by Rachel Cohn
Keisha nodded. “I see.” It was hard to tell on her dark skin, but Very almost suspected Keisha’s face was flushing with anger. “How did that happen?”
“It was during monsoon season. Earlier in the week, I had gone to Carter’s room to find out where class was going to be that day. The hotel was almost empty. Cat usually went into town in the mornings to buy produce for the kitchen, and Carter’s brother, who owned the place, was in Mumbai on business. There weren’t any guests staying at the hotel because of the rain. When I got to Carter’s room, he said class was canceled for the week. One of the kids had been hospitalized with a serious influenza, and the parents had decided to suspend class-time until the danger of it spreading had passed. But … don’t laugh … I was sort of a geek. I actually liked school, and I didn’t want to miss out. So Carter said we could do lessons together. Alone, in his room.”
“Did your mother know about this?”
“She did. But her relationship with Carter’s brother was falling apart. I don’t think she gave it a second thought, me and Carter. She was probably more concerned with other things. Carter was a nice guy. And really, really shy with women. I think he’s the last person she would have suspected would have preyed on her daughter.”
“Was that what he did? Preyed on you?”
Very could feel the tears and pain and hurt rising, threatening to spread through every cell in her body, but she was determined to see the story through. She’d made it this far. Might as well go all the way. “This is the really confusing part. I’m not sure he preyed on me. I knew better than to do what I did. I was twelve, but I was pretty sophisticated, at least in the sense of having had to be pretty self-sufficient most of my life. I was older than my years, and looked it, too, so it was like people validated that to me all the time. But I was so lonely. I was by myself a lot in Goa. Cat was usually working. The other kids thought I was too young to really party with them. But Carter paid me so much attention. We had all these great geeky talks about literature and history and stuff, which we could never do when the other students were around, because they just wanted to hit the waves. They didn’t care at all about learning.
“So then, on the last day of the quarantined week, Carter and I were reading a book together, I think it was one of those moody Brontë ones, with all the moors? And the rain was coming down so hard, it was like bang bang bang on the roof, but sort of romantic, too, you know? Because it was all gray and mysterious outside, and the wind was howling, and we could hear the waves crashing hard. It was kind of dreamy, maybe. Like, it was us alone in that room, and it felt melancholy and sweet at the same time, and we knew it was the last day we’d be alone together like that. And he leaned over to kiss me, and I let him, and things just happened very quickly from there. I can’t say I even consciously made the choice, yes, I want this to happen. It was just, boom, done. It hurt, yes—but maybe my heart hurt more.”
Now the tears streamed down Very’s face, but they were not bang bang bang tears. They were quiet, and easy, and necessary, and just fine.
Keisha said, “Do you think it was wrong, what happened?”
Suddenly, furiously, Very spat out, “I think it was wrong, what he did!”
“Whoa!” Keisha said. “That was quite a reaction. Tell me why it was wrong, what he did.”
“Because I was a kid, and he knew that! And he was the adult, and he should have been the responsible one! I always had to be the responsible one. It was tiring.”
“You’re right, Very. It was his responsibility. He should have acted with restraint. There’s a legal phrase for what happened between the two of you. Do you know what it is?”
“Idiocy?” Very said.
“This isn’t a joke, Very. It’s called statutory rape. Regardless of whether you were willing, or thought you were willing, the fact of the matter is, you were too young to make that distinction. And as the adult, and as your teacher, for goodness’ sake, it was his responsibility to protect you.”
“So you don’t think I’m a slut?” Very asked.
“‘Slut’ is a self-defining term. I think you should stop thinking of yourself as a slut because of one unfortunate incident a long time ago that could have caused the partner in question to be prosecuted if you’d been back home. I think you should stop internalizing that ‘slut’ label and then behaving accordingly. You were a child then, and you were taken advantage of by an adult who undoubtedly knew better. You are a woman now—capable of choosing for herself who she wants to be and how she wants to act.”
