Rise

by Paige VanZant

  “OK, Seth. We can talk,” I offer up, wishing there was some way to telepathically call my mother or the police.

  He drives for a while and far away enough that soon there are no strip malls or apartment complexes anywhere in sight. There’s nothing but a vastness of tumbleweeds and far-off mountain silhouettes, and instead of traffic I start to hear the sounds of the high desert dusk settling into the night. Seth has driven us into the middle of fucking nowhere, and my PTSD kicks in with such fervor that I feel myself starting to hyperventilate. I don’t know what this guy is capable of, but I know that he’s insane, and if he brought me out to the middle of the desert, I am completely fucked. The best thing I can do right now is show him that I care about him. I can’t show him I’m afraid, because he’ll get defensive. I try to breathe deeply through the terror. He stops the car. There’s nothing but dry earth as far as the eye can see.

  “Get out,” he demands, and I oblige, trying my best to remain composed, as if he’s just brought me out to show me the stars.

  “Let’s just talk like adults,” I plead softly, crossing my arms against the encroaching nighttime desert air. If I’m not careful, I can die.

  “I’m gonna fucking kill you for what you did to me,” he barks, his facial expression a blast of pure wrath. “Why can’t you love me?” he screams into my face, a question whose answers he already knows. I did love him. I loved his passion, but it swallowed me up and turned me into a nervous mess. It pulled me from my best friend and family and it asked me to belong to just him, like a piece of property or something. It went from delicious to demeaning.

  My legs are shaking, there are goosebumps all over my flesh, and the sand is starting to whip up into the wind. But I must think fast. So I do the only thing that feels remotely viable—I run like hell. I tear off so fast I can feel the wind sting my face and sand blows hard into my eyes, but I won’t dare stop because he’s chasing me with the same vitriol that he chased Kenny on the bike, and those girls during Thanksgiving—with the savagery of an apex predator hunting down dinner. I’m going as fast as I can, but now he’s right behind me, because I can feel and hear the intensity of his breath. I turn up the speed, pumping my arms, sucking in more and more air so to keep myself going. I don’t know where I think I’m going—there’s nowhere to really go. We’re in the middle of the desert.

  And in the space of that self-doubt he catches me. He tackles me to the ground and turns me over so he’s on top of me, face to face. With one decisive move, he rips my T-shirt right off my body, and then my bra. He’s growling and moaning now, as if preparing himself for a death ritual. I’m so petrified I don’t even feel cold anymore. And I can feel the presence of my demons now, lurking in the dusk, laughing at the irony of me being pinned down into submission by this animal who supposedly loves me, my clothes forced off me, my fear spilling over. I can feel their appreciation for this sick cosmic joke that’s unfolding on this dusty desert floor.

  “I’m sorry!” I scream at full volume. “I love you! Let’s get back together!” It’s all I can think to change the course of this mess. He moves his face close to mine, eyes to eyes and nose to nose, and I think he’s going to kiss me, but he doesn’t and instead squeezes me with the strength of a super snake and bites my lower lip so hard it bleeds. I start crying and now he does, too, and it’s a swirling mess of blood, sand, and tears on both our faces, and I can’t tell which one of us is more disturbed.

  “I swear I’ll drive us both off a cliff if you’re lying, Paige!”

  “I promise! I’ll be with you,” I say, sobbing now. He releases his full weight onto me, and cries hard into my chest, and I can hear a pack of coyotes howling in the distance. After a few moments, he starts to compose himself, gets up and pulls me up with him. We stand there together in silence for a moment, panting, both of us wondering what the hell went wrong, with this night, with our lives, with this love. Both of us experiencing our brokenness in the context of one another. He puts an arm around me, his fingertips digging hard into the fleshy part of my shoulder. He leads me back to his car and pushes me into the passenger seat, still breathing heavy. He can’t help it—for him, love and danger just go together. He rummages in the back for a while until he produces a tank top, one of his, for me to put on.

  He turns the car back on and starts to drive, and I’m quivering so hard I can hear my own teeth.

  “Calm down!” he shouts. I stay quiet, trying to come up with a discreet way of texting my mom, but my phone is in my pants pocket and there’s no way to get it without him seeing. I can’t risk another one of his outbursts. I need things to just stay neutral until I can find a way to sneak to my phone. But he’s driving in the direction of his apartment, and his headspace is so massively compromised right now that he’s capable of anything at this point—especially behind closed doors. I fight back the tears and try to think. How could I be such an idiot?

