Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  “And?” Captain Wells might think the worst of me and there’s nothing I can do about that, but please, not Sergeant Pelton, too. Anyone but him.

  “And he just said, ‘Yeah right.’” Andres shrugs because he couldn’t care less if Sergeant Pelton believes him. “I don’t know why you care what he fucking thinks. He’s a scumbag.” But everyone with any kind of rank is a scumbag to Andres. Andres hates them all.

  If I had any relief from leave, it’s washed away in a sudden surge of panic. The anxiety presses against my chest, a toothy demon sitting there and grinning, Remember me? I crouch on my sleeping bag, palms sweaty. What did Sergeant Pelton think? Did he tell anyone? Was there a good laugh passed between men, a mental slap on the back for Andres? Will this, too, go in the report? I know they’re looking for a reason to disbelieve me, their goal unmistakable from the questions they’ve been asking the others around me, always looking for a crack in the wall. I can’t be messing it up like this. I can’t give them more reason to doubt.

  I unfold onto my sleeping bag, and when Andres says, quietly, “You can sleep up here,” I pretend not to hear.

  Welcome back to Polk.

  Quarters

  Sergeant Pelton is still letting me sleep on his couch, despite everything, even though I’m now settled into Sergeant Daniels’s platoon, even though no one is speaking to me the way they once did. I am still grateful for the couch, for the feeling of home, for his wife who reminds me of my mother.

  She stands in the kitchen by the open refrigerator door one afternoon, holding out a carefully manicured sandwich, crusts sliced off, cut diagonally, and I take it from her outstretched hand. She cranes her neck to see her two-year-old daughter playing on the living room carpet, then checks the rest of the space, as if gauging where her husband is. “It’s not your fault,” she says suddenly, urgently, taking me by surprise. I don’t know what she knows, how much was said, and I drop my gaze, fumbling with the white bread. My fingers leave deep imprints in the sandwich, ruining the aesthetic. I quickly cover the bruised sandwich with my other hand so that she won’t see. “Everyone drinks,” she adds, softly, the refrigerator door cutting off the rest of the room and creating a small, private space just for us.

  I don’t respond because I don’t know what to say. No one has said this to me yet.

  She tilts her head in the direction of Sergeant Pelton. “Even Flynn’s come home plenty of nights and passed out on the bed dead drunk.”

  I can breathe for a brief moment, shoulders rising with a full chest of locked air, and I blink rapidly so that I don’t cry.

  “And I heard—” She lowers her voice and leans in toward me. I lean in, too. “—that one time, at an officers’ party, Captain Wells got stupid drunk and he grabbed one of the poles, like the metal structure ones? He starts swinging around it, round and round, singing ‘I’m a pony! I’m a pony!’” She grins and I do, too, imagining Captain Wells’s fleshy face sweaty and red, stumbling over his own boots, and there is a certain satisfaction in the image. “Everyone drinks,” she reiterates, closing the refrigerator door. I can now see Sergeant Pelton in the living room, kneeling on the carpet, rolling a ball to his daughter, both of them giggling wildly in delight. My chest tightens. “So it’s not your fault,” she says again, soft, quick-spoken words, and then she’s making her way across the kitchen, sitting down with her family, holding out another sandwich square to her daughter.

  Sergeant Pelton’s wife is the only adult who tells me this, just once in passing, and I try to internalize the words, to engrain them on the inside of my body, but they slide away when men who get drunk blame me for drinking.

  * * *

  Then, some weeks after the investigation starts, Sergeant Pelton calls me into his office to ask me if I’m sure I was raped. Office is a generous title for the room—it’s nothing more than a box made up of plywood walls and a threadbare door. Pelton sits behind the desk, glancing up when I walk in. “Leave the door open a little,” he tells me, and I do. He looks anxious. His brow is pulled together, crumbling his forehead, his small hands fluttering over papers. “I was reading the report,” he says of a report I haven’t received, that I still haven’t seen, and I’m not sure how he’s read it before me. “And you really had a lot of shots that night, didn’t you.”

