Taylor was bubbling with enthusiasm as we left the market in search of a restaurant where we could try authentic tapas for dinner. The streets were already dark despite the early hour because it was December, and dusk had fallen before six o’clock. We took the subway back to Kristijan’s neighborhood and found a restaurant where people were eating outdoors in a seating area warmed by heat lamps. It was oddly comfortable, and we decided to eat out there rather than indoors.
The menus provided to us listed options entirely in Spanish, so Taylor and I were at the mercy of Kristijan to order our meals.
“My only requirement is paella,” Taylor said. “I really, really want some vegetable paella.”
“It’s not going to be vegan,” I warned her. “There’s a ton of butter in that.”
“I’m not a vegan today,” Taylor announced. “In fact, I would also like to order the chorizo off the tapas menu.”
“Sometimes Taylor is a vegan,” I informed Kristijan, pretty sure there were no vegans in all of Croatia. “That means she doesn’t eat any meat or animal products, like milk or cheese or even honey, because bees make it.”
“Wow,” Kristijan told Taylor, clearly impressed. “But not today?”
“Not at all while in Spain. Bring on the pork belly.”
“OK,” Kristijan said, and then teased, “so one order of chorizo, one order of paella with snake meat and brains from the monkey, one order of squids fried in fats from the whale, one order of rabbits filled inside with ham…”
“You’re gross,” Taylor said, swatting him across the table with a napkin.
Kristijan cackled, and when our enormous meal arrived at the table he nauseated both of us by making a grand show of eating the little black beady eyeballs of the garlic shrimp he had ordered.
“Boys,” Taylor muttered, helping herself to a huge slice of tortilla, the potato and egg omelet that Kristijan had described, and a scoop of patatas bravas. “I’m so glad I don’t have brothers.”
“This food is amazing,” I commented, stuffing my face with spicy potatoes and fried artichokes. “I never want to go home again.”
“I wish we could just stay here, like this, until classes start again in January,” Kristijan said wistfully. We were all in high spirits once we dove into our food, eager to venture to Akrobat with our full bellies and dance the night away until sunrise. I had even put my conversation with my mother out of my mind, not permitting myself to imagine the elaborate punishment being concocted for me.
“Don’t you want to go to Zagreb for Christmas?” I asked.
He shook his head and then said, “There’s a bunch of weird stuff going on at home right now.”
“Like what?”
Kristijan took a deep breath and appeared, for just a second, reluctant to continue. “Magda. After we got home from Split in the summer, she started acting very strangely. She refused to wear her uniform to school because it’s a skirt and she only wanted to wear pants. My mother thought it was just a phase. Then she cut off all her hair in her bedroom with the... what’s the word?”
“Scissors,” Taylor assisted.
“Yes. That. A couple of weeks ago, however, she told my mom some crazy story about how Danko made her take off all her clothes for him during the summer. My mother thinks she’s lying, of course, just making up stories for attention. But my parents are bringing her to a doctor to have her head examined. They think she’s going crazy. I hate hearing about all of it.”
I almost dropped my fork. It had never, ever entered my mind that Danko might be playing his games with anyone other than me. Especially not sweet little Magda. Kristijan and Taylor kept talking, but I just sat with my mouth hanging open, not sure what to say next, waves of horror washing over me again and again, like the tide.
“That’s terrible,” Taylor was saying to him. “How can you be so sure your sister’s lying? I don’t think girls often lie about things like that.”
“You’d have to know my uncle,” Kristijan was saying. “He’s a great guy, totally normal. He wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“Yes, he would,” I said quietly. The words had blurted out before I could stop myself from saying them.
Both of their heads turned toward me, and I realized that there was no turning back. The secret was crawling out into the night, spilling into the air like a cloud of poisonous gas coming directly from me and hovering in the warm air heated by the lamps around us, over our spread of food.
“What do you mean?” Kristijan asked me with his eyebrows lowered.
I took a deep breath, and looked once at Taylor hoping that she wouldn’t think horrible things about me after I said what I knew I had to say at that point. “Danko would do that, because he has done that. To me. And worse.”
There was a gut-wrenching, terrible silence that followed my statement, which felt like it lasted an hour. I was thankful that everyone seated around us seemed to be having lively conversations in Spanish, ignoring my toxic confession.
“Betsey,” Taylor finally said. Her voice was calm and serious. “Have you ever told anyone about this before?”
I immediately wanted to retract everything I’d just said. My worst fears were coming true. Either they outright didn’t believe me, or they were under the impression that I’d done something to initiate his actions. I could lie, I realized. I could downplay everything Danko had done to me and make it sound like far less of a big deal. But implying that Magda was lying seemed wrong. That, I couldn’t do.
“No,” I said, “Because I didn’t think it was such a big deal. But Magda’s probably telling the truth.”
Taylor pushed her plate away and dropped the silky cloth white napkin from her lap onto it, finished with her food. “What do you mean, not a big deal? Betsey, if your stepfather was making you take your clothes off and touching you, that’s weird and sick! You should have told someone!”