“Oh,” Very said. She’d never considered the label that way, or that she could make a conscious choice to think of herself in a better manner, and try then to meet that expectation. The power belonged to her. Who knew? as Aunt Esther might have said.
Keisha said, “We still haven’t gotten to the other part, about your mother’s death. Do you still want to go there, or wait for another time?”
“Well, the two parts are one and the same.”
“How so?”
“Because Cat found me with Carter. She had been looking for me, so she went to Carter’s room, where she knew we were studying. She walked in on him and me, in his bed, right after. A sheet was over us. But it was obvious what had just happened.”
Somehow, having made the decision to at least try to spin negative thoughts into positive ones, Very was finding that what she had admitted to Keisha felt less horrible than she’d anticipated. Very had always thought she could never tell another person about what happened, that the shame was too great, but actually it wasn’t. It was just a fact of her life that needed to be aired. The past didn’t deserve to be locked up in the attic of her mind. It deserved to fly out the window along with all the other ghosts, to be free, and in turn to free Very from living with it.
“Are you okay?” Keisha asked.
“What? You mean now, or then?”
“This is a tremendous amount you’re working through today. Do you want to tell me the rest of the story, or do you need a breather?”
“May I e-mail you the rest of the story?” Very joked.
Keisha smiled. “No, you may not. Miles Davis is the most you’re getting out of me.”
Very felt a small laugh escape from her throat. “You’re making me laugh when I’m spilling my guts to you?” But the smile Very felt returning to her lips was a welcome one.
Keisha didn’t respond. She, and Miles Davis and his lulling trumpet-playing, waited for Very to come forth with the next move.
Very considered bolting the room; certainly the instinct was there. But her legs felt glued to her chair. Or maybe it was her heart that was keeping her there, not letting her go until she finished what she’d started.
Finally, Very said, “Cat freaked out when she saw us. But not in the crazy, screaming kind of way. She very calmly—like, too calmly—told me to get up and go upstairs to our room. Which I did. And then I heard shouting between her and Carter, but with all the rain, I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Or maybe I didn’t want to. In any case, Carter was gone by that night. No note, no goodbye, just gone. It was the next day that my mom really freaked out. When I woke up in the morning, our bags were packed, and she said, ‘We’re moving,’ and just like that, we were on a bus to another beach town a couple hours away. Completely uprooted.”
“Did you and your mother talk about what had happened between you and Carter?”
“Not really. She wouldn’t look at me the whole bus ride. She had a scarf on her head, and her face was pressed against the window, but I could tell she was crying. When we got settled in the next town, she took me to see a British nurse to make sure I wasn’t pregnant. The nurse told me Cat had asked her to tell me to please wait and talk to my mother first before I considered having sex again. And that was it.”
“Did you feel changed after this experience?”
“It was Cat who changed. Not me. I was just this dumb kid who’d made a mistake. Even I knew that. I just wanted to go back
to being a kid. But I also knew Cat wasn’t going to help me figure out why I’d let it happen. It’s like, I was very aware that as this traveling family, we were a ship with no captain.”
“How did your mother change?”
“She sort of shut down. She got really quiet, and serious, and wasn’t her usual flirty self with men. She’d gotten another hotel job, and she wanted to work all the time, any extra job she could find. Before, when she wasn’t working, we’d go exploring together, looking at old churches, and biking through nearby villages when there were festivals and stuff. But after, she just wanted to work, all the time work.”
“Why do you think she did that?”
“She said it was because she needed to earn enough money so we could go back home. To the U.S. She said I needed to go to a proper school, and have a proper home, and she said she was getting too old to wander the world. For the first time that I ever saw, she seemed like she wanted to be settled. She said once we got back home, she would figure out a new plan. Find a place where we’d stay for a long while. But it felt like she was working so much to avoid me.”
Keisha said, “It sounds like, in her own way, your mother was trying to do the right thing by you. Learn from the mistake, and try to make a better life for you afterward.”
“I know that was the reason. But it didn’t feel that way at the time. The saddest part is, she achieved her hope for me to have a proper home, and go to a proper school, in the worst possible way. I got those things at my aunt’s house in New Haven. But I got those because the U.S. State Department sent me there. After my mother died.”
“How did she die?”
“She loved a good fire, my mom. Late one night, when I was asleep, I guess she saw a group of people partying on the beach, with a fire and dancing and food and all that. She went down to join them. It was a group of backpackers traveling across Asia. Those kids passed a lot of drugs around. Cat wasn’t a drug user; I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I mean, I definitely saw her smoke a joint now and then, and she was open about the fact that she experimented a lot when she was young, before she had me. But she wasn’t irresponsible that way. She just knew a good party, like me. So she joined in that night on the beach, and one tainted tab of X was all it took. Five other people died from that batch, backpackers at that same party. But Cat was the only one of the bunch who had, you know, a life outside of backpacking.”
“She had a child. She was responsible for you.”
“And then she wasn’t.”
CHAPTER 29
Suddenly Very wanted her machines back, but not for the old reasons. She didn’t want to update or comment on a needless blog, or dot-com shop for things she didn’t want or need, or participate in an online romance that was as meaningless as it was fake. She wanted to reconnect with her old life. She wanted to hear the songs her mother had taught her to love. She wanted to look at pictures of Goa, and use the Global Spider to revisit the other places she’d lived with Cat. She wanted to connect to a possible future. She wanted to find a service in New Haven that drove elderly people around where they wanted to go. She wanted to see her biological father’s name, and put her Google skills to work to see what she could find out about him.
Very wanted a laptop she could use to make a list, but not the simple paper kind of list. She wanted a Very-style list, with too many (parenthetical) asides,1 photos added, graphic images blended into the text, and a sound track to complement the list,
1. And footnotes. too, most obviously. It didn’t seem unreasonable to want to use machines again for this purpose. Even Keisha, who’d set Very on the task of making the list, acknowledged that the list could be made better through technology. But Keisha said that although the No Techno sentence was admittedly harsh, it seemed to be serving its purpose for Very, allowing her to take the time-out she needed to unload the nonelectronic baggage that was cluttering the hard drive of her soul. (Keisha acknowledged borrowing Dr. Killjoy’s lame-ass terminology with that last metaphor and apologized for it, thereby endearing herself to Very for eternity, and allowing Very to see that Keisha was right on this point, even if she was quoting Dr. Killjoy.)
In therapy, Very had made the connection that perhaps her overdependence on technology had been her way of not dealing with other, deeper pains. It wasn’t about the technology so much as it was about something to do, to stay busy all the time, and to not connect to what was really in her heart. Keisha said that Very, when she left ESCAPE, would have all the time in the world to reconnect and learn how to live with technology again, hopefully with better boundaries. But since Very was here and starting to make such personal progress anyway, why not really use her remaining time to process what she was feeling, in order to make the best steps moving forward once she was released?
It wasn’t like Very didn’t have some major shit to figure out once she was sprung into the world. She was more or less kicked out of Columbia, at least until she could defend her case at the disciplinary committee hearing that would be scheduled upon her release from rehab. But what case was there to defend? What could she say? Um, guilty as charged, on this count, and so many more. Like, sorry, and can I just pick back up with my schooling like this never happened, even though I’m pretty vague about whether I’d want to go back to Columbia at all? Lavinia was the only reason worth being there.
More scarily, Columbia was only the beginning of the list of life issues Very needed to sort out. She still had to make her amends to people once she went back out. She had a mountain of credit card debt she had to pay off. She had to figure out where she would live.
Problems? Oh, hell yes, Very had problems waiting for her on the outside.
