So I’ve done a good job of clearing my mind of this girl that I’ve got no business thinking about anyway when she appears out of the rain. I’m coming around the bend of the sharpest curve in the whole county when I see someone walking, shoulders hunched, and I remember passing a car that had slid off the road a ways back.
I slow down so I don’t hit them, but I stop because I see that the person is unmistakably female. I would stop anyway—just to be clear—but there’s more of an incentive when the rain has plastered her already tight clothing to a very fit body. I swing alongside, roll down the passenger window, and say, “Need some help?”
I don’t realize it’s Alex until she raises her head, dark hair hanging in wet sheets on either side of her face. She looks at me carefully, as if she’s trying to remember who I am (it hurts more than I want to admit), and then there’s the phantom of a smile.
“Jack?”
She says it quietly, as if she’s either unsure that’s my name, or like she’s been waiting for a chance to talk to me and can’t quite comprehend that I’m actually in front of her. I hope like hell it’s the second option, because that’s exactly how I feel.
“Yeah,” I say. “You okay?”
I realize the second they’re out of my mouth those words are both the last thing I said to her two weeks ago, and the single most asinine thing I can say to anyone who is drenched and walking away from a broken-down vehicle. I reach across my passenger seat and pop the door. “Want a ride home?”
Alex chews her bottom lip for a second, and it kills me because I know she’s wondering if she can get in the car with me and not end up in a hole in the woods like her sister. I don’t say anything. It’s her call.
She releases her lip, leaving behind two little white indents, and says, “That would be ni—” She stops, searching for a different word. “Convenient.”
When she gets in the passenger seat, I smell rain and girl and a hint of chemicals.
I pull away, all the conversations I’d imagined us having since we talked last leaking out of my brain completely. So I say, “Were you swimming?”
“No. Why would I be?”
“Nothing, it’s just . . . you smell like the pool, or chlorine, or . . . something.”
“It’s bleach. I’m doing my SYE at the animal shelter and we clean out the cages on Saturdays. Turn right here.”
I brake and look for the road, aware that she hasn’t given me her address or any real directions to her house. “Here?”
She nods, but is quiet after that. I clear my throat.
“Doesn’t Peekay volunteer at the shelter, too?”
Alex wrinkles her nose, sending her freckles into a huddle just on the bridge. “That’s not her real name, is it? I always wondered.”
“It’s what we call her. PK because she’s the preacher’s kid, you know?”
Alex nods and looks down at herself. “These are her clothes. That’s why they’re so tight on me.”
There are about a thousand sex jokes Park would trot out right now about girls wearing other girls’ clothes and naughty overnights. I’m so glad he’s not here. But it makes sense to me suddenly why I was so surprised to see Alex’s face on the trim silhouette that emerged from the rain.
She’s slipped out of the conscious thought of just about every guy around because she doesn’t make herself visible. Other girls push the dress code, showing a solid few inches of cleavage or leggings that hug so tight you don’t need an imagination. The cheerleaders’ skirts are short enough you can easily pinpoint where leg makes the curvy transition into ass.
But Alex is different, remarkable because her clothes are utterly nondescript. She wears jeans that give no clue what’s underneath and solid-color shirts that are all function, not fashion, like they’ve done their job of keeping the wearer from being naked and that’s all that can be expected. I notice these things because in a sea of flesh, all I can look at is Alex’s hair swinging as she walks.
It’s been like that since I saw her face the night I ran away from a dead body in the woods, shame tearing through the high of weed and sex to punch me so hard that I had to stop to catch my breath fifty feet away from that circle of flashlights. Three years I’ve been trying to find the right things to say to this girl sitting in my passenger seat, and all that pops out of my idiot mouth is:
“Well, you look nice in Peekay’s clothes.”
“I . . . thank you,” she says awkwardly, like the words don’t quite fit around her tongue. “Turn left.”
“You really do.” I plow ahead. “I didn’t know you were so fit.”
It’s an incredibly stupid thing to say, but it’s also the only thing on my mind. She’s put together in a way that seems a little dangerous, all whip-thin and muscle. On a guy that build means he can kick your ass, but he can also lean against a wall and you don’t see him until he wants to fuck with you.
I don’t know what it means on a girl, but I know I like it.
“I run a lot,” Alex says. “I like to be outside. Turn left again. It’s the third house.”
It’s pretty much the only one. The other two are abandoned farmhouses with rotting barns splitting like old shoes, ancient bales of straw hanging out of busted haymows. But Alex’s house is nice and shiny, the kind that you pick out of a catalog and someone builds in two weeks. They’re expensive and they look good, but it’s good skin with a folding skeleton, a house that will collapse in forty years while the farmhouses down the road with no windows and sagging porches will stand against the elements for another century.
I pull into the driveway, but she stays in the car and looks at me for a second longer than necessary. My heart goes up into my throat.
“Thank you,” she says again, this time thinking through each syllable so it comes out a little more smoothly. “That was ni—”
“Convenient,” I interrupt with her word from before and she smiles, the hint of a blush flushing her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and those words flow out easily, like she says them a lot. “I’m not used to . . .”
“Talking to boys?” I supply.
“Yes.”
“Well, get used to it,” I say, and before I even think about what I’m doing, I give her a punch on the arm. Which, it turns out, might have been the best thing I could do because she busts out laughing and punches me back.
And it kinda hurts.
11. ALEX
Sometimes I forget for one second and it hurts.
It’s a different kind of pain than the constant, the weight that hangs from my heart. It swings from twine embedded so deeply that my aorta has grown around it. Blood pulses past rope in the chambers of my heart, dragging away tiny fibers until my whole body is suffused and pain is all I am and ever can be.
But sometimes it swings just right and there’s a moment of suspension when I can’t feel it. The rope goes slack and the laws of physics give me one second of relief. I can laugh and smile and feel something else. But those same laws undo me, and when it swings back there’s a sharp tug on my heart to remind me that I forgot.
Anna told me I would understand about boys one day.
She said that everything would change and I would look at them differently, assess their bodies and their words, the way their eyes moved when they talked to me. She said I’d not only want to answer them but that I’d learn how, knowing which words to use, how to give meaning to a pause.
Then a man took her.
A man took her before I learned any of these things. He took her and kept her for a while, put things inside of her. Of course the obvious thing, but also some others, like he was curious if they’d fit. Then he got bored. Then he got creative.
Then my sister was gone and I thought: I understand about boys now.
And she was right. Everything did change. I look at them differently and I assess their bodies and watch their eyes and weigh their words.
But not in the way she meant.
I remember th
e night Anna left, a casual see you later tossed over her shoulder as I sat in the living room with a book. I grunted in response, having told her a million times before not to talk to me when I was reading. She usually kept chattering until I’d raise my eyes and say, “I’m trying to read,” to which she’d mock sympathy and say, “Oh, honey, I thought you knew how. This is so sad.”
It was a tired joke, one she used every time but somehow made me smile anyway. She didn’t trot it out that night, instead making for the back door like she couldn’t get out of the house fast enough, which I totally understood. She and Mom had had it out earlier, a real rip-roarer that had centered over whether or not I should go to a month-long poetry camp. Mom was all for it, seeing an opportunity to get me far away from her under the guise of good parenting.
Anna said I shouldn’t go, that sending me out into the world alone was like letting a wolf loose, and her, my keeper, nowhere near. I was mad at her when she left, even though a part of me knew she was right.
Then she was gone, and I unlocked the cage myself.
The first time that I acted on my rage it could have gone very badly, but fate played along with me and I had my way. I’ve learned things since then, watched videos with instructors who teach you where to punch, what to pull, things that pop. I’m living my life waiting for the man who comes for me like one did for Anna, with hungry eyes behind the wheel and rope in the trunk.
I’m ready.
But I don’t know how much longer I can wait.
12. PEEKAY
When I get to school on Friday morning there’s a cop car in the lot, which results in a lot of people hitting the brakes so that they’re actually going twenty in the school zone and more than a few pretending to clean bags of chips and scratch-off lottery cards out of their passenger seats and casually walking to the Dumpster as if there isn’t pot in the gas-station bag they’re carrying. I cram a couple of empty beer bottles under my driver’s seat with my heel while pretending to check my phone for texts after I park.
Sara meets me in the hall with a simple, “What the fuck?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I haven’t actually seen the cop anywhere, even though half the student body found a reason to walk past the fishbowl of the office and glance in to see if anybody was standing there in cuffs. The secretary spots me and waves me in, making my heart go up so far into my throat my eyes probably bulge a bit.
“What’s up, Karen?” I ask, trying to ignore Sara miming at me through the window to run for it. The secretary goes to my church so I’m allowed to call her by her first name, which I admit I kind of lean on for a second, like maybe if I’m really nice to her she’ll hide me under her desk when the cop comes to quiz me about where I was and what I was doing last night. Answer: at Sara’s, pretty sloshed.
“Hey, sweetie pie,” she says. “The copier at the church is broken again so I ran off the bulletins here. Could you get these to your dad?”
My mouth twitches when she holds up her own bag from the gas station, straining against the huge stack of paper inside. “Don’t tell anybody,” she stage-whispers at me when I take it. “Technically I’m using school supplies for the church.”
“I doubt that fast-tracks you to hell,” I say before I can reconsider my language.
She laughs a little, her rhinestone-encrusted glasses moving up on her face about an inch as her nose crinkles.
“Hey, Karen,” I say, since we’re being conspiratorial. “What’s with the cop car?”
“Drug assembly,” she says. “You know . . .” She holds her fingers up to her mouth, and totally surprises me by using the right indication for pot instead of a cigarette. “We’ll be on a one-hour-delay schedule; everyone will go to the auditorium first thing. The principal will make an announcement soon, but you’ve got a hot tip so you can get a good seat.”
I tell Sara what’s up as we head to our lockers, the promised announcement drawing groans from the kids in the hall.
“Why can’t you have connections that can get us a hot tip for good seats to a Reds game?” Sara asks.
“I’ll see if they have a Lutheran night or something coming up,” I tell her, and she elbows me.
“What’s in the bag?”
I lean in a little closer to her than necessary when I answer. Carrying around church bulletins at school is not going to break me out of the preacher’s-kid label anytime soon. Sara’s trying not to laugh at me when Branley’s very bronzed, perfectly smooth shoulder knocks into mine hard enough to send the bag flying out of my hands, a hundred copies of the Lord’s Prayer and next week’s hymn numbers spreading out in a fan down the hall.
“Sorry,” Branley says. She’s on her knees restacking bulletins before she even looks up to see who she obliterated with her bony knob. Her eyes meet mine as I start scraping piles of paper into the bag, not caring that a bunch are getting bent.
“Oh,” she says, her hands freezing. “Sorry,” she mutters again, before her similarly tanned friend Lila pulls her to her feet and they head off toward the auditorium. Sara helps me with what’s left and we’re the last kids in the hall. Someone is tapping the microphone in the auditorium, the knock-knock sound filling our ears as we turn the corner to the double doors. Branley and Lila are standing in the doorway, heads craning as they look around the darkened room for the rest of the in-crowd.
“What’s going on?” I didn’t hear Alex come up behind me, so I jump when she asks, drawing the attention of the teachers lining the back wall.
“C’mon, girls, let’s go,” Miss Hendricks says, shepherding me, Sara, Alex, Branley, and Lila up to the front row—the only place there are five seats left.
“Good seats, sweet,” Sara hisses in my ear.
“Shut up,” I say, settling in with Sara on one side of me and Alex on the other. At least I didn’t end up next to Branley, both of us trying not to share an armrest or keep our legs from touching the entire time.
The principal takes the podium and tells us about how a member of the local police is here to give an important presentation, and reminds us that we’re representing our school. He trots out a few more stock phrases that none of us even hears anymore. We politely clap as the officer comes out, a few girls paying more attention once we get a good look at him.
He’s got the clean-cut thing going on, a good jawline, and the kind of body that makes me wonder if they actually rented him from somewhere. But he’s wearing a gun and walks like he’s taking each step really seriously, so I’m pretty sure he’s a legit cop. He takes the microphone off the podium and walks to the middle of the stage so we can see his whole body. No dumbass, this one.
“Hey, I’m Marilee Nolan’s brother,” he says, instead of introducing himself as Officer Nolan, which is smart since we were all going to surreptitiously text one another until we figured out why he looked familiar anyway. Over in the right wing Marilee buries her face in her hands, which I totally get because I feel the same way every graduation when my dad blesses the senior class.
“I graduated from here eight years ago,” he says. “Back then the rough kids smoked pot and the National Honor Society kids drank. Now the NHS kids are smoking pot and the rough kids are on heroin.”
There are a couple of giggles. Sara leans over to whisper in my ear, “And the preacher’s kid drinks,” to which I say “Damn straight” and give her a fist bump.
“Here’s the thing, guys,” Nolan goes on. “I’m supposed to come in here and talk to you about drugs, but I’m guessing most of you already know plenty.”
It’s really quiet in the auditorium. Nolan doesn’t have notes; the big screen is pulled down and there’s a laptop on the podium, but he’s not showing us pictures of meth teeth or heroin sores like we expected. He’s just talking to us. And we’re listening.
“I know a lot of you drink,” he says, and Marilee’s head goes a little farther down into her hands. My cheeks are burning for her because this is way worse than Dad saying a prayer over a bunch of teenagers. ??
?I know because I did it and I know because I find all the Natty Light cans out on 27.”
There are more than a few concerned glances shared at that point. Drinking out on County Road 27 was definitely something we thought flew under the radar.
“So you’re drinking, no big deal,” Nolan says. “Except maybe it is, not because you’re under twenty-one and it’s illegal, but because of what happens next.”
I expect the slides to start up then. Pictures of ruined kidneys or maybe a car crash where someone went through a windshield. But the screen stays blank and Nolan’s eyes land on the front row instead.
“What happens next is you’re more likely to be a victim of sexual assault,” he says, and I feel Alex tense beside me. “Girls, one in three of you.” He points right at me, Alex, Sara, Branley, and Lila. “There are five right here, so let’s be generous and say it’s just one. Which one of you will it be?”
From the left a boy yells, “Please say it’s Branley,” followed by a chorus of laughter.
“Let me guess, she’s the hot one, right?” Nolan says, smiling along with them. “Guess what—one of you is the one who’s going to do it.”
That shuts it down, fast.
“It’s a small town,” he goes on. “Ninety percent of rapes are acquaintance rapes—that means you know your attacker, girls. And guys, that means you know the girl you damaged physically, emotionally, and mentally. One in six of you boys is going to be sexually assaulted too, by the way.”
And that really kills the room.
“Boys are also more likely to OD than girls,” Nolan says, his eyes off us and narrowing in on Jack Fisher and his friends. “You’re also twice as likely to die in a car crash, a full quarter of which was your own damn fault because you were drinking at the time.”