Asking for It

by Louise O'Neill

  ‘Have you seen the photos?’ the second girl asks.

  ‘Bitch, please,’ the first girl says. ‘Everyone has seen those photos.’

  I bend over, burying my face in my hands. This is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening. I repeat the words over and over again, trying to make them true.

  ‘What a whore.’

  ‘I know. It’s actually disgusting, like. Who does that? Who actually does shit like that? And lets them video it?’

  ‘Apparently she was off her face,’ the first girl says. ‘Olivia was talking about it last night and she said Emma O’Donovan was all over Paul O’Brien at that party, that he kept telling her that he had a girlfriend but that she, like, basically forced him to score with her anyway. God, she thinks she’s so fucking gorgeous. Do you remember the GAA gala last year? Like, as if it wasn’t bad enough that a fucking fourth year got invited, she had to come on to every guy there.’

  ‘Well, she is pretty, you have to give her that.’

  ‘Yeah, and she knows it too.’

  ‘What was Paul O’Brien even doing at that party?’ Caroline asks. ‘He must have been at least ten years older than everyone else.’

  ‘Olivia told me—’

  ‘And how does Olivia know so much?’ Caroline interrupts her.

  ‘Her sister Mia was at the party,’ the first girl says slowly. ‘And I know you’re on your period, but there’s no need to get cranky with me.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Caroline says. ‘I suppose . . .’ She hesitates. ‘Well, those photos are sort of weird, aren’t they? Emma looked completely out of it. Was she asleep?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the second girl says.

  ‘Yeah, neither do I. But Olivia said that Mia said that Emma was baloobas, that she had definitely taken something. She was dancing for ages, and her dress had fallen down and she was topless for, like, five minutes before Maggie Bennett noticed and pulled it back up again.’ Something cracks inside me. Cutting everything up. ‘And then she dragged Paul into Sean Casey’s parents’ room.’

  ‘Ewww. His parents’ bedroom? That is so gross.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Caroline still sounds unsure. ‘But if she had passed out?’

  ‘Car.’ The first girl is losing patience. ‘Come on. No one forced the drink down her throat, or made her take shit. And what guy was going to say no if it was handed to him on a plate?’ She laughs. ‘She was fucking asking for it.’

  I place my lunch box on the floor and stand up, thumping the ground as hard as I can with my feet, slamming the toilet seat down and flushing the toilet. There’s a hushed silence from the three girls, then whispered voices. Footsteps hurrying away, laughter once they’re safely outside. Laughter follows me everywhere I go.

  I am tired of it. I am so tired.

  I am afraid to fall asleep. I am afraid of my dreams. Faces in the shadows, hands, so many hands. (You like that.) (Don’t be such a pussy.) Those photos and those comments and more comments and more. (Some people deserve to be pissed on.)

  I had told Mam this morning that I didn’t want to go to school. I came down for breakfast in my pyjamas. Dad had left already. I felt as if I was trying to float away, float right out the top of my head and leave my body behind and I had to hold on to the back of her chair to anchor me down. I’m sick, I told her. You do look sick, Mam had said, her eyes worried as she brushed my hair away from my face, and I remembered when she would comb my hair as a child, running her fingers across my face, the joy in her voice when she told me how pretty I was. When was the last time she did that?

  Please make this better for me, Mam, I wanted to say. Please take this away.

  But her voice hardened as she said, Well, it’s self-inflicted, isn’t it? Get dressed. You’re going to school.

  And I knew that she couldn’t help me.

  I pack the lunch box back into my school bag, the uneaten goats cheese and rocket sandwich, the small bunch of grapes, the organic raspberry yogurt and spoon, all neatly packed in with a couple of paper napkins covering the top. (I’m not hungry.) I check my phone. Another dozen missed calls in the last half an hour, all from private numbers. I don’t listen to the voicemails. There are so many new friend requests on Facebook and Twitter notifications, from accounts with no profile pictures and names like XYZ89u4.

  Slut . . . Bitch . . . Skank . . . Whore . . .

  We know what you are . . .

  Slut . . . Bitch . . . Skank . . . Whore . . .

  We know what you did.

  A text message from Mam, asking if I still feel sick. None from Bryan. There’s one from a number I don’t have saved in my contact list, and I press delete without reading it.

  The bell rings, the door to the toilets swings open and closed, open and closed, the sounds of a bulimic getting rid of her lunch in the cubicle next to me, toilets flushing, the taps turning on and off, one girl begs lip balm off another, panicked voices talking about a test in maths, Oh my God, can I copy your answers? I didn’t have time to study last night, a half-finished assignment, complaints about what a bitch Ms Harrington is for giving her forty-five per cent in German, my dad is going to kill me, especially after he paid for me to go to that German summer camp, then silence. I walk out and stand in front of the sinks. The photos from the Easy Emma page sketch themselves on to the mirror, pink flesh, legs, a collection of body parts (some people deserve to get pissed on) and dance across the glass. I wash my hands, soaping and re-soaping my fingers, watching the red skin disappearing behind the suds, washing and washing and washing.

  ‘How nice of you to join us,’ Ms O’Regan says as I trudge into class, scanning the room for a spare seat. She’s young and pretty, her blonde hair tied up in a neat ponytail. She waits for me to reply. ‘Well. Don’t just stand there.’

  Rows of blank faces. Eyes staring at me like shiny coins, mouths sewn shut.

  Did I enjoy this once, being the centre of attention?

  ‘There’s nowhere for me to sit, miss.’

  She walks up and down the centre of the two rows of seats.

  ‘You’re right.’ She looks confused. ‘There does seem to be a seat missing.’ She faces the class. ‘Did one of you move a seat? There are always twenty-four seats in this classroom. Six rows, four seats a row.’ No one says anything. ‘Come on, girls, you’re all doing higher-level maths here. Six rows, four seats a row, twenty-four seats. I’m only counting twenty-three.’ She’s met with silence. ‘Fine. Emma, please go get another chair from the hall and come back here as quickly as you can. You’ve missed enough class time as it is.’

  My hand is already on the handle when I see Ms McCarthy’s face through the narrow glass pane cut into the side of the door.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your class, Ms O’Regan,’ Ms McCarthy says when I let her in, ‘but may Emma O’Donovan please be excused?’

  No one goes Oooooh like they normally would.

  Ms O’Regan nods, the two pretending as if they barely recognize each other, when we all know that they’re housemates. Everyone knows that the two of them go with Miss Coughlan to the off-licence every Friday night and buy three bottles of white wine, a Pinot Grigio and two bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, that they go to Ahoy Matey’s takeaway afterwards for two battered cods, two large portions of chips and mushy peas, but that Miss Coughlan doesn’t get any because she does Weight Watchers with Sarah Swallows’s mam and their weigh-in is on a Saturday morning. And Miss Coughlan needs to lose sixteen pounds by October because she’s going to be bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding and the dress that’s been bought for her is Vera Wang but they got it on eBay and it was only available in a size twelve, and her sister’s insisting that she lose weight to fit into it.

  ‘Come on, Emma,’ Ms McCarthy says, and I can see that all the other girls in the class are thinking the same as me. She’s seen the photos (pink flesh) and the comments (some people deserve to get pissed on) and she
’s come to tell me that I’m expelled, that I’m a bad influence, that they can’t have such a Slut . . . Bitch . . . Skank . . . Whore . . . in St Brigid’s. You can almost feel the air in the room thicken, a noiseless buzz of energy starting to build up as I follow Ms McCarthy out of the room.

  She turns left, walking down the five steps that lead out of this side of the school towards the gym, ducking into the religion room on the right. When I was in first year, there used to be a crucifix on the wall, and a font of holy water by the light switch, but that’s all gone now. There’s a circle of red chairs, a couple of limp beanbags, a narrow wooden bench running alongside the radiators below the three square windows. On the bench there’s a collection of books on different religions from around the world and an ancient CD player with a stack of CDs, guided meditations and crap pan-pipe music to listen to when we’re doing our relaxation exercises. The other three walls are covered in artwork, projects on racism and tolerance and compassion for all mankind, collages of pictures cut out of magazines, words written beside them in bubble letters.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Ms McCarthy says. Her dark curls are tied back with a pink barrette, matching her cheap pink blazer. She sits down, patting the chair next to her. She stares at me, her tinted contact lenses turning her eyes a strange milky blue. ‘Do you feel comfortable?’ she asks. ‘Do you want something to drink? I can run up to the staffroom to get you a cup of tea if you’d like.’ Her voice is quieter than normal, that sing-song Cork City accent somehow subdued.

  ‘I’m fine.’ I can feel my palms start to moisten. I wish she’d just hurry on and get this over with.

  ‘Are you sure?’ She rests her hand on my shoulder. ‘Because if anything was wrong, you could tell me, you know. You can trust me.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say again, staring at a poster with photos of emaciated models, ‘Dying to be Thin?’ scrawled across it.

  ‘Emma.’ She clears her throat and says more firmly, ‘Emma. I caught two third years looking at some inappropriate photos on Facebook.’ The bones of my skeleton are shifting, moving in like a cage around my heart, squeezing all the air out of my lungs. ‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’

  All the walls are falling down. Falling apart.

  (pink flesh) (legs pushed apart)

  My body is not my own any more. They have stamped their names all over it.

  Easy Emma.

  ‘Yes.’ The word feels like a slug on my tongue, fat and wet.

  ‘Can you understand why I’m so concerned?’

  I don’t know why she doesn’t just say it, that they’re throwing me out, that I’ll have to go to one of those grind schools up in the city to do my Leaving Cert, and that I probably won’t be able to stay there either because there’ll be someone who has a friend of a friend from Ballinatoom, and they’ll send on a link to the page, that page, with all those photos and all those comments, more and more every second. It is a wildfire, out of control, and I am burning up in its path. Don’t read them, don’t read them. (Some people deserve to get pissed on.) In the new school there will be the same hush when I enter a room, the same rows of staring eyes, the same pockets of silence as I pass a table, the same explosion of laughter when I leave. The thought of it makes me want to lie down and fall asleep and never wake up again.

  ‘Emma?’

  ‘No one will talk to me.’

  ‘No one will talk to you?’

  ‘They won’t let me sit with them at lunch, and no one wants to sit with me in class either. I had to eat my sandwich by myself in the toilets. And I can hear people whispering every time I pass, and I don’t think I can cope with this, miss, I really don’t.’

  ‘OK.’ She seems to be searching for the right words. ‘Well. That must be hard for you. But is there anything else you would like to talk about?’

  I pick at the perfectly ironed pleats of my skirt, trying not to cry.

  ‘Back to the photos . . .’ She wraps a ringlet of hair around her index finger, wincing as she struggles to let it loose again. ‘I want you to know that you can talk to me. This is a safe space.’ She waits for me to say something. I wish I knew what she wanted me to say.

  ‘Am I going to get expelled?’

  She leans forward until our faces are nearly touching. I can smell tuna off her breath. ‘No. God, Emma, of course not. No.’

  My legs begin to tremble, pent-up adrenalin flooding through my limbs.

  ‘I checked your files. You’re eighteen, right?’

  It was my birthday two weeks ago. I had woken up to my parents sitting at the end of my bed, Dad telling me that I would always be his little girl no matter what age I was. Mam had made me blueberry pancakes, had let me eat them in bed without complaining that the crumbs would attract mice, telling me stories about the day I was born, about how happy she had been when the midwife had said I was a girl, because that had meant she had one of each, and that her family was perfect. She handed me a small box wrapped in silver paper. Do you like it? she asked me as I held Nana’s gold locket in my hands. I love it, I told her, and for once I was telling the truth. For once I wasn’t looking for the gift receipt while she moaned about how unappreciative I was. For once I felt like maybe she understood who I was. There was a pile of presents stacked at the bottom of my bed, a square box wrapped in pink-and-white pinstriped paper containing the Jeffrey Campbell shoes that I’d been begging for, an envelope with €20 phone credit in it from Bryan, a €500 Topshop voucher from my aunt Beth in London. Maggie and Ali had arrived to pick me up at seven that night. Where’s Jamie? I asked. Oh, she can’t come, Maggie had replied, she has to work, and I pretended to be disappointed. They had two helium balloons with the number eighteen on them and a huge hamper from Auntie Nellie’s sweet shop. We got dressed up and went to Corleone’s Italian for dinner, splitting two pizzas and sweet-talking the waiter into bringing us bottle after bottle of wine, using my ‘Happy Eighteenth!’ sash and crown as proof of our age. We abandoned Maggie’s car in town, staggered up Main Street, but they wouldn’t let us into Voodoo because I was the only one with ID, so we snuck around the back and scaled the eight-foot stone wall, landing into the smoking area with a clatter, our heels in our hands. Within minutes we were surrounded by boys, men really, all in their late twenties and early thirties. We let them take turns in trying on my plastic crown and the sash; made them buy us shots of tequila, and ignored the women they’d been chatting up before we arrived who were muttering under their breath that we ‘should go back to the Attic Disco’. When I woke up the next morning, I was lying crossways on my pillows, my head squashed into my bedside locker. Maggie and Ali were sleeping top to toe on the bed. Mam was calling up from the kitchen to tell us that she had a fry on, but that she could make French toast or pancakes or frittatas if we’d prefer that. And I had felt happy.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell Ms McCarthy, ‘I’m eighteen.’

  She frowns. ‘Well, legally then . . . I just, Emma – look, those photos really concerned me. Do you understand why I’m concerned?’

  There’s a long pause. I can hear the tick, tick, ticking of a clock and I look up above the collages on the wall to my left, above Ms McCarthy’s head, until I find it. It’s a flat white clock, the hands and numbers a stark black. I watch the second hand move around, and around, and around again.

  ‘The reason why . . .’ She clears her throat. ‘The reason why I’m concerned is that in the photos you seemed to be –’ she breaks off – ‘unresponsive.’

  I wipe my palms furtively on the sides of the chair.

  ‘Do you remember what happened, Emma?’

  I don’t remember.

  I don’t remember.

  I don’t want to remember.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘I respect that,’ she says. ‘But I have a duty of care to my students to make sure that they’re safe.’

  ‘It didn’t happen in school, did it?’

  ‘I can understand why you’re upset.’
<
br />   ‘Stop saying you understand, you understand, you understand. Is that what they tell you to say? Are you reading from some fucking manual?’

  My hand jerks up to my mouth when I curse, as if I can just swallow it back down. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper. I wait for her to start yelling at me but she doesn’t.

  ‘Emma, do you think there could have been a possibility your drink was spiked?’

  Yeah, spiked with more drink, I can hear Ali scoffing last year after a girl in our year claimed to have been roofied.

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. I believe you, Emma, and I respect you. It’s just that, in the photos, well, you look—’

  Stop talking about those photos. (Legs spread apart.) (Pink flesh.)

  ‘I was pretending.’

  ‘Pretending?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I look over my shoulder at the door. ‘I was pretending to be asleep. It was a joke.’

  Neither of us says anything. I’m gripping on to the edges of my seat, my feet raised up on to my tippy-toes as if I’m waiting for the starting pistol to go off in a race. Please God, please just let the bell ring so I can go home to my bed, I’ll give five euro to the missionaries’ money box in Spar if you do. Please, please, please.

  ‘OK, Emma. You can leave if you want.’

  I’m at the door when I remember something.

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘Yes?’ She turns around in her chair to look at me.

  ‘Can we keep this between us?’

  ‘That Facebook page is public,’ she says. ‘It’s gone beyond that, I would think.’

  But Mam and Dad don’t know how to work Facebook, I think to myself, and I press her again. ‘Yeah, but there’s no need to tell anyone else, right?’