Now was the make-or-break time for rehab patients, according to Keisha. Once they figured out how and why they got to this position in life, then they had to decide: Who am I going to be now? Would they resume old habits, or pick up the pieces, grow from the experience, and move on, stronger and better?
Very had no.fucking.clue how she was going to sort out the problems awaiting her on the outside. One thing Very did know was that she didn’t want to be guilty anymore of falling into relationships for the wrong reasons. In that spirit, Keisha had suggested that since Very liked lists, she should make a list of her past relationships, to take inventory and see what there was to learn from them.
Very chose to make her list on Day Twenty, during group therapy time with Dr. Joy, who didn’t mind Very sitting in a corner of the room with pen and paper in hand, as that’s how Very typically spent group therapy time. Most of the people in group were both Olds and Acolytes, and their technical skills didn’t extend beyond using the Internet (which a baby could figure out).
Very preferred to sit in a corner and doodle during group time with them, which Dr. Joy actually allowed, saying everyone had the choice about how they wanted to participate, and if Very wasn’t breaking any rules otherwise, and if that’s how her artistic expression called to her within nontechnological bounds, it was fine for Very to write and draw in a paper composition book while the oldsters bemoaned their unforgiving/unreasonable spouses/employers and discussed with one another why it was embarrassing to their kids that they still used AOL to go online. Snoozers.
5 Guys and 1½ Girls
(with some others in between):
A List, by Very LeFreak
1. Carter. The first. Hello, Very LeFreak. I, Veronica, forgive you. Goodbye.
2. Hideo. He was my second first. We competed at high school. We both wanted to be valedictorian. He won; I pulled a major senior slump and didn‘t break the top ten, but I did come in ranked eighteenth overall, which wasn’t too shabby now that I think back on it, so yay for me. Not so yay for me was that by graduation, Hideo wasn’t talking to me anymore. Hideo and I were in a lot of the same Honors/ AP classes, and we were also together in Computer Science Club (I was the president) and the Japanese Art Appreciation Club (he was the founder), both extracurricular activities that were basically résumé pa
dders for college applications. We were competitors, but also friends. I loved that his name looked like “Hideous” but was pronounced “Hee-day-oh.” He was Japanese, and a really nice and handsome boy, nothing hideous about him. His mom made great teriyaki. Hideo and I finally got together in our junior year (it was the sake tucked away in his parents’ liquor cabinet—and his folks were away for the weekend). By that time I was pretty acclimated to living in a regular house in New Haven, and going to a regular school, and I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t cry through the night alone up in the attic, grieving for my mom; and I also had stopped expecting that I was going to be completely uprooted at a moment’s notice, so I guess I was, like, relaxed enough to finally form attachments. I was Hideo’s first. I guess he was sort of my first, too? Like, my better first? He was so sweet, and happy, and nervous, and awkward when we finally did it. It was really nice. Nothing AH-MAY-ZING, but good. Comfortable. The problem was, he wanted us to be a proper boyfriend-girlfriend couple. And I liked it better when no one knew we were doing it.
3. Skinemax girl. After he and I started doing it, Hideo became jealous. Every guy who looked at me, he’d be like, “Do you like him?” I guess, in retrospect, he was mad at me for not giving him back what he was giving me. He was always doing sweet things for me and making me little presents and I didn’t really do that back for him and now I wish I had because he was a good guy and deserved a kinder girl and I hope he’s found someone like that now. Because I wouldn’t commit to being “outed” as his girlfriend (just as Kristy later wouldn’t with me), he started assuming I was cheating on him with other guys. He accused me of it enough that finally I did cheat on him, only not with a guy, but with the girl at that party. I was drunk, and she was drunk, but that’s just an excuse. The truth is, I probably used the alcohol to let loose that side of me, that I’d always known was there, but hadn’t done anything about yet. But since I can’t even remember her name, she probably counts as the half girl. The whole girl, even if physically we didn’t go as far as me and the half girl, would be: