“That bass player was sweet. But I suppose you’re going to tell me he isn’t your type, the way you do about everyone?”
Benji replies with his eyes closed:
“He didn’t like hockey.”
She laughs at that, but as her little brother falls asleep Katia blinks away tears. Throughout his childhood, ever since the sandboxes and swings, she has seen girls look at him. As much because they dream of being able to rein him in as because they suspect it wouldn’t be possible. But they never understand why.
With each passing year, as Benji has grown older, Katia has wished him a different life. In a different place, another time, maybe he would have been a different boy. Milder, more secure. But not in Beartown. Here he is burdened with too much that no one sees, and here he has hockey. The team, the guys, Kevin. They mean everything to him, so he is everything they want him to be. And that’s a terrible thing.
Having to keep a secret from those you love.
* * *
Everyone talks about what it’s like. The school nurse, the poor teacher in charge of the sex education lessons, anxious parents, moralizing television programs, the entire Internet. Everyone. All your life you’re told exactly what happens. Even so, no one tells you it’s going to be like this.
Maya is lying on her back on Kevin’s bed. It’s her first time smoking marijuana. It feels different from how she’s imagined it—as if warmth has a flavor. The smoke seems to fly straight up into her head instead of down her throat. Kevin has posters of hockey players on the walls, trophies on all the shelves, but in one corner is an old record-player. She will remember that because it doesn’t fit in.
“It’s my dad’s old one. I like the way it sounds . . . the way it crackles when you switch it on,” he says, almost apologetically.
He puts some music on; she doesn’t remember what, just remembers the crackle. In ten years’ time she will hear the same crackle from a record-player in the corner of a bar or in a clothing boutique on the other side of the world and will be instantly transported back to this place, this moment. She feels the weight of his body on top of hers and she laughs—she’ll remember that. They kiss each other, and she’ll get these two questions more than any other she ever gets asked in her life: Who kissed whom? Did you kiss him back? He’s the one kissing her. And yes, she kisses him back. But when he forces her jeans down she stops him. He seems to think it’s a game, so she catches his hand and holds it tight.
“I don’t want to, not tonight, I’ve nev . . . ,” she whispers.
“Of course you want to,” he insists.
She flares up.
“Are you deaf or what? I said no!”
His grip on her wrists tightens, first almost imperceptibly, then to the point where it hurts.
* * *
Katia turns the car onto the little road that leads up into the forest just after the “Welcome to Beartown” sign. Drives toward the kennels. There are no lights out here, so when Benji wakes up and looks out through the window, he doesn’t realize what it is before they’ve already gone past.
“Stop,” he mutters.
“What?” Katia replies.
“STOP!” Benji shouts.
Shocked, she brakes hard. Her little brother has already opened the door and run out into the darkness.
* * *
Everyone talks about what it’s like. All your life you’re told exactly what happens: you get assaulted on a jogging trail, beaten and dragged into an alleyway on a package holiday, drugged in a bar and locked up by unknown adult men in a slum in a big city. Everyone warns you, time and time again, they warn all girls: This can happen! This is how it happens!
It’s just that no one tells you it can be like this: with someone you know. Trust. Have laughed with. In this boy’s room, beneath the posters of hockey players with the entire floor below full of classmates. Kevin kisses her neck, moves her hand out of the way. She will remember the way he touched her body as if it didn’t belong to her. As if it were a thing he had earned, as if her head and the rest were two separate objects, independent of each other. No one will ask her about that. They’ll just ask how much resistance she put up. If she was “clear” enough.
“Stop playing hard to get—you came upstairs with me, didn’t you?” he laughs.
She tries to pull his hand away, but he’s infinitely stronger than her. She tries to twist out of his grip and get up from the bed, but his knee is locked around her waist.
“Stop it, Kevin, I don’t wa . . .” His breathing echoes in her ear.
“I’ll be careful, I promise. I thought you liked me.”
“I do . . . but I’ve never . . . Stop it, please!”
She tries so desperately to move his hand that her nails tear two deep scratches in his skin. She will remember seeing drops of blood seep out, slowly, slowly, slowly, and the way he doesn’t even seem to notice. He is holding her down with his weight alone; he doesn’t even have to put any effort into it, and his tone changes instantly:
“Come on, for fuck’s sake! Stop playing hard to get! I can go downstairs and get whatever girl I want and fuck her instead!”
With a last effort Maya manages to pull one hand free, and hits him as hard as she can across the cheek.
“Go on, then! Do that!!! And LET GO OF ME!!!”
He doesn’t let go. His eyes just turn black. It’s as if he’s no longer in there anymore, the guy she had spent all evening joking around with. When she tries to stop his hand he closes his other fist tightly around her throat like a vise, and when she tries to scream his fingers are covering her lips. Lack of oxygen makes her slip in and out of consciousness, and in the midst of everything she will remember peculiar details that no one asks about: a button coming off her blouse when he tears it open, and the fact that she hears it land and bounce across the floor somewhere in the room. And she will remember thinking: “How am I going to find that later?”
* * *
They will ask her about the alcohol and marijuana. They won’t ask about the bottomless terror that will never leave her. About this room with its record-player and posters, from which she will never really escape again. One blouse-button somewhere on the floor, and a sense of panic that will be with her forever. She sobs noiselessly beneath his body, and screams silently behind his hand.
* * *
For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.
22
It’s Saturday night, and everything is different now. Ana just doesn’t know it yet. All she knows is that the older girls in the kitchen laugh at her cruelly when she asks after Maya.
“That little whore? She went off with Kevin. Don’t worry, sweetie, he’ll throw her back when he’s finished with her. No one on the team holds on to second-rate bitches!”
Their laughter tears holes in Ana’s lungs and her throat tightens. Granted, she could have gone off to look for her best friend, and stands there with her phone in her hand for several minutes without actually calling. But anger gets the better of her. Few disappointments can compare with the way you feel the first time your best friend dumps you for a boy, and there’s no more silent walk than the one that takes you home alone after a party when you’re fifteen years old.
Ana and Maya found each other as children when they saved each other’s lives. One pulled the other out of a hole in the ice, and in return she pulled the other out of her loneliness. They were opposites in many ways, but they both liked dancing badly, singing loud, and going fast on snowmobiles. That goes a long way. Best friends. Sisters before misters. And of all the things they’ve promised each other, the most important: we never desert each other.
The girls in the kitchen are still laughing at Ana. They’re saying something about her clothes and her body, but she’s no longer listening; she’s already heard it all in the school corridors and in comments online. Lyt staggers around a corner and catches sight of her, and Ana mutters: “Fuck off.” Because they all can. The w
hole lot of them.
As she walks out of the front door, she stops one last time and considers calling Maya. Maybe going upstairs to look for her. But she’s not going to beg and plead for attention. Even in a town that’s covered with snow three-quarters of the year, it’s unbearably cold standing in the shade of someone who’s a bit more popular than you are. Ana puts her phone on silent and drops it in her bag. Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.
She sees Amat and grabs hold of his shoulder. He’s so drunk he couldn’t even read the top line of an optician’s chart. Ana sighs.
“If you see Maya, tell her I couldn’t be bothered to wait for her to decide if she likes peanuts or not.”
Amat stammers at her in confusion. “Where . . . I mea . . . Wha . . . I mean . . . Who?” Ana rolls her eyes.
“Maya. Tell her I’ve gone.”
“Where . . . Where is she?”
The question makes his brain clearer, his voice more sober. Ana almost feels sorry for him.
“Oh, Amat, don’t you get it? Try looking in Kevin’s bedroom!”
Amat shatters into a thousand invisible pieces, but Ana doesn’t feel like staying, doesn’t want to be in this house when she herself falls apart. She slams the front door behind her and the night cold strokes her cheeks. Her breathing becomes easier immediately; her heartbeat calms. She grew up outside, and being stuck behind windows has always felt like being imprisoned. Social relationships, trying to make friends, be accepted, always starving and sandpapering herself smaller—it makes her feel claustrophobic. She takes the path through the forest in the darkness and feels infinitely safer there than in a house full of people. Nature has never done her any harm.
* * *
Behind a closed door on the upper floor of the Erdahl family house stays the only secret Maya has ever kept from her best friend: that right up to the last moment, when she could no longer breathe beneath Kevin, she kept telling herself one single thing: “I mustn’t be frightened. Ana will find me. Ana won’t desert me.”
* * *
Amat will never be able to explain his reasons. Jealousy, maybe. Pride, probably. An inferiority complex, possibly. Infatuation, definitely. There are two juniors sitting guarding the stairs, and when they tell him he can’t go upstairs he roars at them, surprising not just them but himself: “And which fucking line do YOU play in?”
During all those years in little league and the boys’ team, people kept saying his feet were superior, but that wasn’t what took him all the way. It was the way he saw things. His eyes were always faster than everyone else’s, he managed to see more than everyone else, remembered every detail of every attack. The position of the backs, the movements of the goalie, the tiniest shift in the corner of his eye when a teammate put his stick on the ice.
Intimidated, the juniors get out of the way. There are three sections to the staircase. On the upstairs landing there are photographs of the entire Erdahl family, and beside them pictures of Kevin alone. Pictures of him everywhere. In hockey gear when he was five. When he was six. When he was seven. The same smile every year. The same look in his eyes.
They will ask Amat exactly what he heard. Exactly where he was. He will never be able to say if it was a “no” or a “stop,” or just a desperate, muffled scream from behind the palm of a hand that made him react. Maybe none of those. Maybe he opened the door out of sheer instinct. They will ask him if he was drunk. They will glower at him accusingly and say: “But is it not the case that you are, and have been for many years, in love with the girl in question?” The only thing Amat will be able to reply to that is that his way of seeing was superior. Faster than his feet, even.
He pushes the door handle down and stands in the doorway to Kevin’s room and sees the violence and torn clothes. The tears and the fiery red marks left by the boy’s fingers on the girl’s neck. One body taking the other against its will. He sees everything, and afterward he will dream about the most peculiar details: exactly which posters of exactly which NHL players were on the walls. Amat will remember that for the simplest possible reason. He has the same posters on the wall above his own bed.