  I misunderstand him. I think he’s commenting on all the needles they poked into my arms to protect against STDs. I arch my eyebrows. “Yeah, they gave me all kinds of shots, for things I haven’t even heard of.” I try to laugh it off, to be light and airy and Pelton stares at me oddly, as if I’ve said something very off. I halt mid-sentence, trying to place the emotion on his face. Uncertainty. Doubt. He suddenly seems very uncomfortable, shifting in his chair, eyes darting toward the door, which probably doesn’t seem open enough for him, as if he’s suddenly found himself caged with a very dangerous creature. I get it then, but I don’t want to. I’ve never been that girl before.

  “I…you mean, drinks?” Not Sergeant Pelton. He’s not supposed to look at me like that.

  He’s always been there, constant, unwavering. He’s not supposed to be one of them.

  “It says you had fourteen shots.” He stresses the number, draws out the syllables, as if it somehow has a deeper significance.

  I half shrug one shoulder, because fourteen sounds about right. A tad high but it isn’t even a drinking night until I’ve downed eight shots, my partying minimum. There’s sober and drunk; I was new to drinking so I hadn’t learned to navigate the land of moderation yet.

  He stares at me, head tilted just so, and perhaps innocently, maybe sincerely, he asks, “Are you sure?” There is a heavy pause. “It’s just that…you had an awful lot to drink. Are you sure?” As if I had simply misplaced my keys. Are you sure you left them here? Are you sure he shoved his dick inside you, are you sure you feel dirty, ruined, violated, savaged? Are you sure you’re soldier enough, you who can’t protect yourself never mind her country? Are you sure you’re man enough for that uniform?

  I grasp for words, for some kind of coherent response, but I have nothing. I see a line in the sand, one that separates me from them. I trusted him. He let me play with his daughter, gave me food from his refrigerator, took me in and let me rest. I feel his betrayal more acutely when he becomes one of them.

  But I don’t quite grasp the depth until a few days later, when I arrive at his base housing like normal, like nothing has changed, and he stands at the door, one hand braced against the frame, barring my entrance.

  I balk slightly and stand awkwardly on the stone stoop. I check over his shoulder for his wife.

  “Sandra’s pregnant and I’m not sure if you’re contagious,” he’s saying, and I’m wrapping one arm around my middle, trying to fill the hollowed sensation. He points to my arm, where the PPD test for tuberculosis had come back positive, the one I was taking medication for, the medication that fucked up my tolerance that night at the bar. But that was months ago, the tuberculosis is not new information, and I don’t understand why he’s so concerned about it now.

  “I don’t think I’m contagious,” I say.

  “We just can’t take that risk because you could get the baby sick.”

  That’s the last thing I want so I nod, I say I understand, and he doesn’t slam the door in my face. He closes it gently, but I hear the final click, a sound that rings like struck cast iron, a sound that reverberates up one side of the street, down the other, as if a thousand doors have suddenly been slammed shut, locked, and I stand on the stoop for a moment, trying to figure out where to go.

  * * *

  They eventually give me my own room, but not without a last bit of resistance. First Sergeant Bell is back in front of that door again, but this time with one of the new soldiers who have just been attached to the company. I stand to the side, trying not to be awkward and failing. “You’ll be roommates with Specialist Starre,” he’s saying, gesturing to the small, very pretty, and very hardcore soldier next to him. She’s
a Farsi linguist, just like me. We were at Defense Language Institute together, and I had always liked her.

  “I’m not staying in that room.” It’s a mantra, often repeated yet consistently ignored.

  Starre looks up at me with vibrant hazel eyes. She’s small, somewhere under five feet, but she has an unwavering gaze. “You really don’t want to room with me?” She doesn’t sound hurt, just direct.

  “No, no, it’s not you,” I stutter quickly.

  Starre pulls full lips into a firm line. She doesn’t believe me.

  “That’s fine,” First Sergeant Bell interrupts, grimly pointing to the room next to my old one. “I guess you can have Sergeant Rivera’s old room. Start moving your stuff over so Specialist Starre can move into her room.”

  I don’t thank him. He leaves and Starre starts to back into her new room. “It’s really not you,” I say quickly.

  She tilts her head at me, watching me with that strange, direct gaze.

  “I was…” I fumble for a moment, glancing over her shoulder into my room, which still houses my stuff, the bathroom still littered with my bottles and creams and makeup jars. “Assaulted in there.” I don’t say sexually and I most certainly don’t say rape. I say as little as possible.

  She blinks in surprise. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I’m not quite sure she gets what I’m saying and I’m sort of happy for that. “So I just don’t want to be in there.”

  She shrugs. “I get it.” She doesn’t.

  I retreat to Rivera’s old room, a new place given to me at last, and I walk the empty space. It’s barren and stark. In one corner lies an old construction sledgehammer. I don’t know where Sergeant Rivera got it from, or why he left it behind, but I palm the wooden handle. It’s heavy. I bring it over to the bed and place it by the head of the frame. I scoot the nightstand over to make room for it.

  I like it there, even though it’s too heavy to be an effective weapon. Later, I’ll often wake at night, not startled or alarmed but half pulled from my sleep, and I’ll see a dark shadow looming over me, standing by the edge of the bed. I’ll reach out and touch the sledgehammer handle, grind my fingers around the wood until it creaks. Eventually I’ll tuck a flimsy steak knife I’ll lift from the DFAC under my pillow, the kind with the plastic handle and the cheap, thin metal, but nothing comforts me quite like that sledgehammer.

  Andres and Diaz move my stuff from one room to the other. They do it quietly, without telling me, a silent kind of support as they fill the lock closet with my uniforms, stand boots and shoes neatly side by side on the floor, fill drawers with clothes. I return to the room one day and it’s fully stocked, all complete, lacking only a bright-red bow. They make it so that I never have to step back into that room and I stand at the threshold of my new room, eyes burning, blinking back tears, and I breathe once, twice, collecting the emotions carefully because they spill too easily these days. “Thank you,” I mumble over my shoulder at them, inarticulate and insufficient.

  I have no roommate, just my sledgehammer, and Andres begins to spend more time here in this room, quiet hours of just him and me behind closed doors. Sometimes I keep the door ajar, just to prove that nothing is happening. Sometimes I don’t.

  And holed up between these four walls, I begin to eat. I drink strawberry and vanilla milkshakes from the convenience store—sometimes several bottles a day. I don’t even have to leave the barracks to get them. I simply ask Andres and he’ll leave on the spot, drive to get whatever I want, whenever I want, because I think that’s his version of comforting me. He’s not the type to hold me while I cry; he bears it in silence and offers no words of relief. He’d much rather do something, hand me anything, his quick compliance a cover for the fact that we don’t overtly talk about the rape at all. In fact, he tells me one day, “Stop talking about it,” when I bring it up yet again to someone new. I flush, instantly mortified, not realizing I’ve been saying so much, that I was stretching that hard to find validation even from people who don’t know me or the situation. So instead I fill my mouth with chocolate bars, even though I don’t much care for chocolate. I eat cheese on my fries, anything fried, loading my plate well beyond what is necessary. I eat to shut up, I eat out of anger, I eat to give myself something else to think about, because at least I have food to look forward to. I gain weight. A lot of it. And fat is not something the Army abides. In this insular community, where there are no physical disabilities, no deformities, no elderly, no sick, nothing but youth and mandatory fitness, no one is more of a shitbag soldier than the one who is fat. I become not just the girl who cried rape, but the fat, repulsive soldier who can’t do PT and who cried rape. “She’d have to get raped just to get laid,” someone snickers, and I tighten my grip around the flesh on my arms, pretending I can’t hear.

  I hate who I’ve become. I keep saying I’ll stop, and that I’ll start a new diet and lose the weight. Tomorrow. “You probably should start today,” mutters one of the Sergeants, the side of his mouth lifted ever so slightly in disgust.

  I can’t do push-ups; I fail my two-mile run. I huff and cough and carry my disgrace around the middle, my uniform fitting too tight. They threaten to kick me out but it’s weak intimidation—no one is getting kicked out right before deployment. I wear my shame physically, the hatred of myself reflected in the bulge of my hips, the width of my thighs. In trying to disappear, I’ve only made myself bigger.

  * * *

  As a young Christian, I was raised on a staunch diet of abstinence. I took the edict of “no sex before marriage” very literally, though. I internalized the idea of “this much but no further” so that there was a Rubicon River I would not cross, but right up to the bank was fair play. So aside from Jonathan, with whom I crossed the river both willingly and eagerly, I have years of experience of holding other boys at bay, of successfully slamming knees together to avoid the wandering hand, or twisting hips to tilt away access, of giving this much of my body but not that much. I know how to placate boys, how to allow hands to tightly grasp bare breasts so that I can keep them away from the hem of my skirt. I know how to twist out from under the weight of a body when he’s half naked and I’m completely bare, how to make it out of the room even then, how to be so nice while saying no. I know how to push my own discomfort to the side so that I’m not rude, allowing access to parts of me while contemplating how best to whisper soft apologies, underwear still firmly in place. I know how to swallow dread and anxiety, to give just a little more when they plead, wet lips brushing against my ear, begging for that last drop, that tiny, final distance that I’m so proficient at denying. Coercion and persuasion can only get so much from me.

  Usually. Usually I’m so good at this, deflecting, parrying, just barely getting away, but something is off tonight. This time I sigh in annoyance, not so nice while Andres presses his lips against my neck. He doesn’t care that I’ve gained weight—perhaps because he played a part in it. Or maybe because he genuinely likes me, although I can’t understand why, then. I recline my head back, elongating the line for him, but stare at the ceiling. I clench my jaw, irritated that we’re here again, the movie blaring in the background, flooding my dark bedroom with erratic flashes of white. I twist away after giving him a moment. I’m not in the mood.

  Sometimes I am. Sometimes I don’t mind his kisses, his direct, dark stare, drinking in my every gesture, taut with need. Sometimes it feels good to be wanted, especially when I don’t even want this body myself. And sometimes it doesn’t, like now, when I know I’ll ruminate over every little touch, running an invisible tally in my head of how much we’ve done and how that’s not okay for a rape victim to do. That’s one too many touches, one too many kisses. I’m confused by my own desire, betrayed by a body that wants. It should be more broken than this. Right? I have an impression of what a rape victim should be and I’m not aligning up correctly, a realization that makes me sick.

  Andres has a trump card he never plays. He could remind me that after fo
rmations are released, I stand off to one side, one step away from the inside. He could mention that I wait there for him because he’s the only one there who joins me. It would be a very easy thing to whisper—a casual reminder that there are polite smiles from others in my direction, greetings made in passing, but there’s nothing deeper to warm me should he stroll away in the opposite direction. Andres never says this. He’s not that kind of man, but I’m acutely aware of these facts, too.

  “Please,” he murmurs against my skin, brushing his palm up my shirt, wiggling awkwardly under the sports bra. He sighs, resting his hot forehead against my shoulder, squeezing lightly. Even this little delights him. But, like all of them, he wants more. “Come on, Dostie. Please?” He pushes me slightly and I let him, lying back on the hard barracks mattress.

  And I’m so tired. My shoulders sag, my body sags, my knees sag in something like defeat. I’ve become so proficient at deflecting actual sex that I’m doing it out of habit. My jeans peel off. My shirt gets tossed off the bed and rolls under the desk. It occurs to me there is no sacredness here. This is a bodily function, as elegant and necessary as an early-morning shit. I wrap my arms around his neck and I’m tired. I have the sense that I’ve been worn down. Coercion and persuasion may not have worked, but persistence did.

  I’ll always resent you for this, I think as he eases into me, a bumbling affair as we try to figure out each other’s parts, the way we fit together, the measure and rhythm of our bodies. I’m being unfair, I’ll realize much later. I could say no. I always could say no with Andres. But I want someone to blame, at least at the start, for why I tumbled so quickly into this. I poison what we could have had with this single thought, this lasting grudge.

  I feel shame like a jab in the gut as he thrusts against me, the sound of bare skin slapping echoing across the room, overpowering the hiss of TV static. A part of me wants to pull away from this, to wrap around myself and protect my middle, the softness, the most vulnerable spot of me. But another part of me enjoys it. My body flushes, warms, skin turning pink, my legs wrapping firmly behind his back, hooking ankles together, and I enjoy it.