Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  “Let’s just hang for a while.” It was Dean speaking. It was Dean’s arm pulling me into him. Dean was the only one there. Where had everyone gone?

  “Wait.” I dipped my head low, my forehead against Dean’s chest, anything to avoid his mouth, the angle at which it was coming at me.

  Dean wiggled his finger into the crevice between my chin and my neck, applying an upward pressure.

  “I’m really cold,” I protested even as I gave in to it. I swallowed when I felt Dean’s wet lips on mine. Just for a little bit, I thought. You only have to do this for a little bit. Don’t be rude.

  I toyed with Dean’s fat tongue, realizing my palms were on his chest, still pushing him away. I wrapped them around the back of his hairy neck obediently.

  Dean’s fingers were stumbling over the button of my khakis. It was too soon to stop, Dean wouldn’t believe me if I put an end to it now. As calmly as I could, I broke the kiss.

  “Let’s go inside.” I tried to make it sound breathy, seductive, but we both knew there was nowhere to make good on my promise inside the house. Too late, I realized my play was dangerously transparent, that I’d fatally miscalculated Dean. He seized the button on my pants with such gusto my pelvis thrust forward and my feet flew off the ground. I stumbled backward, landing on my wrist at a ruthless angle, and I let out an injured-puppy yelp that reverberated through the yard.

  “Shut up!” Dean hissed. He dropped to his knees and slapped me.

  Even before I’d come to Bradley, even before all the evidence proved I was the one not like the others, I was still not a girl you slap. The hot hand on my cheek undid me. I was screaming, the sound guttural and ancient, something I’d never heard before. There is so rarely an occasion in this modern life when your body takes over, when you find out what it will do, the smells and sounds it will release when it’s trying to survive. That night, on the ground with Dean, clawing and screeching, a starchy sweat collecting in my armpits, I found out, and not for the last time.

  Dean had the button undone and my pants low on my hips when the lights in the front of the house popped on, when we heard Olivia’s father hollering. Olivia burst out the back door and screamed at me to go and never come back. I heard Dean gasping behind me as I ran to the gate and my hands shook over the latch.

  “Move!” He shoved me out of the way and released the hook, the gate swinging open. Dean charged through but paused, inexplicably holding the gate open behind him so I could escape as well. The dark driveway was shortening ahead of me when I heard the patter of more footsteps behind me, the other boys, heading for Dave’s Navigator parked on the street.

  At the road, I turned right. I didn’t know where I was going, just that right was away from Dave’s car, away from the direction its nose pointed. I kept going until the light from Olivia’s house faded completely, and it was dark and I could collapse on the side of the road, my lungs sharp with the cold night air, my heart cartwheeling madly, as though I’d never run a mile straight in my life, as though it wasn’t the school sport I chose of my own accord.

  I was deep in the bowels of the Main Line, the mansions set far back from the road, burning bright and smug in the trees. I slipped into the brush at the mere vibration of a car on the road, peering through the lingering red and yellow leaves and exhaling only when I saw that it wasn’t Dave’s Navigator. Adrenaline had purged my body of any high, but by the way I zagged on the road, I could tell it would be hours before the vodka and Diet Coke wore off, hours before I realized my wrist was swollen to two times its size, that it was throbbing in sync with my heart.

  A plan had formulated in my mind: Get to Montgomery Avenue, then walk the straight line to Arbor Road, where I would turn right to get to Arthur’s house. I’d chuck pebbles at his window the way boys do when they like a girl in the movies. He would take me in. He had to.

  I kept turning on different roads, each time so sure that was the one that would lead me to the main strip. At one point I grew so desperate that I didn’t flee when a set of headlights appeared at the top of a steep hill, the vehicle to which they belonged low and sleek, definitely not Dave.

  As it rolled to a stop at the bottom of the hill, I jogged up to the window to ask how to get to Montgomery. The mom face in the window panicked, her mouth dropping open in horror and the car squealing beneath her foot. Her Mercedes shot out ahead of me, tearing into the night, in fast pursuit of the dinner party where she would no doubt regale her flaccid friends with the tale of her narrow escape of the hooligan carjacker who appeared like the boogeyman on Glenn Road.