* * *
Kevin loses his concentration for two seconds when Amat rushes through the door. That’s twice as much time as Maya needs. She won’t remember it as a reaction but as a fight to the death. A survival instinct. She manages to knee Kevin hard enough to get a tiny gap in which to push his body out of hers. She hits him as hard as she can in the neck, and runs. She doesn’t know how she gets out of the room, who she passes on the way, if she hits or kicks the juniors guarding the stairs. Perhaps everyone at the party is too drunk to notice her, perhaps they only pretend not to see. She tumbles out through the door, and just runs.
The year is halfway into March, but the snow still embraces her feet as she marches along the side of the road in the darkness. Her tears are hot when they leave her eyelids but already frozen by the time they fall from her chin. “You can’t live in this town; you can only survive it,” as her mom says. Never has that been more true than tonight.
Maya tugs her jacket tighter around herself; she’ll never know how she managed to take it with her—her blouse is torn to shreds, the skin on her neck and wrists already black with finger-shaped bruises. She hears Amat’s voice behind her but doesn’t slow down. The boy stumbles a few last breathless steps in the snow before falling to his knees in it. He’s drunk and crushed as he calls her name. In the end she stops, turns with her fists clenched, and stares at him, her tears now caused by equal parts exposure and fury.
“What happened?” Amat whispers.
“What the hell do you think happened?” she replies.
“We need to . . . You need to . . .”
“What? What do I need to do, Amat? What the hell do I need to do?”
“Talk to someone . . . the police . . . anyone, you need to . . .”
“It won’t make any difference, Amat. It won’t make any difference what I say, because no one will believe me anyway.”
“Why not?”
She rubs the back of her glove across her eyes, and it comes away stained with eyeliner. Amat is crying, too, now. They are fifteen years old and the entire world has collapsed in the course of a single evening. A solitary car passes them; Maya’s eyes flare with the reflection of the headlights. When it’s gone past, something goes out inside both her and her eyes.
“Because this is a fucking hockey town,” she whispers.
Amat is left kneeling in the snow as she disappears down the road. The last thing he sees before night swallows her is her silhouette against the sign that says, “Welcome to Beartown.”
* * *
Soon she won’t be anymore.
* * *
Ana opens the door to the house. It swings open without a sound on freshly oiled hinges. Her dad is asleep; her mom no longer lives here. She walks through the kitchen toward the storeroom. The hunting dogs greet her with cold noses and warm hearts. She does what she has done a thousand times in her childhood when the house stank of alcohol and her parents were screaming at each other. She sleeps with the animals. Because the animals have never done her any harm.
* * *
For people who have never lived where darkness and cold are the norm, where anything else is the exception, it is hard to understand that it is possible to find someone who has frozen to death with their jacket open, or even naked. But when you get really cold your blood-vessels contract and your heart does all it can to stop blood reaching the frozen parts of your body and then coming back to your heart cold. Not unlike a hockey team suffering a penalty and playing at a numerical disadvantage: prioritize resources, play defensively, defend the heart, lungs, and brain. What happens when the defense finally collapses, when you get cold enough, is that your box play falls apart, your goalie does something stupid, your backs stop communicating with each other, and the body parts that were previously shut off from circulation are suddenly switched back on again. And
then, when warm blood from your heart flows back to your frozen feet and hands, you experience an intense rush of heat. That’s why you suddenly imagine that you’re overheating and start to take your clothes off. Then the chilled blood goes back to your heart and it’s all over. Every couple of years or so, someone in Beartown goes home drunk after a party and takes a shortcut across the ice, or gets lost in the forest, or sits down to rest for a moment, and is found lifeless in a snowdrift the following morning.
When Maya was little she often used to think how strange it was that her mom and dad, the two most overprotective parents in the universe, chose to settle here, of all places. Somewhere where even nature itself tried to murder their daughter every day. As she’s gotten older she’s come to realize that the admonitions “don’t go out on the ice alone” and “don’t go into the forest on your own” are almost designed to promote team sports. Every child in Beartown grows up with the constant warning that the threat of death is ever-present if you’re alone.
She tries calling Ana, but gets no answer. She can’t force herself to walk down the main street through town, so she wraps her jacket more tightly around herself and takes the narrow road through the forest instead.
When the car drives past her in the darkness and stops abruptly fifty yards ahead of her, panic hits her with full force. The adrenaline in her body reacts instantly, convincing her that someone is about to run up and grab her and do it to her all over again.
* * *
One of the many things snatched from the girl that night is the place where she never needed to feel afraid. Everyone has a place like that, until it gets taken away from us. You never get it back again. Maya will feel afraid everywhere from now on.
* * *
Benji sees her through the car window with newly woken eyes. No one walks this way of their own volition at night, and he can see that she’s limping. He makes Katia stop, and is out in the darkness before the car comes to a halt. Maya is hiding behind a tree. You can’t do that for more than a minute or so in sub-zero temperatures—the cold forces you to move about in order to keep your circulation going, whether you want to or not. Benji has been hunting in these forests with his sisters since he was big enough to hold a rifle, so he sees her. Maya knows he’s seen her. Katia calls from the car, but to Maya’s surprise Benji shouts back: