well be oblivion. It didn’t happen if I can’t recall it. It didn’t happen if I don’t know its details. And just like the rumor, which takes on a life of itself, I start to believe my own lies: This horrific thing simply did not happen to me. Period. But even as I try to block out the truth, deep inside I feel my life in two parts: life before Halloween and after. I know that whatever happened that night flipped a switch in me, and that in some way I will never be the same.
At Thanksgiving, I’m at the table, but only physically. I can smell the cozy aromas of roast turkey and homemade stuffing. Everyone is chatting and giggling and happy to be together, people playing with the baby, the dogs eating scraps off the floor. But there is a frost in my soul that doesn’t allow those happy sentiments anywhere near me, and I stare at the television, which is on but muted, and I question the purpose of my life.
“Yoo-hoo,” says my aunt Cara, waving a hand in front of my face. “You with us?” I don’t answer with words, but attempt some kind of nod. The real answer is no. I’d be thankful to disappear, is the truth.
One afternoon during a water polo game for which the squad cheers, someone a few rows behind me opens a bag of watermelon-flavored candy. The achingly sweet smell reaches my nostrils, and I suddenly feel so vile that I may just puke right there. It feels like a smell that has the power to wake a demon from the deepest pits of hell, and without even thinking, I get up and leave the bleachers midcheer and go straight for the toilet, where I vomit so much that my throat turns to fire. When I come back, I can feel that all color is sapped from my face. But instead of any compassion or even a “Hey, are you OK?” from anyone on my squad, I get eye rolls, whispers, and side-smirks. Somehow, I have become the villain here.
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