Asking for It

by Louise O'Neill

  ‘Emma, I can’t promise you that. You know that.’

  I imagine Dad seeing the photos, his shock, then disgust. (He would look at me with disgust.) He would turn away from me. He would never be able to see me again without seeing those pictures. (Legs spread apart.) (Pink flesh.) He would never want to see me again.

  I thought you were better than this, he would say. I thought you knew the difference between right and wrong.

  ‘Please, miss.’ I squat by her feet. ‘What’s the point in telling my parents?’

  ‘I don’t have a choice in the matter, I’m afraid, Emma. Once there’s a suggestion of illegal misconduct, it’s my duty to report it to the DLP.’ I must look confused because she says, ‘That’s the Designated Liaison Person. In this case, Mr Griffin.’

  Mr Griffin? She’s going to tell Mr Griffin? She’s going to show those photos to Mr Griffin?

  ‘Please, miss. I’m begging you. I’ll do anything, but you can’t tell Mr Griffin, or show him the photos.’ I am going to get in so much trouble.

  ‘I don’t have a choice.’ She repeats herself. ‘He already knows. I believe he’s been in contact with your parents. Emma, the guards will probably need to get involved.’

  I forget my terror for a minute and almost start laughing. The fucking guards? Why would the guards care about some teenagers getting drunk and having sex?

  ‘Come off it, miss.’

  ‘I. Don’t. Have. A. Choice.’ She says each word slowly and clearly. ‘Not when there’s a possibility it could be rape.’

  Rape.

  It is like a whip cracking against my spine.

  The word fills the room, until there’s nothing left, and all I can breathe is that word (rape) and all I can hear is that word (rape) and all I can smell is that word (rape) and all I can taste is that word (rape).

  ‘No.’ I shake my head, trying to stop that word from echoing in my brain, over and over and over again, beating its drum inside me. ‘What are you talking about?’

  And I fall down. (The walls are falling down. Falling apart.)

  ‘Are you all right? Do you need some air? Do you want me to get you a glass of water?’ She crouches down beside me, rubbing my back.

  ‘You, you . . .’ I lose my train of thought, all the images from the Easy Emma page crammed up inside my brain and my mouth and my chest and there is no room to breathe.

  (Pink flesh.) (Legs spread apart.)

  ‘You can’t just say things like that. Have you said that to my parents?’

  ‘Said what, Emma?’

  I cannot repeat that word.

  She sits back on her seat, drawing her knees into her chest, and she looks so young you could mistake her for a Leaving Cert student. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I really am. But I have to follow protocol. The DLP has to be notified, then he’ll contact the HSE. And then, like I said, a report to the guards if the HSE think it’s necessary.’ She bites her lip. ‘And Emma, I have to be honest with you here. I think it’s likely that the guards are going to be involved.’

  A low keening sound, one that I’ve never heard myself make before, is coming from the depths of my stomach. Ms McCarthy tells me to breathe, to try and catch your breath, but her face is dissolving before me. What are my parents going to say, and the guards, the guards, and what about Paul, are they going to contact him, he’s going to think that I said he did that, and I didn’t, I didn’t, but he’s not going to believe me, no one is going to believe me when I say this isn’t my fault, that I never said that I was . . . that word . . . and my dad saying I thought you were a good girl, and I don’t want this, and I hate Ms McCarthy, I hate her so much I want to ram her stupid hair barrette down her throat and shut her the fuck up, why did she have to see those photos, and why did I have to get so drunk, why didn’t I go home with Jamie? I should have been a good friend and gone home with her (and when she tried to tell me about Dylan, and she used that word, or she implied it at least, and I told her not to say that, when you say that word you can’t take it back, J, I told her, you have to be careful), what is Jamie going to say to me now?

  ‘Come on, Emma.’ Ms McCarthy raises her hand and then lowers it, taking exaggerated breaths as she does so. ‘Come on now. Take deep breaths, that’s a good girl, come on. Breathe in –’ and she sucks her breath in – ‘and breathe out.’ And she lets it go again. ‘Come on, you can do it. Come on now.’

  She puts her arm around my waist and drags me back on to the chair. I flop over my knees, holding on to the backs of my ankles.

  Last year they found a few pre-cancerous cells on my mam’s ovaries, and the doctors kept saying that it was lucky they found it early. They could just cut it out, a simple operation, no one need know anything about it, it would be easy. That’s the wonderful thing about catching it early, Mam had told us over dinner, dolloping creamed spinach on to Dad’s plate. You’ll know all about this, Dymphna. I wanted to scream at her, to tell her to stop comparing her situation with Dymphna’s, when she wouldn’t even need to have chemo. (I imagined Mam dying, what I would wear to the funeral, the glamour the tragedy would give me. I thought about how much easier my life would be if it was just me and Dad and Bryan.) Dymphna and Conor were eating with us, Dymphna’s bald head covered with a silk scarf, Conor sneaking concerned looks at me, and I didn’t know how he could be worried about me when his mam was so much sicker. The doctor says they can contain it, and get rid it before it spreads. Once it starts to spread into other organs, you’re . . . and Mam drew a line across her throat. That’s what this feels like now, like a cancer is spreading, and I can’t do anything to stop it. I don’t have any control over it.

  Ms McCarthy helps me to my feet, keeping her arm around my waist as we leave the religion room. I lean on her as we walk up the few steps, past the door to my maths class. I can see them through the glass panel, Josephine in the front row, her hand waving frantically in the air to answer a question, the others stifling yawns. Bored with it all, wishing the time would move faster, wishing their lives away, as Mam would say. And then they are gone, as Ms McCarthy guides me up the corridor towards the principal’s office.

  And I see them. My parents.

  ‘They’ll be expecting you at the station,’ I hear Mr Griffin saying in his Midlands accent.

  ‘And the boys involved?’ Mam asks.

  ‘Ah, here she is,’ Mr Griffin says, his shovel-like hands twisting at his belly. I turn to Dad, wanting to apologize, or to reassure him, I don’t know what. But he won’t look at me. He just stands there, his shoulders hunched, staring at his feet.

  *

  ‘So, yeah . . . I hope we’re cool, because I didn’t have anything to do with this, obviously. Right. Well, call me back if you get a chance. OK. Bye.’ I hang up. It’s the fifth voice message I’ve left on Paul O’Brien’s phone since I got home from school, pretty much identical to the messages I’ve left for Dylan and Fitzy and Sean. None of them answered the dozens of texts I sent, and I need to fix this, I need to fix this right now.

  The principal’s office, the huge window overlooking the primary school and the sea beyond that. Mam and I sitting in the plastic chairs across the worn pinewood table from Mr Griffin, Dad standing behind us, drumming his fingers on the back of Mam’s chair. I don’t understand, Dad said. I just don’t understand this. Why can’t they just delete the photos? Mr Griffin sighed. That’s not really how it works, Mr O’Donovan.

  The Garda station. (Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.) The silent car journey home after. I sat in the back, my fingers chubby and short in the window’s reflection. The view is beautiful, but it feels wrong now, like that word has bled all over the glassy sea, shaping it blood red. My dad glancing at me in the rear-view mirror, looking back at the road whenever I caught him doing it. Mam’s body was tense, crouched forward, her knuckles white as she held on to the edges of her knee-length beige skirt, random words and half-finished sentences coming out of her mouth. I don’t . . . non-consensual . . .
good families . . . I didn’t think Ethan was interested in girls in that way . . . She said that at least five times, never using the word ‘gay’, although it’s obvious that’s what she’s thinking. She often commented on how nicely he dressed, how well he spoke, asking me if he ever had a girlfriend, if he ever played sports, or if it was ‘just the art’ he liked. She kept muttering under her breath, twisting the fabric between her fingertips, until Dad turned up the radio to drown her out. We walked up our driveway in single file, Mam smiling at Dymphna O’Callaghan and telling her it was ‘a shame the fine weather broke. Still, we can’t complain, we were lucky to have it for as long as we did.’ Dad opened the front door and went straight to his office. Shut the door. Mam went into the kitchen, closing the door behind her.

  And I was left alone.

  I hear a knock, then Mam’s voice. ‘You have a visitor.’ I yank the door open. Maggie? Ali? Maybe even Sean Casey, come to tell me that this is all just a misunderstanding?

  Oh.

  ‘Hey.’ Conor is still in his school uniform, the top three buttons of his white shirt undone, an angry rash on his neck. He always gets that when he’s nervous, a dead giveaway when we told our parents that it wasn’t us who cut the hair off his sister’s Barbie, or ate the last of the brownies that my mam had made for the old people’s home, or made prank phone calls to our neighbours.

  I walk back to the bed, flinching when I see myself in the mirror. My hair is pulled up into a messy ponytail, my face still raw from crying and blistering sunburn, the baggy UL sweatshirt I stole from Bryan’s room not exactly flattering.

  ‘I’m a mess.’

  He doesn’t say anything, not like before this, when he would tell me I was beautiful. Boys are always telling me I’m beautiful, their eyes roaming around my body hungrily, as if looking for a place to plant a flag. When Conor said it he always looked me in the eye, as if he was saying an oath.

  ‘I wanted to come yesterday,’ he says. ‘As soon as I saw the Facebook page I wanted to come, but I wasn’t sure if you would want me to.’

  ‘You saw the page?’

  When we were little, Conor and I would take baths together, and I knew his childish naked body as well as my own. And then we became too big to do that, too grown-up.

  (He has seen me naked.)

  Neither of us says anything. We both know that everyone has seen that page. I think of all the people I know, and all the people in Ballinatoom, and all their friends on Facebook, and friends of friends of friends, looking at me (pink flesh) (legs spread) and reading all those comments, and calling me a slut, bitch, whore. I sit on the edge of the bed, tracing my finger over the pattern of the quilt. He sits next to me.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘What do you think?’ I try to sound calm but my voice quivers, yet another part of my body to betray me.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘It’s not that big of a deal.’

  ‘Aren’t the guards involved now?’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I can feel my breath becoming shallow. ‘Who told you that?’ He doesn’t answer. ‘Who told you that, Conor?’

  ‘Fitzy rang me.’ Conor tugs at his shirt collar to loosen it even further. ‘Sergeant Sutton phoned him to say that he’d be called in for questioning in a couple of days.’

  ‘I thought they weren’t allowed to do that.’

  ‘Well, you know. He’s friends with Dr Fitzpatrick so . . .’ He bites his lip. ‘I hung up on him, Emmie. I told him that I didn’t want to speak to him ever again, not after what he did to you—’

  ‘Fitzy didn’t do anything, not really. He was just there.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Emma, I saw the photos. I know what they did to you.’

  And then I know that there is no way that I can stop all of this. I can’t stop this now.

  I bend over with the crippling pain of it, aware of nothing but the sobs hacking up through my chest and a blistering heat building behind my eyeballs, and I’m rocking back and forward. A bottomless grief. Black hole. Black space. Falling, falling, falling.

  Slowly I come back into my body, into the room, and I can smell vanilla and coconut from my candles, and soap and apple shampoo (I don’t use apple shampoo?) and then I remember that Conor is here with me, that he is still by my side, his hand rubbing my lower back, his head bent over mine, his lips against the back of my head, whispering you’re OK, you’re OK, you’re OK into my hair.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I sit up straight, turned away from him so that he won’t see my ruined face. He keeps stroking the back of my hair, and I am four years old, and my daddy is holding me close, and telling me I’m his little princess, I’m his little girl, and that he’ll love me forever.

  ‘You’re OK,’ Conor says again, pulling me closer to him. ‘I’m here. I’ll take care of you.’ I relax into him, burrowing my face in his chest, the worn wool of his school jumper against my skin. I listen to the beat of his heart, steady and slow, as he murmurs shhh, shhh against my head. He is so good to me. He has always been so good to me, and he never got anything from me in return. (We thought we could trust you to be a good girl, Emma. We thought we had raised you better than this.) I see my father’s face and I am broken from the way he is looking at me, and I cannot think about it, I cannot bear to think about it. I wriggle my right hand behind Conor, nestling it in the small of his back, the other hand dropping to his knee, making small circles with my fingertips, working my way up to his inner thigh. His body stiffens, and he pulls away from me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’d better go,’ he says, staring straight ahead.

  I rest my head on his shoulder, swallowing a sob. ‘Don’t cry, Emmie,’ he says, and he wraps his arm around me again. I can feel him relax into it, and I move so that my lips inch closer and closer to his neck. He gives an involuntary moan. I can do this. I know I can do this. I butterfly-kiss my way towards his mouth, ready to give him what he has been waiting for all these years. My fingers move higher on his thigh. He reaches down to grab my wrist, pushing me away, and stands up, turning away to adjust himself.

  ‘Conor –’ I reach out for him – ‘there’s no need to be nervous.’ I undo the button of his school trousers. I know that if he’s inside me, he can make me forget, he can make me clean. He’s so good, he can make me better. He grabs both my hands to stop me.

  ‘No need to be shy.’ I tilt my head at his hard-on. ‘It’s pretty obvious you want this too.’ He blushes. ‘What?’ I say. ‘Are you worried about someone walking in? I can lock the door.’

  He crouches down to meet me at eye level. ‘Emma. You don’t have to do this.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘But I want to. Don’t you want to be with me?’

  Of course he wants to be with me. He has to.

  He lays his hands on my shoulders, pushing me away from him gently.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ I spit the words out.

  ‘I just . . .’ He looks at the ground before reluctantly making eye contact again. ‘I don’t want you to feel like you have to do this.’

  ‘I don’t feel like I “have” to do this, Conor. I want to do this. I thought this was what you wanted too.’

  ‘I just want . . . I just want—’

  ‘I just want, I just want,’ I mock him, but he doesn’t react.

  ‘I just want to help you. I want to protect you, Emma.’

  And he brushes a piece of my hair away from my face. I’ve never seen this look from him before. It’s pity. He feels sorry for me. (I can’t bear it.)

  ‘Just go,’ I say.

  ‘Emma—’

  ‘Just leave me alone for fuck’s sake, will you?’

  And he does.

  And I watch him leave.

  This year

  Thursday

  I am awake. And then I remember.

  I am awake and I instantly wish that I was not.

  (Life ruiner.)

  (I have ruined their lives.)


  Guilt paints itself on to my skin. I am tarred in it and feathered.

  The morning is creeping under the curtains like it is hunting for me. Even the light seems different now. It is greyer, shaping itself into shadows that want to smother me.

  I am thirsty. A chalky residue coats my tongue. I look around the room, at the mirror, and the desk, and the windows. I can see points and the hard edges, the bits I might cut myself open on.

  There is an old-fashioned radio alarm clock on my bedside locker, a cheap plastic square my mother bought to replace my iPhone. I’m not supposed to use my iPhone. I am not supposed to keep my laptop in my room any more either.

  *

  8.51 a.m.

  I have slept for ten hours and fifty minutes.

  That is a long time. (It was not long enough.)

  I wrap the oversized dressing gown around myself. I sit on the desk chair, swivelling around once, twice, three times. I used to twirl my father’s globe like this as a child, my eyes closed, putting my hand out to stop it. I insisted that wherever my finger landed told of my future husband, my future home, my future life. I was so sure then. I was sure it was that easy.

  The chair comes to a standstill. I concentrate on the edges of the mirror first, at the tacky residue left behind from the torn-off Polaroids, postcards, tickets for gigs. I work my way slowly towards the centre until I see that girl. Her face is slightly rounder now, her eyes like pieces of broken blue glass glued on to a papier-mâché moon.

  I pick up a hairbrush from the vanity table, my eyes watering as I try to wrench out some of the knots (when was the last time you brushed your hair, Emma?) and for a second I think I can see chunks of vomit in my hair, that I’m covered in it, so gross, like, Sean puked all over her, did you see that photo?

  I jerk forward, searching.

  But there’s nothing there.

  *

  8.57 a.m.

  This is a normal time for breakfast.

  I stand at the top of the stairs, looking down. If I fell . . . (Broken neck? Brain trauma?) People fall down the stairs all the time.