What a joke. A sick, demented joke.
I gag a few times.
I’m so angry. I followed that idiot Sean Nessel up those stairs, into that dark bedroom, and took off my jeans. I’m so angry, so mad at myself. He spoke to me all of one time before the party. Once. With Raj, standing there watching me at my locker. And it somehow was enough to make me believe he wanted what I wanted. Some diluted fantasy. Now, Sean Nessel knows even less about me, except that his dick was buried inside me.
I rip a few of the pages—whatever I can get my hands on—my sweet pasted-on collage of little hearts and cutout flowers, all the tiny petals that I layered with such care, I tear them apart—out of the book. Pages fall to the ground.
My father beats on my door like a jail cell warden. “I hope you’re up. You need to get downstairs. Now.” He clomps away.
The clock says after ten. I bury what’s left of my collage book under my bed. Look at me. I was such a child with my stupid flowers and hearts.
I turn on my phone. A million texts from Sammi. From Raj. A message this morning from my mother. How would that conversation go? Her voice, pressing me from so far away. How are you, honey? Your voice sounds shaky. What’s wrong? I can’t call her back. Not now.
In the bathroom, I stare into the mirror at myself. Deep breath, Ali. Take a deep breath. I brush my teeth. I scrub my face. Who knows how I smell. I want to get into the shower, but I consider what happened last night.
Was I raped?
This might be the strangest question I’ll ever have to ask myself.
If I say yes, then it means Sean Nessel didn’t listen when I said stop. It means I lost my virginity to Sean Nessel this way.
I think of the TV shows that I’ve seen on rape victims. I know the first thing I’d have to do is go to the police, or have someone professionally check me. Anyone who’s watched SVU knows this. But I don’t want any remains of him on me anymore. There’s a crackly feeling between my legs. I’m dirty and I want it off.
So I force myself into the shower. The hot water and beating pellets of the special massage shower head that my dad just installed numb my back and arms. My shoulder. My bruised shoulder. I can’t even turn it into the shower, it burns if I do. How am I going to cover up this shoulder?
I turn into the stream with my face. It beats down on my cheeks. My skin hurts. It burns. And I turn the heat higher. And higher again.
7
BLYTHE
Some friendships are about loyalty. Some friendships are built on secrets. Some friendships are built on mutual infatuation. Donnie and I are all of these.
That’s why the next morning I shower—I get all that party off me, and those awful conversations, my promises, my icky, icky promises—and haul my ass over to Donnie’s house. I look in the mirror, the steam clouding my view. I hate myself today.
Donnie is my other side. My emotional side. The side who falls apart. The side who has nothing to hide. She’s got the together family. The rocket-scientist mother. The minivan. The massive house. The beautiful working parents. The sisters and their Instagram accounts, where they post pictures of each other all day long in bathing suits and stringy leather outfits (her one older sister is a fashion designer) lounging over each other like melting bodies.
Donnie has no one to take care of.
She has no self-loathing.
If only.
I’m the hard side. The calculated side. The side that holds it all in. The controlled one.
Donnie’s house is on a block of palatial mansions. She calls it “fake mansion-ing.” It’s very typical Donnie to underplay everything.
* * *
* * *
I walk up the stairs and Donnie is still in bed. She’s wearing an eye mask, and she’s snoring. Her dark hair circles the pillow.
Donnie’s mother is black—dark-skinned black—and her father is Jewish with an olive tone.
Me, one side is straight from the shtetl, as my mother likes to say. Her family is a mix of Eastern European Jews. Great-grandparents from very poor villages. Poland. Czechoslovakia (before it was divided up into two different countries). Lithuania. Austria. A little of this, a little of that. Then to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where all the other Jews went when they escaped the Nazis. My father’s family, Swedish royalty.
People comment on the two of us together. On the color of our skin. Our hair. Me, a blond. Donnie, with the black curls. Last year, a few assholes at a frat party Donnie’s sister dragged us to screamed, “I want to Oreo Cookie the two of you girls in bed.” Racist and drunk.
I pull off my boots and toss them over by the door—hoping they clunk against the wall so she’ll wake up. But no. They just hit her thick, white shag carpet, practically bouncing as they land.
I crawl into bed and inch next to her, wrapping my arm around her waist. She’s wearing a loose white T-shirt, her thin gold chains pooling at her neck and shoulder crease. Her silver cuff around her wrist. I whisper in her ear, “Donnieeeee . . .”
She flips her head around. Whips off her eye mask.
“Your wake-up call, lover,” I say to her.
“Jensen? What the fuck are you doing here?”
I smell it as she speaks. Her breath is rancid.
“Seriously, I had two hours of sleep. Was puking all night.”
“Ugh,” I turn away. “I can smell it. I beg you to brush.”
She winces and hops out of bed to the bathroom, where I hear her brushing her teeth.
I wiggle my jeans off so I can feel the silky sheets across my thighs.
Donnie climbs into bed next to me. She pets my hair, scratching at my scalp a little. Caressing me how I like it.