There was a hot stickiness rising up my throat, threatening to make my eyes start to water. My heart was racing. I just wanted to take my words back and hit replay on the whole night. Now Taylor knew, and worse, Kristijan knew, and neither of them would ever think of me the same way again. Just like when the bus on which Nicola and I had been hiding the night of the Fall Fling had pulled out of the Treadwell parking lot, I had set bad events in motion that couldn’t be reversed. The dominos were falling. I was just going to have to wait in anguish until every last one fell over.
“Who would I have told?” I said, in a voice louder than I intended. “My mom? How do you suppose I would have gone about telling my mom that her husband – who she’s in love with – made me do weird stuff with him?”
“She’s your mother!” Taylor exclaimed. “It’s her job to project you.”
A million images of my mother popped up in my head of her wearing her patterned silk blouses, her high heels, carrying her chic briefcases, mobile phone pressed to her ear. My mother had a different job to do, one that involved selling makeup and presenting an exterior image to the whole world that was one of flawless, feminine perfection. That job was her primary job. Protecting me was nowhere near as important to her as doing that job well.
“Betsey,” Kristijan said finally. “We have to do something. I feel so bad that we didn’t believe Magda.”
“I don’t know what you’re proposing to do,” I shrugged, forcing another forkful of potatoes into my mouth. “Call the police? Call Danko? Be my guest.”
“What about your dad?” Taylor asked. “Couldn’t you tell him?”
I rolled my eyes, not wanting to admit that telling my dad had been my original plan until I realized that he didn’t especially want his life complicated with my sob stories any more than my mom did. “I really don’t think he’d care,” I said.
Taylor stared at me in disbelief. “Are you kidding? Your dad is going to flip out.”
“He’s not going to flip out, because he’s never going to know,” I reminded her.
Taylor looked at Kristijan as if the two o
f them, who had only known each other a matter of hours, were forming an alliance against me. “Look, Betsey. I hope you don’t get mad at me, but if you’re not willing to tell someone, I have to. I mean, how have you even been living at home with your stepfather if he’s taking advantage of you?”
She studied me, and I stared down at my food. The answer was that I wasn’t living at home. I was living at Treadwell.
“Oh my god,” Taylor exclaimed suddenly. “That’s why you’re at school with me! You convinced them to send you to Treadwell so that you could get away from him.”
Now it was all out in the open. I felt as exposed and as vulnerable as I had felt the night Danko had driven me away from the beach. Only I wasn’t on a desolate road where no one could see me, I was at a very crowded, glamorous restaurant and I was on the verge of breaking into loud, uncontrollable sobs.
“That’s not exactly how it happened,” I said, hearing my voice tremble dangerously. I feared now the whole night was ruined. No one would want to go to Akrobat anymore. Instead of listening to loud dance music and dancing until we were delirious and sweaty, this night was about to turn into one of mortifying, serious conversations. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now, because I do go to Treadwell, and I never see my stepfather anymore, except that he’s on his way here right now to pick me up tomorrow.”
Kristijan looked alarmed. “Why is he coming to Madrid?”
“He’s in Paris,” I said. “My mom decided she wants me to come home for Christmas so he’s meeting me here.”
There was no reason at that point to reveal to Taylor and Kristijan that I had lied to my mom about coming to Madrid. I really didn’t want either of them thinking even worse things about me than I assumed they already were.
“Betsey,” Taylor said, “you can’t leave here with him. I’m serious.”
I took a deep breath, just wanting to restore the night back to the festive tone I had been enjoying before all of this discussion about Danko had begun. “Look, could we just talk about something else? I am super uncomfortable right now. I just want to go to Akrobat.”
We paid for dinner and Taylor insisted on using the bathroom before we began what Kristijan assured us would be a long but picturesque walk to the night club. Kristijan and I sat in uncomfortable silence in her absence across from each other at the table. It was getting late, and many of the other patrons had already paid and left.
“I’m sorry about all that stuff we were talking about before,” I said, not wanting to leave things dangling awkwardly between us.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said.
I looked toward the interior of the restaurant, and saw Taylor pacing just inside the door, talking on her cell phone. Our eyes met and she looked away quickly. I had a fleeting hope that she hadn’t called her dad, but relaxed. It was more likely that she was on the phone with Todd, giving him one last chance to explain himself before we ventured off toward Akrobat for the night in pursuit of the guy who had broken her heart over the summer.
Akrobat was unlike any nightclub I had ever seen in New York. It was three stories high, with balconies on each floor overlooking the main dance floor. Bright red neon lights lined the balconies and illuminated the undersides of black leather couches positioned around the dance area and bar. The interior of the club was circular, and mirrors lined the walls. I took a picture for Nicola, because it was precisely the kind of over-the-top trashy European glamour she would have loved. As Kristijan had predicted, the bouncers outside, who hadn’t spoken much English, let us in even though I bashfully claimed to have left my ID at our hotel. We were lucky to have arrived at what was considered to be early by nightclub standards, or Kristijan and I might not have been permitted inside.
The music was deafeningly loud, the kind of obnoxious thump-thump-thump electronica that Bijoux loved. Taylor looked around nervously as we ordered bottled water at the bar. Thankfully, nightclubs in Europe were a little more forgiving with their dress codes than those in New York. Because they mostly catered to tourists, no one faulted us for wearing jeans and sweaters instead of tight dresses. Kristijan pulled his wool sweater over his head and tied it around his neck, revealing a t-shirt with a slogan on it in Croatian. It was sweltering inside the club despite cool air being pumped in through the ventilation system, which we could distinctly feel blowing on us in certain areas of the dance floor.
The DJ in the booth when we arrived, visible because the turntables were on a raised platform in plain view of everyone in the club, was a heavyset guy with a million tattoos, wearing sunglasses. Unlike at clubs in New York where DJ’s were typically hidden away in an obscure booth on an upper level, in Europe the DJ’s appearance was always a part of the spectacle of the night.
“That’s not Jake,” Taylor told us defensively.
We eventually wandered out onto the dance floor and elbowed our way into its center. Taylor suddenly grabbed my arm and screamed into my ear, “That’s him!” She pointed across the club toward the bar at a guy with shiny blond hair that hung straight to his shoulders. He had broad shoulders but was skinny, and I could see why Taylor would think he was cute, even though he was totally not the kind of guy I would have thought to be her type. There was nothing studious or intellectual-looking about this guy. He looked like the kind of guy who had probably spent a lot of time serving detention. And like the kind of guy who had probably made out with a lot of girls. Everything about him, from his posture to the hand motions he used as he casually chatted with the bartender, oozed confidence.
“I think I want to go say hi before his set starts,” Taylor said. I asked her if she wanted me to accompany her, and she insisted on approaching him alone. She bounced off into the crowd, disappearing into the sea of thrashing, gyrating bodies, until I saw her over the tops of dancers’ heads as she emerged on the other side of the dance floor. She waved shyly at Jake, and he set his bottle of water down on the bar. He cartoonishly rubbed his eyes as if he couldn’t believe she was really standing in front of him, and then he held out his arms so that they could awkwardly hug.
I’m not sure what possessed me to turn my phone on and check my text messages an hour later when I stepped into the long line to use the bathroom. I ignored my missed calls, and was confused to find that I had seven new text messages, from a very strange variety of people. I clicked through them from most recent to oldest.
PHOEBE 11:59 PM
Betsey, stay with Taylor at her hotel until your dad arrives. Don’t leave the hotel with anyone.
DAD 11:45 PM
You just stay with Taylor and I’ll be there at 9 tomorrow.
DAD 11:43 PM
I’ll be on a flight departing Newark at 7:35. It lands in the morning.
BIJOUX 11:41 PM
Don’t go with Danko if he meets you in Madrid! Dad is on his way and says he is going to MRDR him!
DAD 11:40 PM
Chase just called me and you’re not answering your phone.
MOM 11:32 PM
Betsey please call me as soon as you get this. I really must speak with you.
BIJOUX 11: 16 PM
Holy crap!! Where are you? Chase Atwood just called Dad and everyone is freaking out!!
So, Taylor had called Chase, it seemed. There were so many thoughts running through my mind, I wasn’t sure what to think first. It was mortifying to know that everyone now knew what Danko had done, it at least what I had said he’d done. Whether or not they believed me was another story, but the fact that my dad had presumably stopped whatever Christmas-type stuff he had been doing to drive to the airport after Chase called him led me to believe that he probably suspected I wasn’t lying. I had barely talked much to my dad since arriving at Treadwell, and hadn’t even known he’d be in New Jersey that week, but the fact that he was on his way to Madrid to get me made my chest swell with hope.
After finally having my turn in a bathroom stall, I found my way back to Kristijan and led him to the outdoor courtyard on the club’s first floor where every
one was going to smoke cigarettes. Despite the heat in the club, it was still shockingly cold outside, especially because our heavy coats were checked at the front of the club and the backs of our shirts and necks were damp with perspiration from dancing. Giving much consideration as to who the best person would be to call to find out exactly what was happening, I decided to risk the odds of my mother answering my sister’s phone, and called Bijoux.
“Oh, my god!” my sister squealed when she answered. “How did you get yourself to Spain, you nut?”
“I bought a ticket like any regular person,” I said, so happy to hear her voice sounding normal again that a smile stretched across my face. Standing behind me, Kristijan was playing with strands of my hair.
My sister said that Chase Atwood had called my dad that afternoon, New York time, and had told him that Taylor said I was hiding in Spain, trying to avoid contact with Danko because he had been sexually abusing me. I cringed when she said the phrase sexually abusing, even though I knew that’s technically what it had been. “Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?” Bijoux demanded.
“You were busy doing stuff with Tobin,” I said, barely able to hear her over the blasts of music. “Besides, I didn’t think you would believe me.”
“Why wouldn’t I have believed you?” Bijoux asked. “What he did was so messed up, Betsey. He should go to jail. I’m so mad at you for not talking to me.”
“I don’t want to talk about this right now,” I said, not wanting to imagine all of the further complications of my admission, like Danko possibly going to jail, or what my mom might have to say about any of it. “I guess I’ll see you when I get home.”
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