  At least we’re back in the city now, and I’m so physically exhausted from the last few hours that against my better senses, I unwittingly start to doze off. The sound of a police siren startles me awake. The cop car is right behind us, and when I look around I see there’s not one but four police cars hot on our trail.

  “Sons of motherfucking bitches!” Seth yells, pounding his fists on the wheel like an overgrown toddler about to get the time-out of a lifetime. The cop closest to us demands through a megaphone that Seth pull over immediately, which Seth finally does, but then proceeds to lock us both inside the car. “Don’t you fucking move. I’m gonna pretend I have a gun—I’ll say I’m gonna blow both our brains out.” His tone is even but his body shakes.

  “Step out of the vehicle with your hands up!” the cop yells. Seth does nothing. He closes his eyes hard, as if willing the cops away with his thoughts. “I’m not gonna ask you again, son. Step. Out. Of. The. Vehicle,” the cop repeats, each word now sharper and loud. One, two, three beats of silence—and then the main cop, along with the other three, are outside their cars, bulletproof vests visible, guns drawn, and they are inching their way toward Seth’s car. Now we’re surrounded by them—there’s one on Seth’s side, one on mine, and one in the front, facing us—all of their guns pointing straight at us. They clearly don’t know I’m a hostage. “Roll your window down, right now!” says the cop on Seth’s side. When Seth doesn’t comply, the cop on my side instructs me to roll mine down. I look at Seth, in tears, and quickly do as told before he has a chance to object. Within seconds I feel the cold steel of the officer’s gun barrel grazing the skin of my temple, and hysterically crying, I raise my hands slowly and meekly to show clear surrender. The policeman is close enough to see the fresh blood on my face, and with that he must understand that I am in trouble with the driver, and signals for me to move out of the car. He cuffs me and sits me in the back of his cruiser. The three other cops force Seth’s door open, drag him out, and cuff him fast. He’s arrested for battery with a deadly weapon, coercion, domestic battery, false imprisonment, and simple battery.

  I learn that a passerby had seen Seth beating up on Kenny (who is OK but mad as hell) and discreetly took down Seth’s license plate number. The cops have been looking for his car since. Seth ends up in jail for three nights, after which he somehow manages to bail himself out. I’ll never know how he could afford it, or anything for that matter. That guy has the stealth and craftiness of an alley cat, and while it definitely concerns me, it doesn’t surprise me that he gets out soon.

  Two of the cops have me lead them back to the spot in the desert where Seth drove me, where we find my T-shirt and bra right where they were torn off.

  “Ma’am, were you in any way sexually assaulted?” one of them asks sternly, his notepad flipped open, pen in hand. He puts on a rubber glove and puts my stuff in a plastic bag.

  “No,” I say, in reference to Seth—but in the recesses of my mind everything else is bubbling up and fizzing like hydrogen peroxide on an open wound. My ghosts are suddenly with me again. And I start to thi
nk that I must be cursed, that maybe God wants me to live as one with this pain for reasons that I can’t comprehend. “He said he was going to drive us both off a cliff,” I say weakly, and in that moment I half wish Seth actually had.

  I’m with Alexa and finishing up paying for my burrito at Taco Bell. It’s been a long school day, we have lots of work to do, and we just need to quickly fuel up. We grab our food, fill up our drinks, and start making our way out into the parking lot, when I see him come in. Seth—with his hands in his pockets and a demonic smile on his face. This is starting to get ridiculous. How does this asshole always seem to know where I am?

  “Jesus, Paige!” Alexa says, glaring at me, clearly under the impression that I have something to do with his being here.

  “Fuck,” I say, and grab her arm. I haul ass, with Alexa in tow, and quickly find the side exit. We bolt to my car and speed off, but he’s already on our tail in that crazy way that he does, relentless and deranged. It’s impossible to comprehend what allows a person to think that this type of behavior is acceptable. What does he think I owe him?

  He drives up to me, revving his engine even more when he gets close. Alexa screams. I keep driving, but I don’t know where to go. I have to avoid ending up somewhere he can corner us. I already know his game. So I start driving in the direction of the police station, and by the time we’re there he’s nowhere in sight. Coward, I think to myself.

  “Are you in any kind of communication with him?” the officer inquires when they question me.

  “No way!” I respond. And I’m not. He’s dead to me after what he did in the desert.

  “So how do you think he knew you were at the Taco Bell?”

  “I have no idea!”

  The cop inspects my purse. Then he goes outside to my car, where he pokes around for about fifteen minutes and discovers that there’s a tracking device on its underside. I can’t believe it! He is a full-fledged sociopath. Alexa doesn’t come out and say, “I told you so,” but she always knew he was no good. She’s a good friend, though, and sticks with me for the whole ride.

  With clear evidence in hand that Seth has been following me everywhere, I’m able to get a restraining order against him easily. But I’m always looking over my shoulder to see if he’s behind me.

  Now when I train at Ken’s gym it’s not just to blow off steam. I’m not just there for a workout. I’m there to learn. I go several times during the week and watch some of the fighters practice hard-core moves like twisters, guillotine chokes, and flying knees, listening for the guttural sounds emitted from their opponents who fall like dead birds to the floor. Watching these guys, I start to think about the energetics of power, the primal dance of survival that happens when two humans are eye to eye like this, their adrenaline coursing like gasoline. Ken starts to let me spar with some of the rookie fighters, and right away I’m transported back to those grassy yards in Oregon, when I was the girl who hit like a boy, when I’d come home with someone’s blood on my wrist and Dad would half smirk. The sparring now starts to feel like a moving meditation, or like a place that collects my disparate emotions and reassembles them all into a singular strength. Ken observes me quietly, arms crossed at his chest. “That’s the way,” he says after I hit someone good.

  I’m ready to move on to some basic grappling moves, and Ken carefully matches me up with equal opponents. One evening I’m up against a new guy who has been training for a lot less time than me. He’s short, if a little stocky, and his breath smells like dirt. I can take him, I think as the ref counts us off. Not even seven seconds pass and the guy has me pinned on the ground. Rationally, I know I’m not scared of him or this situation, but his weight on me and the feeling of his grip on my wrist and the drop of his sweat that lands on my face all send me into an unforeseen panic, my airway tightening and my vision blurring. I can feel my heart beating in every part of my body, and instead of fighting back I almost pass out.

  Your breakdown is

  a BREAKTHROUGH.

  —Andrea Benito

  WRESTLING WITH MYSELF

  Alexa and I are at a party. A friend from school casually told us about it, and we figured why not. Get out a bit. Have some fun. There are all kinds of people there. A Lil Wayne track is playing loud on the sound system, the bass buzzing in the yard so loud I can feel it in my abdomen. Someone is making these special craft tequila cocktails that taste like juice and go down like water. With drinks in hand and the carefree abandon of a whole weekend ahead, Alexa and I bop our heads to the rhythm of the music, just happy to be out and letting ourselves unwind.

  And then, like a recurring nightmare that creeps into even the soundest of sleeps, there is Seth. He pulls up in a fancy Range Rover, which is probably the only reason it takes me longer than a moment to realize it’s him, and he parks it right next to my mom’s silver Accord. He’s here for me.

  “No way,” I say, dropping my drink, the cocktail splattering all over my shirt.

  “What the fuck!” Alexa says, equally stunned.

  He’s walking over to us now, all pomp and swagger. Like it hasn’t even crossed his mind that this is an actual problem.

  “You need to get yourself a decent set of wheels now that you go to big-girl parties,” he says menacingly to me from a distance. He may be a scumbag, but he’s no dummy, and he knows a restraining order is not something to tamper with, especially if you’re out on parole, which is pretty much the story of his life. “Your car looks like my ass,” he says, chugging a beer. He drunkenly rambles on about his big settlement, which I imagine is the only way he’s able to afford that new Range Rover of his.

  “I’m out of here,” I say faster than I can even think about it, and before Alexa has time to object or even offer to come with me, I’m in my car and speeding off. I can’t believe he tracked me down again. It’s been months! Is he seriously so purposeless that all he can do is concoct these insane schemes just to find me? Also, what good is a restraining order if someone’s just going to violate it? How am I ever safe?

  Then it hits me. Maybe I’m the asshole for letting someone like that into my life to begin with. I allowed it. I tolerated it. I invited this drama. I ignored red flags, I forgave things that weren’t OK. I encouraged the passion. And the weight of this revelation pumps at my chest and stings in my eyes and I want to cry and scream and break something because somewhere in the reservoir of my truths, I start to intuit a thread of toxicity woven from my past into the now. And I begin to see myself as a vehicle of all this bedlam, deserving of Seth’s mania and all the other shit I’ve received. I start to understand myself as innately damaged, as someone who was born into the world to suffer. I drive faster, unhinged, tears streaking my cheeks, the stench of tequila rising up from my clothes. I drive even faster, watching the city lights turn into blurry trails of color on either side of me, feeling the throb of my sadness like an all-over bruise.

  Then the sound of a siren. And a neon red spiral of light flashing rhythmically. Behind me. Fuck.

  All previous thoughts stop dead in their tracks, heap into a giant pile and collide with a wall of panic. I pull off to the right, the dread boiling in me. The back of my neck and palms profusely sweat and my heart goes from beating to pounding at such a speed that I have to clutch my chest and squeeze my eyes. In the rearview mirror, I see the footsteps of a policeman approaching my mother’s car. He has a flashlight in one hand and notepad in the other. I may vomit. He’s right at my window now. I roll it down; he must be able to see tears still fresh on my cheeks. The beam of his flashlight cuts like a laser into my field of vision.

  “License and registration, please,” he says, his body stiff but his eyeballs searching. My body turns into a mess of fumbling and fidgeting, fingers burrowing through my purse for my wallet, nervously digging around for the items, which I produce with a sweaty, quivering hand. “You OK, miss?” he asks, with equal parts suspicion and concern.

  I am not OK.

  “Yes, officer,” I reply, the
words barely coming out. He leans in closer, and there’s nothing I can do to control the heaviness of my breath, very possibly bordering on an asthma attack.

  “Have you been drinking, ma’am?” he asks, already knowing the answer.

  Silence from me.

  “Ma’am. I asked you if you’ve been drinking tonight.”

  I know I have to respond, but the shame and my parents’ impending disappointment moves in like a storm confiscating my rationale. I turn my face upward to the cop. It’s not an admission, but it’s not a no either. “Ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to step out of the vehicle.” And that’s when I know it’s over. That’s when I understand that I have failed.

  I flop the sobriety test, am cuffed and arrested. The letters “D.U.I.” sear into my brain, thoughts of my busted future appear like hard-to-watch scenes emerging on photos in a darkroom. I sit in the back of the cop’s car as radio transmissions come in and out, their static crackling in jarring blips. I stew in my own disbelief, unable to grasp the fact that I am currently among the transgressors, a person of interest, a fucked-up girl, a lost soul. No amount of weeping buys me any mercy from the officer. He calls my parents and solemnly breaks both of their hearts with the truth.

  I cradle the weight of my head in my hands and try to never look up from my view of the dark gray scuffs on the floor, because even the tiniest glimpse of the jail cell will make the sobbing start again. It’s three a.m., which means I have another four or so hours to go. I try to lay down on the thin mattress, but it smells like stale pee, and any amount of sleep I can achieve is laced with sharp pangs of sorrow and remorse. A slide show of heinous memories plays on a loop inside my brain, stuttering and stopping at the roughest parts, sometimes rewinding and fast-forwarding to even worse ones, micromoments of my existence like living flash cards moving so fast I want to vomit. One minute I see myself alone onstage, the hot spotlights burning my skin. I’m supposed to break out into a dance, but I have forgotten the whole choreography and there’s no song playing. My limbs feel stuck, held into place, pinned into submission, suspended in front of a cackling audience. Then I’m alone in a corridor and the laughing audience has morphed into shadows that creep behind me and grow into monstrous shapes with each lurch toward me. Then I’m naked and those shadows have become distorted faces like masks that come up close to mine, laughing thick stinky smoke into my face. Then I’m in the throes of a cheerleading routine and I’m the flyer, but instead of being thrown up and caught, my body disappears into the cosmos and nobody notices. Then I’m on the alkaline earth of the High Sierra desert, a glob of Seth saliva hot on my face while the massive orange sun does nothing to stop it and drops into the horizon, pretending it saw nothing. I see myself whole, then I see myself broken. I see myself laughing, which quickly turns into a wail. I see a little girl on a BMX blazing down the road like a shooting star, but then her bike suddenly disappears and she goes tumbling toward oblivion until there is no trace of her, not even a hint of a memory of what she used to be.