  After what somehow felt like both forever and a second, I found a turn that opened up into a long row of streetlamps, a Wawa anchoring the curve of the last quarter mile. I was so impatient I broke into a run, my hands loose at my sides the way Mr. Larson taught us. “It takes energy to make a fist,” he explained, showing us his own, clenched tight. “And you want to conserve as much of it as possible.”

  I jogged under the gas station’s fluorescent lighting, shielding my eyes against their sudden, razor brightness, as though it were the sun that just burst free from the clouds. I pushed the door open with my shoulder, discovered how warm it was inside, realized just how raw I smelled now that I was in a contained space. I stopped a few inches short of the counter to keep the stench from reaching the cashier.

  “Montgomery Avenue is further up on the right, right?” I was horrified to realize I was slurring my words.

  The cashier looked up from his crossword puzzle, irritably. He blinked, and it was like it reset his entire face.

  “Miss.” He covered his heart with his hand. “Are you all right?”

  I touched my hand to my hair and felt dirt. “I just tripped.”

  The cashier reached for the phone. “I call the police.”

  “No!” I leapt forward, and he took a step back, still holding on to the phone.

  “Don’t do that!” he yelled. I realized for the first time that he was scared too.

  “Please,” I said. His finger had hit only the number nine. “I don’t need the police. I just want you to tell me how to get to Montgomery Avenue.”

  The cashier paused, both hands clutching the phone so tightly that the skin on his knuckles turned white. “You are very far away,” he said, finally.

  I heard the door open behind me, and I froze. I didn’t want to create a scene with another customer in the store. “Can you just tell me how to get there?” I whispered.

  The cashier slowly hung up the phone, looking unsure as he reached for a map.

  I heard my name.

  It was Mr. Larson behind me. It was Mr. Larson’s hand on my shoulder, guiding me out of Wawa, clearing the take-out bags from the passenger seat and urging me to get in his car. There was a surrender in being found that made me lose my grip on all my secrets. All my lies—the ones I told everyone, even myself. Tears shivering on my cheeks, one split with a cut so thin and midnight dark it could have been a pen mark, I started to tell him what had happened. And then I couldn’t stop.

  Mr. Larson gave me a blanket and water and an ice pack for my face. He wanted to take me to the hospital, but I became so hysterical at the suggestion that he agreed to bring me back to his apartment. The fact that he knew exactly how to handle the situation—get me to a safe place, calm me down, sober me up—didn’t surprise me then, but it does now. He was an adult, of course he knew what to do, but what I couldn’t have realized then is how new to it he was, how young twenty-four is when you’re not fourteen. Not two years earlier Mr. Larson had been skinny-dipping in Beebe Lake at Cornell with his fraternity brothers, was the only one to score with the freshman they all called Holy Shit because she was so beautiful you gasped “holy shit” when you saw her. We didn’t even look so far apart in age; if I’d been wearing makeup and a dress, we could have been going back to his apartment after a first date gone exceedingly well.

  I had made it to Narberth, had walked at least seven miles from Olivia’s house. It wa
s almost one in the morning, and Mr. Larson had been driving home from the bars in Manayunk, where most of his friends lived, where he would live if it wasn’t such a hike to Bradley in the morning. He had stopped at Wawa for a snack, he told me. Then he patted his middle and said, “I’ve been eating too many snacks lately.” He was trying to get me to smile, so I did, politely.

  Mr. Larson didn’t look fat to me, but when we got to his apartment and I was able to trace the perimeter of the living room, studying the pictures on his walls, the blanket he’d given me loosening around my shoulders, I saw that he used to have that same slim, muscular build that Liam and Dean had. Muscled shoulders worked hard for in the gym, but the slender waist revealing what would be there without the bench press. I’d stopped thinking of Mr. Larson as the best-looking guy I’d ever seen in real life after he’d become my coach, after he’d started getting on my case, but these pictures reminded me of what I’d seen on my first day of school. I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders, suddenly feeling like the V-neck of my sweater was too low.

