Asking for It

by Louise O'Neill

  ‘Stick . . .’ (Emmie, why would a boy buy the cow when he can have the milk for free?) ‘. . . in there . . . now.’ (It’s different for boys and girls.)

  ‘. . . I like that . . .’ (Be more ladylike.)

  ‘. . . You like that, don’t you? . . .’ (Cover yourself up, Emmie, for goodness sake.) ‘. . . Dirty little . . .’

  (I don’t like that word . . .)

  Don’t use that word, wait. No.

  (. . . but I don’t say anything.)

  A rush comes upon me again, a stuttering, fading one, shimmering through me as he pushes my face into the centre of the rose-print on the duvet, and I feel like the flower is eating my face. I try to get up.

  ‘What?’ he says. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Maybe we should . . .’ I try and swallow, but my mouth is too dry. ‘Paul, maybe we should go back to the party.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he says. (I brought him in here. This was my idea.) ‘Don’t be a fucking cock-tease.’

  ‘Wait,’ I try and say. ‘Wait, I don’t feel . . .’

  But he pushes me back down, yanking my underwear aside, and he’s inside me, and I’m not ready and it hurts and I don’t feel well, and I don’t think he’s using a condom, and I should stop him, I should stop him and tell him to get one. I have one in my wallet. But he’ll think I’m a slut if I say that, but they say in magazines to always have condoms, but it’s too late now, and I don’t feel well, and I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s any point in stopping him now. And it’s too late now anyway.

  (It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it’s no big deal, and who cares, who cares anyway?)

  He’s wrapped some of my hair around his fist, wrenching my head back. I can see the photo on the bedside locker is of John Junior. He is like a toddler version of Sean, his red-blond hair in messy curls, his short dungarees showing off knees scuffed with dirt. I wonder what he must have been like, all those years ago, eaten alive by the slurry pit, yelling for someone to save him, but he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe with his mouth crammed full of shit. Paul bites my shoulder, hard, and it hurts, and it hurts, and I want to tell him to stop but I can tell he thinks this is what I want, that this is something I should enjoy (would other girls like it?) so I moan, they always like that, that’ll make it end quicker, and he leans over me again, biting my ear, telling me I’m a slut, and he knows I want it, you know you want it, Emma, thrusting harder and harder, slamming his body into mine. I just want it to be over. And finally, it is, his fingertips gouging into my hip bones, and he pulls out, giving a long, desperate groan while a wet heat splatters across my lower back. He collapses to the side of me, his breath coming fast and heavy.

  I hold myself very still, lying on my stomach, my head turned away from him. There are people laughing outside, muttered conversations, a moment of silence when someone changes a song on the iPod, then a low drone of music again.

  ‘Fuck, that was amazing,’ he says after a few moments. ‘Did you come?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He pats the back of my head. ‘You’d better clean yourself up.’

  The en-suite toilet is cramped; there’s only room for a toilet and a basin. I pull on my knickers and take a rolled-up washcloth from a pink-and-white checked basket on the cistern, hold it under the running water and rub the drying stickiness off myself. I look in the bathroom cabinet above the sink, rummaging through toothpaste, haemorrhoid cream, KY Jelly, mouthwash and bottles of pills until I find a hair scrunchie. I tie up my hair into a high bun, tucking the matted ends under. My tongue feels swollen with thirst, and I turn the tap on and stick my head under it. When I straighten up, I wipe my mouth in the mirror. I look different somehow, like the bones of my face have shifted. My jaw is jutting at an odd angle, my pupils so large that my eyes look completely black, but I’m still me, Emma O’Donovan, my name is Emma O’Donovan, I am Emma, Emma, Emma. A wave of dizziness hits, and I lean my face against the cold glass.

  ‘Jesus, Susan.’ Paul’s voice, angry and harsh. I wait until there is silence before I open the door. He is lying on the bed, all of his clothes back on.

  ‘Girlfriend problems?’ I close the door behind me, then lean against it, showing myself to him.

  ‘You could say that,’ he says, patting the bed next to him.

  ‘Bitches be crazy,’ I say, aligning my body with his, and he runs his hands all over me, as if he’s trying to claim me for himself. It’s as if he wants to own me. ‘What’s her problem?’

