Echo Bridge

by Kristen O'Toole

  “Whores,” Hilary said, glaring at the girls at the keg.

  “Never mind them,” said Melissa. “Did you hear about Marian? She got caught fooling around with Lexi Rosenthal in the old dark room.”

  “Sexy Lexi?” Hilary asked.

  “The one and only,” said Melissa.

  “People only call her that because she’s got big boobs,” I said lazily. I could relate, although Lexi had at least a cup size on me. I watched Marian and Selena wave their racquets around. Periodically, Jake Hobart would yell out “Shuttlecock!” and then chuckle.

  “Well,” said Melissa. “Apparently Marian started hanging out in the dark room, because she can smoke pot there without getting busted. There’s a ventilation fan for chemicals or something. Sexy Lexi’s the only other person who’s ever in there. She still uses actual film.”

  I would come to know Lexi Rosenthal rather well, but back then she was just this weird junior who didn’t have a lot of friends. She was pretty, with those round cheeks and sparkling eyes that make you think of a doll’s face, but people mostly called her Sexy Lexi because it rhymed, and then made up a reputation for her that fit the rhyme. In addition to being the last film photography hold-out in the digital age—our photo classes had been held in the computer lab for years—she was the editor of Belknap Country Day’s arts magazine, Bards and Muses, and the only orphan in our school. She lived with her grandfather.

  “Poor Farah,” snorted Hilary. “If Lexi dumps her, she’ll only have her computers for company.”

  Lexi Rosenthal’s best, and maybe only, friend was a girl named Farah Zarin. She was the lead student administrator for the Belknet, the intranet that was home to school-designated email accounts, online tools for classes, student club web pages, and special interest message boards. This got her a certain level of respect—we had to go to her when we forgot our passwords—but nobody thought it was very cool, except for the World of Warcraft geeks who spent all their free periods in the computer lab. Farah was totally their queen. She had mad programming skills, punk-rock patches on her messenger bag, and the spiky black hair, enormous brown eyes, and pointed elfin face of an anime character. Supposedly, she and Lexi were more than friends, although to my knowledge this was one of those rumors that had no evidentiary basis and people idly embroidered upon when they were bored.

  “Well, if they were ever together, I doubt they are now,” said Melissa. “Because Sexy Lexi, like, seduced Marian. Plus, Hugh said he ran into her at Echo Bridge a few weeks ago, and she practically fell to her knees and undid his pants with her teeth. She’s a total nympho.”

  I was skeptical of that story even at the time. “I don’t know why you would believe anything Hugh says,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Have you heard his hockey hazing stories? That crap can’t be true.”

  “Well, I know for a fact it’s true what he said about making Chip Horowitz eat an Oreo they all jerked it on.” Melissa shrugged and we tossed back a round of vodka. “Uh oh, Court. Looks like Ted’s about to lose his shirt.” Ted was sitting down at the poker table with Horse, his friend Will McKinley, and a junior named Sayre Matthews.

  “I hate when they play cards,” pouted Hilary. “It pulls the whole focus of the party. We’re here to socialize,” she said, drawing out the word and slurring it a bit, “not to watch Horse take everyone’s money and have them get all pissy and sad about it.”

  This did happen on occasion. Horse loved cards, and though I knew nothing about poker, the word was he was very good unless he was very drunk. It was hard to tell if he was drunk already from our spot on the balcony, but as he began to shuffle the cards, I realized that I was a bit drunk: the fun kind, when you’re all swagger and confidence, which lasts about five minutes before you wind up either sloppy or sober, depending on whether you have another drink or not.

  “I’ll put a stop to that,” I said, and took one more shot and wiggled my hips to make the girls laugh. Then I went downstairs and climbed into Ted’s lap.

  “Babe,” said Ted, unhooking my arms from around his neck. “It’s not a good time, see?” He tried to show me the two cards he had facedown in front of him, but I was not interested. In my vodka haze, and with Melissa and Hilary in the peanut gallery above, it suddenly seemed extremely important that I win over poker and break up the game by distracting Ted.