  “Here you go.” Mr. Larson appeared in the doorframe, a soggy slice of Tombstone pizza on a plate for me.

  I ate obediently. I had insisted Mr. Larson not make anything for me, I had no appetite, but as I bit into the microwaved pizza, the center still doughy and cold, a rabid hunger overcame me. I ate that slice, then three more before I finally leaned back on the couch, spent.

  “Feel better?” Mr. Larson asked, and I nodded, grimly.

  “TifAni,” he began, hunching forward in the La-Z-Boy chair next to the couch. He had been careful to take that seat. “We need to talk about next steps.”

  I dropped my face in the blanket. The pizza had given me the energy to cry again. “Please,” I whimpered. Please don’t tell my parents. Please don’t tell the school. Please just be my friend and not make this any worse than it already is.

  “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this.” Mr. Larson sighed. “But we’ve had, problems, like this, with Dean before.”

  I used the blanket to wipe my face and raised my head. “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t the first time he’s physically assaulted another student.”

  “Tried to,” I corrected him.

  “No,” Mr. Larson said, firmly. “What he did at his house three weeks ago wasn’t trying, what he did tonight wasn’t trying.”

  Even after everything was said and done, after the ashes fermented the grass, after I moved on to college and then New York City and got everything I thought I wanted, Mr. Larson was the only person who ever told me that this, none of this, was my fault. I saw the momentary hesitation even in Mom’s eyes. You give a blow job, it can’t be done to you. How can it be what you say it is? How could you go to the party, be the only girl, drink that much, and not expect to have what happened happen?

  “My parents will never forgive me for ruining this,” I said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Larson promised. “They will.”

  I leaned back, resting my head against the couch and closing my eyes, my legs aching with all the Main Line roads I’d wandered. I could have fallen asleep right there, but Mr. Larson insisted I take his bed, the couch was fine for him, really, it was.

  He closed the door with a gentle click, and I climbed beneath his duvet, dark red and scratchy with wear. Mr. Larson smelled like a grown-up, like a dad. I wondered how many other girls had slept in this bed before me, if Mr. Larson had kissed their necks while he moved on top of them, slow and labored, like I had always pictured sex would be.

  I woke up in the middle of the night screaming. I never actually heard it myself. But it must have been pretty bad to send Mr. Larson panting into the room. He heaved the light on, standing over me and pleading with me loudly to wake up from my bad dream.

  “You’re okay,” Mr. Larson shushed when he saw my eyes focus on him. “You’re okay.”

  I gathered the blanket underneath my chin, everything covered except my head, the way Mom used to do with heaps of sand at the beach. “Sorry,” I whispered, embarrassed.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Mr. Larson said. “It was just pretty bad. I thought you might want to wake up from it.”

  My bodyless head nodded. “Thanks.”

  Mr. Larson was wearing a T-shirt, snug around the impressive slope of his shoulders. He turned to go.

  “Wait!” I held the blanket tighter. I couldn’t be in this room alone. My heart hiccuped threateningly in the cavity of my chest, the first sign of the spin. It couldn’t go on like this for much longer, and if it stopped, I needed someone there to call for help. “I can’t . . . I’m not going to be able to sleep. Can you stay?”

  Mr. Larson looked over his big shoulder at me in the bed. There was a sadness in his face I didn’t understand. “I could sleep on the floor.”

  I nodded, encouragingly, and Mr. Larson continued on to the living room, returning with a pillow and a blanket. He arranged his materials on the ground next to the bed before turning off the light and crouching low, rearranging them to fit his form.

  “Try to sleep, TifAni,” he said drowsily. But I didn’t try. I stayed up all night, listening to his soothing breath assure me everything would be okay. I didn’t know it then, but I had a lifetime of sleepless nights waiting for me after that.

  In the morning, Mr. Larson microwaved me a frozen bagel. He didn’t have cream cheese, only a crusty stick of butter with bread crumbs clinging to the ragged end.