  ‘She wants to get married,’ he says, his hands stilling.

  ‘But you’re only, like, what? Twenty-eight?’

  ‘Aine and Ben are nearly there. Ben’s even gone shopping for a ring.’ He continues as if I haven’t said anything. ‘And a few of the other lads on the team as well. Susan and me have been together for six years now. She says it’s “time to take the next step”. Fucking women.’

  ‘I never want to get married,’ I say. ‘Gross.’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’ He pulls my body closer, wrapping one of his legs over mine. ‘You’re not like other girls, are you?’

  His phone starts to ring, and he switches it to silent, throwing it next to the framed photo of John Junior. We kiss, his tongue heavy in my mouth. The phone rings again, vibrating against the wood. He breaks away from me, cursing, and cuts the call dead.

  ‘Here,’ he says, ‘what’s your number?’

  ‘What’s the point? This is only a one-night type of thing.’ I always say that when boys ask me for my number.

  ‘Come on.’ He doesn’t look me in the face, just runs his hands up and down my body. ‘Susan is away a lot,’ he says, and I laugh.

  ‘Come on,’ he says again. ‘I would very much like to fuck you again.’

  I must have been good; he must have enjoyed it if he wants to see me again.

  I call out my number to him and he phones me immediately, my phone lighting up, then cutting out, and he says, ‘And now you have my number too.’

  ‘Look at what we have here, then.’

  I scream, jumping off the bed and yanking the covers around me, Paul getting to his feet as well. Laura and her friend are walking past, and they gasp when they see me, naked except for my knickers and crouched down on the floor, the duvet wrapped around me, searching under the bed for my dress. Dylan and Paul just stand there, watching me.

  ‘Close the fucking door, will you?’ I pull my dress back on.

  ‘Lads.’ Sean stumbles in, wrapping an arm around Paul and Dylan’s necks. He hiccups. ‘Did you have fun?’ He looks at me, and he tries to smile. ‘Did you, Emma?’

  ‘Will you please close the door?’ I plead. ‘How did you even get in? I thought I locked it.’

  Paul makes an ‘oops’ face and says, ‘Ah, you’re too hot not to show you off.’ He grabs my arm and pulls me up to standing. ‘Look at her.’

  This is the price of my beauty, and I am willing to pay it. I am willing.

  Dylan snorts (but who cares – he likes Jamie; some guys have a thing for Asian chicks, it doesn’t mean anything).

  I smile, although my arm hurts where Paul pulled me. I sit on the bed. ‘So. What’s the story?’

  ‘Not much,’ Dylan says, taking a swig out of his plastic Coke bottle before passing it to Paul. He tilts his head at me. ‘Where’s Jamie?’ He tries and fails to look casual. ‘Did she go home?’

  ‘It’s never going to happen, Dylan. She’s not interested.’

  ‘Did I say I was fucking interested in her?’ He looks away. ‘I was just asking a question.’ He grabs the Coke bottle back off Paul and takes a swig. ‘Listen, I’ve heard there’s another party happening in town. You guys up for it?’ He holds out the Coke bottle to Paul, but Sean goes to grab it off him, knocking it out of his hands.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Casey.’ Dylan throws his hands up in disgust. ‘I don’t have any more drink left.’

  He turns to leave, his
hand on the door handle, when Sean yells after him, ‘Wait. Wait. I just remembered. My mam has some stuff.’

  ‘What kind of “stuff”?’

  Sean brushes the edge of the photo frame. He puts the picture facing down and opens the drawer to the bedside locker, rifling through it until he pulls out a cream cotton washbag. He unzips it, and there are about five different bottles filled with pills.

  ‘Well, well, well.’ Paul stands up and goes to lock the door again. He takes the washbag off Sean, muttering under his breath as he looks through it. Dylan holds his hand out, swallowing down a little blue pill as soon as Paul gives it to him.

  ‘Here.’ Paul holds one out for me. ‘For you, my darling.’

  I don’t know if I want to.

  ‘Come on,’ he says when I hesitate. ‘Let’s just take these before we go.’