  “Come on,” I whispered in his ear. His stubble tickled my lips, and I put a little breathy Marilyn in my voice. “Wouldn’t you rather come upstairs and play with me?”

  “Later, Courtney,” he said, laughing. “We’ve got all night.” And he put his hands on my waist and lifted me off his lap. Which would have been no big deal, except that vodka makes my ego rather fragile, and it seemed utterly preposterous that my boyfriend, who had gleefully dispatched my virginity many months before, might find Horse Riley’s pocket money more interesting than me, his girlfriend, star of the BCD stage and just then wearing silk stockings and a garter belt under my black wool dress. So I squeezed his arm. “Ted,” I said. “I need to talk to you.” It was a little desperate, and like I said, I was a little drunk.

  Ted cupped my face with one hand and kept the other on his cards. “You need a glass of water and a nap,” he said. “You go lie down in the guest room. I’ll come find you in a little while.” He patted my cheek and looked over my shoulder. “Hugh, get Court a soda or something.”

  So I went upstairs to the guest room to pout until Ted came looking for me or I passed out, whichever happened first. Perhaps now is when you’re yelling at the screen, telling the starlet not to go into the basement. You aren’t wrong, but let me remind you: This was my best friend’s house, filled with people I’d known for years. If there was anywhere I thought I could let my guard down, this was it.

  I was in the bathroom when I heard someone in the adjacent guest room.

  “Ted?” I called through the door. I wasn’t on the toilet, only fixing my hair and trying to wipe away the mascara that inevitably smudged under my eyes after a few beers.

  The bathroom door opened and there was Hugh with a can of Diet Coke. Hugh’s gray eyes were almost as pale as his white skin, which I’d always found a little startling.

  “Hi, Hugh,” I said, reaching for the can. “Thanks for the DC.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, and he caught me by the wrist and shoved me up against the sink. His lips mashed against mine. The can of soda dropped and hit my left foot, hard, before bouncing into a corner.

  I twisted my face away, but he was squeezing my arms against my sides, and his legs pressed my own against the cabinet below the sink. My knees buckled.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I said.

  “Come on, C. I know your whole bombshell act,” he said. His breath was hot and beery on my neck. He slid one finger along what was, yes, a low-cut neckline, but not an open invitation. “I just saw you practically begging Ted for it.”

  “Ted is my boyfriend,” I said. I tried not to breathe. I thought that if he got the impression I wasn’t going to fight him, he’d ease off a bit, and I’d be able to get to the door. I had to get downstairs, back to the crowd, back to Ted.

  “And he’s my best friend. And I’m your friend. So really, what’s the difference, Courtney? Come on. Don’t be a tease.”

  He held my wrists together with one hand. I had always wished I were taller, and the sensation of my wrist bones grinding together in Hugh’s fist reminded me of this. It seemed incredibly unfair that anyone should have such a physical advantage over anyone else. He pulled up my skirt and pushed my legs apart with one of his knees. “Please, Hugh,” I said, and I hated how weak and wavering my voice sounded. Like I had already given up. “Please don’t.” The hand that wasn’t holding my wrists was on me now, in me. Already I wanted to die. I was begging. “Please don’t do this. You’re hurting me.”

  “I like that word, ‘please,’” Hugh whispered. “But, please, Courtney. Shut up.”

  I tried, then, to wrench my hands ou
t of his grip. He spun me around easily, like we were dancing, and pinned my arms behind my back. Now I was really helpless, my hips pinned between Hugh’s bulk and the marble countertop, my arms bent so my hands were at my shoulder blades. Not happening not happening not happening this is not happening to me. Hugh had one arm between us, reaching down to unzip his pants.

  That was when I started screaming. It was a last-ditch attempt to get out of there, but even caught in the rising tide of panic, I knew no one could hear me. There were too many rooms between us and the party, too many people talking and laughing downstairs, too many songs cued up on Melissa’s iPod in a speaker dock loud enough to fill the whole first floor with music. In the mirror, Hugh rolled his eyes and covered my mouth with one meaty hand. He squeezed my jaw so tight I couldn’t even bite him.

  Then it was happening, really happening, and he was watching, he was actually smiling in the mirror. I closed my eyes. This is a role, I told myself. It’s next year and I’m already at Tisch and this is someone’s stupid student film. This is happening to the girl in the movie. I’m just playing her.

  When he was done, his grip relaxed. His weight went slack against my body, and then he stepped away and zipped up his pants. I backed away from him, my arms aching from the way he’d been holding them, trying to maintain a defensive posture and straighten my clothes at the same time. I had started to cry somewhere in the middle of it, and for some reason this made everything so much worse. I might have been stoic and unflinching, and slammed Hugh’s head into the mirror in his post-coital moment. I might have been Charlize Theron in Monster. Instead, I was puffy and red, sniveling and cowering by a toilet.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I whispered.

  “Don’t be like that,” he said. He reached out and held my shoulders. “Half the people out there have messed around with each other. This is what we do.”

  “I said no.”

  “C,” said Hugh. His grip tightened. “Drop it. No one can hear us. You don’t have to worry; it’s our secret.”

  “What are you talking about?” My legs were shaking so hard I wasn’t sure I’d stay standing if he let go of me. I couldn’t imagine which was worse: Hugh having this secret hold over me, or everyone knowing. I felt dizzy.

  “I won’t tell anyone. About how you dragged me up here after Ted blew you off in front of everyone at the poker table.”

  I stared at him. Then I bent over and threw up in the toilet. Hugh left, and I locked the door and sat down against it. I wanted to shed my skin like a snake, leave behind everything that Hugh had touched, like I could shed the bruises and the shadows and be a whole new person.

  During the winter of my junior year, I had been cast as a rape victim in a play. A senior named Lila Horton (aggressively emo; head of our Amnesty International chapter) had been doing an independent study in directing, and she’d chosen Pinter’s One for the Road. It’s a play about the trauma of political prisoners, and it was a controversial choice—Headmaster Farnsworth was not thrilled and tried to force Lila to pick something different. The theater teacher, Mr. Gillison, went to bat for her, and a compromise was reached: we would do the play, but the flyers and programs would carry an “explicit material” advisory. Lila was thrilled—she was Making a Statement. I was Gila, my dress torn, my body covered in grease paint bruises, flinching under every gesture made by my interrogator, local warlord Nicolas (Rodney Fairchild, who fancied himself a ladies’ man and who was playing John Proctor opposite me in The Crucible). As I sat in the Lewis’ guest bathroom, black marble tile and plush towels closing in on all sides, the only thing I could think about was how wrong I had played Gila. I pressed my forehead against my knees. My Gila had been so reactive, so twitchy and jumpy. This, I now knew, was wrong: Gila would have been stone-still, her self buried so deeply that whatever might happen to her body didn’t matter anymore.

  I didn’t have a tiny room where I could lock my soul away from my body, but I was in a tiny room where I could lock out Hugh, my friends, Ted, and the entire party. I didn’t know what face to put on that would hide what Hugh had done to me. I spent the night under a towel in the bathtub. When Ted and Hilary came looking for me, I refused to open the door, and they assumed I was still drunk and angry with Ted for brushing me off. Eventually they got tired of knocking and went away. I didn’t unlock the door until morning, when the clamor in the backyard had finally ceased and the gray light of dawn spilled over the windowsill. Then I crept out, through the sleeping bodies filling Melissa’s house, and walked all the way home.