“Stop petting me like a dog, Don.” I squeeze a pillow between my knees. “Something happened last night. Something big. Like, too much.”
“Something big. Ooooh? Why so cryptic, Jensen? It’s not like you.”
So I tell her about Sean. I tell her about how I was glad to see Ali terrified outside of the bathroom, because I knew that look. I was all too familiar with that look.
“Part of me wanted her to be hurt. Isn’t that just awful? Aren’t I awful?”
She rubs her eyes, scratches her head a few times.
“No, it just makes you human. Because you’ll always be in love with Sean, and you’ll always be jealous of whoever he’s with.”
“Get out of here. I’m not in love with Sean. I spend a lot of time with him because of Dev.”
Of course she’s right. Of course I like Sean. I like his aura. Of course I feel special around him. That I’m the girl he goes to for advice. When the other girls get tossed, I’m there in the wings. I’m his steady best friend, along with Dev. And it feels good to have that power. It has nothing to do with lust. But Donnie. She stirs shit up. She’s been on this kick for a while. My secret crush on Nessel, she says.
“Changing the subject,” I say. “I feel sorry for Ali. She doesn’t know what happened to her. I’m sure of that.” Ali. Her face a deer in headlights.
“But you seem to know.” Donnie widens her eyes.
I don’t want to say too much. Especially after Sean broke down last night. I have loyalty toward Sean, even though Donnie, I know, would never pass this on to anyone.
“He was whimpering in the car about me needing to help him.”
“So he really hurt her, then?”
“His jacket was rolled up in a ball. Blood was all over it, he said.” I shudder.
“Did you see the jacket?”
I shake my head.
“Broken cherry.”
“You can’t go back after you split that cherry. That’s forever.”
“I don’t know why you feel so bad for Sean,” Donnie says, and turns away. She’s not wrong—but Donnie doesn’t understand.
I think about la
st night and how he was crying on my shoulder—I’ve never seen a guy cry before like that. And I just wanted to hold him and fix it for him.
I tell Donnie about my plan to become friends with Ali Greenleaf. That I’m going to just manage the whole thing. Make sure she’s okay.
“Sean wants me to look out for her. You have to give him credit for that.”
“I sense a social media assassination,” Donnie says, and pulls the covers over her head. Then she wraps her arms around my shoulders and spoons me, nudging my hips so they lock in with hers. I’m safe in this cocoon of Donnie’s silk sheets.
And I’ll show empathy for Ali. Help her get over those shitty feelings. I can relate. I’ll tell her how it hurts for a while. How you keep playing the same scene over and over again in your mind.
That’s how it was for me, at least, after the Initiation.
The Initiation is an unspoken tradition in my school. You get chosen for it as a freshman girl. And once you’re chosen, you’re expected to follow through. A senior girl walks you through the part that’s To Be Expected. My senior was Amanda Shire.
“At some point in high school, you’re going to give a blow job,” she said. “You do it with a guy you think is down with you. But then he spreads the word. It goes viral. You feel used. You’re tagged a slut. But in this situation, you’re protected. You’re not going to get any shame. You’re going to do it and it’ll be callous. It’s not about pleasure; it’s not about bonding. This is about your future. It’s about your safety. The girls who set this up, before you even came into this world, before you even bothered to ask your mother if you could shave your nasty leg hair—they set it up because girls were getting raped. Girls were getting pushed into this without controlling it. Now there’s no curiosity. Now there’s no shame. You do it on them. They’re your practice and then it’s over.”
This is what Amanda Shire told us.
I could have said no. But no one says no. Donnie and I got on our knees that night. Suki and Cate weren’t asked. We held hands for the first half, which the guys liked. They’re not supposed to talk. But ours did. They whispered. Things I couldn’t hear. There were soft moans. Amanda Shire told us to expect this. “They’re just human,” she said.
I kept my eyes closed. Otherwise you risk looking at their hairy, thick thighs. I sang a song in my head. To this day I can’t even listen to that song without hating myself.
They don’t expect you to swallow; they tell you to pull back. But some gets on your face. It drips on the floor. I’ll give Amanda Shire this: It’s a robotic experience. Except for their faces after. Their smiles. The way I had to wipe my mouth and then look at them, look at the guy I was paired with. Alex Kramer. After, still sitting on that cold floor as the guys filed out, wanting to cry. Donnie saw my hatred, how I was about to weep or puke or both. “Keep it together, Jensen. Don’t fold, Jensen,” she said, whispering.
After the Initiation, you’re invited to all the senior parties. All the parties that mean anything. You made it through that—so guys don’t fuck with you. They accept you. At least that’s the concept. I don’t know anymore what I believe.
When I was a freshman, before the Initiation, you’d hear rumors about guys slipping a roofie in someone’s drink. A few guys recording someone going down a girl’s pants, a girl who was wasted, and then putting it on Twitter. But you didn’t have to go through something so traumatic to be put through hell. You just had to jerk off a guy at a party. Let someone finger you behind a pool house. I’ve seen girls go through hell for the most innocent acts, especially early on, because I put them through hell.
So to be in this exclusive group where your reputation is always protected—how could anyone not want that?
Except after, I didn’t feel like I did it for myself. I felt like I was doing it for them. Those needy boys. Those boys who take.
That’s when I met Dev. Well, I always knew him, that cute, shy boy in my AP class. The guy who always hung out with Sean Nessel. We were at a party down the shore. Drinking jungle juice from a garbage can. Dev was there, and Cate wanted to hook up with him. I was sent over to lasso him. To talk up Cate. Then it was an hour later, and Dev and I were still talking. Cate sneering at me from the corner. I shrugged. She had no chance with him anyway.
I latched on to Dev, and he made me feel protected. I told him about my mother. About my father. He hung on to my words and understood me. He didn’t want to play any games. And he wanted me with him all the time. Then it was the three of us. Me, him, and Sean. Fingers overlapping each other.
Dev’s the only other person besides Donnie who knows how I feel about the Initiation. He thinks it’s bullshit. That it was always bullshit. That it was some made-up thing concocted by some demented senior. Some girl who wanted to shame everyone.
“How could it be bullshit if I did it then, Dev?” I said. “Then what happens to me? Am I bullshit? Have I been used?”
I couldn’t believe that. I can’t believe that. Maybe it does work. No girls have been sexually assaulted since that time, none that I’ve heard of. So maybe it did work to a certain extent. Maybe the Initiation serves its purpose. Acts as a deterrent.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t scar you. That you never forget it. That I didn’t feel taken. That I still don’t.
That’s how I’ll approach Ali. I’ll explain to her that we’ve been in the same position. That everyone has to have some kind of initiation, even if it’s not organized like mine was. I’ll be empathetic, sure. I’ll tell her maybe Sean was wasted, that he pushed things a little too far, and it was uncomfortable for her. That it might really mess with her head. But then I’ll explain that Sean is a great guy. He couldn’t . . . he couldn’t help himself or something. That the whole night he was talking about how cute she was. He was so excited to be around her. He couldn’t stop himself. If she could have seen him that night crying. His silky hair falling in his face. Have you ever seen a god fall?
8
ALI
My father is waiting at the kitchen table wearing his Phish shirt because that’s what he always wears on weekends.
“What did you do to your hair?”
“I—” I touch my bangs. How do I say it? That I’m still drunk? That I’m in shock?
“Forget it, I don’t want to know.” He shakes his head. More disgusted than I’d ever thought he’d be. “You want me to ask questions or should I just let you talk?” he says.
“The way I see it is that you have some explaining to do too,” I say, hoping that his making out with his date Sheila the She Woman in the living room deflects whatever trouble I’m in.
“Yeah, well, I’m an adult, so I don’t actually have any explaining to do,” he says. And he looks at me like start talking.
“I didn’t sleep at Sammi’s.”
“Yes, I know that.”
My father sees right through all the bullshit, because the downside to having a cool dad is that he’s already done it all, and according to him, he’s done even more than anything I even know about. Whatever that means. Plus, I’ve recently learned about bands like Phish—specifically what people do when they’re seeing a band like Phish. As in they take a lot of acid, mushrooms, and whippits. My father’s been around.
“Cherie drove us to a party. But I’m not going to tell you whose house we were at, so you shouldn’t ask me that.”
“Oh. Okay. I’ll make sure not to ask you.” He rolls his eyes. “What else?”
“There was a beer keg.”
“And?”
“And then . . . Sean Nessel. He walks into the party.”
“Hold up. Sean Nessel, from your collage book? With all the roses and the hearts, the kid in the school newspaper, Sean Nessel?”
“That one.”
Buzz in my back pocket. A text from Sammi.
Just want to know if you’re alive or dead
“And you’re not going to like this next part. At all. So close your eyes or something.”
“I’ve always told you that you’ll never—”
“I know, Dad . . . I’ll never get in trouble for telling you the truth, but that was before, when I had nothing to tell you. Except for things like I didn’t brush my teeth. Or I didn’t do my homework. But what I’m about to tell you is not like that.”
He rubs his eyes, weary.
“I need you to shut your eyes.”
“What? Ali—”
“Please, Dad. I can’t look at you.”
So he shuts them. “I’m ready.”
I tell him about how Sean Nessel started opening those little airplane bottles of vodka.
“Wait a second—” My father clears his throat and shifts in his chair. “Go ahead.”
“I thought I could tell you the truth— Why are you getting all uncomfortable like I’m going to be in trouble?”
“You can,” he says, “but it doesn’t mean I’m not going to react strongly. You’re not in trouble. Whatever you tell me, you’re not in trouble. But drinking vodka? You’re not in trouble—but I’m upset.”
“Well, there’s more,” I say. I focus on the furrow between my dad’s eyebrows that’s been there for the past couple of years. I don’t remember seeing it before then—it wasn’t in pictures. It’s something that grew out of worry. Fear. First with my mother. Now it’s going to deepen like a valley after I tell him this. I wring my hands and surrender my head to the table.
Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf Page 4