  Dylan cackles, as if he knows that Emma O’Donovan would never take pills, even prescription ones. He thinks that he knows me. He thinks that I am boring, and traditional, and a good girl, and I am going to study hard for my Leaving Cert and go to university, and get a good job, and marry someone sensible (All this talk of romantic love, Mam sighs. What’s important is that you have similar values and beliefs, that you come from similar cultures, that you’re the same rather than different. That’s what makes for a successful relationship) and he thinks I will have children, and turn into my mother. I am going to be just like my mother.

  I’m so sick of everyone in this stupid fucking town thinking they know what I would or wouldn’t do.

  I reach out and take the tablet and swallow it down, gagging at its acrid taste without water.

  ‘So –’ I smirk at Dylan – ‘did someone say something about another party?’

  Sunday

  ‘Emmie. Emmie!’

  I don’t want to get up for school, Mam. I don’t feel well. I try to get up, but tiredness is holding my head underwater. Desperate for air. I am . . .

  Air.

  ‘Denis, help me. Will you help me, for God’s sake. We need to get her inside.’

  A pinch under my arm, squeezing tight. Too tight.

  You’re hurting me.

  ‘Emma, you’re making a holy show of yourself. Get up. Get up, I said.’

  Her voice is too loud.

  She touches my face, whispering angrily, wake up, Emma, wake up wake up wake up. I try and open my eyelids, but I can’t, the skin scraping as it folds against itself.

  ‘She’s burning up. Look at those blisters.’ My mother’s voice is panicked. ‘Feel her forehead, Denis. Denis, I said, feel her forehead. Her skin will be ruined.’

  Daddy? Daddy, help me, I want to say, but my tongue has been cut out of my mouth with the pain.

  He is silent. I hear the front door open, squeaking on its frame, and she tells him to run and get the thermometer. There are hands around my waist, dragging me off the ground, the material of my dress chafing the raw skin, and I almost scream. I see the open door, the hallway, then the roof of the porch before it dissolves into red flesh again, and the earth moves, it moves, and I move with it, falling to my hands and knees, feeling the concrete tear at me. I stretch my hands out before me, watching as the white scuffed skin fills with stripes of blood, carving lines into my palms, dripping on to the concrete below me.

  ‘Denis. Would you stop just standing there like an eejit and help me.’

  Dad reappears, and he has a strange look on his face. Words gargle at the back of my throat, coming out in a clotted mess. He takes a step away from me.

  ‘Denis, pick her up. For God’s sake, will you move?’

  He scoops me up in his arms, carrying me over the threshold; Mam telling him to mind the rug. Once inside the hall, I lie down on the wooden floor, tasting vomit in my breath.

  ‘What the . . .?’

  Bryan on the stairs, his eyes bleary with sleep. Jen is standing behind him, wearing his old Ballinatoom jersey, her long legs bare. Her jaw drops in horror, and I know something must be very, very wrong.

  ‘Please, cover yourself up, Jennifer,’ Mam hisses.

  ‘Don’t speak to her like that,’ Bryan says, taking a step back up the stairs to hide Jen from view. ‘Why are you even home so early?’

  ‘It’s four o clock in the afternoon.’ Mam is standing at the bottom of the stairs, her hand gripping the banister, the knuckles whitening.

  ‘I thought you said you weren’t going to be back until this evening.’

  I close my eyes again.

  ‘Yes, I can see that’s what you thought.’ She’s almost shouting now. ‘I gave you one job. One job. To mind your sister.’ I can hear her shoes squeak against the wooden floor as she turns on her heel towards me. ‘And look at her. Just look at the state of her.’

  ‘She’s eighteen, Mam.’

  ‘I don’t care what age she is. This is a respectable house and I expect you to follow my rules under my roof. I suppose you didn’t even go to Mass?’ Bryan snorts at this – unwisely, I think – and she screams at him: ‘Don’t you dare laugh at me.’

  Please be quiet, please be quiet, please be quiet.

  ‘Denis! Are you just going to let him talk to me like that?’ Dad mumbles something, shifting from one foot to the other. ‘Do you really think this is funny?’ Mam continues. I feel like I’m going to be sick.

  Don’t get sick, don’t get sick, don’t get sick, don’t get sick.

  ‘You were supposed to be taking care of her and we arrive home and find her lying on the porch. I thought she was dead – dead, do you hear me?’ I try to sit up and the room spins like I’m on a merry-go-round. ‘We left you in charge.’ Oh shit, I can feel it coming, boiling up inside me, crawling up my throat, and I try and stop it, but when I get on to my hands and knees to stand up (I need to get to the toilet, someone help me get to the toilet) the walls and the floor melt into one, and I’m falling through it, down, down, down . . .

  ‘I thought we could trust you, Bryan, I thought—’

  And my body heaves, bile spurting out of my mouth and splashing against her low court sandals, and it’s on the rug too, and I didn’t mean it and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

  There is noise and there is blackness, and I fall into both.

  Monday

  My eyes are sinking into my head as if they’re dissolving in quicksand. It is too bright. (What day is it?) The curtains are open, sunlight blasting through the windows, drilling holes into my brain. Dust is shimmering through the air. My skin feels tight, wrapping around my bones like cling film. I claw my way up to sitting, waves of static turning in my head. (What time is it?)

  I fall back down.

  ‘You’ve been a silly girl, haven’t you?’ Dr Fitzpatrick’s face flashes before me, a more lined version of Fitzy’s, except for his flat nose, broken and reset too many times over years of rugby matches. Mam is there too, trying to smile at the other patients in the waiting room at SouthDoc.

  ‘Just a touch of sunstroke, I reckon,’ Mam told Mrs Ryan, an elderly woman with hairs growing out of a mole on her chin, her fingers gnarled with arthritis. ‘She fell asleep outside. In this weather.’ Mam threw her eyes to heaven in a ‘kids today’ type of way. ‘Oh, I know, it’s terrible close,’ Mrs Ryan agreed. ‘Still, we shouldn’t complain, I suppose. We get enough rain.’ I was swaying in my seat, Mam holding me up, barely touching me with the tips of her fingers. Dr Fitzpatrick called me into the surgery, and I can see myself getting up and moving towards him, my knees buckling beneath me as I fall to the ground again. Chairs scraping back on tiles – give her room, get back and give her room to breathe – and then there is nothing.

  *

  The front of my body is painted in sunburn, curving around my arms and legs until it fades into my normal alabaster white. I place a hand on my chest, then both hands on my cheeks, my skin almost sizzling hot to the touch. I swing my legs out of bed, cursing as I knock a glass of water over, grabbing my iPhone to make sure it doesn’t get wet. One new message.

&nbs
p; Bryan: Seriously, Emma. FUCK YOU.

  I put the phone down, a lump of nausea squirming in my throat like a worm. Maybe if I don’t look at it, it will go away.

  I pick up the phone.

  Bryan: Mam and Dad are raging with me because of you. They’ve cut my weekly money and have taken the car off me for two months. You need to get your fucking act together.

  I read the message again. The words feel wrong, somehow, like the position of the letters doesn’t make any sense.

  The other messages were sent by me to the girls last night. There are vowels missing, and words spelled entirely wrong, there are repeated messages to Jamie, all of which are blank. But there is no response to any of them.

  Why haven’t they replied? Are they fighting with me?

  There are dozens of notifications but I don’t open them up. I don’t have the energy.

  Why haven’t the girls replied to any of my text messages?

  I try to remember. I fumble through my memories of Saturday night, but they run away from me.

  It doesn’t mean anything. I just drank too much. How did I get home? I shouldn’t have drunk so much. Why am I so sunburnt? And it was stupid taking that wrap off Paul; why did I do that? Why can’t I remember anything? I see a bag of pills, blue ones, and yellow ones, and pink ones, no, wait, what? It’s as if my dreams are swirling through my memories, making them sticky, and I can’t pull them apart to see which are which.

  Voices. Laughing. Hands grabbing at me, pushing through the black felt of the night, no bodies, no faces, just hands, white as chalk against the darkness. What happened?

  ‘Ah sure, look who it is.’ Sheila Heffernan is sitting at the kitchen counter, her short, bright red hair gelled into solid spikes. The two of them are sipping tea out of china cups, a half-eaten loaf of Mam’s Madeira cake between them. Sheila holds her powdered cheek out for me to kiss, but I can’t move any closer to her, the smell of her perfume ramming into my nostrils.

  ‘Why are you still in your pyjamas?’ Mam asks.