  Chapter 2

  What made me craziest, at first, was not telling anyone. I desperately wanted to, as if saying it out loud would diminish the horror, but at the same time, I was terrified of what would happen if I did. I didn’t want to tell my parents—they were very hands-off, having expended all of their energy on my older siblings, and I knew it would break my mom’s heart and that they’d both blame themselves. And I couldn’t imagine telling anyone else without telling Ted first, because he was sure to find out no matter whom I told, and I didn’t know how he’d react. At the very least, I’d break up the group of friends I’d had all through high school while everyone chose sides, get Melissa in trouble for having a kegger at her parents’ house, and ruin senior year for all of us. And what proof did I have that I hadn’t wanted it? I was afraid of the man-eater image Hugh had implied I gave off. It was true that my clothes and demeanor were intentionally inspired by my favorite screen seductresses: Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, both Hepburns. But reflected in Hugh’s icy eyes, I felt over the top and garish. I felt like Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass when she wears her pink dress and new bobbed hair to the dance, all tarted up and crazy. I couldn’t help feeling like if I came forward, and it was Hugh’s word against my own, his harsh vision of me would become infectious, and everyone would see me that way: my family, my teachers, my friends, and especially Ted.

  So I acted like everything was normal. I read Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, a Personal Biography and Marilyn’s My Story and Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman. I memorized my lines for The Crucible. I drafted the statement of purpose for my Tisch application. I turned in a history paper on the Industrial Revolution in the British Isles a week early, because I couldn’t sleep and needed to do something with my nights. In public, in the student lounge between classes with Melissa and Hilary or while getting lunch in the refectory (“cafeteria” just wasn’t formal enough for Belknap Country Day School) with Lindsay Stevens, I felt like I might go full-on Frances Farmer and start screaming, tearing at my hair, rolling on the floor with mashed potatoes and gravy dripping down my face. I only felt safe with Ted.

  There was so much I didn’t know, then.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Ted and I both had last period free, and we spent it in the back of his Rover at Echo Bridge, Belknap’s answer to Inspiration Point. Once part of an aqueduct that carried water from Lake Cochichewick in North Andover into one of the reservoirs that ring Boston, the bridge was partially hidden in the woods and consisted of a series of small brick and stone arches on the sloping banks, with a single large arch leaping the Souhegan River. On one side of it was Aqueduct Park, in a neighborhood of large Tudor-style houses, but coming from school, we took a small dirt road that turned off Riverview Street and ran past a few small, shabby houses, coming to a dead end in a patch of woods. A narrow footpath lead through the trees down to the bridge, with a series of stone steps descending from the top to a wooden platform below, where you could yell whatever you wanted and hear the eponymous echo. Upstream, the river was calm and flat as a mirror, but downstream the river cut through Polk’s Gorge and ran rough and white for maybe a quarter mile before calming again, eventually merging with the Charles River downstream in Newton. I liked the bridge, which wore moss like shreds of a green velvet gown and was covered with spray-painted proclamations of love and hate and prid
e, but Ted and I tended to stay in the car when we went there. With the backseat laid flat, there was plenty of room to stretch out, and parked down by the woods, it was fairly private.

  It was just over a week after Hugh raped me, and I was keeping all my clothes on. Ted and I had been sleeping together for months, but I was afraid that if he saw me naked, he’d know everything, as if my skin was covered with Hugh’s fingerprints. But in the back of the car, wrapped in Ted’s thick, sinewy arms, listening to his heartbeat through his shirt, it felt like no one would ever hurt me again. Unfortunately, Ted was confused by my newfound chastity.

  “Court,” he asked. “What’s going on with you?”

  I gazed into his eyes, which were a dappled green, like new leaves in the sun. He had a hand on my cheek and looked at me with concern. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about Hugh.

  So instead I said, “You’re going to be late for soccer practice.”

  Ted twisted around so he could see the clock on the dashboard. I lay back and admired his broad shoulders and the tendons in his neck while he craned over to check the time. I thought about his big fists pummeling Hugh’s face in. I thought, Tell him. But even now, I can’t say that if I had, it all would have turned out differently. I sat up and smoothed stray hairs back into my French twist.