Sometimes the only thing worse than death is surviving.
It is morning and she is only mostly gone. Her hair is caked with puke. She hurts all over. She hurts inside. The floor is littered with her crumpled clothes and half a dozen used condoms. How vile this tiny sliver of gratitude: they only destroyed; they did not plant anything live inside her.
The bottom-feeders have cleaned her skeleton of all its flesh. She is washed up onshore, tangled with seaweed, smelling of decay. She crawls across the storm-tossed beach, over the rocks and garbage, over the beer bottles and cigarette butts and lifeless bodies. Over so many red cups.
Bodies all over the place, bodies everywhere, people who didn’t make it home last night. All these people down here while she was drowning.
Bodies stir. Eyes open and follow her ghostly walk to the door.
A laugh like glass breaking.
A voice in the darkness, giving her a new name:
Slut.
ERIN.
“You need to get a life,” Erin tells Grace at lunch because she won’t stop talking about Lucy Moynihan.
“Manners,” Rosina says.
“Being honest is more important than being nice,” Erin says. “I’m being honest.”
Grace is being annoying. Erin doesn’t understand why people are so insistent on letting each other get away with being annoying. If she’s being annoying, she wants someone to tell her about it, like Rosina does.
“Grace here hasn’t had the time we’ve had to become hopelessly apathetic,” Rosina says. “She still gives a shit. We gave a shit at the beginning, remember?”
“I never gave a shit,” Erin says, because it’s what she wants to believe, but she’s not quite sure she’s telling the truth. A tinge of discomfort spreads through her, a vague suspicion that perhaps there is a different truth beneath the surface that is staying murky and hidden. Usually, she is a big fan of truth, but these sneaky kinds of truth are definitely not her favorite.
“Well, I cared,” Rosina says. “I was fucking pissed.”
Erin remembers Rosina going up to that football guy Eric Jordan and spitting in his face, how it dripped off his nose in slow motion, how the entire hallway was silent in those moments it took for the gob to reach the ground, how he just laughed in her face, called her a spic dyke, and walked away. Then, like everyone else, Rosina realized caring was a waste of time. Like Erin, she realized caring hurts.
Rosina never actually talked to Lucy, the girl she supposedly cared enough about to spit in someone’s face to defend. But Erin knows there’s a difference between an idea and a person, how it’s so much simpler to care about something that does not breathe. Ideas do not have needs. They demand nothing but a few brief thoughts. They do not suffer or feel pain. As far as Erin knows, they are not contagious.
“Point the guys out to me,” Grace says. “Are they here?”
“Eric has third lunch, I think,” Rosina says. “But Ennis is here. Over there at the troll table.” Rosina nods toward the center of the lunchroom, where the worst people sit. The girls who have been making fun of Erin since she moved here freshman year, the guys who don’t even bother lowering their voices around her when they brainstorm about what it must be like to fuck “someone like her.” Compared to the rest of them, Ennis is quiet, even soft spoken, the one you’d least suspect to be a monster.
“Ennis Calhoun is the one with the pubey goatee,” Rosina says. “And you’ve probably seen Eric around school. He always has a gang of trolls following him around. There was a third one, the ringleader, Spencer Klimpt, but he graduated. Works at the Quick Stop off the highway. Real winners, those guys.”
“I don’t think ‘pubey’ is a word,” Erin says.
“Is Ennis that guy sitting by Jesse?” Grace says. Erin recognizes the look on Grace’s face as disappointment, as if she expected that large, dopey boy named Jesse to be someone else, someone who does not sit by Ennis Calhoun at lunch.
“You know him?” Rosina says.
“He goes to my church.”
“He’s waving at you,” Erin says. “He looks like a stuffed animal.”
“You like that guy?” Rosina says.
“No,” Grace says. “Never.”
Everyone thinks Erin can’t read people. That’s what they’ve been telling her for her whole life. But Erin has no problem recognizing obvious emotions. She knows what crying means. She knows what angry shouting sounds like. She knows teasing. She knows the looks between people when she accidentally walks into the wall when rounding a corner, when she blurts out inappropriate things in class, when she rubs her hands together so hard they make a sound. It’s the more subtle things that get confusing. Things like irony, attempts to hide feelings, lying. For these things, Erin’s spent countless hours learning, getting tutored in reading facial expressions and interpreting body language. She has been trained to pay attention, to study human emotion and relationships with an intensity rivaled only by psychologists and novelists. Because it is not intuitive, because she is an outsider, sometimes she sees things other people miss.
For instance, she suspects Grace may have been considering liking this Jesse guy. If she didn’t like him, she’d have no reason to look so disappointed by the news that he may not be likable. Erin notices Jesse’s happy stuffed-animal face turn sad as soon as he sees the way Grace’s looking at him. Maybe he was considering liking her, too.
“They look so normal,” Grace says. “Those guys. You can’t even tell they—”
“Did you know that otters rape baby seals?” Erin says, knowing full well how shocking and inappropriate her words are, but she desperately wants to change the subject. Sometimes shocking people is the best way to get their attention. “People think they’re so cute and cuddly, but they’re still wild animals.”
“Jesus, Erin,” Rosina says.
“They can’t help themselves,” Erin says. “It’s in their natures.”
“Someone has to do something,” Grace says.
“About sea otters?” Rosina says. “Like sensitivity training?”
“About Lucy. About those guys. They can’t just get away with it. They can’t just sit there eating lunch like nothing happened.”
“You’ve seen the website, right?” Rosina says.
“What website?”
“Trust me,” Rosina says. “You’re better not knowing.”
Grace looks at Erin for her opinion, but Erin just shrugs.
“What website?” Grace says again. “I want to know.”
“It’s more of a blog, really,” Rosina says. “It’s called The Real Men of Prescott. Hey, Erin. Give me your phone.”
“You have a phone,” Erin says.
“I have a crap phone,” Rosina says. “I need yours.”
“Who writes it?” Grace says.
“Nobody knows for sure,” Rosina says, typing something on Erin’s phone. “But most people think Spencer Klimpt is the main one behind it. It surfaced right around the time Lucy and her family left town. The blog had a couple hundred followers last time I checked.” Rosina scrolls down the phone’s screen. “Shit! It has more than three thousand now.” She shoves the phone at Grace like she can no longer bear touching it. “Here,” she says. “See for yourself.”
They are silent as Grace scrolls through the blog. Erin hasn’t looked at it since she first heard about it at the end of last school year, but she can only imagine what Grace is reading. Stuff about how to pick up girls. Rants about how feminism is ruining the world. Degrading descriptions of women the author has supposedly slept with.
“Oh my God,” Grace says quietly. “This is horrible.”
“There are a bunch of links on the sidebar to other sites just like it, even bigger ones,” Rosina says with disgust. “It’s called the ‘manosphere.’ All these guys online, a whole network of assholes who believe this shit. So-called ‘pick-up artists’ sharing advice on how to manipulate women. They call it a ‘men’s rights movement,’ but basically
they just hate women.”
There is so much Erin has tried to forget. Not just this. Not just Lucy. The wrong is bigger than Lucy, bigger than their school and town, bigger than all of them. But it is also as small as her own private memories. It is a tiny box she locked them in and left back in Seattle.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Erin says, pulling her phone out of Grace’s hand. She is thinking a trip to the library might be in order.
“I appreciate your passion, Grace,” Rosina says. “But Lucy’s gone. No one knows where she went. No one can help her.”
“Maybe we could,” Grace says. “We could help her.”
Rosina laughs. Erin shudders. “Even if we wanted to—which we don’t,” Rosina says, “who would listen to us? Erin and I are like the freaks of the school and you’re new, and no offense, but you’re kind of sabotaging your social capital potential by hanging out with us.”
Grace is different today, Erin thinks. Until now, she’s mostly just sat quietly and a little hunched over, like she’s not quite sure she has permission to speak. Now she won’t stop talking. Erin thinks she liked the old Grace better. This new Grace is far too exhausting. This new Grace is bringing up things Erin doesn’t want to think about, and certainly doesn’t want to care about.
“Hey,” Rosina says. “Think of the positive. At least we’re not getting married off to old guys at nine years old and getting our clits cut off.”
“Gross,” Erin says. “Too much.” She looks at the chopped nuts and veggies in her bento box, and for the moment she’s glad Mom has made her a vegetarian.
“Why do you care so much?” Rosina says. “You never even met Lucy.”
“I don’t know,” Grace says. “It’s weird. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Maybe your house is haunted,” Rosina says. “And you’re possessed by her ghost. Except she’s still alive.” Rosina’s face pales. “I hope.”
Grace opens her mouth like she’s going to say something, but then closes it and starts chewing on a fingernail. Maybe she does think her house is haunted.
“Get a hobby,” Erin says. “You need a hobby.”
“Or a job,” Rosina says. “You can have mine. Do you want to get paid less than minimum wage and get yelled at all night by my uncle?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Grace says, obviously not listening. She is looking over at the troll table like she’s thinking the kind of thoughts that can get a person in trouble.
“You can’t change nature,” Erin says, but she knows Grace doesn’t hear her, so she doesn’t say the rest of what she was going to say, which is probably for the best because she knows Rosina would get mad at her. They’ve had this conversation before, and it ended in Rosina throwing a water bottle at her.
What Erin was going to say but didn’t is that boys are animals, and they act like animals because it’s in their natures, even the ones who seem cute and cuddly like sea otters. But like otters, they will turn ruthless in an instant if certain instincts are triggered. They will forget who you think they are supposed to be. They will even forget who they want to be. Trying to change them will never work. The only way to stay safe is to stay away from them completely.
Erin knows none of us are better than animals. We are no more than our biology, our genetic programming. Nature is harsh and cruel and unsentimental. When you get down to it, boys are predators and girls are prey, and what people call love or even simple attraction is just the drug of hormones, evolved to make the survival of our species slightly less painful.
Erin is lucky to have figured this out so young. While everyone else wastes their lives running around chasing “love,” she can focus on what’s really important and stay away from that mess completely.
US.
A girl sits in the corner of her classroom, looking at all the backs of heads, trying to take deep breaths and notice without judgment the feelings of rage bubbling up inside her. She tries to remember the mindfulness techniques she learned over the summer. The only way out is through, she repeats silently to herself. She waits for the feelings to drift away like clouds.
It’s so strange how someone can be one person one day, then be transformed over the course of a few months, then come back to their previous life with completely different insides but all anyone still sees are the same old outsides. It’s not like she thought she’d come back from rehab and suddenly be able to have a normal high school experience, but maybe a part of her hoped there’d be space for a tiny reinvention. She thinks maybe she should do something different with her hair, dye it some drastic new color. But all people would see is the same girl with different hair. Her place has been carved out for her already. There is nowhere else here for her to fit.
She watches a couple flirt next to her. She notices the rage bubble up again, but focusing on her breath does nothing to distract her. She hates them with a fury that scares her. How dare they flaunt what this girl knows she’ll never have—that innocence, that romance, that feeling of potential? Whatever possibility of that she ever had was burned out of her a long time ago, before she even had a chance to know it was something she wanted.
* * *
A few seats away, in the desk assigned to Adam Kowalski, sits another student, nameless. The student watches the flirting couple with yearning, with a thick, heavy sadness that makes it hard to breathe.
I just have to make it one more year, the student thinks. One more year until I’m out of this school and out of this town, until I won’t have to hide.
But even then, they think. Is there anyone who could ever want a freak like me? Is there anyone who can love someone whose outsides will never fully match their insides?
* * *
On the other side of the school is a different set of students, kept mostly separate from the rest. Erin sits in the back of Mr. Trilling’s AP American History class, trying not to look in the general direction of Otis Goldberg, in fear that he’ll turn around the way he always seems to do at the precise moment she happens to be looking at him, his eyes making contact with hers like annoyingly precise lasers. Not that she looks at him often, or on purpose. She looks at all kinds of things. That’s just what eyes do. Erin’s eyes just happen to occasionally fall on him.
She can’t help it. He’s always raising his hand and saying surprisingly smart things. He’s always sitting there with his neck that’s tan and just a little muscly from cross-country, with tiny blond hairs that catch the dim light streaming through the classroom window. Sometimes he even says hi to her, and she can never figure out what to say back in time. Everything about him is confusing. How can someone who has all the usual trappings of a nerd be so incongruously cute? How can someone so cute be so nice? No classification seems quite right for him, which is excruciating for Erin. It’s almost like he chose to be a nerd instead of being forced into it like everyone else.
Otis Goldberg is very problematic.
* * *
This girl walks home after school, attempting to stay dry under her joke of a cheap umbrella. It’s not even that windy, but the umbrella keeps getting blown inside out, like it actually wants to catch the air and carry her away, which wouldn’t be that bad now that she thinks about it. Maybe then she could leave this world, this life, and she wouldn’t have to hate herself yet again for sleeping with a guy last night who, she realized, as soon as he rolled off her, was never going to want her for anything more than that.
She doesn’t want to go down the rabbit hole of counting how many times this has happened, how many times she’s convinced herself maybe this time is going to be different, maybe those moments when their bodies are touching actually mean they’re connecting, and those brief moments when he looks into her eyes actually mean he sees her.
She doesn’t want to ask herself why this keeps happening, why she seems doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. It’s like as soon as a guy touches her, she goes on autopilot. Her body moves to his, but it’s like she’s not even ther
e anymore. It’s like she’s half awake. It’s like she’s half dead.
* * *
Another girl is on her way to Eugene, to the U of O campus, driving way too fast on the rainy highway. She can practically taste his lips already, and her lap is warm with anticipation. It’s such torture that he lives so far away, that they must coordinate their love life with his college-dorm roommate. But it beats having to resort to the backseat of a car or worry about parents coming home early the way you do with high school boys.
She doesn’t think she loves him, but it might be a possibility down the road. That’s not important right now. All she cares about is ripping his clothes off and feeling his firm stomach rubbing against hers, his hands searching the warmest parts of her body until they find her breasts, her ass. She arches her back and presses her foot on the gas when she thinks about him inside her, the way it feels when everything fits so perfectly.
It’s like as soon as he touches her, she goes on autopilot. Her body moves to his, and it is something so natural, so primal, so right. It is in these moments when she feels fully alive, fully in her body, fully herself, and she wishes there was a way she could stay forever.
The Real Men of Prescott
Quite a few readers have asked me for this, so here it is—a detailed inventory of all my lays, starting with the most recent. I would like to note that this list only includes the full conquests. If I included every blow job and hand job, I’d be here for days. So without further ado, here is:
AN ANALYSIS OF ALL MY HOOKUPS
1. Late-thirties MILF. Regular at my work, buys a bottle of cheap wine almost daily. Great body for her age, must do lots of yoga, definitely the oldest I’ve ever fucked. Did it doggie style in her basement while her kid played video games upstairs. She came into my business a few times afterward, but I made it clear I wasn’t interested in her anymore. Must have started going somewhere else to buy her wine.