  Even though the swelling in my face had gone down during the night, I still had that thin red line etched into my cheek. But it was my wrist that was really concerning me, so Mr. Larson offered to go to CVS and get me an Ace bandage and a toothbrush. After that, he wanted to drive me home, and he promised he would help me tell my parents what had happened. I agreed reluctantly.

  When he left, I picked up his phone and dialed home.

  “Hi, sweetie!” Mom said.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Before I forget, Dean Barton called for you a few minutes ago.”

  I clung on to the kitchen counter to steady myself. “He did?”

  “He said it was important, um, hold on, let me find the message.” I heard Mom rustling around, and it was all I could do not to scream at her to hurry up. “What, honey?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” I snapped, before I realized she was talking to Dad.

  “Yes, in the freezer in the garage.” Pause. “It’s in there.”

  “Mom!” I barked.

  “TifAni, relax,” Mom said. “Your father, you know how he is.”

  “What did Dean say?”

  “I have the message right here. Call soon as possible, about chemistry project. He left his number too. He sounded very nervous.” There was the dainty tinkle of her laugh. “He must like you.”

  “Tell me the number?” I found a Post-it and a pen in Mr. Larson’s drawer and wrote it down.

  “I’ll call you right back,” I said.

  “Wait, TifAni, when should I pick you up?”

  “I’ll call you right back!”

  I hung up the phone and hurriedly dialed Dean’s number. I needed to know what this was all about before Mr. Larson got back from CVS.

  Dean answered on the third ring. His hello was hostile.

  “Finny!” His tone changed completely when he realized it was me. “Where the hell did you go last night? We tried to find you.”

  I fed him a lie about how I ended up at the house of one of my teammates, who lives not far from Olivia.

  “Good, good,” Dean said. “So listen, about what happened last night. I’m really sorry.” He laughed sheepishly. “I was really fucked up.”

  “You hit me,” I said, so quietly I wasn’t even sure if I’d said it or not until Dean responded.

  “I’m really sorry, Finny.” Dean’s voice caught in his squat throat. “I feel sick that I did that. Can you ever forgive me? I won’t be able to live with myself if you don’t forgive me.”
<
br />   There was a desperation in Dean’s voice that I felt too—it would be so much easier if this never happened, and only we have the power to make it so.

  I swallowed. “Okay.”

  Dean’s breath sounded heavy on my ear. “Thank you, Finny. Thank you.”

  I called Mom back after we hung up and told her I would take the train.

  “And, Mom?” I asked. “Do you have any Neosporin? Olivia’s dog scratched my face while I was sleeping.” Olivia didn’t have a dog.

  When Mr. Larson returned I was dressed and ready with my lies. I insisted on taking the train, insisted he didn’t understand my parents, that it would be better if I told them on my own.

  “Are you sure?” Mr. Larson asked. His tone made it clear that he didn’t believe one shred of it.

  I nodded apologetically. “There’s an eleven fifty-seven from Bryn Mawr. We can make it if we leave now.” I turned away from the disappointment in his face so he couldn’t see my own. I sometimes wonder if this was the decision that set everything into motion. Or if it would have happened anyway, if, like the nuns at Mt. St. Theresa’s said, God has a plan for all of us and he knows the outcome before we’re even born.

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  I didn’t lie to Luke. I told him I was going to e-mail Mr. Larson a few days after we returned from Nantucket. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him, hadn’t been able to stop picturing the two of us shoulder to shoulder in a dim bar, a mixture of concern and lust on his face when I confessed my second dark secret to him: I’m not sure I can go through with this. The way he would kiss me—the restraint he would try to have at first because of his wife. Booth. Elspeth. But then he’d remember, it’s me.

  Then the credits of this little fantasy roll. Mr. Larson would never do that with me. I didn’t even really want to do that with him either. I was getting married. This was just cold feet doing the same shuffle they do for every bride. And it’s normal to have cold feet, Mom reminded me when I felt her out, let it drop that maybe I wasn’t as ready to get married as I thought I was. “Guys like Luke don’t come along every day,” she warned. “Don’t mess this up, Tif. You’ll never get anyone as good as him again.”